The trademark dispute between Jack Daniels, famed maker of brown liquor, and VIP Products, maker of less famous doggy chew toy Bad Spaniels, has been a long and winding road. If you aren't familiar with the case, the timeline goes like this. VIP made a dog toy that is a clear parody homage to a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey, called Bad Spaniels (get it?). Jack Daniels sent a C&D letter to VIP, claiming trademark infringement. VIP turned around and sued Jack Daniels for declaratory judgement that its product did not infringe, leading Jack Daniels to then file its own trademark lawsuit in response. The initial court ruling found for Jack Daniels, rather bizarrely claiming that VIP's product couldn't be expressive work, thereby protected by the First Amendment, because it wasn't a form of traditional entertainment. On appeal, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said that ruling was made in error, vacated it, and instructed the lower court to apply the Rogers test since the product was clear parody and expressive after all. Rather than have that fight, though, Jack Daniels instead petitioned the Supreme Court to hear its case.

While I might find it interesting to see just how many doggy-related puns several SCOTUS Justices might fit into opinions on this case, however, we now have the news that the court has declined to hear the case.

As reported by Law360, the justices denied the petition filed by Jack Daniel’s last year that said the Ninth Circuit had been “egregiously misguided” when it afforded said protection to the toy, which looks like the famous whiskey but replaces the text on the label with puns.

The justices didn’t explain why they denied the petition, but it is not hugely surprising as the courts only grant a small fraction of the petitions it receives.

So, this isn't SCOTUS saying Jack Daniels is wrong, but it does mean that the only place it is going to have this fight is the lower court that has already been instructed on appeal to apply the Rogers test. That means that Jack Daniels is now going to have to show that the use of any JD marks by VIP products is both "not artistically relevant to the underlying work" and that it "explicitly misleads consumers as to the source of the content of the work."

And if you really think that Jack Daniels is going to be able to show that either of those are the case when it comes to a pet toy overflowing not with whiskey but with puppy puns, you may need to get your head checked. Certainly, it sounds like VIP is more than happy to have that particular fight.

In a statement to Law360, an attorney for VIP Products said the justices had made the right decision.

“The Ninth Circuit followed settled precedent, which strikes the right balance to protect expressive speech,” said David G. Bray of Dickinson Wright PLLC. We look forward to bringing this litigation to conclusion in the district court.”

Or Jack Daniels can realize its mistake and try to settle this whole mess it made. Look what you did, Jack Daniels! Look what you did! Bad corporate bully. Bad!

Summary: Since the rise of the internet, the recording industry has been particularly concerned about how the internet can and will be used to share infringing content. Over time, the focus of that concern has shifted as the technology (as well as copyright laws) have shifted. In the early 2000s, most of the concern was around file sharing applications, services and sites, such as Napster, Limewire, and The Pirate Bay. However, after 2010, much of the emphasis switched to so-called “cyberlockers.”

Unlike file sharing apps, that involved person-to-person sharing directly from their own computers via intermediary technologies, a cyberlocker was more of a hard drive on the internet. The issue was that some would store large quantities of music files, and then make them available for unlicensed downloading.

While some cyberlockers were built directly around this use-case, at the same time, cloud storage companies were trying to build legitimate businesses, allowing consumers and businesses to store their own files in the cloud, rather than on their own hard drive. However, technologically, there is little to distinguish a cloud storage service from a cyberlocker, and as the entertainment industry became more vocal about the issue, some services started to change their policies.

Dropbox is one of the most well-known cloud storage companies. Wishing to avoid facing comparisons to cyberlockers built off of the sharing of infringing works, the company put in place a system to make it more difficult to use the service for sharing works in an infringing manner, while still allowing the service to be useful for storing personal files.

Specifically, if Dropbox received a DMCA takedown notice for a specific file, the company would create a hash (a computer generated identifier that would be the same for all identical files), and then if you shared any file from your Dropbox to someone else (such as by creating a shareable link), Dropbox would create a hash and check it against the database of hashes of files that had previously received DMCA takedown notices.

This got some attention in 2014 when a user on Twitter highlighted that he had been blocked from sharing a file because of this, raising concerns that Dropbox was looking at everyone’s files.

Dropbox quickly clarified that it is not scanning every file, nor was it looking at everyone’s files. Rather it was using an automated process to check files that were being shared and see if they matched files that had previously been subject to a DMCA takedown notice:

“There have been some questions around how we handle copyright notices. We sometimes receive DMCA notices to remove links on copyright grounds. When we receive these, we process them according to the law and disable the identified link. We have an automated system that then prevents other users from sharing the identical material using another Dropbox link. This is done by comparing file hashes. We don’t look at the files in your private folders and are committed to keeping your stuff safe.”

Decisions to be made by Dropbox:

• How proactive does the company need to be to remain on the compliant side of copyright law?
• Will blocking sharing of files that might be shared for non-infringing purposes, make the service less useful to users?
• What steps are necessary to avoid being accused of supporting infringement by traditional copyright industries?

Questions and policy implications to consider:

• There may be legitimate, non-infringing reasons to share a file that in other contexts may be infringing.
• Is it appropriate for a company to block that possibility?
• What measures could be put in place to allow for those possibilities?
• The recording and movie industries have a history of being aggressive litigants against technologies used for infringement. What level of response is appropriate for new startups and technology companies?
• Will there be limitations on innovation to services like cloud storage imposed by the need to avoid angering certain industries?

Resolution: Dropbox has continued to use a similar setup, and for the most part has avoided being compared to traditional cyberlockers. Since 2014, the issue of DMCA takedowns leading to future blocking of files has not received all that much attention either. There have been a few articles and forum discussions about how it works, with some users looking for workarounds, but for the most part this technological setup appears to have prevented Dropbox from being considered a cyberlocker-style site for infringing file sharing.

Originally published on the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

In light of the events at the Capitol, social media and other online companies have been reevaluating who they let speak on their platforms. The ban of President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, and various other platforms has sparked fierce debate over moderation and free speech. But Google’s recently reinstituted ban on political advertisements until at least inauguration day and the continued ban from Facebook are silencing voices that need to be heard the most – those speaking about state and local political issues.

Before last November’s election, both Google and Facebook restricted the ability of political advertisers to submit and run new ads. This policy was implemented to prevent situations like those in 2016, when Russian agents were able to purchase $100,000 in Facebook ads related to that year’s presidential election. Although these ads did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, they gave rise to the spurious narrative that Russia “hacked” the election.

But Facebook’s ban has continued far past election day under the stated purpose of preventing ads claiming the election results were rigged or that the election had been stolen. Google eventually returned to allowing ads and Facebook made an exception for the Georgia runoff. However, the companies’ most recent bans leave many smaller speakers without two of their most important platforms, despite the policies’ failure to prevent the spread of doubt over the 2020 election results.

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz, while certainly benefiting from social media, can reach an audience without these platforms. But many other speakers who want to speak to local audiences about important political issues have come to rely on them.

Before the advent of targeted online advertisements, communicating and organizing locally required going door-to-door or hanging flyers in your neighborhood. If you could find enough support, perhaps you could even set up a meeting in a public space. The old system was not only inefficient, but often costly in terms of time and money.

This is what makes advertising on Facebook and Google so valuable to those wanting to engage on important issues. Want to inform your neighbors about a city board meeting over a key issue for your community? Want to build a coalition of people to support or oppose an issue at your state capitol? Facebook and Google can do so more successfully, and at a fraction of the cost.

This is often the most important kind of political engagement - forming relationships with your fellow citizens to make your voices heard on issues that carry major personal impacts and are far too often under-reported and less understood.

And make no mistake, the last year has featured no shortage of critical state and local issues.

State legislatures are already in session dealing with important and contentious topics like education, budget cuts, and of course, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Local governments are still dealing with shutdowns and business closures as the pandemic continues into 2021. And as organizing in person gets increasingly difficult, if not impossible, digital tools are becoming even more important.

Key state and local issues are also too often drowned out by politics at the national level. Given the turbulent times we are living through, who can blame people for being glued to the events unfolding in Washington? That’s why Facebook and Google ads are important tools to draw attention to state and local issues.

Inauguration is over and the stated purpose of banning these ads has passed. But more importantly our federalist system of government means that politics don’t only happen at the national level. Rather, the political issues that most greatly affect our lives are those closest to home. Facebook and Google should recognize this fact and end its political ad ban which puts national politics ahead of state and local issues.

The internet is at its best when it informs and connects local communities on the issues that impact them. Blanket political ad bans lessen the opportunity for this kind of much-needed engagement while also failing to improve the national discourse.

Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where he is the Director of the Pelican Center for Technology and Innovation

Talk of police reform has escalated over recent years. It reached an inflection point after the killing of an unarmed black man by a white Minnesota police officer last May. Since then, a lot of proposals have been put forward, but very few have passed without being stripped of anything useful.

What's being asked doesn't make it impossible to be a cop, no matter what law enforcement and union officials may claim. There's definitely room for improvement and giving taxpayers better, more accountable cops is something that will likely pay for itself, especially in cities where millions of dollars of lawsuit settlements are paid out to victims of rights violations and excessive force every year.

The Newark, NJ police department had plenty of problems. It still has a few, but it has shown dramatic improvement. A federal consent decree put in place following a DOJ investigation has started to pay off. The ACLU demanded an investigation into the Newark PD back in 2010, pointing out an alarming pattern of abuse by officers.

The ACLU-NJ identified at least 407 allegations of NPD misconduct over a recent 2.5 year period, including police shootings, sexual assault, beatings of prisoners, false arrests, reckless high-speed driving, and discrimination and retaliation against NPD's own officers by their superiors. It also details almost 40 lawsuits resolved at a taxpayer cost of at least $4.8 million during those same 2.5 years, and describes almost 40 other misconduct lawsuits that are still pending in federal or state court.

The DOJ opened its investigation in 2014. In 2016, a consent decree was put in place after the DOJ arrived at the same conclusion the ACLU had more than a half-decade earlier.

The agreement, which is subject to court approval, resolves the department’s findings that NPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional stops, searches, arrests, use of excessive force and theft by officers in violation of the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments.  

In the intervening years, there have been more problems. In 2017, an off-duty officer killed his estranged wife and injured another man. Another officer was recently indicted for manslaughter and assault after he shot into a moving vehicle during a pursuit, killing one of the people in the car. Notably, no other officer opened fire, despite claims by officers one of the occupants had a gun. And the department was sued over another controversial killing that occurred shortly before the consent decree was put in place.

But here's the good news. The reform efforts appear to be having a positive effect. For the first time in ever, the Newark PD rang up a couple of notable zeroes.

Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.

And, despite arguments to the contrary by the noisiest police voiceboxes, these reforms didn't make it impossible to effectively fight crime.

At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.

Reform isn't zero sum, no matter what vociferous opponents to almost any police reform efforts may claim. Violating rights and deploying force irresponsibly is not inseparable from "effective" law enforcement or deterrent efforts. Cops can fight crime and stay on the right side of the Constitution. Cop guns don't need to be "discharged" to keep the peace.

One key aspect is the Newark PD's abandonment of old training programs -- ones that instilled a warrior mentality, rather than one that recognized cops serve and protect residents, rather than go to war against them.

Training is critical, too, especially on de-escalating violence. Brian O’Hara, the deputy chief overseeing training, said the old-fashioned version was to show officers how to win a confrontation, when to make the move. “It was a paramilitary kind of training, just focused on stopping the threat,” he said.

Now, the model is to calm things down, engage the threatening person, while creating distance or taking cover, and buying time until reinforcements arrive, he says. Newark officers view videos presenting challenging scenarios, offer responses, then discuss it with supervisors.

“It’s not about resolving the situation as quickly as you can,” O’Hara says. “It’s about protecting the sanctity of every life.”

If this can work here, it can work elsewhere. And, it must be noted, the Newark PD rang in the new year with a fatal shooting of a citizen. but this is a huge improvement.  

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes the federal government stepping in to provoke (and enforce) needed reform efforts. Under Trump, policing the police was largely abandoned. This has set the clock back on better policing. Moving forward, law enforcement agencies with histories of abusive practices will hopefully be receiving more visits from the DOJ's dormant Civil Rights division. The DOJ is far from perfect -- and houses its own fair share of abusers -- but it's one of the few entities that have been able to force the institution of needed reforms. Hopefully there will be more of this -- and more success stories to report -- in the future.

Ajit Pai's tenure wasn't devoid of value. He arguably oversaw some decent moves that will bring more spectrum to market (albeit not without some caveats and casualties), and he implemented the nation's first suicide hotline (988). But by and large it's pretty hard to not see Pai's tenure as a giant middle finger to consumer welfare, and a four year, sustained ass kissing for the nation's biggest telecom monopolies.

In his departing statement, of course, Pai gushes about what an honor it was to serve the "American people":

"Serving the American people as Chairman of the FCC has been the greatest honor of my professional life. Over the past four years, we have delivered results for the American people, from narrowing the digital divide to advancing American leadership in 5G, from protecting consumers and national security to keeping Americans connected during the pandemic, from modernizing our media rules to making the agency more transparent and nimble. It has been a privilege to lead the agency over its most productive period in recent history."

That is, if you've paid even the slightest bit of attention to Pai's tenure, a paragraph of delusion. US 5G is a disappointing mess. "Modernized" media rules is a misnomer for "gutting decades of media consolidation rules with bipartisan support." Pai's purported adoration of the American public is the biggest lie of all, given he spent most of his tenure either ignoring them or making protecting them far more difficult. Often with a total disregard for factual data, or the will of the actual public.

The shining example of this was Pai's net neutrality repeal, which not only killed net neutrality rules, but the agency's ability to hold telecom giants accountable for much of anything. The repeal took the consumer protection authority of an agency crafted to police telecom, and shoveled it to the FTC -- which lacks the resources or authority to do the job (which is precisely why the industry wanted this to happen). As an additional gift to monopolies, Pai's repeal even tried to ban states from being able to protect consumers as well, something only thwarted because the courts told him his agency lacked the authority.

To force this hugely unpopular proposal through, Pai lied repeatedly about net neutrality's impact, claiming the modest rules (by international standards) had demolished telecom sector investment. Once repealed, Pai lied just as often about how the repeal had resulted in a huge spike in investment (it hadn't). When reporters contacted Pai's FCC to fact check the agency's dodgy numbers, they were literally directed to telecom lobbyists who'd provided the false data. Reporters who asked tough questions were effectively blacklisted during Pai's tenure.

Pai's office also blocked law enforcement inquiries into the broadband industry's (and Trumpland's) use of fake and dead people to provide bogus public support for unpopular policies. And when genuine, pissed off, John Oliver viewers wrote to the FCC to complain, swamping the FCC website, FOIA data revealed that Pai's office repeatedly lied and claimed it had been the victim of a DDOS attack. The entire affair culminated in Pai dancing with a pizzagate conspiracy theorist in a video the internet would like to forget.

As such Pai's tenure wasn't just pockmarked by bad data and bad policy, it was, as is custom for the Trump era, a shining example of trolling as a government policy, where policymakers take an active enjoyment in being insufferable and hostile. Hostile to the press. Hostile to the public. Hostile to experts and expert data, especially if those experts question entrenched industry ideology or rampant US monopolization.

There's a laundry list of other examples of Pai's disdain for the public welfare and market health, including Pai's efforts to utterly dismantle decades-old (and bipartisan) media consolidation rules just so disinformation giants like Sinclair Broadcasting could get ever larger. He flubbed hurricane disaster responses, mindlessly rubber stamped giant, job and competition killing mergers, undermined his own agency's efforts to combat prison telco monopoly price gouging, refused to seriously tackle location data abuse scandals, turned a blind eye while Verizon throttled firefighters during a crisis, and so much more.

So if by "served the American public" you mean ignored them completely and actively made it harder to protect them, sure. Pai now stumbles off to work either in telecom, or at some telecom-funded think tank where he'll spend the next few decades coasting on an illusory reputation as a "free market champion" and noble destroyer of "burdensome regulation," hopeful folks forget or ignore that his primary agenda was, fairly uniformly, to act as an apologist for, and denier of, American monopolization and the laundry list of obvious problems it creates.

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While lots of people have been blaming social media for the insurrection at the Capitol a few weeks back, fewer have recognized that Fox News is at least as much to blame, if not more. As we've covered in the past, Yochai Benkler's book, Network Propaganda, went into great detail with tons of data and evidence, to highlight how, contrary to popular belief, the crazy conspiracy theories don't really spread that quickly on social media... until after Fox News picks them up. That book also highlights how, while "left-wing" media has its own fair share of wacky conspiracy theories, they don't spread to nearly the same degree, and competition among different news venues includes attempts to debunk the wackier conspiracy theories. The same is just not there in the Fox News media-sphere.

We've actually seen this play out in interesting ways over the last few weeks. Fox News actually did, finally, break with President Trump and his pathetic attempts to deny the election results, and it simply made Trump and his cultist fanboys switch channels to even more insane merchants of garbage: OAN and Newsmax.

Somewhat infamous neocon Max Boot, who spent years championing the kinds of policies that Fox News used to support, before becoming a vocal "Never Trumper," has penned a piece in the Washington Post that rightly calls out Fox News' role in the current mess that we're in. However, he then goes much further, in suggesting legal consequences for Fox News and other Republican/Trumpist voices that played a role via things like Fox News.

Anyone who cherishes our democracy should be grateful to the management of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for their newfound sense of social responsibility. We should expect at least the same level of responsibility from broadcast media — and in particular from Fox News, which has the largest reach on the right.

To its credit, Fox News acknowledged that Joe Biden won. But, reports Media Matters for America, “in the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubt on the results of the election at least 774 times.” According to NPR, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said Trump’s opponents in the government were guilty of “treason” and that it would be “criminal” for Republicans to recognize Biden’s victory. Fox News host Mark Levin told viewers: “If we don’t fight on Jan. 6 on the floor of the Senate and the House — and that is the joint meeting of Congress on these electors — then we are done.”

The pro-Trump insurrectionists were listening. To take but one example, The Post reports that Ashli Babbitt, who was killed in the attack, “was an avid viewer of Fox News, praising Tucker Carlson and other far-right media personalities on the network as she derided their liberal targets.” This is dismaying but hardly surprising. As the New York Times notes, “Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News ‘religiously.’”

And, yes, it makes sense to call out Fox News for spreading outright falsehoods over and over again in a somewhat slavish devotion to a rabid Trumpist audience, but Boot's suggestion to have the FCC go after Fox News is hugely problematic.

But while we should expect better behavior from media executives, we shouldn’t count on it. CNN (where I’m a global affairs analyst) notes that the United Kingdom doesn’t have its own version of Fox News, because it has a government regulator that metes out hefty fines to broadcasters that violate minimal standards of impartiality and accuracy. The United States hasn’t had that since the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the “fairness” doctrine in the 1980s. As president, Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC. Or else the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America.

This is... nonsense. And also unconstitutional. The "fairness doctrine" which Republicans have been against for ages, and which they falsely claimed net neutrality was an attempt to bring back (it was not), only covered broadcast media. And that was because broadcast media used public spectrum, and since the broadcasters received that spectrum in exchange for broadcasting content for the public good, it was ruled that the FCC could require what was, basically, a right of response.

However, such a thing has never applied to areas that the FCC has no authority over, including cable TV (and now internet TV). Nor does it apply to the internet and social media. Even if the FCC brought back the fairness doctrine, it couldn't apply it to Fox News. Any attempt to do so would almost certainly lose (and lose badly) in court as an attack on the 1st Amendment itself.

It is easy to understand why Fox News has some responsibility for what has happened in the last few years (and especially in the last few weeks). But it is a much trickier question to figure out what should be done about it. One thing that should not be done is tossing out our principles, and trampling basic rights like the 1st Amendment. I agree that Fox News is an embarrassment and harmful to American democracy in many, many ways. But forcing it to be "impartial" and compelling it to share speech with which it disagrees is no way to support democracy. Any such rule would lead to trouble down the road.

Imagine how the next version of a Trump FCC would treat the NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN and CNBC -- all of which the President referred to as "fake news" and "enemies of the people." It's not hard to see that any precedent to go after Fox News via the FCC or other legal means would not only be repeated against those other news organizations under the next Trumpist President, but it would likely be worse and even more extreme -- all while pointing back to the "precedent" set by a Biden administration doing something similar to Fox News.

We don't support democracy by throwing away our own rights.

To be very clear: American consumers don't like broadband usage caps. At all. Most Americans realize (either intellectually or on instinct) that monthly broadband usage caps and overage fees are little more than monopolistic cash grabs. They are confusing, frustrating price hikes on captive customers that accomplish absolutely none of their stated benefits. They don't actually help manage congestion, and they aren't about "fairness" -- since if fairness were a goal you'd have a lot of grandmothers paying $5-$10 a month for broadband because they only check their email twice a day.

Enter U.S. cable giant Charter (Spectrum), which has spent a good chunk of the last year trying to get the FCC to kill the merger conditions applied as part of its 2015 $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Those conditions, among other things, required that Charter adhere to net neutrality (despite the fact that the GOP has since killed net neutrality rules), and avoid usage caps and overage fees. Both conditions had 7 year sunset clauses built in, and Charter, eager to begin jacking up U.S. broadband consumer prices ever higher, has been lobbying to have them killed two years early.

To get its way, Charter petitioned the FCC, falsely claiming that such caps are "popular" among consumers. They even employed the help of the Boys and Girls Club, which was apparently happy to petition the FCC on Charter's behalf even if that meant selling out their constituents. Unfortunately for Charter, COVID has brought renewed attention on the fact that usage caps are glorified price gouging bullshit. And with industry BFF Ajit Pai headed for the exits, Charter has been forced to back off its request:

"Spectrum internet customers can be assured of an additional two years of unlimited internet service after Charter Communications dropped its petition Tuesday with the FCC to allow the cable company to introduce data caps. The FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau acknowledged receipt of Charter’s withdrawal of its petition to end a prohibition on the company imposing data caps and usage-based pricing mechanisms two years before the original agreement with the regulator expires on May 18, 2023."

Granted this doesn't mean that Charter won't simply turn around in two years when the conditions sunset and impose the restrictions anyway. The problem so far has been the optics of imposing predatory price hikes in the middle of a pandemic where broadband is seen as essential to survival. Even then, such concerns certainly didn't stop Comcast from recently expanding its own caps, or AT&T from restoring theirs despite the accelerating pandemic and millions of Americans still struggling to get online for work or education.

Even during COVID US broadband monopolies have tried to claim that such monthly usage restrictions are about "fairness." But they've never been about fairness. ISPs love to insist they just want to "experiment with price differentiation," but you will never see a giant ISP offer a super cheap plan for people like your grandma who only check the Weather Channel website and their email a few times a day. And they don't do that because the goal is to drive up the costs of everybody's connection over the longer haul to please investors' needs for higher quarterly returns.

Cable giants like Comcast and Charter can get away with this because in most U.S. markets, their only competition is a phone company that hasn't seriously upgraded its DSL lines since 2004 or so, or there's no competition at all. If the market actually saw competition and had functional regulatory oversight, you might see plans more closely tailored toward your actual usage. But in a market absent of real pricing competition and overseen by fecklessly captured regulators, what you get instead is endlessly higher prices, usually in the form of sneaky, misleading fees.

Anyone who says anything critical of the Turkish government is a terrorist. That's been the operative theory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has jailed more journalists than China and somehow managed to make a handful of governments around the world complicit in the punishment of his critics.

The hits just keep on coming. The latest roundup of "terrorists" in Turkey is COVID-related, linked to the government's attempt to bury its bad infection numbers.

Sebnem Korur Fincanci, a forensic physician, and many other doctors had long insisted there was something dodgy about Turkey’s covid-19 figures. Excess deaths across the country far surpassed officially reported deaths from the virus. Case numbers seemed suspiciously low. Vindication came at the end of November, when the government revealed it had stopped reporting asymptomatic infections months earlier. Once it resumed doing so, the case-count rocketed from about 7,000 to over 30,000 a day. (The numbers later dropped, after new lockdowns were imposed.) For her troubles Dr Fincanci, who turned 61 last year, was labelled a terrorist by none other than Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The head of the Nationalist Movement Party, the president’s coalition partner, called for the group she heads, the Turkish Medical Association, to be disbanded.

That's how the bearers of inconvenient facts are being handled in Turkey. And the government has a brand new weapon to deploy against anyone saying anything it doesn't like. A law passed late last year gives the government direct control of civil rights organizations in the country, including local branches of worldwide groups like Amnesty International. The law allows the government to remove members facing bogus terrorism charges and seize their assets. It also allows the government to handpick replacements for organization members it has jailed. If that isn't enough to silence these rights-protecting loudmouths, the government can ban the groups altogether.

All this is happening while Turkey continues to suffer from numerous violent attacks by actual terrorists. But the government has chosen to focus on multitudinous "terrorists" who do nothing more damaging than raise justifiable concerns or undercut the official narrative.

These latest arrests just add to the breathtaking number of people arrested and/or jailed by the Turkish government following a failed coup in 2016. Only a small percentage of those were participants or have engaged in actual terrorists acts. A majority of those arrested are opposition party leaders, teachers, journalists, members of civil rights groups, and dissidents. This may be making things simpler and easier for Erdogan and his acolytes. But it isn't making his country any safer. With Erdogan in charge, the population's threat matrix now includes a vengeful, thin-skinned leader.