Before we dive into the latest IC transparency report [PDF] from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, let's take a moment to recognize the small miracle that it even exists. If NSA contractor Ed Snowden hadn't decided to color outside the official whistleblowing lines, we'd still be expected to put our complete trust in the government with zero evidentiary support.

That being said, the transparency report is still several steps removed from actual transparency, but it will have to do for now. What can we learn from it, even with many of the numbers being seemingly meaningless thanks to purposefully-missing context? Several things, actually. Marcy Wheeler has torn apart the report across four posts, each dealing with the report's fuzzy numbers (or, in the case of the CIA's contribution, a lack thereof).

One of the first misleading numbers in the report is the supposed single search of the NSA's 702 collections by the FBI for non-terrorism-related purposes. According to the report, this happened exactly once. But that's actually not true. The FBI makes far more frequent use of NSA data for non-terrorism investigations. It just does it in a way that won't show up in the IC's transparency report. Parallel construction is the FBI's friend.

FBI’s querying system can be set such that, even if someone has access to 702 data, they can run a query that will flag a hit in 702 data but won’t actually show the data underlying that positive return. This provides one way for 702-cleared people to learn that such information is in such a collection and — if they want the data without having to report it — may be able to obtain it another way. It is distinctly possible that once NSA shares EO 12333 data directly with FBI, for example, the same data will be redundantly available from that in such a way that would not need to be reported to FISC.

So, there's that bit of obfuscation right off the top. And the FBI isn't the only agency using an ostensibly foreign-facing collection to obtain information about US persons. The CIA -- an ostensibly foreign-facing agency -- does this as well. The FBI doesn't count its dips into the NSA haystacks. Neither does the CIA. The report shows 30,000 searches of unminimized US persons' data occurred last year. That number doesn't include the FBI's searches (because the FBI doesn't report its searches) and is quite possibly much, much higher than what's reported. This is only a good faith estimate by the IC, using software, rather than any form of reporting from the CIA.

NSA will rely on an algorithm and/or a business rule to identify queries of communications metadata derived from the FAA 702 [redacted] and telephony collection that start with a United States person identifier. Neither method will identify those queries that start with a United States person identifier with 100 percent accuracy.

As Wheeler points out, it could be 30,000… or 3 million… or 3 billion searches. No one knows. By the time the CIA's required to count its US persons searches, it will likely perform most of its searches under Executive Order 12333 authorities, rather than the more closely-watched Section 702.

Finally, there's a really big number contained in the report. It looks amazingly high, but might be indicative of not much surveillance activity at all, at least not in the entire scheme of things. According to the report, the NSA was able to scoop up 151 million "call detail records (CDRs)" using only 42 selectors.

Read in the (lack of) context in the report, this would look like pure bullshit. There's no way 42 terrorism suspects (and their 3,150 one-hop "friends") are making 130 calls a day. (Or, if they're only talking to each other, 65 calls a day.)

As Wheeler points out, call records are not just records about phone calls. They also pick up records on text messages.

If these were phone calls between just two people, then if our terrorist buddies only spoke to each other, each would be responsible for 24,000 calls a year, or 65 a day, which is certainly doable, but would mean our terrorist suspects and their friends all spent a lot of time calling each other.

The number becomes less surprising when you remember that even with traditional telephony call records can capture calls and texts. All of a sudden 65 becomes a lot more doable, and a lot more likely to have lots of perfectly duplicative records as terrorists and their buddies spend afternoons texting back and forth with each other.

With this, 151 million records looks less like full-blown exploitation of this surveillance authority and something possibly more targeted than the NSA's used to. Then again, it could mean the NSA is sweeping up 65 innocent Americans every day of the year with its CDR demands. There's simply no way to tell.

But CDRs include all "call events," which include a whole lot of related metadata having nothing to do with voice calls.

A CDR is defined as session identifying information (including an originating or terminating telephone number, an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, or an International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number), a telephone calling card number, or the time or duration of a call.

Further trimming down this seemingly large number are two other aspects of the collection. Records obtained previously by the agency are included in this count, as well as junk metadata related to past selectors that may not be returning any current records.

That means our 3,192 targets and friends might only have had 48 calls or texts a day, without any duplication.

Which is a completely believable number of calls and texts between surveillance targets. The breathtaking 151 million records is suddenly a more manageable number that actually *gasp* looks as though the NSA is engaging in truly targeted collection.

But before we get carried away with the NSA's new "maybe collect a little less than it all" approach to surveillance, we need to remember this only covers a very small part of the NSA's collection activities.

[W]e need to understand the 65 additional texts — or anything else available only in the US from a large number of electronic communications service providers that might be deemed a session identifier — a day from 42 terrorists and their 3150 buddies [is] on top of the vast store of EO 12333 records that form the primary basis here.

Because (particularly as the rest of the report shows continually expanding metadata analysis and collection) this is literally just the tip of an enormous iceberg, 151 million edge cases to a vast sea of data.

That's what we're really dealing with here, unprecedented transparency or no: there is a vast surveillance apparatus operating in near-complete darkness, authorized by a presidential executive order and subject to almost zero oversight. Whatever concessions the NSA makes in relation to Section 702 in the upcoming months, its biggest collections will remain untouched. Unless something changes dramatically, the potential for constitutional violations and agency abuse remains unchanged. And, unless something changes dramatically, it will remain unseen.

So we've noted for years now how giant broadband ISPs have made a 20-year career out of taking taxpayer money, subsidies and other perks in exchange for broadband networks they only partially deliver. When it comes time to hold these large ISPs feet to the fire, well-lobbied lawmakers and revolving door regulators pretty consistently do their best to ensure accountability never happens. Obviously this is just one of numerous problems leading to a lack of broadband competition in the United States, where two-thirds of homes lack access to more than one ISP at speeds of 25 Mbps.

And while it makes perfect sense for ISPs to want the best return on their investment, problems have arisen as broadband is increasingly seen as a necessary utility, but government refuses to stand up to some of the most politically powerful companies in America. ISPs don't want anybody dictating where they can and can't deploy service, but at the same time their lobbyists are passing protectionist state laws preventing towns and cities from improving their broadband fortunes...even in areas incumbent ISPs refuse to serve.

AT&T has come under fire in recent months after allegations emerged that the company was avoiding deploying upgrades to low-income neighborhoods. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group called Connect Your Community released a report last month claiming AT&T was engaged in "digital redlining" -- or intentionally only upgrading higher-income customers. The report notes that while AT&T provides scattered speeds of between 18Mbps and 1Gbps to the Cleveland suburbs, poorer neighborhoods in central Cleveland remain stuck on speeds between 768kbps to 6 Mbps.

A map from the report highlights what this not-so-subtle practice looks like:

The groups have threatened to sue AT&T, stating that FCC data and "city construction permits and other information" support its case that AT&T intentionally ignored low-income communities. AT&T, as you might expect, insists that it has done nothing wrong:

"Access to the internet is essential, which is why we've continuously invested in expanding service and enhancing speeds," the AT&T response starts. "The report does not accurately reflect the investment we've made in bringing faster internet to urban and rural areas across the U.S. While we are investing in broadband, we're also investing in technologies that will mitigate some of the infrastructure limitations."

But a more recent study also accuses AT&T of doing the same thing across California. The study, drafted by the UC Berkeley Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, again offers up some pretty compelling data:

"By contrast, the median household income is $53,186 in California neighborhoods where AT&T provides only DSL, with download speeds typically ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps. At the low end, that's less than 1 percent of the gigabit speeds offered by AT&T's fiber service. The median income in areas with U-verse VDSL, which ranges from 12Mbps to 75Mbps, is $67,021. The income difference is even more stark in some parts of California. "For example, in Los Angeles County, the median income of households with fiber-to-the-home access is $110,474, compared with $60,534 for those with U-verse availability, and $47,894 for those with only DSL availability," the report said.

All told, rich or poor, around 4.1 million California households, or about 42.8% of AT&T's California service area, can't get access to the FCC's base definition of 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. AT&T often promises regulators they'll shore up these broadband coverage gaps in exchange for regulator favors (merger approval, etc). But these improvements often never arrive, and AT&T uses misleading marketing to make its "next gen" offerings appear more uniformly available than they actually are. In the real world AT&T's focus is elsewhere: namely wireless, and buying media companies like Time Warner.

A major reason for broadband's inconsistent deployment was the state "franchise reform" laws AT&T and Verizon passed in dozens of states a decade ago.

Originally, local franchise authorities required even network deployment in exchange for doing business in towns and communities. But around 2006 or so, both companies went state by state promising lawmakers that if they eliminated the local franchise reform laws and replaced them with state-level rules, consumers would be awash in broadband and TV competition. That never happened, but company lobbyists were successful in demonizing the old franchise system as archaic, and towns and cities as viciously uncooperative (which was sometimes true, but often not).

The problem: because state-level politicians are even more corrupt than their local or federal counterparts, many of the state-level franchise reform laws AT&T and Verizon managed to get passed were little more than legislative wishlists that killed many essential consumer protections, broadband deployment requirements, and in some states even citizen eminent domain rights. So yes, the franchise reform system was "streamlined" to be more efficient, but at a major cost to consumers that's pretty rarely talked about.

It's understandable that these companies don't want government dictating where they can or can't deploy broadband services. That said, it's just as important to remember that companies like AT&T have gone out of their way to use corruption and bureaucracy to stall and hamstring would-be competitors at every conceivable opportunity. In this way they get to have their cake (lamenting demands for even broadband deployment as government "over reach") and eat it too (use that same government to give them taxpayer dollars for services only half-delivered, and to pass regulations and laws hamstringing competitors).

With current FCC boss Ajit Pai looking to roll back oversight even further of some of the least competitive companies in America, there's going to be a hell of a lot more of this particular flavor of market dysfunction in our foreseeable future.

This long Austin American-Statesman investigative report details apparent police brutality as discovered by parents who were kept in the dark by local cops about how their teenaged son actually died. It all started with their 5'4" 110-lb. 18-year-old suffering through a bad acid trip while hanging out with friends. It ended in the hospital with their son brain-dead, on life support, and the arresting agency unwilling to say anything more than their son had suffered a "head injury."

To the law enforcement agency, it's just another in-custody death. To the parents of Graham Dyer, it's long-delayed closure to a chapter kept deliberately unfinished by the law enforcement agencies who took Dyer into custody and returned him to his parents more dead than alive.

In Texas, the system is stacked against victims of police misconduct. State law, upheld by court decisions, make it almost impossible to mount a lawsuit against law enforcement officers. Courts are generally receptive to law enforcement claims and extremely hesitant to strip officers of immunity, no matter how egregious the apparent civil rights violation. This situation is made much, much worse in Texas where documents needed to propel a lawsuit past a judge's first reading often can't be obtained from the law enforcement agency holding them.

State law says a police agency isn’t required to turn over records for incidents that don’t result in a conviction. Graham, who’d been charged with assaulting a police officer after the confrontation, had died before his case could be litigated. So, the department reasoned, his records were confidential. Asked to weigh in on the dispute, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed the Mesquite police could refuse the Dyers’ request.

The most important part of this paragraph is two words in the last sentence: "could refuse." The law does not forbid departments from handing over this information. It simply gives them a legal excuse not to. The Mesquite PD could have closed this tragic chapter in the Dyers' lives, but doing so would have guaranteed a lawsuit. So, it withheld the records, ensuring the officers involved in Graham Dyer's death remained free of accountability. It continued to deny release of the record, citing "ongoing investigations" that apparently involved one dead "suspect" and another arrestee, who had only been charged with public intoxication.

Faced with this hurdle, the Dyers approached the FBI, asking it to investigate Graham's death. It performed an investigation, but informed the couple it could not find enough evidence to move forward with a federal civil rights lawsuit on the couple's behalf. But it did open a door for the Dyers to obtain the evidence the Mesquite PD wouldn't release.

Using the federal Freedom of Information Act, in early 2015 Kathy asked the FBI to turn over any records it had accumulated in its investigation of Graham’s death in Mesquite. That fall, police videos of the fatal evening started arriving.

The recordings are disturbing. Graham's parents haven't watched them, on the advice of their lawyer. (All images below a screengrabs from the video posted at the Statesman.)

There was, for example, the image of a Mesquite police officer standing with his foot on Graham’s head.

There was the image of Graham in the backseat of the police cruiser, his hands and feet bound — yet also unseatbelted or otherwise restricted — in obvious distress, hurling himself about the car. And then the ghostly image of a police officer’s hand with a Taser stun gun appearing in the camera frame, shocking Graham on the leg.

And then, pushing him on his back and shocking him again — this time directly, and apparently deliberately, in his testicles. And Graham screaming silently as the electric shock to his genitals appeared to be repeated.

The Statesman has also released 24 seconds of audio from the arrest. It contains just enough to add even more horror to the images above. It contains the tortured screams from the 18-year-old as he is tased by an officer. It contains another disheartening scream from Dyer, who was suffering through a bad LSD trip at the time of his arrest: "Where the fuck am I?" And, disturbingly, it contains an officer's brutal statement as he tased the bound teenager: "Motherfucker, I'm going to kill you."

That officer was correct. The Mesquite PD did kill Graham Dyer. It killed him to save him from himself, according to the PD.

“A Taser was deployed in an effort to control decedent, prevent escape and prevent him from injuring himself,” the city stated in court documents, adding the officer had been aiming for Graham’s leg and it was dark.

The PD also killed Dyer with indifference. By the time Dyer arrived at the jail, he was in terrible shape. But to the five officers on the scene, he was just a piece of inconvenient meat.

The videos of Graham as he was delivered to the jail also seemed at odds with the police department’s explanation of what occurred. According to the agency’s in-custody death report, upon arriving at the jail Graham had still needed to be placed in a special restraint chair “until the jail personnel noticed he was having labored breathing.”

Yet the video the Dyers received from the FBI depicts Graham lying limp on the sally-port floor after being lifted out of the cruiser. As he tries to raise his head, one of the officers pushes it back to the ground.

Records show it would be more than two hours before an ambulance was called.

The Dyers can finally move forward with their lawsuit. The presiding judge says the evidence obtained -- no thanks to the Mesquite PD -- shows they have a plausible civil rights claim. The PD obviously hoped its public records exemptions would keep the Dyers from successfully suing it, much less actually finding out what happened that night.

The government, far too often, insulates the worst of its employees against the public that's entrusted it with power. In many ways, the system is deliberately designed to push citizens towards resigned acceptance of abuse by authority figures. The courts, meant to be a check against government power, have been far too compliant for far too long. The end result is the ugliness above where no one in a position of power will do anything to assist constituents until forced to. And they'll will follow this up by doing as possible to deter future acts of violence and brutality. The cops involved in this arrest -- and every government official that's assisted in erecting a wall between police and accountability -- should take a good, long look at the terrorized teen captured by the police cruiser's camera and see if they still feel comfortable with their decisions.

Recently, we discussed an odd post by the American division of Atlus, the company behind the recently released game Persona 5. The post basically outlined restrictions on streaming the game in the popular "let's play" format. Those restrictions were pretty clearly geared towards keeping spoilers for the game's stories off of the internet, with indications that discussing or streaming game content that occur after an in-game date was verbotten. The post was also couched in threats for DMCA notices, which is odd because spoilers aren't what copyright law was designed to combat. The public backlash was fairly uniform, with Atlus coming out not looking particularly good as a result.

It took a while, but Atlus has finally responded. While it positions this response as a loosening of the restrictions on streaming, it still keeps all of the worst aspects of the original restrictions in place.

On Tuesday Atlus announced that they will allow players to stream or post videos from up until the in-game date of November 19, just before the story's final act. The post wrote it was in response to "numerous reactive news articles," opinion videos and "many emails" asking them to loosen the restrictions.

"We also want to apologize to those of you who saw the previous guidelines as threatening," Atlus wrote. "It was never our intention to threaten people with copyright strikes, but we clearly chose the wrong tone for how to communicate this."

That last bit is more than laughable. Here is the original text that from the first set of restrictions that caused concern among streamers that they would be hit with copyright strikes.

This being a Japanese title with a single-playthrough story means our masters in Japan are very wary about it. Sharing is currently blocked through the native PS4 UI. However, if you do plan on streaming, video guidelines above apply except length. If you decide to stream past 7/7 (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT DOING THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED), you do so at the risk of being issued a content ID claim or worse, a channel strike/account suspension.

That seems pretty clearly to be a threat of copyright or DMCA notices if the rules aren't followed. As for the loosening of the restrictions on streaming, Atlus essentially just pushed back the in-game checkpoint in the rules. Instead of prohibitions on streaming content beginning at the in-game date of 7/7, it now begins at 11/19. And if that following sentence doesn't read as purely absurd to you, then you need some help getting your mind calibrated.

There is value in having fans stream games in let's play videos. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. Either Atlus buys into that or it doesn't. Straddling the line in the name of saving fans from spoilers, even after it has moved that line, isn't good enough. Restrict streaming. Or don't. Pick a lane, in other words, rather than trying to build guidelines based on in-game dates. That simply makes no sense.

It was way back in the early part of 2016 that the rumors came out that the Oakland Raiders football team would be moving to a new home city. Fans were understandably upset and voiced their displeasure in a variety of ways, but the dumbest of those ways certainly must have been Lane Blue's attempt to trademark the team name in conjunction with all of the different potential landing cities the team was rumored to be moving to, including the "Las Vegas Raiders." Lane wasn't the only sad Raiders fan to attempt this, it seems, as we now see reporting on his and other trademark applications being denied for obvious reasons.

Lane Blue, an air-freight company owner from Fresno, Calif., said that he applied for the trademark in an effort to stop the Raiders from relocating to Las Vegas.

"If I own the trademark that’s worth possibly millions of dollars, maybe I can talk them into staying," Blue said, per KCBS.

Blue's application was denied, as is likely with everyone else who applied for the trademark.

The reason for the denial is that trademarks must be used in commerce in order to be valid. Trolling your favorite NFL team in order to prevent it from moving cities is not, as best as I can tell, a form of commerce. Instead, it's a form of being a mere annoyance to both that team and the Trademark Office. These squatting attempts, motivated either by fandom or attempts at a quick cash-grab, almost never work.

"These people think they’re going to cash in, and 99.9 percent of the time, they’re wrong," sports-trademark attorney Patrick Jennings said, per KCBS. "For a trademark lawyer, it doesn’t take much effort to knock those (applications) out separate from the patent and trademark office."

The only effect these applications are likely to have on the Raiders is a delay on them receiving the trademark. That could still be damaging, though, as knock-off "Las Vegas Raiders" gear is already flooding the marketplace.

And that's supremely unfair for the Raiders ownership to have to spend the time and capital slapping these applications down. Meanwhile, of course, the Trademark Office is collecting the application fees from members of the public who somehow think a trademark application will bend an NFL team to its knees. Sorry, Raiders fans and get-rich-quick people, it isn't going to work.

Ahead of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey released his planned testimony, which covers a variety of subjects Comey hoped to cover during the hearing. A lot of the talking points were touched on, but Comey spent most of his time fielding questions from pissed-off senators about how much they were disappointed in recent FBI investigations.

The testimony Comey planned to give contains another discussion of the FBI-centric "going dark" issue. According to Comey, device encryption has blocked FBI's searches nearly 50% of the time, preventing it from pulling data from more than 3,000 phones. Comey also says other approaches -- such as using metadata or cellphone forensic software -- won't work. They're too expensive and won't scale. Left unsaid is Comey's desire for legislation or a few precedential court decisions to force manufacturers to compromise their customers' security.

He makes this argument by conflating privacy and security and using this conflation to arrive at a completely wrong conclusion. From Comey's testimony [PDF]:

Some observers have conceived of this challenge as a tradeoff between privacy and security. In our view, the demanding requirements to obtain legal authority to access data—such as by applying to a court for a warrant or a wiretap — necessarily already account for both privacy and security. The FBI is actively engaged with relevant stakeholders, including companies providing technological services, to educate them on the corrosive effects of the Going Dark challenge on both public safety and the rule of law. The FBI thanks the committee members for their engagement on this crucial issue.

Warrants and court orders cover the "privacy" end of the argument, but using court orders (or legislation) to force device makers to build backdoors in users' devices throws security out the window. The balancing act in the encryption debate has never been "privacy vs. security." It's been "security vs. insecurity." Comey's false equation presents privacy and security as two sides to the same coin, yet somehow completely separable in the presence of a court order. Fourth Amendment protections cover the privacy end, but showing up at a device backdoor with a warrant in hand does nothing for anyone's security.

Comey doesn't want a balancing act, despite all his assertions about "adult conversations" and deferring to the "smart people" at tech companies. He wants device owners to sacrifice security in exchange for protections they're already guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

One of (several) reasons why American broadband is so uncompetitive is the fact that we continue to let giant broadband mono/duopolies quite literally write awful state telecom law. As we've long noted, more than twenty different states have passed laws making it difficult to impossible for towns and cities to improve their local broadband networks -- even in instances when the entrenched duopoly refuses to. Many of these laws even ban towns and cities from entering into public/private partnerships with the likes of Google Fiber. It's pure protectionism.

Maine is the 49th ranked state in broadband speed and coverage -- in large part due to rural markets. Despite countless years of subsidies, broadband providers consistently refuse to seriously upgrade these areas at any scale due to costs. And yet they refuse to let the towns do it themselves, either. State Representative Nate Wadsworth has introduced HP1040, aka "An Act To Encourage Broadband Development through Private Investment." Except like so many of these bills, the proposed law's name is a stark 180 from what the legislative measure actually does.

You see Wadsworth is a state chair for ALEC, the group most ISPs use to help them ghost write these protectionist bills. And Wadsworth's proposal, like countless others, imposes a laundry list of restrictions on any town or city that might dare try to do something about the fairly awful service state residents receive from the likes of Frontier Communications and Comcast. From limits to how money can be raised to requirements for repeated public referendums (at which point deep-pocketed ISPs outspend local advocates), communities suddenly face all manner of restrictions on what they can or can't do in their own backyards.

Page Clason, Member of the Islesboro Broadband Committee, described HP 1040 this way:

"I would say this proposed bill is puzzling because while suggested to promote investment of broadband in Maine it would do the opposite. Nothing in the bill provides stimulus, most everything in the bill provides increased hurdles and costs for communities needing the broadband investments. The only stimulus I can garner from such an approach would be that the largest providers would be further comforted that no other service providers would show up to do the builds that the dominating providers have not been supplying for the last few decades."

More often than not, backers of these bills claim they're only looking to protect taxpayers from fiscal mismanagement. But community broadband networks aren't by nature inherently dysfunctional (though they're often sold that way by municipal broadband opponents). They're like any other business plan: some are good, and some aren't. But the reality is that towns and cities wouldn't be getting into the broadband business if they were happy with local service. The "solution" to this organic backlash isn't letting giant duopolists write shitty law; the solution is more competition.

And laws banning municipal broadband -- and especially public/private partnerships -- accomplish the exact opposite of that. And while large ISPs (and their ocean of paid think tankers, economists, and other doller-per-holler professionals) have tried to make this a partisan issue -- the vast majority of municipal networks are built in Conservative areas with broad, bipartisan support. That's because there's one thing we can all agree on: nobody likes the local cable and broadband monopoly. And, as the local Maine newspapers make clear, consumers aren't half as dumb as many politicians think they are:

"I can guarantee you if this bill moves forward, they will hear from an awful lot of very angry people," (said one Maine resident). “Maine people are self-reliant, but island people are very self-reliant. When the boat stops at the end of the day, we take care of each other, and if somebody comes in from the outside and says we can’t take care of ourselves, that message won’t go over well."

The public is, however, inattentive -- and so state by state, large ISPs like Frontier, CenturyLink, AT&T; and Comcast continue to push such bills through state legislatures. When they can't get a bill passed once, they'll try repeated times. When that doesn't work, they'll try to push these restrictions through via entirely unrelated legislation, like traffic bills. These same companies will then whine excessively about "overreach" when government does things they don't like, but remain dead quiet when they use that precise same government to protect the dysfunctional status quo.

Update: Lo and behold, the fierce public opposition has resulted in the bill being killed. Pressure appears to have been so intense, even the bill's sponsor, Nate Wadsworth, voted it down.

The UK's long-gestating Digital Economy Act has finally gone into force. The law is mainly interested in porn and pirates -- two issues most of the UK public is far less interested in having subjected to intrusive regulation.

But just keeping an eye on who is or isn't availing themselves of porn/torrents isn't the only intrusive aspect of the Act. As Joseph Cox of Motherboard points out, an amendment to the law grants some pretty scary new powers to UK law enforcement, allowing them to kill citizens' means of communication.

[L]aw enforcement agencies can remotely disable or restrict a mobile phone if it is suspected of being used for drug dealing or related to it, and in some cases regardless of whether a crime has actually been committed, according to legal commentators.

Law enforcement isn't being given a kill switch. But it's being given the next best thing. With a court order, police can approach service providers and have them restrict or cut off service. The only thing law enforcement will have to provide is a vague theory the targeted phones may be involved in criminal activity.

Orders can apply if the user is "facilitating the commission by the user or another person of a drug dealing offense," or "conduct of the user that is likely to facilitate the commission by the user or another person of a drug dealing offence (whether or not an offence is committed)."

Nice touch there, with the "whether or not an offence is committed." A person may not know someone they communicate with is involved in criminal activity, but they're at risk of having their phone service interrupted (possibly indefinitely) nonetheless.

The only way this part of the Act [PDF] could be considered "narrowed" or "tailored" is its limitation to alleged drug-related crimes. That narrowness is immediately removed once you realize how things like buying gardening supplies or driving around with too many air fresheners is considered evidence of drug trafficking.

So, UK police will be doing even more "pre-crime" work, robbing people of their ability to converse with others or keep up with the world around them using nothing more than a target being in the same social circle as criminal suspects currently under investigation.

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In his testimony yesterday in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey became the latest government official to speak out against Wikileaks. In doing so -- even though he very carefully worded his answers to Sen. Ben Sasse's softballs -- Comey also made a very dangerous insinuation about what separates "real" journalists from Wikileaks.

From the transcript published at the Washington Post:

SASSE: [T]here is room for reasonable people to disagree about at what point an allegedly journalistic organization crosses a line to become some sort of a tool of foreign intelligence. There are Americans, well-meaning, thoughtful people who think that WikiLeaks might just be a journalistic outfit. Can you explain why that is not your view?

COMEY: Yes and again, I want to be careful that I don't prejudice any future proceeding. It's an important question, because all of us care deeply about the First Amendment and the ability of a free press, to get information about our work and -- and publish it.

To my mind, it crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public and instead just becomes about intelligence porn, frankly. Just pushing out information about sources and methods without regard to interest, without regard to the First Amendment values that normally underlie press reporting. And simply becomes a conduit for the Russian intelligence services or some other adversary of the United States just to push out information to damage the United States. And I realize, reasonable people as you said, struggle to draw a line…

So, where does the journalistic publishing of leaked documents cross the line into "intelligence porn?" Comey says the difference between real journalists and Wikileaks is real journalists seek input from the government before publishing.

Comey: [T]here's at least a portion and people can argue that maybe this conduct WikiLeaks has engaged in, in the past that's closer to regular newsgathering. But in my view, a huge portion of WikiLeaks's activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public, commenting on important public controversies, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America. And -- and -- and people sometimes get cynical about journalists.

American journalists do not do that. They will almost always call us before they publish classified information and say, is there anything about this that's going to put lives in danger, that's going to jeopardize government people, military people or -- or innocent civilians anywhere in the world. And then work with us to try and accomplish their important First Amendment goals while safeguarding those interests. This activity I'm talking about, WikiLeaks, involves no such considerations whatsoever. It's what I said to intelligence porn, just push it out in order to damage.

The First Amendment contains no such requirement to run leaked documents past the government first. This can be an ethical decision on the part of the publisher, but the notion that the First Amendment only covers publishing after government input has been sought is a dangerous one. This assertion by Comey also just isn't true. As Trevor Timm pointed out on Twitter, Wikileaks has attempted to contact the US government in the past before publication, but has been ignored.

Furthermore, Comey and Sasse both claim Wikileaks' publications have caused some sort of damage to government employees. They offered unproven assertions it has endangered lives, even though the evidence shows the worst the US government (and its employees) suffered is some embarrassment.

The only mitigating factor was Comey's assertion that the DOJ isn't interested in using espionage laws to prosecute journalists for publishing leaked documents. As he correctly points out, the culpability lies with the person leaking the documents, not the journalists publishing them. Of course, this statement isn't being made in a vacuum. It's being made in the current political climate where the president has expressed an interest in reducing free speech protections. The DOJ itself appears to be working towards prosecuting Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. All that can really be gathered from Comey's assertions is that the DOJ may not prosecute journalists who run everything past the government before publication.

This delineation between "legitimate" journalism and "intelligence porn" is disturbing. It suggests the government still wants to have the final say on who is or isn't a journalist and punish accordingly. If this had been the attitude since the beginning of this nation, it's doubtful we'd have as many protections as we enjoy today. Rob Graham of Errata Security sums up Comey's statements in a single, unforgettable sentence:

If this were 1776, Comey would of course be going after Thomas Paine, for publishing "revolution porn", and not being a real journalist.