Appeals Court Says Police Ballistics Expert Can Be Sued Helping Wrongfully Imprison Two Men For More Than 17 Years
from the New-Haven-PD-just-as-fucking-culpable-for-this-atrocity dept
"Judge Alex Kozinski noted back in 2015 there was an "epidemic of Brady violations" occurring during prosecutions in this country. "Brady" refers to the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland -- one that established the right for defendants to have access to exculpatory evidence, creating an obligation for prosecutors and law enforcement to produce this evidence during trials.
Obviously, this hasn't been an absolute since this ruling. Prosecutors aren't interested in handing over evidence that undermines their cases. And cops are equally unwilling to produce evidence that undercuts their arrests, narratives, and coerced confessions.
Here's how it works out for defendants, according to Judge Kozinski, while excoriating an appeals court decision that basically blessed Brady violations as long as the government still presented some inculpatory evidence. . ."
Court: Just Because An Anonymous Yelp Reviewer Is Mean, Doesn't Mean You Get To Unmask The Reviewer
from the anonymity-matters dept
"I've never understood why so many doctors sue over bad reviews, but it just keeps happening. Dr. Muhammad Mirza has built up something of a reputation for suing people who leave bad reviews on Yelp -- and has been successful in stifling speech:
Dr Mirza says he's already won or reached settlements with three reviewers, forcing them to take down the false review and pay an undisclosed amount of money.
As that article notes, he was able to get courts to force Yelp to turn over the names of anonymous reviewers in the past, and it appears that has emboldened him to continue suing reviewers.
However, in one of his more recent cases, thankfully, a court has pushed back on the unmasking attempt. This was yet another case where Dr. Mirza had to go to court against Yelp to try to get the company to unmask an anonymous reviewer who wrote:
“Worst experience I’ve ever had! Woke up looking like a monster!!! Cheap product and he’s absolutely not experienced nor does he care!!!!!”
As Yelp pointed out to the court, this statement clearly is not defamatory as there are no statements of fact that can be proven true or false -- it's all opinion. And, thankfully, anonymous speech is protected under the 1st Amendment. In a recent ruling in NY the court agreed and rejected Dr. Mirza's attempts to unmask that reviewer. . ."
Officer Claims Sheriff's Office Told Him To Play Copyrighted Music To Shut Down Citizens' Recordings
from the future-is-Denis-Leary's-'Asshole'-on-repeat-forever dept
The new hotness for law enforcement is trying to end the careers of police accountability activists. When approached by people filming them, officers from multiple law enforcement agencies have begun playing the zero-accountability hits, hoping that notoriously litigious artists like Taylor Swift and the Beatles will join forces to keep these recordings from being uploaded to social media sites.
The thought process is so simple a cop could understand it. When someone starts recording or livestreaming, crank up some music in hopes the copyright bots will recognize the track and shut the whole thing down. Even if it can't terminate a livestream, it might terminate a few pesky accounts with enough copyright strikes.
One law enforcement officer straight up admitted to the people filming him that he was playing music in hopes of keeping the video from making it past YouTube's copyright cops, much to the eventual dismay of his fellow officers. The Alameda County Sheriff's Department has learned from this Streisanding, and has since made it official policy to forbid the playing of copyrighted content for the sole purpose of thwarting the recording of officers by members of the public.
Welcome to the flipside. Matthew Gault and Motherboard have uncovered a document written by an officer who deployed the same tactic claiming his employer specifically directed him to engage in this IP-abusing effort. . ."
Florida Presents Its Laughable Appeal For Its Unconstitutional Social Media Content Moderation Law
from the disney-exempt! dept
Now that Texas has signed its unconstitutional social media content moderation bill into law, the action shifts back to Florida's similar law that was already declared unconstitutional in an easy decision by the district court. Florida has filed its opening brief in its appeal before the 11th Circuit and... it's bad. I mean, really, really bad. Embarrassingly bad. I mean, this isn't a huge surprise since their arguments in the district court were also bad. But now that they've had a judge smack them down fairly completely, including in terribly embarrassing oral arguments, you'd think that maybe someone would think to try to lawyer better? Though, I guess, you play with the hand your dealt, and Florida gave its lawyers an unconstitutionally bad hand.
Still, I'd expect at least marginally better lawyering than the kind commonly found on Twitter or in our comments. It starts out bad and gets worse. . ."
Subject: Legal Issues
Malwarebytes Conclusion Shows Section 230's Best Feature: Killing Dumb Cases Before They Waste Everyone's Time And Money
from the 230's-procedural-benefits dept
A few years ago, Professor Eric Goldman wrote an important paper, explaining how Section 230 is better than the 1st Amendment. The key part of the argument is that if you treat Section 230 as a rule of civil procedure that kicks out frivolous and wasteful cases quickly, you realize how important it is.
Last month, a federal district court in California dismissed Enigma Software's high profile lawsuit against Malwarebytes. You may have heard about this case. We've been covering it for years, and it even got some (dubious) attention at the Supreme Court, regarding Section 230. Enigma didn't like that Malwarebytes (and others) found Enigma's "SpyHunter" software to be sketchy itself and started suing. Malwarebytes initially won on Section 230 grounds, pointing out that its opinions on what is and what is not spyware is a moderation choice -- in this case protected by Section 230's rarely used (c)(2)'s immunity for content that the provider deems "otherwise objectionable."
Unfortunately, the 9th Circuit reversed that ruling with a very weird opinion that seemed to contradict its own previous precedent. In that ruling, the 9th Circuit carved a new hole in (c)(2) arguing that you could lose 230 protections if there was an argument that the decision to block content (or call something spyware) was done "for anticompetitive reasons" . . ."
COVID Drove A Big Jump In Community Broadband Networks
from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept
For twenty-five years now, U.S. broadband has been painfully mediocre in nearly every metric that matters thanks to regulatory capture (read: corruption) and limited competition. With the occasional exception, the U.S. policy solution to this problem has been to kiss the ass of regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, throw billions of dollars at these companies for networks that they repeatedly fail to complete, then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why we still don't have affordable, widely available, next-generation broadband access.
But as COVID arrived, it brought with it a renewed focus on the problem, brought into stark relief by images of kids having to huddle in the dirt outside of Taco Bell just to attend class. And while these images did drive a lot of important changes -- like a temporary $50 broadband discount for low-income Americans, and the looming $65 billion infrastructure plan (assuming it passes) -- most of these solutions still didn't really target the real reason U.S. broadband is so painfully mediocre: regional monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects it.
Frustrated by 25 years of this cycle, local communities all over the U.S. keep taking things into their own hands. . ."
GAO's Second Report On Facial Recognition Tech Provides More Details On Federal Use Of Clearview's Unvetted AI
from the still-greater-than-zero-agencies,-unfortunately dept
Some agencies appeared to have no internal oversight of facial recognition tech use, leading to agencies first telling the GAO no one was using the tech, only to update that answer to "more than 1,000 searches" when they had finished doing their first pass at due diligence.
A more complete report [PDF] has been released by the GAO, which includes answers to several questions asked of federal agencies using the tech. Unfortunately, it confirms that many agencies are bypassing what little internal controls are in place by asking state and local agencies to run searches for them
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