Surprise: Judge Recuses Himself From Elon Musk’s GARM SLAPP Suit
from the did-not-see-that-coming dept
Elon Musk’s legal team probably thought they had the perfect strategy: file a SLAPP suit in a court with a judge known for partisan rulings, including rulings benefiting Elon himself in the past. But they didn’t count on one thing – the judge recusing himself.
Last week, Elon sued GARM and the others, claiming that it was an antitrust violation for them to organize a boycott against putting ads on Twitter. There was no evidence presented of any such boycott. Instead, there was evidence that GARM had recommended that advertisers be careful about how it might look if their brand ads appeared next to awful content.
However, we had worried that Elon filed it in the Wichita Falls division of the Northern District of Texas federal courts, knowing it was guaranteed to be assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor. O’Connor is known as a “go-to judge” for all sorts of partisan pro-GOP nonsense. And, Elon already has a case in front of him with his SLAPP suit against Media Matters.
In that case, O’Connor refused to toss it out early (when it obviously should have been). Just recently, Media Matters had requested that ExTwitter have to file an amended statement of interested parties, to indicate that Tesla is an interested party, noting that Judge O’Connor appears to own a significant number of Tesla shares. ExTwitter has insisted that Tesla is unrelated to the case while Media Matters has responded by pointing out how ridiculous that is. Judge O’Connor has not yet ruled on that issue in that case.
However, this morning, he announced that he was recusing himself from this new case and told the clerk to reassign it to another judge.
It’s unclear why (and we may never know the official reason, though how he rules on the Media Matters request may give us some clue).
That said, GARM has already announced that it was shutting down. It’s also possible that the case still gets assigned to a different terrible judge in Texas. Or that the 5th Circuit does what it normally does on appeals and ignores basically all legal history.
But, for a brief moment, Judge O’Connor has done the right thing and recused himself from a case in which the media was already highlighting the very real appearance of bias.
Update: As a few people have pointed out, it appears that O’Connor owns some Unilever stock, and that’s one of the defendants in the case, which could explain things.
Filed Under: elon musk, garm, recusal, reed o'connor, slapp suits, texas
Companies: garm, twitter, wfa, world federation of advertisers, x
Prosecutors Announce Plan To Criminally Charge Police Chief Who Led Raid On Small Kansas Newspaper
from the bake-him-away,-toys dept
[Extremely War Boys voice]: Oh, what a lovely mess!
The problem with a story like this is that a recap will run a couple thousand words before you even get into the new stuff. To quote another cult classic movie, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody led the raid of the local newspaper (Marion County Record) after speaking to a business owner about some alleged “theft” of her personal info. The business owner was seeking a liquor license but a tipster had told the paper that this person also had a problematic DUI record of her own.
That business owner said some stuff about this at a city hall meeting. Somehow, Cody got involved. The paper decided to abandon the story — even after it had independently verified the tip via a third-party website providing access to driving records — because the tip had originated from the business owner’s estranged spouse.
This same paper had also been asking Gideon Cody about his decision to abandon his more high-profile and better-paying job in Kansas City to become the chief of small police force in a small town.
All this came to a head when Cody decided he was going to avenge his friend (the business owner has since shared private text messages between her and former police chief in which he not only told her about the planned raid, but also told her to delete any messages between the two after the raid was completed) and take care of the burr under his particular saddle.
The paper’s offices were raided, which included pretty much every bit of electronics (including journalists’ personal phones) seized by the Marion County PD. (For some reason, a deputy from the sheriff’s office and a local fire inspector were also involved in the raids.) So was the home of the co-owners of the paper, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer whose strenuous objection to the invasion of her home undoubtedly contributed to her death two days later.
Everyone involved in the raid sought to distance themselves from it once the paper and its journalists started complaining. The local prosecutor claimed he had never seen, much less given his blessing to the search warrants — something that was proven to be a lie shortly thereafter. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation also claimed it had no previous knowledge of the impending raids — something also shown to be untrue. The judge handling the warrants was not only a friend of the business owner central to the case but apparently had some impaired driving problems of her own.
The fallout continues. Lawsuits have been filed. (One settlement has already been obtained.) The people involved with this raid have been doing all they can to recede into the background. The judge who signed off on the warrants was investigated by the court system. And Gideon Cody himself rode off into the sunset shortly after this became national news, providing this as part of his resignation letter:
I do not want to defend my actions to the Council and I do not want for everyone to have to formally discuss any discipline.
Good news, Gideon! You won’t have to “defend your actions to the Council.” HOWEVER, you will need to defend your actions. This is the latest in the Marion County raid debacle, coming to us from Sherman Smith of the Kansas Reflector:
Special prosecutors plan to charge former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody with a low-level felony for his actions following the raid he led last year on the Marion County Record and the homes of the newspaper publisher and a councilwoman.
The full report [PDF] lists plenty of options for criminal charges, but according to investigators, they only have evidence to support a charge of “Obstruction of Judicial Process.” The rest of the findings clear Cody of other potential charges, as well the officers who accompanied him during the raids. The report was compiled by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
As to KBI’s input, the report (and recent interviews with KBI officials) makes it clear it was aware of Cody’s actions but did nothing to dissuade him from pursuing these searches. However, since it’s far more convenient to do so now that Cody is no longer a fellow law enforcement officer, KBI officials feel comfortable saying how uncomfortable Cody’s raid plans made them feel.
KBI special agent in charge Bethanie Popejoy told investigators that Cody called her two days after the raid while she was in church service. She stepped outside to take the call.
She said Cody told her: “This is a mess. I really wish you guys would take this over.”
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s a little f***in’ late for that now,” Popejoy said.
Although KBI agents had agreed to join Cody in the investigation before the raid, they had not yet reviewed evidence at the time of the raid. Popejoy said when she first read the search warrants several days after the raid, she was “shocked, angry, disappointed, (in) disbelief.”
Cody, faced with intense national scrutiny, asked the KBI to issue a public statement defending his character. Popejoy declined.
Somehow, I doubt this charge will stick. Despite the report being very critical of everything that happened, it also arrives at the conclusion that most of what happened was actually not unlawful. And that’s probably the most disappointing conclusion an investigation like this can reach — something that says it’s going to happen again because cops can violate rights without violating laws. And if they do these things at the same time, they’re more than likely going to be able to be immunized in civil lawsuits. But if Gideon Cody can’t escape these lawsuits because his rights violations were so obvious and egregious, it’s absolutely mind-boggling that the combined forces of prosecutors and two outside law enforcement came to the conclusion all of this was very legal, even if it was extreme inadvisable.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, gideon cody, journalism, kansas, marion, marion county pd, marion county record
Daily Deal: The 2024 Microsoft Essential Tools Training Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The 2024 Microsoft Essential Tools Training Bundle will help you become a Microsoft expert in no time. Courses cover Microsoft 365, Excel, Word for beginners, and Word advanced. It’s on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Breton Wields DSA As Censorship Tool, Musk Tells Him To ‘Go Fuck His Own Face’
from the meme-diplomacy dept
I know that many Elon Musk supporters assume that my mockery of the many stupid things that Elon does means that I won’t give him a fair shake. But when he does something good, I’m happy to highlight it and give him kudos.
In this case, he’s right (if a bit provocative) in telling EU Commissioner Thierry Breton to, well, [checks notes] go fuck his own face.
Let’s take a step back, because this requires some background. We’ve been warning for many years that the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) would be abused for censorship by the government. EU officials and supporters of the DSA kept insisting that we were overreacting. But, Thierry Breton has made it clear that while the DSA is under his purview as a Commissioner, it is his own personal censorship tool for anything he dislikes online.
When Elon first sought to buy Twitter, Breton had a sit-down meeting with him. He got Musk to stupidly give a full-throated endorsement of the DSA. We warned him at the time that he (1) looked foolish doing so and (2) would regret it. Now that ExTwitter has been accused of violating the DSA, it looks like our warning was prescient.
Anyway, that brings us to yesterday. As you might have heard (or, I guess, given the massive technical difficulties, perhaps you didn’t hear), Donald Trump joined Elon Musk for a conversation on “Spaces,” the extremely buggy real-time audio chat feature on ExTwitter. Before that happened, however, Thierry Breton posted one of his typically smug open letters that more or less warns Elon that if Trump said anything bad, the EU might seek to take action against ExTwitter.
There’s a lot of text in that letter. If you really want to read it, here’s a larger version, but the short version is “Hey, Elon, I hear you’re going to have Donald Trump on. Under the DSA, I’m warning you that you better stop him from saying anything that I consider ‘harmful.’ In the meantime, I need you to waste a bunch of your time and tell me how you plan to block Trump from saying such things.”
While Breton sprinkles the phrase “illegal content” throughout the letter, he’s not really warning about that. First of all, Trump is not saying anything that is actually illegal, no matter how much nonsense he spews. But more importantly, Breton very clearly calls out “harmful content” in the third paragraph:
This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.
That is flat out demanding that Musk and ExTwitter have tools in place to silence Donald Trump if he says something that Breton and other EU technocrats believe is “harmful.”
And that’s bullshit.
Especially coming right after he says “freedom of expression… are effectively protected.”
And therefore, I actually appreciate Elon going into meme form to tell Breton what he thought of his letter:
I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily call it the most diplomatic approach. Nor is it one that is likely to endear many in the EU ruling class to Musk. But, honestly, someone should be calling out Breton and his repeated use of the DSA as a tool for issuing personal threats over speech he disagrees with.
I’m no fan of either Trump or Musk, but (1) the idea anything being said that would violate the law is crazy and (2) the idea that it’s any of the EU’s business is beyond stupid. And at least someone is calling it out.
Filed Under: censorship, donald trump, dsa, elon musk, eu, free speech, thierry breton
Companies: twitter, x
Report: Real World 5G Signal Availability Is Pathetic At AT&T (12%) And Verizon (7.7%)
from the great-job-everybody dept
Fifth-generation wireless (5G) was supposed to change the world. According to wireless carriers and gear makers, not only was it supposed to bring about the “fourth industrial revolution,” it was supposed to usher forth amazing new smart cities and help with cancer treatment. Wireless giants routinely portrayed a world full of 5G powered robots giving tattoos or engaging in remote bananna surgery (?).
In the real world, 5G landed with a dud. While it does offer faster and lower latency connections, it was always more of a modest evolution than a revolution. And U.S. telecom being what it is (highly consolidated, barely competitive, poorly and inconsistently regulated), most U.S. 5G service wound up being slower and significantly more expensive than most other developed nations.
A new report on U.S. wireless network performance by OpenSignal once again drives the inferiority of U.S. 5G home. The research firm created a metric dubbed the “5G availability score” — or the percentage of time customers actually have a 5G network connection “in the places they most commonly frequent.” The results are… particularly bad for two of the U.S.’ biggest wireless providers:
“On “5G availability,” T-Mobile resembles an Usain Bolt alongside the decrepit fun runners of AT&T and Verizon, scoring 67.9%. AT&T limps over the line below 12%, while Verizon collapses on it at 7.7%.”
Analysts note that the problem is particularly bad for U.S. 5G signal strength indoors. And it’s particularly bad indoors for Verizon and AT&T due to their heavy reliance on C-band spectrum (3.7 GHz), which lacks the range, speed, and wall penetration of other spectrum assets. It’s something that can be fixed in time, but not without both companies (read: consumers) spending significantly more money.
Meanwhile, something that Wall Street analysts and wireless research firms couldn’t care any less about is consumer costs. The consolidation of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger may have given T-Mobile a treasure trove of spectrum assets, but other studies have found the elimination of a fourth competitor ultimately caused the U.S. wireless industry to immediately stop competing on price.
And while T-Mobile may be faring better on 5G availability, other signs of deterioration thanks to consolidation have been evident. This is a company that has been hacked eight times in the last five years. And despite building a reputation for being different from industry giants AT&T and Verizon, they’ve increasingly been caught nickel and diming their userbase at an accelerating rate.
It’s not all gloom: 4G networks do generally perform well. And 5G in many areas has resulted in a big boom in fixed 5G home broadband access, which, while not as reliable as fiber, is a big improvement for those stuck on traditional broadband. But again, the quality and pricing of these connections are heavily dependent on healthy market competition, which the U.S. now has less of after the Sprint T-Mobile union.
Again, this conversation about competition and the perils of consolidation is simply not something most analysts, wireless research firms, and public policy officials care about in the slightest. In large part because the act of dismantling regulatory oversight and competition through mindless consolidation results in the only benefit that matters to the industry: stock valuations.
Thanks to consolidation, U.S. consumers not only pay more for mobile data than most developed nations, but the quality of the long-hyped 5G connections is inferior to many overseas deployments. We ultimately lost the once-heralded “race to 5G” thanks to mindless deregulation and consolidation, resulting in a clumsy waddle toward mediocrity the industry doesn’t much like to talk about.
Filed Under: 5g, broadband, competition, consolidation, high speed internet, mobile, telecom, wireless
Logitech’s ‘Forever Mouse’ Idea Pulled Back After Backlash
from the forever-in-our-memories dept
It was just a few months ago that we had some fun with Logitech over it’s amazing, never been done before AI mouse… that was actually just a rehash of a previous mouse that had a button that could be used to launch a ChatGPT prompt. So it wasn’t so much an AI mouse, as a mouse that could button-click you to an AI prompt. To borrow a catchphrase from John Oliver… “cool.”
Well, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber went on the Decoder podcast recently to talk about some of the changes that were occurring at Logitech, as well as an idea for a new “forever mouse” that would come with a subscription cost for regular feature updates. This device would be built solidly, so as to allow for a longer lifespan than your typical mouse. But then came the question of how to fit a device with that kind of longevity into a business model.
I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?
Possibly.
And that would be the forever mouse?
Yeah.
So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.
Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.
But it’s a mouse.
But it’s a mouse, yeah.
I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.
Narrator: consumers perceived those to be very different. From both the public and tech journalists alike, the idea of a subscription-based optical mouse was lampooned viciously. And for good reason. The fatigue in the public for subscription sprawl is very, very real. As is the public’s ability to suss out when they’re being scammed. The idea that a peripheral like a mouse should come with a monthly subscription is obviously absurd on its face. I need my mouse to point and click at things and then, hey, maybe a couple of other features. I don’t need it to change. I don’t need it to download anything beyond any updates that will keep it working with my operating system. Point. And then click.
Ultimately, though, I think the main problem people might find with a forever mouse—which, let’s face it, is really just another way of saying a subscription mouse—is that many of us don’t like having to continually pay for something we used to just own. It’s already unsettling just how much of our digital space is offered as a service with a subscription rather than an up-front price tag, so do we really want our physical peripherals to join that list?
It’s a question it appears we don’t have to answer in the immediate. Logitech’s Nicole Kenyon released a statement that the company has no plans for any mouse that would require a subscription with it.
“There are no plans for a subscription mouse,” said Logitech communications head Nicole Kenyon in a statement provided to The Verge and other publications.
Now, Kenyon writes in response to inaccurate reports about the interview, Logitech’s stance is that “the mouse mentioned is not an actual or planned product but a peek into provocative internal thinking on future possibilities for more sustainable consumer electronics.”
“Inaccurate reporting.” Sorry, but no. At the very best, Faber was inarticulate or unclear in her statements as to whether this device or idea was planned or just some spitballed brainstorming result. And I don’t doubt for a second that if the public was silent about this idea, it would have made its way into production plans.
For now, it appears, we’ll have to stick with enjoying the “AI” mouse along with watching this retreat from the public mocking the company has undergone.
Governor To Students: ‘Look The Other Way’ If You’re Bothered By Mandated Posting Of Ten Commandments In Public Schools
We fought a revolution for this?!?
This is the new America: a loose confederacy (yes, I’m using that correctly [and pointedly]) of states that desire to see us returned to the harsh reality our founding fathers (and colonists before them) left their homelands to escape. The shift of the so-called “conservative movement” to the extreme right has created a disturbingly large subset of state legislators and governors who seem to truly desire a return to the heady days of our pre-Revolution past.
The future of the Republican party under Trump (or any of his favored toadies) is a blend of theocracy and autocracy. Trump is more partial to the autocratic aspects, but has proven willing to ingratiate himself with theocracy superfans — supposed Christians willing to see past his narcissistic nihilism as long as their own bigotry and hatred is catered to.
That’s why this country is inundated with laws that seek to forbid social media companies from ejecting the more nauseous of so-called “conservative” mouthpieces. That’s why multiple states have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ people. That’s why legislators think now is the time to give cops more rights. That’s why several states gleefully greeted the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade with trigger laws that immediately eliminated long-held reproductive rights, even though most residents of these states never pushed for these trigger laws to be written in the first place. And that’s why we have law enforcement officers blundering into school classrooms and public libraries to find content they somehow believe is against the law.
All of the above applies to Louisiana. That’s why Louisiana has decided to reject a couple hundred years of precedent to add more church to its state. In late June, Governor Jeff Landry decided it was a good idea to make this an actual thing in one state of the United States of America.
Under the new law, all public K-12 classrooms and state-funded universities will be required to display a poster-sized version of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” next year.
Yeah, that’s not what we do here. (To date, it still is. Louisiana is [at press time! things could change!] the only state with a law like this on the books.) Separation of church and state has been a key aspect of this nation since its formation because the lack of this separation in England was the impetus for colonization of America, which led to its eventual overthrow of its British overseers.
Flash-forward to 2024 and somehow everything that was old and summarily rejected by this new nation is now cool and good.
While we’ve all seen plenty of performative laws enacted in recent years, there are few that reach this level of showmanship. And if you’re wondering why I’ve dragged Donald Trump into this (this means you, disingenuous commenters who seem to think my Trump-bashing is egregious and off-target), let’s just let the law, the legislators, and the Associated Press journalists speak for themselves:
Lawmakers backing the bill said during debate in May that the posters or funds to print them will likely be donated to schools in this deep Bible Belt state. Nationwide praise for the law from conservative groups and figures including, most recently, former President Donald Trump, could result in outside financial support for the mandate.
Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian conservative organization, has already created a page on its website for donations that “will be used specifically for the purpose of producing and distributing ‘10 Commandments’ displays to educational institutions around Louisiana.”
But the question of what happens if a school doesn’t receive enough donations has lingered for months with little clarity.
“So schools have the ability to raise the funds or they (the posters) can be donated. But, what if you can’t raise the funds or find a donor?” state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat who voted against the law, asked during debate on the legislation last month.
“I don’t know what happens then,” replied state Sen. Adam Bass, a Republican who co-authored the law.
Did you get all that? The law is praised by people (like Donald Trump) for being a good thing for America, even though no other state has imposed this same demand on their public schools. The mandate does not demand schools pay for these posters, suggesting instead the mandate will be complied with thanks to the help of “donors” who care so much about imposing their preferred religion on elementary school students, they’ll ensure no school suffers the negative outcomes of failing to comply with the new law.
But if the funding fails to appear and/or the school refuses to post the Ten Commandments, the punishments will include any portion of the following: “I don’t know what happens then.” And those are the words of one of the legislators who wrote the law.
So, there’s nothing in the law that would allow the state to enforce it. That is the very definition of “performative.” It makes dumb fucks like Trump stand up and holler but the law has no teeth, no value, and very few school administrators expressing their support for the mandate. The AP asked 55 schools for comment and received only two responses in favor of it. The rest of the schools made no comment. But the two supporting respondents are already outnumbered by the school officials willing to go on record as opposed to law and unwilling to punish any “failure” to plaster classroom walls with the state’s preferred religious beliefs.
And, of course, the law has already been hit with multiple lawsuits. It’s an easy win, given that it violates a very clear delineation of church and state that has been recognized by all courts everywhere for most of this country’s history.
But the state won’t let it go. Here’s the literally unbelievable response offered by state attorney general Liz Murrill, who is the person tasked with defending the law against these constitutional challenges. The first thing Murrill does is get the law wrong:
As kids in Louisiana prepare to return to school this month, state officials presented large examples of posters featuring the Ten Commandments that Attorney General Liz Murrill argues “constitutionally comply with the law.” The Republican said she is not aware of any school districts that have begun to implement the mandate, as the posters “haven’t been produced yet.”
Murrill said the court brief being filed, which was not immediately available, argues that “the lawsuit is premature and the plaintiffs cannot prove that they have any actual injury.”
I sincerely hope I’m not the first person to tell you this, Liz, but “actual injury” is not the legal standard in lawsuits like these. The potential for actual injury is enough to move these lawsuits forward. And it’s often more than enough to obtain, at the very least, a temporary injunction blocking the law from being enforced. And if the state can’t convince a court this incursion on constitutional rights is justified by a legitimate government function, the potential for harm can be enough to obtain a permanent injunction.
But that’s not even the stupidest thing that’s been said by Louisiana state officials about this law. This is the stupidest. And it fell right out of the mouth of none other than the governor himself, Jeff Landry:
When asked what he would say to parents who are upset about the Ten Commandments being displayed in their child’s classroom, the governor replied: “If those posters are in school and they (parents) find them so vulgar, just tell the child not to look at it.”
Oh. DO TELL. Let me know how that works out. Is it your firm belief that anyone who doesn’t like constitutional violations should just look the other way when they occur? What are you? A cop?
And is this really the stance you want to take? I mean, I don’t recall you telling semi-pro busybodies who think it’s their personal duty to rid libraries of expression they don’t like to simply “not look at” books they personally find offensive. I certainly haven’t heard any of your ilk telling people offended by things they see on the TV to just change the channel. No one aligned with your perverse view of church-state separation has ever told anyone raising a complaint about drag shows to just steer clear of these events.
That’s a clearly ludicrous suggestion. Gov. Landry is one of those people who thinks he should be able to force others to live by his personal moral standards. If you told him to just “not look at” things he finds sinful or offensive, he would tell you he’s abdicating his responsibility as a government leader, parent, member of society, or whatever. But when it’s a shit law he’s particularly fond of, he’s more than willing to tell people to ignore things they disagree with. And while it might be a good idea to do that when the stakes are low and it’s nothing more than subjective opinions in play, it’s makes absolutely no sense to pretend that’s an acceptable way to handle a clear constitutional violation.
These responses make it exceedingly clear that these are not serious people. They are not capable nor willing to provide actual leadership and/or do what’s best for all state residents. They only appear interested in catering to the basest members of their voter base: the people who are only happy when they’re making other people miserable while pretending they hold the moral high ground.
Filed Under: church and state, jeff landry, liz murrill, louisiana, petit theocracy, unconstitutional
UN Delegates Cheer As They Vote To Approve Increased Surveillance Via Russia-Backed Cybercrime Treaty
from the why-are-we-even-doing-this? dept
For years now, the UN has been trying to strike a deal on a “Cybercrime Treaty.” As with nearly every attempt by the UN to craft treaties around internet regulation, it’s been a total mess. The concept, enabling countries to have agreed upon standards to fight cybercrime, may seem laudable. But when it’s driven by countries that have extremely different definitions of “crime,” it becomes problematic. Especially if part of the treaty is enabling one country to demand another reveal private information about someone they accuse of engaging in a very, very broadly defined “cybercrime.”
The UN structure means that the final decision-makers are nation-states, and other stakeholders have way less say in the process.
And, on Thursday, those nation-states unanimously approved it, ignoring the concerns of many stakeholders.
Some history: two years ago, we warned about how the proposed treaty appeared to be perfect for widespread censorship, as it included considering “hate speech” as a form of cybercrime it sought to regulate. Last year, we checked in again and found that, while updated, the proposed treaty was still a total mess and would lead to both the stifling of free expression and increased surveillance.
No wonder certain governments (Russia, China) loved it.
While the final treaty made some changes from earlier versions that definitely made it better, the end product is still incredibly dangerous in many ways. Human Rights Watch put out a detailed warning regarding the problems of the treaty, noting that Russia is the main backer of the treaty — which should already cause you to distrust it.
The treaty has three main problems: its broad scope, its lack of human-rights safeguards, and the risks it poses to children’s rights.
Instead of limiting the treaty to address crimes committed against computer systems, networks, and data—think hacking or ransomware—the treaty’s title defines cybercrime to include any crime committed by using Information and Communications Technology systems. The negotiators are also poised to agree to the immediate drafting of a protocol to the treaty to address “additional criminal offenses as appropriate.” As a result, when governments pass domestic laws that criminalize any activity that uses the Internet in any way to plan, commit, or carry out a crime, they can point to this treaty’s title and potentially its protocol to justify the enforcement of repressive laws.
In addition to the treaty’s broad definition of cybercrime, it essentially requires governments to surveil people and turn over their data to foreign law enforcement upon request if the requesting government claims they’ve committed any “serious crime” under national law, defined as a crime with a sentence of four years or more. This would include behavior that is protected under international human rights law but that some countries abusively criminalize, like same-sex conduct, criticizing one’s government, investigative reporting, participating in a protest, or being a whistleblower.
In the last year, a Saudi court sentenced a man to death and a second man to 20 years in prison, both for their peaceful expression online, in an escalation of the country’s ever-worsening crackdown on freedom of expression and other basic rights.
This treaty would compel other governments to assist in and become complicit in the prosecution of such “crimes.”
EFF also warned of how the treaty would be used for greater governmental surveillance:
If you’re an activist in Country A tweeting about human rights atrocities in Country B, and criticizing government officials or the king is considered a serious crime in both countries under vague cybercrime laws, the UN Cybercrime Treaty could allow Country A to spy on you for Country B. This means Country A could access your email or track your location without prior judicial authorization and keep this information secret, even when it no longer impacts the investigation.
Criticizing the government is a far cry from launching a phishing attack or causing a data breach. But since it involves using a computer and is a serious crime as defined by national law, it falls within the scope of the treaty’s cross-border spying powers, as currently written.
This isn’t hyperbole. In countries like Russia and China, serious “cybercrime” has become a catchall term for any activity the government disapproves of if it involves a computer. This broad and vague definition of serious crimes allows these governments to target political dissidents and suppress free speech under the guise of cybercrime enforcement.
Posting a rainbow flag on social media could be considered a serious cybercrime in countries outlawing LGBTQ+ rights. Journalists publishing articles based on leaked data about human rights atrocities and digital activists organizing protests through social media could be accused of committing cybercrimes under the draft convention.
The text’s broad scope could allow governments to misuse the convention’s cross border spying powers to gather “evidence” on political dissidents and suppress free speech and privacy under the pretext of enforcing cybercrime laws.
That seems bad!
EFF also warned how the Cybercrime Treaty could be used against journalists and security researchers. It creates a sort of international (but even more poorly worded) version of the CFAA, a law we’ve criticized many times in the past for how it is abused by law enforcement to go after anyone doing anything they dislike “on a computer.”
Instead, the draft text includes weak wording that criminalizes accessing a computer “without right.” This could allow authorities to prosecute security researchers and investigative journalists who, for example, independently find and publish information about holes in computer networks.
These vulnerabilities could be exploited to spread malware, cause data breaches, and get access to sensitive information of millions of people. This would undermine the very purpose of the draft treaty: to protect individuals and our institutions from cybercrime.
What’s more, the draft treaty’s overbroad scope, extensive secret surveillance provisions, and weak safeguards risk making the convention a tool for state abuse. Journalists reporting on government corruption, protests, public dissent, and other issues states don’t like can and do become targets for surveillance, location tracking, and private data collection.
And so, of course, the UN passed it on Thursday in a unanimous vote. Because governments love it for all the concerns discussed above, and human rights groups and other stakeholders don’t get a vote. Which seems like a problem.
The passage of the treaty is significant and establishes for the first time a global-level cybercrime and data access-enabling legal framework.
The treaty was adopted late Thursday by the body’s Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime and will next go to the General Assembly for a vote in the fall. It is expected to sail through the General Assembly since the same states will be voting on it there.
The agreement follows three years of negotiations capped by the final two-week session that has been underway.
And then they gave themselves a standing ovation. Because it’s not them who will get screwed over by this treaty. It’s everyone else.
For the treaty to go into force, 40 nations have to ratify it. Hopefully the US refuses to, and also pushes for other non-authoritarian countries to reject this treaty as well. It’s a really dangerous agreement, and these kinds of international agreements can cause serious problems once countries agree to them and they enter into force. Terrible treaties, once ratified, are nearly impossible to fix.
Filed Under: cfaa, computer crimes, cybercrime, cybercrime treaty, data access, russia, surveillance, un
8th Circuit Says Iowa Can Keep Its LGBTQ-Targeting Book Ban
from the reviving-irrational-hate dept
In one of several ongoing campaigns of hate in our country, the Iowa legislature passed a law that not only changed what schools could teach, but what students could be allowed to read.
First, let’s get to the changes to the state’s health curriculum, which is nothing less than the erasure of HIV/AIDS sufferers.
The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases
including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.[…]
The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases,
including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
That’s what’s being deleted from school health curriculum — a state-enforced vanishing of information about a communicable disease that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the nation and tens of millions around the world. The state legislature believes students should have to seek out information about this disease on their own, outside of school rooms, and of their own initiative.
This is nothing more than the government expressing a disdain for anyone non-heterosexual. The state pretends this is about giving parents more control over what their children are taught, but the law only allows the state to decide what children are taught. There’s nothing in the law that allows parents to decide they want their children to be taught about HIV/AIDS. There’s only the removal of that particular part of the curriculum.
The other part of the law governs the content of books carried by school libraries. It’s more of the same, with the law targeting “depictions of sex acts” in books. Of course, the law contains an exception for “religious texts,” which (also of course) only means the Bible and its depictions of incest, rape, and sodomy.
The law was immediately challenged by pretty much every rights group and book publisher late last year. One lawsuit was spearheaded by the ACLU and a ton of parents and students rights groups. The second lawsuit was headed up by book publisher Penguin, along with a long list of authors and other, smaller publishers. That lawsuit also notably featured a powerhouse in the educational arena: the Iowa State Education Association, the union representing most of the state’s educators.
Less than a month later, these lawsuits managed to secure an injunction forbidding the law from being enforced. The federal court handling the lawsuits saw nothing remotely redeemable about the new law and made its point forcefully in its decision:
The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault. The sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.
As if that wasn’t enough already, the federal court added this while discussing the restrictions on in-class instruction:
The law forbids programs, promotion, and instruction to students in those grades relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” but those terms are defined a neutral way that makes no distinction between cisgender or transgender identity or gay or straight relationships. Meaning: on its face, the law forbids any programs, promotion, or instruction recognizing that anyone is male or female or in a relationship of any sort (gay or straight). The statute is therefore content-neutral but so wildly overbroad that every school district and elementary school teacher in the State has likely been violating it since the day the school year started. This renders the statute void for vagueness under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the State will have unfettered discretion to decide when to enforce it and against whom, thus making it all but impossible for a reasonable person to know what will and will not lead to punishment.
That (mostly) killed off the new law. The only part that remained was the part of the law that required administrators to notify parents if their students requested “accommodations relating to gender identity,” including the use of preferred pronouns. And the only reason that part of the law survived was that no plaintiff could plausibly claim to be harmed (potentially or otherwise) by this particular mandate.
You’d think that decision would have stood. It was clear and forceful, and detailed everywhere the law violated Constitutional rights. But the Eight Circuit Appeals Court says otherwise. Its decision [PDF] is extremely short and barely interacts with the lower court’s decision, other than to say its initial reading of the law was incorrect.
It does agree some of the plaintiffs can still pursue their First Amendment claims (albeit not exactly in the way they’ve pursued them here) because curation of school library content by librarians and schools cannot truly be considered “government speech” — something that does not implicate the First Amendment.
[I]t is doubtful that the public would view the placement and removal of books in public school libraries as the government speaking. Take routine examples of historic tomes on political science. A well-appointed school library could include copies of Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’ Das Kapital, Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Plaintiffs noted, if placing these books on the shelf of public school libraries constitutes government speech, the State “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently.”
But granting that part of the argument to the plaintiffs (and only some of the plaintiffs) isn’t enough to keep the injunction intact. It says the lower court applied the wrong standard, replacing what the plaintiffs were actually engaging in (a facial challenge to the law) with something a bit more subjective.
We note that the district court concluded that the Library Provision is a viewpoint-neutral, content-based, age-appropriate restriction on the content of public school libraries, and we agree. The purpose of public school libraries is to advance the school curriculum—that is, to facilitate the pedagogical mission of the school, which may involve some limitation of expression.
[…]
Given the pedagogical mission and the policy making authority possessed by Iowa, it is important in conducting a review and analysis to bear in mind that Iowa is not required to tolerate speech that undermines or is inconsistent with its central mission of educating Iowa children.
Meanwhile, the district court insisted the Instruction Section could only be interpreted in an “absurd” manner, an interpretation not shared by the defendants and even some of the Plaintiffs. The district court imparted its interpretation without referencing several canons of construction that may have revealed a narrower, reasonable interpretation, such as the canons of constitutional-avoidance, noscitur a sociis, and Iowa’s admonition to interpret its laws reasonably and in a manner feasible of execution, Iowa Code § 4.4(3)-(4). Other interpretive methods should be discussed and exhausted before concluding the only textual interpretation is an absurd one because the resulting interpretation inevitably bears on whether the law’s applications are constitutional or not.
This means the state can go back to banning books from school libraries while the First Amendment challenges are more fully-developed in the lower court. But no facial challenges to the law survive. Anything that has a chance of moving forward will have to use the “as applied” standard, which means book bans can be challenged on a case-by-case basis, and litigants will have to do some dividing before they can conquer. And they’ll have to decide whether any single challenge is worth pursuing since it seems clear the Appeals Court won’t be handing out injunctions for anything broader than the injury particular to each individual plaintiff.
And that sucks. It means a lot more time and money will need to be spent to protect Iowans from their own government. All the state has to do is continue to tell students they can’t read this or they can’t learn about that.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, 8th circuit appeals court, book bans, censorship, iowa, lawsuit, libraries
Daily Deal: The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA has 15 courses to help you prepare for various CompTIA certification exams. Courses cover everything from the fundamentals to cloud essentials to cybersecurity. The bundle is on sale for $49.97.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
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