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The British have a number of traditions. Some, such as drinking tea, are famous around the world. Less well-known is a habit of revealing highly-confidential information by carrying pieces of paper in public that photographers using long-focus lenses are able to snap and then magnify to read. The Guardian wrote an entire article on the subject, detailing how numerous embarrassing leaks occurred in the UK because people forgot to put the documents they were holding in some kind of opaque folder. On one occasion, an anti-terror operation had to be brought forward when Britain's most senior counterterrorism officer walked around with top secret documents on display -- a blunder that cost him his job.

This mistake is so common that there are notices by the door of the UK Prime Minister's residence at Number 10 Downing Street reminding people not to walk out with confidential material that is exposed. The fact that there is a photographer with a long-focus lens who hangs around outside No 10 in the hope that they do precisely that shows how often they ignore this warning.

Although the Brits have practically turned this activity into another weird sport alongside cricket, it's not unknown in the US. For example, the following happened at the end of November last year:

Potential Donald Trump cabinet pick Kris Kobach accidentally leaked Department of Homeland Security plans when posing for a press photograph with the president-elect. Using photo editing tools, a zoomed-in view on the documents being carried by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach reveals a plan to put Trump’s hard-line immigration platform into practice.

Aside from the carelessness of the people involved, the problem has arisen because long-focus lenses are now so powerful and commonly-deployed that it is relatively easy to capture a high-quality image of an exposed document so that its contents can be read. That's a problem that will only get worse as camera technology advances, especially combined with digital enhancement techniques. If this story on the BBC's website is to be believed, it's not just documents that are now at risk as a result:

A Japanese researcher says doing the peace sign in a photo could lead to your fingerprints being stolen.

They might be easy to recreate if your digits are "in focus with strong lighting".

That claim is from Isao Echizen, from the National Institute of Informatics (NIII), who says prints could then be made "widely available".

That's clearly a big problem at a time when fingerprints are increasingly being used to unlock digital devices, and to provide access to sensitive data. The British experience shows it's hard enough to shield confidential papers; keeping fingerprints out of high-resolution photos seems like an impossible task.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

The CIA has millions of declassified records stashed away in Maryland -- something it claimed was accessible to the public. Actual access, however, resembles something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," rather than what any reasonable person would call "accessible."

This so-called "publicly accessible" database -- known as CREST -- has been the target of MuckRock contributor Mike Best, who kickstarted an effort to liberate records from the vault through the use of manual labor. The records can be accessed by computer, but only certain computers, and only if you know exactly where to find them.

This is the CIA's "publicly available" records system front-end.

And here's how you locate it.

Accessing the information isn't easy. Researchers have to go to the back of the 3rd floor library at the National Archives building in Maryland, which is unfortunately unstaffed for half the day. Tucked away in the library are the only computers that can access the millions of pages of declassified records. If researchers ask the the main "Information" desk, they're answered with confused stares and incorrect directions. Researchers trying to look up on the National Archive's website where to access the computers, won't find it on the page about doing research at that location or on the page for electronic records at that location. That information is tucked away on the page for online databases - despite not being online.

Best's crowdfunding effort sought to free these documents from their four-computer cage. But the only way to do so was to visit in person, print out pages, and rescan them. All of this would be done under multiple forms of surveillance at the National Archive.

To expedite the process, MuckRock turned to litigation. Three years after commencing its FOIA lawsuit against the CIA, MuckRock has emerged victorious. The CIA has released the contents of the CREST vault online at its site, something it repeatedly claimed would take dozens of years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete.

The story behind the CIA's forced transparency is amazing. The claims made by the CIA during its opacity efforts are simply astounding. MuckRock has published a long, detailed recounting of its FOIA battle against the agency at its site and I wholeheartedly encourage you to click through and read it. But here are some of the highlights.

First off, everything in the database is in an unsearchable format by choice. The CIA only uses TIFF files, claiming that these are more resistant to alteration. But when faced with litigation, the CIA reversed course on the supposed hardiness of TIFF files.

The declaration... says that CIA cannot release these TIFF files in electronic form because they can be so easily altered by the mere act of a CIA FOIA analyst looking at them, and that the security measures they must take to remove this accidental metadata for an electronic release (involving editing each file separately by hand) would take 28 years and 1,200 CDs.

And there's where the hilarity begins. These are the DOJ's claims as to the difficulty of releasing the database it just released well ahead of its 28-year estimate. Not only is the process supposedly far too onerous to even begin to consider undertaking, but the DOJ claims the documents it just made available to the public at the CIA's website are not of public interest -- this despite being (technically) available to for public viewing at the National Archive for several years now.

In another filing, the CIA admits the 1,200 CDs that would take 28 years to compile have actually already been compiled -- and there are actually 1,450 CDs of records, but it will only consider releasing the quoted 1,200 if forced to. Unless the CIA is still porting these documents over to the CREST system at the National Archive, its claim of "28 years" looks even more ridiculous. From one of MuckRock's filings:

"Moreover, when [CIA] estimates that it would take 28 years just to create copies of the CREST database, it begs the question of how CIA loaded CREST in the first place. The system has only been operational since 2000.”

Then it claimed it would need $108,000 and six months to make copies of the CDs it already had in hand. And it doubled down on its contradictory claims about TIFF files, stating they were so easy to alter because they were so difficult to alter.

This lead to one of the best rebuttals (and lead-offs) in FOIA history:

I file a sur-reply drawing on my extensive experience as a person with a working brain, closing with the following thought:

“Last, CIA claims that ‘the act of a CIA employee opening a document on his or her terminal may cause metadata to embed itself on the image header.’ This is a frivolous statement for two reasons. First, files on PCs are not altered unless they are saved after the alteration. Simply opening a file and then closing it without changing it does not embed metadata on the file. Second, if this were a valid concern, it would apply to every file processed by the CIA FOIA office, not just CREST files. Since it clearly does not (which would paralyze the FOIA office), then the Court should view this claim very skeptically.”

Kel McClanahan -- the author of the post and MuckRock's legal rep for this case -- digs into the DOJ/CIA's repeated assertions about the "burdensomeness" of complying with this FOIA request. By the time he's done, everyone and everything is covered with government bullshit.

In 2000, using cutting edge 2000 technology, CIA populates CREST over a matter of months. For the next 15 years they insist that the only way to protect this system is to videotape people who want to access it. In 2015 they say that, using cutting edge 2015 technology, it will take them 28 years to make CD copies of CREST. Then they say that they already MADE CD copies of CREST in a matter of months if not weeks, meaning that it will only take 6 years to copy THOSE copies.

But they can copy those records to the web in 4 years. Less than a year later, they say that because of the huge public interest in CREST over the last several years (that they expressly disavowed less than 6 months before, did you remember?) they will have all of CREST online within a year because nobody needs to be videotaped any more. Then, less than 2 months later, they put all of CREST online.

The CIA and DOJ insist this stonewalling had nothing to do with the CIA's online release of CREST files. Apparently, it did all of this out of the goodness of its heart, forfeiting a shot at $100,000+ in FOIA fees and chance to do next to nothing for the next 30 years. It's obvious the effort to move these records online increased once it became apparent the government was going to come out on the losing end of these FOIA lawsuits (Jason Smathers was suing the CIA over the same database). Rather than be on the hook for legal fees, the CIA preempted any judicial judgment by releasing them to the public (the same public it said had "no interest" in these files) in bulk before final rulings could be made.

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For years now we've noted how incumbent ISPs have written and purchased protectionist state laws in roughly twenty states. These laws were quietly passed by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other large ISPs as a response to communities that began considering building their own broadband networks. Granted these efforts only emerged because these communities were frustrated by the lack of competition, poor service, and high prices (aka market failure). Instead of shoring up service and competing, these ISPs found it more economical to simply buy legislation overriding local community rights.

Virginia is just the latest state to happily do the bidding of incumbent telecom giants with a new proposal that would hamstring towns and cities with all manner of restrictions should they decide to build their own networks, or strike a public/private partnership to that same end.

House lawmaker Kathy Byron has crafted the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" after receiving healthy campaign contributions from ISPs like Verizon and AT&T. But her proposal actually restricts broadband deployment -- or public/private partnerships like Google Fiber -- by preventing towns and cities from building networks if incumbent ISPs offer speeds of just 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up across 90% of their footprints:

"...a locality wouldn't be allowed to offer Internet service if an existing network already provides 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. That speed threshold is low enough that it can be met by old DSL lines in areas that haven't received more modern cable and fiber networks.

Of course, because expensive, last-generation DSL and pricey satellite broadband service already likely meet that metric in Virginia, this is effectively a ban on all community broadband -- without the bill's authors having to overtly admit that's what they're doing. But in addition to that restriction, the law would saddle any new municipal broadband project with all manner of logistical caveats, while giving ISPs ample ammunition to sue and cajole any effort that makes it past this first hurdle:

"Moreover, the legislation would give private ISPs grounds to challenge municipal broadband projects in court. Local governments seeking to offer broadband would have to file various documents with the state Broadband Advisory Council at least 120 days before construction and "an annual certification by July 1 of each year that any expansion to or changes in its projects or system since the preceding July 1 still qualify as broadband expansion services."

"Any person who believes that any part of such filings is incomplete, incorrect, or false and who is in the business of providing Internet services within the locality shall have standing to bring an action in the circuit court for the locality to seek to require the locality to either comply with the substantive and procedural content of the filings required by this section, or cease to provide services, and no bond shall be required for injunctive relief against the locality," the legislation says.

Many municipal broadband providers are sued right out of the gate by incumbent broadband providers. After the lawsuits inevitably raise project costs and delay timelines, those same ISPs come in and use these struggles as proof positive that community broadband is the pinnacle of dysfunction. Not too surprisingly, Virginia's bill is being heavily promoted by the Virginia Cable Telecommunications Association, which, like most telecom lobbying arms, implies they're just nobly trying to protect taxpayers from themselves:

"The VCTA believes that the General Assembly should debate and establish a state policy to determine if local governments should be risking public dollars to build duplicative networks competing with the private sector that it also regulates, taxes and serves as the gatekeeper to the rights of way used to deploy broadband."

This idea that all municipal broadband deployments are automatically failures -- and that taxpayers need protection from themselves -- is a fairly standard argument from telecom industry lobbyists. But municipal broadband deployments are just business plans, and like any business plans -- some are good -- and some aren't. As such, poorly planned networks fail, and well-designed proposals succeed. But there's nothing automatically calamitous about community broadband; it's simply an organic local response to market failure in the broadband space.

These bills have been successful in large part because ISP lobbyists have managed to frame municipal broadband as a partisan issue, intentionally sowing division. But the majority of such networks are built in Conservative cities and states and have broad, bipartisan consumer support (hating Comcast is pretty damn near universal). The reality remains that if ISPs really wanted to kill municipal broadband, they simply have to do a better job. But again, it's much more efficient to buy state laws protecting your stranglehold over a failing market, than to actually stand up and deliver the kind of better service broadband consumers have been demanding for fifteen years.

As we've noted, sorta-porn company Perfect 10 really is the gift that keeps on giving. The company claims that it's in the porn business, but in one of the many, many lawsuits it has filed, it was suggested that the company is little more than a pure copyright troll, just looking for companies to sue. This was in a filing made by one of the companies Perfect 10 sued back in 2010:

Perfect 10 is a copyright troll that does not operate a real business and instead seeks to foster the spread of infringing copies of works that it owns over the Internet in order to entrap and shakedown websites and services where copies of its images may randomly end up.

Perfect 10 does not have the employees or attributes of a legitimate business. Today, Perfect 10 is essentially a paralegal service masquerading as a porn company. It is run by its founder, Norm Zada, out of his Beverly Hills home with the help of full and part time employees who are paid primarily to troll the Internet looking for (but not removing) allegedly infringing copies of Perfect 10 images for use in existing or potential future litigation and to draft declarations and other papers.

One of the core elements of a Perfect 10 copyright trolling operation is that it rarely sends legitimate DMCA notices. Sometimes it just sends screenshots of images and basically says "take this down" without ever pointing to the actual location of the content. That's yet another reason why many have argued it's little more than a troll. Someone truly looking to protect its own content would actually follow the DMCA and tell service providers where the content was hosted, rather than tap dancing around such questions... and then filing lawsuits. I'm sure that some who Perfect 10 threatens just settle, but when cases go to court, Perfect 10 not only loses, but loses in impressive fashion, setting all sorts of useful and valuable precedents around the DMCA and how service providers should respond to takedowns. Among the useful cases:

• Perfect 10 v. Google
• Perfect 10 v. CCBill
• Perfect 10 v. Amazon
• Perfect 10 v. Visa

And, then, in 2014, Perfect 10 lost yet again, this time to Usenet provider Giganews. The case there was so egregious that in 2015, Perfect 10 was ordered to pay $5.6 million in legal fees to Giganews for filing such a bogus claim.

Perfect 10 appealed (of course) and the 9th Circuit has now given us yet another smackdown of Perfect 10, affirming the lower court decision, and saying that Perfect 10's theories about Usenet infringement are pretty crazy. One key point in the ruling, that Perfect 10 tried to argue, was that in light of the bizarre (and still nonsensical) Supreme Court Aereo ("looks like a duck") test, Giganews should be found to have been a direct infringer due to its interpretation of "volitional conduct." Specifically, Perfect 10 seemed to argue that Aereo wiped away the need to show "volitional conduct" by the parties accused of infringing. The court isn't buying it:

Contrary to Perfect 10’s contention, this requirement of causation remains an element of a direct infringement claim. In Fox Broadcasting, we explained that “[i]nfringement of the reproduction right requires copying by the defendant, which comprises a requirement that the defendant cause the copying.” ... In using this language, we indicated that causation is an element of a direct infringement claim.

Furthermore, the court points out that Perfect 10's interpretation of Aereo is just wrong:

The volitional-conduct requirement is consistent with the Aereo majority opinion, in which the Supreme Court held that Aereo, a service that streamed broadcast television programming to subscribers over the Internet, “perform[ed] publicly” as defined by the Transmit Clause.... First, the Aereo Court did not expressly address the volitional-conduct requirement for direct liability under the Copyright Act, nor did it directly dispute or comment on Justice Scalia’s explanation of the doctrine. Thus, as one court in the Central District of California subsequently opined, because “[t]he volitional conduct doctrine is a significant and long-standing rule, adopted by all Courts of Appeal to have considered it, . . . it would be folly to presume that Aereo categorically jettisoned it by implication.”

From there, the court makes quick work of each one of Perfect 10's claims, pointing out how each one appears to be divorced from the reality of the law. Perfect 10 seems to be one of the perfectly ridiculous plaintiffs. A key part of this case, for example, is that Giganews regularly pointed out that in order to remove postings from its Usenet servers, it needs the proper Message-ID and, in the rare cases where Perfect 10 passed those along, they were quickly removed. But most of the time, Perfect 10 refused to actually pass along Message-IDs, and seemed to indicate Giganews should still block those images:

we hold that there were no simple measures available that Giganews failed to take to remove Perfect 10’s works from its servers. Giganews presented sufficient evidence that Perfect 10’s proposed method for locating infringing messages was onerous and unreasonably complicated. Indeed, Giganews spent more than 20 hours processing 565 Message-IDs from Perfect 10 because they were not machine-readable. Giganews calculates that Perfect 10’s method would therefore require 354,000 hours of manual work for every 10 million Message- IDs – the number of Message-IDs that Giganews receives every month. Moreover, the record is clear that when Giganews did receive machine-readable Message-IDs, it immediately processed them and subsequently removed the messages from its servers.

There's also the question of "inducement" -- the Supreme Court-invented legal concept that sunk Grokster a little over a decade ago. Once again, there's nothing in what Giganews that comes even remotely close to inducing infringement:

Based on the record, no reasonable juror could conclude Giganews distributed its product “with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright.”...

Perfect 10 points to entirely inconclusive evidence of any such objective to infringe copyrights. For example, Perfect 10 identifies Giganews’s advertising materials, which state that its product “has built-in MP3 and File Locators that search all Giganews newsgroups for music, pictures, and movies without having to download millions of messages.” Perfect 10 also points to a web page where a Giganews advertisement appears next to text written by another entity, which states that Giganews “provide[s] an uncensored news feed with up to 20 ssl encrypted connection and over 460 days worth of retention. That is over a years [sic] worth of access to downloadable music, movies and games.” However, neither of these advertisements nor any other evidence in the record indicates that Giganews itself promoted its product “with the object” of infringing copyright.

Perfect 10 further argues that Giganews has the object of promoting infringement because it: (1) “offers 25,000 terabytes of copyrighted materials . . . without permission,” (2) “continues to commercially exploit the content of known repeat infringers,” and (3) “advertises that it does not keep track of subscriber downloads, effectively encouraging infringement.” Even if true, none of this conduct suggests that Giganews clearly expressed an intent to promote infringement or took “affirmative steps . . . to foster infringement.”

The court also rejects the "vicarious" liability wackiness that Perfect 10 argues, noting that Perfect 10's theory seems to violate the very basic concept of who has standing in court:

Here, Perfect 10 argues for a rule that would allow a court to hold Giganews liable under a theory of vicarious liability by showing only that Giganews benefits financially from the infringement of another’s works, regardless of whether Giganews received any financial benefit from the specific infringement alleged. Such a rule would allow cases to be built on the rights of owners and the actions of users not before the court. At the very least, Perfect 10’s proposed rule is in significant tension with Article III’s standing requirement. At most, Perfect 10’s view runs counter to the requirement that there be a “causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of[.]”

Finally, the court upheld the fee award for legal fees from Perfect 10, meaning that it may now be on the hook for many millions of dollars for bringing such a ridiculous lawsuit in the first place. Perfect 10 may, of course, ask the Supreme Court to hear a further appeal, but that seems unlikely to go anywhere. And, in the meantime, we've got another useful precedent sent by a wacky Perfect 10 case.

We've repeatedly noted how the idea of a healthy and open internet, free from the meddling of incumbent giants like Comcast, is a good thing. We've also noted that until we bring some real competition to bear on the broadband sector, the FCC's inconsistent protection is about the only thing separating you from a hearty "servicing" from Comcast corporation (whether that's usage caps or abysmal service). As such, the nation's net neutrality rules (which are really quite basic and if anything didn't go far enough) have broad, bipartisan support, and holding Comcast accountable is a bipartisan, very popular idea.

And while Trump's Presidential campaign endlessly promised Trump would focus on bringing power back to the people, Trump's new FCC boss Ajit Pai -- a former Verizon lawyer -- effectively represents the complete opposite of that. He's yet to seriously stand up to Comcast or any other ISP, adores media consolidation, wants to kill net neutrality, is incapable of admitting the broadband market lacks competition, and has promised to dismantle the FCC's consumer watchdog functions solely at AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter's behest.

On his way out of office, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler had a message for Trump supporters: you need net neutrality protections and healthy broadband competition too.

"The Trump administration campaigned that they are the voice of the forgotten," Wheeler said in a phone interview with Ars yesterday. "Well you know, the half-dozen major carriers [lobbying against FCC regulations] are hardly forgotten."

The people who are forgotten are the "two-thirds of consumers in America who have one or fewer broadband choices," Wheeler said. "Where are those choices most limited? In the areas where Donald Trump got the strongest response, in rural areas, outside of major cities. If indeed this is an administration that is speaking for those that feel disenfranchised, that representation has to start with saying, 'we need to make sure you have a fast, fair, and open Internet because otherwise you will not be able to connect to the 21st century.'"

In many of these states, convincing people to vote against their own best interests has become an art form. Like in Tennessee, where Representative Marsha Blackburn has allowed companies like Comcast to write horrible laws protecting giant corporations from public accountability (the end result for the consumer should be obvious). Again: improving broadband networks shouldn't be partisan. Ensuring that these networks remain healthy and open shouldn't be partisan. Keeping Comcast from destroying level competitive playing fields should not be partisan. Yet here we are.

For his part, Wheeler responded to indications that the incoming administration intends to kill net neutrality and neuter the FCC with sadness and alarm:

"I think it would be tragic," Wheeler said of taking away the FCC's competition and consumer protection authority. "This is tragic for the American consumer and the competitive marketplace."

"We’re talking about a handful of companies who are lobbying for their own self-interest, and trying to say to the new commission, 'you need to listen to us, not to consumers, not to a competitive marketplace, not to those who could be affected by a network where we act as gatekeepers,'" Wheeler said. "And if they are successful, that will put in jeopardy tens of thousands of other companies that rely on open networks and millions of consumers."

Historically, most FCC bosses paid empty lip service to the competition problem in the broadband sector. Many, like former FCC boss turned top cable lobbyist Michael Powell, went comically out of their way to pretend the market was perfectly healthy. While his solutions were sometimes imperfect, Wheeler was at least capable of admitting that the core issue in the telecom sector is a lack of competition. A lack of competition not only in the last mile, but in the very cable boxes and closed hardware at the heart of the industry's control.

In contrast, Pai's entire platform rests on the idea that the real problem in the broadband sector is that government has been too hard on companies like Comcast and AT&T, and that these companies need less oversight than ever before. Of course, that kind of thinking is what helped create the Comcast and the pricey, annoying broadband and cable sector most consumers know and love today. Believing that dismantling the only government agency to stand up to Comcast this decade is going to somehow fix everything is precisely the kind of thinking that gave us Comcast in the first place.

The FBI has reams of documents of interest to the public. And it knows it. That's why it plays keepaway with so much of them. Sometimes it releases tons of fully-redacted pages to requesters -- a middle finger to government transparency that also serves as a "response" on the FOIA balance sheets, ensuring the agency fulfills the letter of law while spitting on its spirit.

Other times it just drags it feet. Requesters are often moved to sue the agency, thanks to its tendency to spend a year or four responding to FOIA requests. And that's only if it hasn't attempted to short-circuit the FOIA process by asking requesters for a small fortune in advance of its search for documents.

The FBI's internal search mechanisms are deliberately broken, forcing FOIA requesters to become intimately familiar with the FBI's multiple databases and search methods, none of which seem to overlap. And when documents are finally delivered, a vast array of exceptions are deployed to ensure the public is given only the murkiest version of transparency.

So, it comes as no surprise that the FBI has quietly decided to make it even more difficult for requesters to get their hands on documents. Michael Best of MuckRock explains.

According to the FBI’s website as of publication, a request still has to be 951 pages or more to qualify as large or complex.

From the FBI's site:

Requests are divided into three different processing tracks based on the number of pages responsive to the request. A request is routed through a small processing track if it encompasses 50 pages or less, a medium processing track if it encompasses 51 to 950 pages, or a large processing track if it encompasses 951 pages or more. Requests that encompass a high volume of responsive records will take a longer time to process than requests that encompass a small volume of responsive records.

If your request encompasses more than 950 responsive pages, an FBI representative will contact you in an effort to reduce the fees and the processing time associated with your request.

That's apparently been changed, although the FBI has yet to update its website more than a month after it made this internal decision.

However, according to correspondence the FBI sent on December 8th, the medium track for FOIA requests has been eliminated entirely.

From the FBI's letter to Best:

Requests are processed in the order in which they are received through our multi-track processing system, and the FBI receives a voluminous amount of requests on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Requests are divided into two tracks--simple (under 50 pages of potentially responsive documents) and complex (over 50 pages of potentially responsive documents).

By calling more FOIA requests "complex," the FBI can spend more time fulfilling them, charge more for their processing, and up its level of "responsiveness" by eliminating the most common medium-level "track" in its entirety.

The FBI likely has to do some serious number-massaging because it's ability to respond in a timely manner flat-out sucks.

Even with this new definition, the FBI says that its average processing time for “simple” cases of 50 pages or less is 181 days - or slightly more than thirteen times the statutory limit. For complex cases, it’s 659 days - nearly fifty times what’s allowed by law.

As Best points out, this middle-track elimination will speed up the average time it takes for the agency to respond to "complex" requests. Crank out a few dozen 50-page "complex" requests a year and the upper end will begin to slide down towards the now-nonexistent "middle" track's response times. But for a majority of requesters, processing times will now go UP, as theirs will now be called complex, even if the responsive page count barely clears the 50-page mark. There's a lot of middle ground to be exploited in the 50-950-page range, all without a single beneficial outcome for the general public.

Last summer, we brought to you the story of how Bryton Mellott, a young man in Urbana, IL, was arrested for posting a picture of himself burning the American flag on his social media accounts. The story was strange on a variety of levels. First, the law utilized to arrest him, one of many flag-burning prohibitions that exist in laws at the state level, had been declared unconstitutional decades prior to it having ever been enacted. Burning the flag has been codified as a form of protected free speech, no matter how stomach-turning any individual might find it. It was for that reason that the local State's Attorney's office requested that the police let Mellott go and didn't even attempt to bring any kind of charges against him, because they couldn't. The police report also noted that Mellott had been taken in for disorderly conduct, referencing the backlash his actions caused, which is insane. Blaming a victim of threats for receiving those threats as a reaction to protected speech ought to be beneath the common citizen, nevermind those we actually entrust to enforce the law.

But perhaps the strangest part of the story, previously un-noted by us in our original post, the impetus for Mellott's arrest was one officer's apparent desperate search to find something for which to arrest him.

Mellott’s post was widely shared and had received 200 comments by the following morning. But just 12 hours after his post, Urbana police officers arrested him at his job at Wal-Mart after Mellott’s supervisor called and reported threats made by unknown people against Mellott and the store. Officer Jeremy Hale researched the Illinois flag-desecration statute, found it was still on the books, and decided of his own accord to enforce it.

Policing in this country isn't traditionally done in this way. Complaints to a local law enforcement office aren't generally then used to scour the books for some potentially applicable law. For this reason, Mallott is suing the three arresting officers for violating his civil rights.

Mellott filed a civil-rights lawsuit late Wednesday in Urbana federal court, claiming the three arresting officers knew or should have known that flag burning has been a protected means of political protest for almost 30 years. He says they violated his civil rights by arresting him. Mellott seeks compensatory damages and a court order that the Illinois flag-desecration statute is unconstitutional. He is represented by Rebecca Glenberg with the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Open dissent is the highest form of American patriotism,” Mellott said in a statement. “And it was a frightening display of irony that on the Fourth of July, I should be taken from my workplace to sit in a county jail for exercising this liberty.”

It's difficult to see how this lawsuit isn't a winner. The Illinois state law is, on its face, flatly unconstitutional. That it was enacted decades after this question was decided says everything about the Illinois legislature and the rise of nationalism nationally and nothing about whether or not it might be remotely legal or enforceable. For Mellott to have been arrested and held for hours in a zealous attempt to punish protected speech, and on Independence Day no less, is about as blatant example of an infringement on the First Amendment of which I can think.

A little more than three years after it shut down to avoid complying with federal prosecutors' demands for its encryption key, Lavabit is returning to life. The secure email system, whose most famous user was Edward Snowden, fought the US government in court over demands to produce the key that would unlock access not only Snowden's emails, but those of every user. Not only did it shut down, but it also memorably delivered a 4-point middle finger to the feds in the middle of the legal battle.

With its users' privacy secured -- along with its legacy (Snowden-approved, man-sticking-it-to-itiveness) -- the Lavabit team gave the code to the public and started working on a newer, more secure email platform. As Kim Zetter reports for The Intercept, Lavabit's successor is now live.

[Ladar Levinson is] relaunching Lavabit with a new architecture that fixes the SSL problem and includes other privacy-enhancing features as well, such as one that obscures the metadata on emails to prevent government agencies like the NSA and FBI from being able to find out with whom Lavabit users communicate. He’s also announcing plans to roll out end-to-end encryption later this year, which would give users an even more secure way to send email.

The "SSL problem" was the weak link the government sought -- the key that would unlock all users' accounts, rather than just the one targeted. With this eliminated, Lavabit's new basic option should be far more resistant to government demands than its earlier version.

With the new architecture, Lavabit will no longer be able to hand over its SSL key, because the key is now stored in a hardware security module — a tamper-resistant device that provides a secure enclave for storing keys and performing sensitive functions, like encryption and decryption. Lavabit generates a long passphrase blindly so the company doesn’t know what it is; Lavabit then inserts the key into the device and destroys the passphrase.

But if vanilla Lavabit still feels a bit compromisable, there are a couple new tiers of increasing darkness available to users, known as "Cautious" and "Paranoid." (The vanilla tier is "Trustful," which places the security duties completely in Lavabit's hands.) "Cautious" offers end-to-end encryption, with the encryption key being stored in users' devices, but while still using Lavabit's server to transfer the key from device to device. (This will also allow users to recover keys if needed.)

"Paranoid" goes even further.

Some people who want more security — like activists, journalists, and whistleblowers — might balk at having their key stored on a third-party server. That’s where Paranoid mode comes in. The key for doing end-to-end encryption remains on the user’s device and never goes to Lavabit’s server. But to use another device, the user has to manually move the key to it. And there’s no way to recover the key if the user loses it or deletes it.

In all three cases, it will be difficult-to-impossible for governments to demand access to users' communications. Additionally, Lavabit's service will deliberately mangle metadata, making it mostly useless to surveillance agencies engaging in passive collection, as well as to government agencies seeking to obtain these so-called "third party records." This is utilized in all three tiers and is based on Tor's origin/destination obfuscation tactics. The most that can be gleaned from the metadata is the domain sending or receiving the email -- but not both on any single record.

Unsurprisingly, Lavabit had little to say on its "responsiveness" to government demands for users' communications, letting the end products speak for themselves. If the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it, communications platforms are more frequently coming to the conclusion that government surveillance is just more wreckage to avoided.