At a time when Europe is pushing for much greater filtering and takedowns, it's worth a reminder that these kinds of systems pretty regularly takedown perfectly legitimate content -- either content that is fair use or that is licensed. Case in point: this past Sunday, Ariana Grande held a huge benefit concert in Manchester called One Love Manchester. As you no doubt know, a few weeks back there was a bombing at Grande's concert in Manchester, and her decision to put on a massive benefit concert right back in Manchester just a couple weeks later is impressive.

Except, for at least some period of time, the copyright gods didn't want you to see it. Grande streamed the whole thing via her YouTube account. And... the concert was then promptly shut down by by Warner Music and Sony Music, saying that the stream violated their copyrights.

Now, chances are these were simply ContentID matches that were automated -- rather than direct takedown notices as suggested in the tweet. And the video is now back, so some might argue this is no big deal. However, with the record labels demanding stronger and stronger filters, along with demands that content not just be taken down but then "stay down", stories like this would only get worse and worse, and more and more perfectly legitimate content would get blocked.

There's been plenty of talk about the rapid arrest of Reality Winner (and, yes, people are still baffled that a real person is named this) and the fact that the tracking dots on printers may have helped track her down (along with the fact that she was one of only a few people who had recently touched that document). Fewer seem to have focused on the details in the leak, about how the Russians quite likely hacked e-voting vendors to a much deeper level than suspected. That seems like really important information for the public to understand -- especially for those of us who have been screaming from the mountaintops for years about the lack of security in e-voting machines.

In short: this certainly feels like a completely justifiable leak to better inform the public of something important, and done in a way that is unlikely to harm any national security efforts or assets. It seems to fit right in with the whistleblowing tradition of other leakers. And, yet, Reality Winner is charged under the Espionage Act. And, as we've also discussed for years, the Espionage Act explicitly blocks people from using the public interest or whistleblowing as a defense. Such information is simply inadmissable.

As Ed Snowden has now pointed out in response to the charges against Winner, this remains a huge threat to a free press.

Winner is accused of serving as a journalistic source for a leading American news outlet about a matter of critical public importance. For this act, she has been charged with violating the Espionage Act—a World War I era law meant for spies—which explicitly forbids the jury from hearing why the defendant acted, and bars them from deciding whether the outcome was to the public's benefit. This often-condemned law provides no space to distinguish the extraordinary disclosure of inappropriately classified information in the public interest—whistleblowing—from the malicious disclosure of secrets to foreign governments by those motivated by a specific intent to harm to their countrymen.

The prosecution of any journalistic source without due consideration by the jury as to the harm or benefit of the journalistic activity is a fundamental threat to the free press. As long as a law like this remains on the books in a country that values fair trials, it must be resisted.

Indeed. There are many arguments that this aspect of the Espionage Act is unconstitutional -- but that hasn't been tested in court, and it may never get tested in court. Even if it does, you never know how judges might rule. But it does seem quite problematic that a law that is explicitly designed to deal with literal spies sending information privately to our enemies is now regularly applied against whistleblowers releasing information for the public's benefit.

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The debate over the renewal of Section 702 surveillance continues, but a group of legislators is looking to short-circuit the discussion. Senator Tom Cotton and a whole bunch of Republicans have introduced a bill that would ensure this discussion is never raised again. [h/t Julian Sanchez]

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) along with Senators Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), John Cornyn (R-Texas), John McCain (R-Arizona), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), John Thune (R-South Dakota), and David Perdue (R-Georgia) today introduced legislation making Section 702, and the entirety of Title VII, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) permanent.

This followed Cotton's statements on the Senate floor, where he used recent attacks in the UK to make incoherent points about domestic security.

The attacks in London last weekend exposed in a matter of minutes just how vulnerable our free societies truly are. All it takes is a van or a knife and an unsuspecting bystander to turn a fun night out on the town into a horrific nightmare. Course, we shouldn't need any reminders, but let me give one yet again: We are at war with Islamic extremists. We have been for years, and, I'm sorry to say, there's no end in sight. It's easy to forget this as we go about our daily lives, but our enemies have not-and they will not. They've never taken their eyes off the ultimate target either: the United States.

Attacks in other countries are apparently just pre-game warmups for terrorists. The only way to prevent a domestic attack is to never ask questions about Section 702 again, apparently. If we don't trust our government to respect our privacy and civil liberties, it's not because the NSA constantly abused its Section 702 collection programs (and then hid these abuses from its oversight). No, the real villain here is the man who exposed this abuse to the general public.

Unfortunately, this and other programs were distorted in the public debate by a traitor, disgruntled ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who now sits in the warm embrace of Russian intelligence services. And ever since his very damaging leak of classified material a few years back, many Americans have grown doubtful of these programs-and section 702 in particular.

I love it when someone describes the dumping of internal documents as "distorting." It underlines the speaker's desire to have the Great Unwashed remain in the dark while the government expands its collection capabilities and surveillance powers.

Cotton's Senate statement goes on to make it clear that nothing but a "forever" renewal will do, while handwaving away NSA abuses with meaningless phrases about privacy protections.

It's true that this program occasionally does collect information about American citizens-and that will be true of any attempt to stop any kind of homegrown terrorism. But if you're concerned about protecting Americans' privacy rights, then you should support extending this program. It puts in place a host of privacy protections to scrub raw intelligence of any unnecessary identifying information. To allow this program to expire on December 31 would hurt both our national security and our privacy rights.

That's why today I'm introducing a bill that would reauthorize section 702 permanently, as is, with no changes.

If nothing changes, then the "host of privacy protections" simply don't exist. The NSA itself made the biggest step towards fixing its routine, decade-long run of privacy violations by dropping the "about" program. A clean re-auth adds nothing to anyone's privacy. A forever re-auth would ensure this status quo in perpetuity.

As astounding as Cotton's contradictory assertions are, they're topped by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Earlier in the day, Graham was reported to have stated he would not support the reauthorization of this surveillance program because it could be "politically manipulated." And yet his name appears in the list of legislators pushing this bill.

So here we are, with the debate just officially beginning in the Senate and already surveillance proponents are making it clear they're not interested in discussing Section 702. Ever.

In the wake of the FCC's attempt to kill net neutrality, ISPs like Comcast have been working overtime trying to convince the press and public that nothing bad is actually happening. Shortly after the FCC voted to begin killing the rules, Comcast posted a trifecta of press statement, comment from company CEO Brian Roberts and commentary from top lobbyist David Cohen all saying the same thing: nothing bad is happening, and whatever happens -- Comcast really, truly adores transparency and will work tirelessly to defend the open internet:

The fact that this runs in stark, documentable opposition to reality and Comcast's behavior over the last twenty years isn't something you're supposed to dwell on. Cohen (the company gets mad at us for pointing out he's still a lobbyist despite using the title of "Chief Diversity Officer" to dodge lobbying accountability rules) has also been spending the last month or so trying to argue that we can still have net neutrality despite walking back the FCC's authority over broadband providers:

"While some try to conflate the two issues, Title II and net neutrality are not the same. Title II is a source of authority to impose enforceable net neutrality rules. Title II is not net neutrality. Getting rid of Title II does not mean that we are repealing net neutrality protections for American consumers."

That ignores history. You'll recall that the FCC's original 2010 rules were demolished by the Verizon lawsuit, with the courts saying that the FCC couldn't impose such rules without first classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. So in 2015, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler did precisely that. Walking back that decision means stripping out the legal authority to actually enforce net neutrality, and Comcast certainly knows this. In fact we've repeatedly noted how the government's plan is to effectively gut privacy, net neutrality and other broadband consumer protections, and to replace them with the policy equivalent of wet tissue paper.

This message that nothing bad is actually happening and that Comcast really secretly loves net neutrality has been the cornerstone of an ongoing PR effort at the company the last few weeks. But given there's few if any people who trust what's arguably the least-liked company in America, responses to these claims on Twitter haven't been what you'd call warm:

One of the only pieces of evidence Comcast provides for its professed dedication to net neutrality is that it didn't, unlike Verizon, sue to overturn the FCC's 2010 rules. But as we noted back then, Comcast and AT&T didn't oppose the rules back then because they weren't really enforceable, but more importantly they simply didn't do very much. Having been written by Google and major ISPs, they carved out massive loopholes for all manner of anti-competitive behavior, and didn't even cover wireless networks.

But as the EFF writes in a missive taking aim at Comcast's new image reformation effort, the company also saw no point in suing then because it was bound to adhere to the (already flimsy) rules as a condition of its 2011 merger with NBC Universal:

"In its PR campaign, Comcast claims that its decision not to challenge the 2010 Open Internet Order is evidence of its support for network neutrality. In reality, it's likely the company stayed quiet because shortly after the Open Internet Order was approved Comcast was required to operate neutrally as a condition of its merger with NBC Universal. It had little to gain from publicly opposing the 2010 Order because they could not lift network neutrality obligations over their network even if they won in court due to merger conditions."

In short, Comcast didn't fight to overturn the 2010 rules because it loves net neutrality -- it did so because it knew the rules were garbage, and merger conditions wound up binding the company to them anyway (for whatever good that would have actually done). It's only once the rules had actual teeth -- provided by Title II authority -- that Comcast began to get nervous that somebody might actually stop the company from being an anti-competitive jackass.

Comcast's positions are viciously contradicted by a decade of indisputable anti-competitive decisions on this front, including the company's early decision to throttle all upstream BitTorrent traffic (and lie about it, repeatedly), its ham-fisted decision to use usage caps and overage fees to hamstring video competition, and it's decision to try and limit what devices consumers use to view the content of their choice on the platforms of their choosing.

By and large you'd be hard pressed to believe any major ISP -- especially Comcast -- has much if any credibility on this subject, and it's not really clear exactly who one of the least-liked companies in America thinks it's fooling.

To date, the most remarkable aspect of the Denuvo story was the very brief stint it had as a successful DRM. Brief is the operative word, of course, as the past six months or so have seen Denuvo's vaunted status devolve into one more typical of DRM stories, with defeats for the security software coming at rates measured in days and weeks of a game's release.

But now things have taken a turn towards the ironic. A security software firm called VMProtect, which makes software to protect against reverse engineering and developing cracks of applications, is accusing Denuvo of having used its software without properly licensing it. This is the kind of thing that folks who support DRM tend to call piracy. And, thus, Denuvo may have "pirated" another company's software to make its anti-piracy DRM.

According to a post on Russian forum RSDN, Denuvo is accused of engaging in a little piracy of its own. The information comes from a user called drVanо, who is a developer at VMProtect Software, a company whose tools protect against reverse engineering and cracking.

“I want to tell you a story about one very clever and greedy Austrian company called Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH,” drVano begins. “A while ago, this company released a protection system of the same name but the most remarkable thing is that they absolutely illegally used our VMProtect software in doing so.”

drVano goes on to detail the story to a degree that seems legitimate. Denuvo had met with VMProtect about using the latter's software, but had wanted to do so under the common and cheap $500 license offered publicly as a "personal license." Rolling that software into a distributed DRM obviously fell outside of that sort of personal use license, leading VMProtect to ask for much more in the way of money if Denuvo wanted to move forward. Denvuo declined, but then apparently went ahead an bought a personal license anyway and began rolling out the software in Denuvo DRM. VMProtect revoked the license due to Denuvo's breach of the license conditions, but Denuvo kept up its distribution anyway.

Which lead VMProtect to go on offense.

VMProtect then took what appears to be a rather unorthodox measure against Denuvo. After cooperation with Sophos, the anti-virus vendor agreed to flag up the offending versions of Denuvo as potential malware. VMProtect says it has also been speaking with Valve about not featuring the work of “scammers” on its platform.

“Through our long-standing partners from Intellect-C, we are starting to prepare an official claim against Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH with the prospect of going to court. This might be a very good lesson for ‘greedy’ developers who do not care about the intellectual property rights of their colleagues in the same trade,” drVano concludes.

The irony here is delicious. The precipitous fall of DRM, once claimed to be the end of software piracy entirely, culminates in what may be piracy on the part of that same company. All while the effectiveness of that DRM has dropped to essentially zero.

If the gaming industry were ever going to learn that DRM is a failed concept, Denuvo ought to be the teacher of that lesson.

The surprising story that quickly followed the somewhat-less-surprising Intercept leak was the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner for the leak of the document. It was an incredibly fast leak investigation that apparently began when The Intercept reached out for comment after obtaining the document on May 30th.

There's been a lot of talk that The Intercept acted carelessly when speaking to government officials and burned its source. But the evidence trail laid down by the FBI's affidavit suggests Winner did most of the burning herself. The document given to The Intercept was either an original printout or a scan of it. It showed telltale creases where it had been folded and placed into an envelope by the leaker.

More importantly, the document contained something else: data that indicated where and when the document had been printed. This made it much easier to link Winner to the posted document. Rob Graham of Errata Security walks through the steps he took to decipher the physical metadata created by the NSA printer used by Winner. Printers -- and not just those owned by secretive government agencies -- can help rat out leakers.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

Using a paint program to invert the document's color scheme and the EFF's handy spy-in-the-printer tool, Graham obtained the following information using only the auto-printed dots on the Intercept document:

The document leaked by the Intercept was from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218. The document was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20. The NSA almost certainly has a record of who used the printer at that time.

Very definitely it does have such records, as do a great many entities not heavily involved in national security. Many documents in many companies are considered "uncontrolled" if printed, and built-in document tracking allows them to track down employees who may have jeopardized nothing more than their own employment.

However, this does bring everything back around to the "just metadata" argument. The government has often claimed the wholesale collection of metadata is harmless, because it's nothing more than transactional records. Obviously, metadata can be quite damaging. Winner's decision to print the document ended her very short stint as a leaker.

Conversely, the government also claims -- when raising the "going dark" specter -- that metadata and other transactional records aren't nearly as useful as intercepted communications and/or device contents. To some extent, that's true. But it's obvious that metadata/transactional records aren't nearly as useless as they're portrayed by law enforcement handwringers. Either way the government spins the metadata argument, it's insulting the intelligence of Americans.

There was this bizarre mystery earlier this year where no one in the government would even say who was in charge of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). There had been public statements made that the Trump administration was keeping on Michelle Lee, but her picture had been deleted from the Commerce Department website, and public appearances were being canceled and no one would say what was up. Finally, in mid-March, after months of questioning, the USPTO told people that Lee was still in the job. To us, this was a good thing. The past few USPTO directors had been cut from the "more patents is always a good thing" mold, whereas Lee actually recognized that bad patents harmed innovation. And even though the last time the Patent Office got concerned about bad patents it allowed the patent approval backlog to fill up, under Lee the backlog has reached its lowest point in a decade.

She seemed to be doing a great job all around -- though patent trolls and the group of patent lawyers who love the trolls were campaigning about her -- and it appeared she would stick around. That would be a good thing. For all the craziness going on in the government right now, having competent leadership at the USPTO would be one less thing to worry about. But... now it's being reported that Lee has suddenly resigned and sent a goodbye email to staff. That's bad news on the patent front. Of course, it may be ages before any new director is appointed. As I type this, of the 559 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, Trump hasn't even named a nominee for 431 of them. That number rises to 456 if you include nominees who have been announced but not formally submitted. And that doesn't even get to the 63 nominations that haven't yet been confirmed. Adding the new USPTO director to that pile may mean no new USPTO director for.... who the hell knows how long.

One of the fundamental strengths of the internet has always been its decentralization, but over time we've seen a bunch of different forces start to distort this setup. This week, we're joined by Jamie King, director of Steal This Film and host of the Steal This Show podcast to discuss the ongoing efforts to restore the decentralization of the web.

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We've been waiting a long time for the Supreme Court to tackle the Fourth Amendment implications of cell site location info. After putting it off for as long as possible (or so it seems...), the nation's top court is finally ready to handle yesterday's hotly-disputed tech/privacy issue.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case next term challenging the use of cellphone records without a warrant.

The case, Carpenter v. United States, centers on Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted of committing a string of armed robberies of Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio between December 2010 and March 2011.

The government’s evidence at trial included business records from the defendants’ wireless carriers, showing his cellphone was used within a half-mile to two miles of several robberies during the times they occurred.

The nation's top court seemed to have a pretty good handle on the issues raised by today's smartphones in its Riley decision, so there's some hope the Court will engage in a thorough examination of the Third Party Doctrine in light of today's technological realities.

The Supreme Court turned down a chance to reconcile a circuit split back in 2015. Its decision to take it up now might make this a bit easier, seeing as that split no longer exists. The holdout -- the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court -- reversed its original finding to align it with the other circuits in stating there is no expectation of privacy in third party records.

The case the Supreme Court will examine comes from the Sixth Circuit Court and deals with historical cell site location records. Almost coincidentally, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court released another cell site opinion the same day the Supreme Court announced its review, only this time dealing with real-time gathering of cellphone GPS data. In both cases, the Appeals Court found no Fourth Amendment implications, even though it had to push through its own contradictory assertions to arrive at this conclusion.

Unfortunately, a previous Supreme Court decision on GPS tracking further complicates the issue. The Court's decision on this issue -- which is very much related to warrantless access to cell site location info -- was about three-quarters punt. It suggested long-term warrantless GPS tracking could violate the Fourth Amendment, but did not go so far as to institute a warrant requirement. It's likely it could arrive at a similar non-decision here -- one that would allow the continued exploitation of the Third Party Doctrine by law enforcement, even though the wealth of data handed over to third parties by today's smartphones bears almost no resemblance to the dialing records discussed in 1979's Smith v. Maryland.