This seemed fairly inevitable, after it became quite clear that the Twitter hack from a few weeks ago was done by teen hackers who didn't seem to do much to cover their tracks, but officials in Florida announced the arrest of a Florida teenager for participating in the hack, followed by the DOJ announcing two others as well -- a 19 year old in the UK and a 22 year old in Florida.

As for why the first announced was separate and done by Florida officials, it appears that it involved a 17-year-old, and apparently it was easier to charge him as an adult under state laws, rather than under federal law, as with the other two.

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges against the teen this week for “scamming people across America” in connection with the Twitter hack that happened on July 15. The charges he’s facing include one count of organized fraud, 17 counts of communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to computer or electronic device without authority.

Hillsborough County Jail records show Clark was booked into jail shortly after 6:30 a.m. Friday.

Warren’s office says the scheme to defraud “stole the identities of prominent people” and “posted messages in their names directing victims to send Bitcoin” to accounts that were associated with the Tampa teen. According to the state attorney, the scheme reaped more than $100,000 in Bitcoin in just one day.

Once again, it's looking like we got incredibly lucky -- that it was just some young hackers mostly messing around, rather than anyone with serious ill-intent and the ability to plan something bigger. It now appears that Twitter's internal security controls were kind of a mess. Over 1,000 employees had access to the control panel that would allow people to make the changes that enabled the hack -- and even that some staffers and contractors somehow made it a game to abuse their powers to spy on users.

Once again, it seems that Twitter needs to fix up a lot of things on the security side, including figuring out how to do end-to-end encryption for direct messages.

Summary: With news breaking so rapidly, it’s possible that even major newspapers or official sources may get information wrong. Social media sites, like Twitter, need to determine how to deal with “news” tweets that later turn out to be misleading -- even when coming from major news organizations, citing official government organizations.

With widespread protests around the United States calling attention to police brutality and police activity disproportionately targeting the black community, the NY Post tweeted a link to an article discussing an internal communication by the NY Police Department (NYPD) warning of “concrete disguised as ice cream cups” that were supposedly found at some of the protests, with the clear implication being that this was a way to disguise items that could be used for violence or property destruction.

The article was criticized widely by people who pointed out that the items in fact appear to be part of a standard process for testing concrete mixtures, with the details of each mixture written on the side of the containers. Since these were found at a construction site, it seems likely that the NYPD’s “alert” was, at best, misleading.

In response to continuing criticism, the NY Post made a very minor edit to the story, noting only that the markings on the cups make them “resemble concrete sample tests commonly used on construction sites.” However, the story and its title remained unchanged and the NY Post retweeted it a day later -- leading some to question why the NY Post was publishing misinformation, even if it was accurately reporting the content of an internal police memo.

Questions for Twitter:

• Should it flag potentially misleading tweets when published in major media publications, such as the NY Post?
• Should it matter if the information originated at an official government source, such as the NYPD?
• How much investigation should be done to determine the accuracy (or not) of the internal police report? How should the NY Post’s framing of the story reflect this investigation?
• Does it matter that the NY Post retweeted the story a day after the details were credibly called into question?

Questions and policy implications to consider:

• Do different publications require different standards of review?
• Does it matter if underlying information is coming from a governmental organization?
• If a media report accurately reports on the content of an underlying report that is erroneous or misleading, does that make the report itself misleading?
• How much does wider context (protests, accusations of violence, etc.) need to be considered when making determinations regarding moderation?

Resolution: To date, Twitter has left the tweets up, and the NY Post article remains online with only the very minor edit that was added a few hours after the article received widespread criticism. The NY Post tweets have not received any fact check or other moderation to date. There are, however, many replies and quote tweets calling out what people feel to be misleading aspects of the story (as well as plenty from people taking the content of the story at face value, and worrying about how the items might be used for violence).

Update: Sooo... we already have a bunch of updates on this story. Trump has said he's banning TikTok entirely and is "against" allowing a US company to buy TikTok. Below is the original post, with only a slight clarification regarding Ben Thompson's thoughts on TikTok, which I didn't present very clearly in the original. Then, beneath the post I'll have more thoughts on Trump's comments.

There's been a panic over the last few weeks about TikTok, the rapidly growing social network that is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance (by way of history: ByteDance purchased a startup called Musical.ly in 2017, and rebranded it TikTok in 2018, and then it started growing like crazy). A few weeks ago, the Trump administration started suggesting it would ban TikTok, and a story was built up around the idea that TikTok was some sort of national security threat, despite very little evidence to support this. A separate narrative was simply that Trump was annoyed that TikTok kids made Trump look bad in Tulsa by reserving a bunch of tickets to his rally that they never intended to use.

Either way, it was announced today that the Trump administration was likely to order ByteDance to shed TikTok and immediately with that was the news that Microsoft was a likely buyer.

The whole thing is kind of silly. The most compelling argument I've seen for why the US should ban TikTok came from Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who more or less says (this is a very simplified version of his argument, so read the whole thing) that since China is engaged in a war to impose its ideology on the world, and that it will make use of TikTok and other services to effectively attack Western liberalism, it is effectively dangerous to allow it to operate in the west under Chinese ownership. He supports selling TikTok off to a American company, or barring that, banning the app in the West. I tend to lean the other way: to me, banning TikTok strikes me as effectively proving China's views on liberalism, and allowing them to claim hypocrisy on the west, and use these actions to justify its own actions.

On top of that, if the concern is about China, then the fact that most of our network and computer equipment is built in China would seem like maybe a larger concern? But beyond a weird, similar freakout about Huawei, no one seems to be taking any serious interest in that. And that doesn't get into the fact that US intelligence has leaned heavily on US internet companies to try to get access to global data -- meaning that there does seem to be a bit of US exceptionalism built into all of this: it's okay when we do it, but an affront if any other government might do the same thing...

Separately, this whole situation with TikTok and Microsoft demonstrates the pure silliness of the antitrust hearing in the House earlier this week. Note that there were claims that the four companies there represented "monopoly power." And yet, just days later, we're talking about how a recent entrant in the market, which has grown up quickly, and which Facebook certainly sees as a threat, is so powerful on the internet that it needs to be sold from its Chinese owners -- and the leading candidate to purchase it, Microsoft, is not even one of the "too powerful" companies who were on the panel.

If a new entrant can rise up so quickly to be a "threat" and then needs to be purchased by another giant... it certainly suggests that the internet market still remains pretty vibrant, and not at all locked down by a few monopolies.

Updated thoughts: So that's the original above. Now that Trump is saying he really is going to ban TikTok and is against its sale, there are multiple issues raised. Trump seems to think he can do this under his emergency economic powers (effectively declaring TikTok to be a national security issue -- the same "tool" he used to impose tariffs on China without Congressional approval). If he goes that route, there will be lawsuits -- and there will be significant Constitutional issues raised. The Supreme Court has in the past declared software speech, in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (the case about whether or not the government could regulate video games and require age warnings). And, in the 2nd Circuit, a somewhat frustrating decision regarding the publishing of some code that would break DRM, Universal v. Corley, it is at least notable that the Court made a clear statement that software is protected under the 1st Amendment:

Communication does not lose constitutional protection as "speech" simply because it is expressed in the language of computer code. Mathematical formulae and musical scores are written in "code," i.e., symbolic notations not comprehensible to the uninitiated, and yet both are covered by the First Amendment. If someone [*446] chose to write a novel entirely in computer object code by using strings of 1's and 0's for each letter of each word, the resulting work would be no different for constitutional purposes than if it had been written in English. The "object code" version would be incomprehensible to readers outside the programming community (and tedious to read even for most within the community), but it would be no more incomprehensible than a work written in Sanskrit for those unversed in that language. The undisputed evidence reveals that even pure object code can be, and often is, read and understood by experienced programmers. And source code (in any of its various levels of complexity) can be read by many more. Ultimately, however, the ease with which a work is comprehended is irrelevant to the constitutional inquiry. If computer code is distinguishable from conventional speech for First Amendment purposes, it is not because it is written in an obscure language.

And, later:

Computer programs are not exempted from the category of First Amendment speech simply because their instructions require use of a computer. A recipe is no less "speech" because it calls for the use of an oven, and a musical score is no less "speech" because it specifies performance on an electric guitar. Arguably distinguishing computer programs from conventional language instructions is the fact that programs are executable on a computer. But the fact that a program has the capacity to direct the functioning of a computer does not mean that it lacks the additional capacity to convey information, and it is the conveying of information that renders instructions "speech" for purposes of the First Amendment.

There were other issues with that case, but it remains law in the 2nd Circuit. TikTok suing over being banned would present an interesting 1st Amendment issue at the very least.

As to whether or not Trump could block the sale to a US company -- ordinarily the answer to that should also be no, with a few caveats. However, as was recently revealed in Congress, the Bill Barr-lead DOJ appears to have no problem at all weaponizing its powers against companies the President is annoyed with -- meaning that the DOJ could trump up some ridiculous excuse for why TikTok cannot be sold to an American company, and it's possible a court would buy it.

On a related noted, it's also entirely possible that the President would try to lean on both Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. And while I'd like to believe both companies would push back -- the fact that there are realistically just those two bottlenecks to blocking TikTok entirely from the country, it could also get... interesting.

I get the feeling we'll be writing about all of this for quite some time.

Last month, we wrote about the big publishers suing the Internet Archive over its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program, as well as its National Emergency Library (NEL). As we've explained over and over again, the Internet Archive is doing exactly what libraries have always done: lending books. The CDL program was structured to mimic exactly how a traditional library works, with a 1-to-1 relationship between physical books owned by the library and digital copies that can be lent out.

While some struggled with the concept of the NEL since it was basically just the CDL, but without the 1-to-1 relationship (and thus, without wait lists), it seemed reasonably defensible: nearly all public libraries at the time had shut down entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the NEL was helping people who otherwise would never have had access to the books that were sitting inside libraries, collecting dust on the inaccessible shelves. Indeed, plenty of teachers and schools thanked the Internet Archive for making it possible for students to still read books that were stuck inside locked up classrooms. But, again, this lawsuit wasn't just about the NEL at all, but about the whole CDL program. The publishers have been whining about the CDL for a while, but hadn't sued until now.

Of course, the reality is that the big publishers see digital ebooks as an opportunity to craft a new business model. With traditional books, libraries buy the books, just like anyone else, and then lend them out. But thanks to a strained interpretation of copyright law, when it came to ebooks, the publishers jacked up the price for libraries to insane levels and kept putting more and more conditions on them. For example, Macmillan, for a while, was charging $60 per book -- with a limit of 52 lends or two years of lending, whichever came first. And then you'd have to renew.

Basically, publishers were abusing copyright law to try to jam down an awful and awfully expensive model on libraries -- exposing how much publishers really hate libraries, while pretending otherwise.

Anyway, the Internet Archive has filed its response to the lawsuit, which does the typical thing of effectively denying all of the claims in the lawsuit (though I will admit that I chuckled to see them even "deny" the claim that the Archive's headquarters are in an "exclusive" part of San Francisco (FWIW, I'd probably describe the area more as "not easily accessible by public transit," but that doesn't quite make it exclusive -- or at least not any more exclusive than most of the rest of SF)).

The Internet Archive admits that its headquarters are located in San Francisco, but denies that the corner of Funston and Clement Streets is an “exclusive area.”

The key part, of course, will be the defenses, and as expected the Internet Archive throws everything in starting with fair use, failure to state a claim, first sale, DMCA safe harbor, and statute of limitations and laches. The key ones are going to be fair use and the first sale issue. And the response lays out the basics of how this defense is going to be argued:

The Internet Archive does what libraries have always done: buy, collect, preserve, and share our common culture. In furtherance of that mission, the Internet Archive has received grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the federal government’s Institute of Museum and Library Services, among many other sources. Many libraries and archives, including the Library of Congress, Boston Public Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and smaller community libraries like the Allen County Public Library trust the Internet Archive to digitize books and other materials in their collections in order to preserve physical texts and to facilitate public access. The Internet Archive is part of a network of libraries around the world—each of which is using digital technologies to meet the many challenges of serving patrons with diverse needs and differing abilities and to ensure that the growing storehouse of human creativity is not lost because no one has the capacity to preserve it.

Like Plaintiffs, the Internet Archive believes that “[b]ooks are a cornerstone of our culture and system of democratic self-government” and “play a critical role in education.” Accordingly, democratizing access to information, and facilitating access to books in particular, has been a core part of the Internet Archive’s mission for decades. But, for many people, distance, time, cost, or disability pose daunting and sometimes insurmountable barriers to accessing physical books. Digitizing and offering books online for borrowing unlocks them for communities with limited or no access, creating a lifeline to trusted information. Readers in the Internet age need a comprehensive library that meets them where they are—an online space that welcomes everyone to use its resources, while respecting readers’ privacy and dignity.

[....]

The Internet Archive has made careful efforts to ensure its uses are lawful. The Internet Archive’s CDL program is sheltered by the fair use doctrine, buttressed by traditional library protections. Specifically, the project serves the public interest in preservation, access and research—all classic fair use purposes. Every book in the collection has already been published and most are out of print. Patrons can borrow and read entire volumes, to be sure, but that is what it means to check a book out from a library. As for its effect on the market for the works in question, the books have already been bought and paid for by the libraries that own them. The public derives tremendous benefit from the program, and rights holders will gain nothing if the public is deprived of this resource.

During the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, in response to urgent pleas from teachers and librarians whose students and patrons had been ordered to stay at home, the Internet Archive decided to temporarily permit lending that could have exceeded the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. With millions of print books locked away, digital lending was the only practical way to get books to those who needed them. The Internet Archive called this program the “National Emergency Library” and planned to discontinue it once the need had passed. Twelve weeks later, other options had emerged to fill the gap, and the Internet Archive was able to return to the traditional CDL approach.

Contrary to the publishers’ accusations, the Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world. Copyright law does not stand in the way of libraries’ right to lend, and patrons’ right to borrow, the books that libraries own.

In a blog post about this, Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle notes that beyond trying to kill the CDL, the lawsuit also looks to force the Archive to destroy the digital books it's scanned for so many libraries, and to preserve that history.

These publishers call for the destruction of the 1.5 million digital books that Internet Archive makes available to our patrons. This form of digital book burning is unprecedented and unfairly disadvantages people with print disabilities. For the blind, ebooks are a lifeline, yet less than one in ten exists in accessible formats. Since 2010, Internet Archive has made our lending library available to the blind and print disabled community, in addition to sighted users. If the publishers are successful with their lawsuit, more than a million of those books would be deleted from the Internet’s digital shelves forever.

I call on the executives at Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the pressing challenges to access to knowledge during this pandemic. Please drop this needless lawsuit.

It really is quite incredible that these publishers are looking to effectively do a digital book burning in the midst of a pandemic.

You can't always pick your fighter for Constitutional challenges. Sometimes you're handed an unsympathetic challenger, which makes defending everyone's rights a bit more difficult because a lot of people wouldn't mind too much if this particular person's rights are limited. But that's not how rights work.

A pretty lousy decision has been handed down by a Minnesota federal court. A challenge of two laws -- one city, one state -- has been met with a judicial shrug that says sometimes rights just aren't rights when there are children involved. (h/t Eric Goldman)

The plaintiff is Sally Ness, an "activist" who appears to be overly concerned with a local mosque and its attached school. Ness is discussed in this early reporting on her lawsuit, which shows her activism is pretty limited in scope. Her nemesis appears to be the Dar Al-Farooq Center and its school, Success Academy. Ness feels there's too much traffic and too much use of a local public park by the Center and the school.

Here's how she's fighting back against apparently city-approved use of Smith Park:

Ness has taken it upon herself to document activity at site. That includes maintaining a public blog and Facebook page all about the “DAF/Success Academy controversy,” complete with photos and video of street traffic, kids being dropped off at school, and people otherwise going about their business.

Her legal representation in this lawsuit isn't that sympathetic either.

The American Freedom Law Center, which claims that “the battle for America’s soul is being waged in the courtrooms across America” against “secular progressives and Sharia-advocating Muslim Brotherhood interests,” is co-counseling the case. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls that organization’s co-founder David Yerushalmi an “anti-Muslim activist” and “a leading proponent of the idea that the United States is threatened by the imposition of Muslim religious law, known as Shariah.”

Her lawyer says this has nothing to do with the school's religious affiliation. Her co-counsel, David Yerushalmi, disagrees.

In a statement, he says Ness’ predicament is just “another example of encroachment on our liberties when Islam is involved.”

Ness became involved when the mosque opened its school and obtained a Conditional Use Permit for Smith Park that allowed students to use it during school days. Ness believes the permit is being violated on a daily basis by students' "excessive" use of park facilities that makes it "impossible" for nearby residents to use it at the same time.

To document these supposed violations, Ness has approached children in the park and parked across the street to take photographs/record DAF students using the park. She had two run-ins with local law enforcement before filing her lawsuit. After the most recent law enforcement encounter, Bloomington police attempted to charge Ness with felony harassment, but the Hennepin County Attorney's office declined to bring charges against her. Bloomington prosecutors also declined to prosecute Ness.

Ness sued, claiming the laws cited infringed on her Constitutional rights and that the ongoing threat of prosecution has resulted in her curtailing her documentation of park use by the school.

The problem is the laws. Ness' behavior is problematic but it shouldn't be criminally problematic. First, the state's harassment law -- as quoted in the court's opinion [PDF] -- does not require prosecutors to prove intent.

Subdivision 1. Definition. As used in this section, “harass” means to engage in conduct which the actor knows or has reason to know would cause the victim under the circumstances to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated, and causes this reaction on the part of the victim regardless of the relationship between the actor and victim.

Subd. 1a. No proof of specific intent required. In a prosecution under this section, the state is not required to prove that the actor intended to cause the victim to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated, or except as otherwise provided in subdivision 3, paragraph (a), clause (4), or paragraph (b), that the actor intended to cause any other result.

Then there's an additional ordinance -- one put in place by the city of Bloomington after Ness' two run-ins with the local PD -- that criminalizes Ness' documentation of park activities.

(24) No person shall intentionally take a photograph or otherwise record a child without the consent of the child's parent or guardian.

This is amazingly broad. It criminalizes journalism and the recording of criminal acts by minors. This revision appears to have been crafted solely to target Ness and her activism. Ness was also a frequent commenter at Bloomington city council meetings until filing this lawsuit.

The court says Ness has no standing to challenge the laws. According to the judge, she does not face a credible threat of prosecution. The decision cites the two refusals to prosecute, as well as prosecutors' statements on the issue.

Ness claims she intends to monitor an issue—the non-compliant use of DAF’s facilities and the use of Smith Park—by filming and photographing the activity in the physical vicinity of DAF, which may include filming and photographing people. Compl. ¶¶ 36, 47, 70, 71; Ness Decl. ¶¶ 6, 18, 28. Ness does not claim a desire to surveil individuals or track their location by filming or photographing them once they leave DAF’s neighborhood. As Ness herself has stated, “I try to make this as not about people . . . . It’s not specifically about an individual. It’s about the City collectively not doing their job.” Jones Decl. Ex. 1 at 18:49–18:53. Thus, as the County Attorney and the City both acknowledge, Ness’ intended conduct is not proscribed by the Harassment Statute because she is not tracking or monitoring a particular individual.

But then the court goes on to quote police officers' implicit threats of arrest as evidence Ness won't be subjected to further law enforcement scrutiny or prosecution.

Ness relies on the police report from the incident, which states that Officer Meyer “asked [Ness] to stop filming,” and that “Ness was advised that she could be charged with harassment if the parents and principal felt intimidated by her actions.” Compl. ¶ 54. However, the bodycam footage of the encounter establishes that Sgt. Roepke expressly told Ness “this is a public place, . . . you have a right to . . . take pictures in a public place or video or, or anything like that. There’s not an issue with that. . . . [B]ut if you’re doing it in a means to intimidate them or to harass them, then it becomes a problem.” Jones Decl. Ex. 3 at 1:50. Sgt. Roepke also told Ness “if you want to take some pictures, come and take some pictures and then move on.” Id. at 7:50. When Ness described the August 2019 encounter to Detective Bloomer months later during her interview, Ness stated that Sgt. Roepke “clarified” Ness’ conduct was not harassing behavior, and told her to “be careful and read the statute.” Jones Decl. Ex. 5 at 36:22–36:43. The police report of the August 2019 incident, particularly when viewed together with Sgt. Roepke’s statements and Ness’ own recollection of the incident, does not rise to the level of a credible threat of prosecution. Ness’ decision to chill her speech, after being told by Sgt. Roepke that she had a right to take videos and that her conduct was not harassing behavior, was not based on an objectively reasonable fear of prosecution.

Unfortunately, this supposedly "unreasonable" fear of prosecution stems directly from the law, making it a lot more reasonable than the court says. Prosecutors do not have to prove intent. And, as the officer stated clearly, all it would take is for subjects of Ness' recordings to feel harassed. It doesn't matter whether or not Ness intended to harass anyone. That's pretty open-ended and that makes her fear of prosecution a lot more reasonable.

The court agrees Ness has standing to sue the city of Bloomington over its ban on filming children.

The City Defendants argue that “[e]ven if Ness had standing to sue, her facial challenge to the ordinance under the first Amendment would fail.” City Defs.’ Mem. Supp. Mot. Dism. [Docket No. 68] at 10 (emphasis added). However, the City Defendants’ briefing does not include an argument for why Ness might lack standing to challenge the City Ordinance. Ness’ intended conduct will include photographing and filming children in a City park without parental consent. This conduct is proscribed by the City Ordinance, and the City has not disavowed an intent to charge Ness with violating the City Ordinance if she were to engage in this conduct. Under these circumstances, Ness’ decision to chill her speech due to the existence of the City Ordinance is objectively reasonable. Ness has standing to challenge the City Ordinance.

But it says she has nothing to sue about because the ordinance does not affect her First Amendment rights.

Here, the City Ordinance makes no distinction based on who is the photographer or recorder, what use will be made of the photograph or recording, or what message will ultimately be conveyed. Because the limitation on its face does not draw distinctions based on a speaker’s message or viewpoint, it is content neutral.

Neutral, except as to the content of the recordings, which is what's targeted by the city's ban. But the court says the definition of "content" hinges on what the speech conveys, rather than what it contains.

Ness also points out the ordinance is unconstitutional because it fails to do what it purports to do: protect children from being recorded. The court disagrees, saying the ordinance is adequate enough to achieve its aims.

Ness argues that the City Ordinance is underinclusive because if a person takes a step outside a City park and films children from the street, the City Ordinance will not be violated. Ness contends this underinclusiveness undermines the City’s claimed interest in protecting children’s privacy and preventing them from being exploited or intimidated. However, requiring would-be recorders to collect images from a distance, rather from inside a City park, makes it less likely that a child in the park will feel frightened or that the child’s identity will be ascertainable. Thus, the City’s important government interest in protecting children is not undermined by allowing a person to record children from just outside a City park’s boundaries.

Finally, the judge says the ends justify the means. The judge appears to believe laws are "narrowly tailored" if they accomplish what they set out to do.

As discussed above, the City Ordinance promotes the important government interest in regulating the competing uses of City parks and protecting children’s privacy and sense of safety and freedom from intimidation while playing in a City park. This interest would be achieved less effectively without the City Ordinance. The City Ordinance is narrowly tailored.

Sure, and the city's attempts to achieve other interests would undoubtedly be more effective if the Constitution didn't exist. But it does. And the court is supposed to be a check against government overreach, not an enabler of government efficiency.

The lawsuit is dismissed. The court says Ness can film kids from outside of the park's boundaries without fear of prosecution. Of course, this is what Ness was doing when she was approached by officers who told her to "take her photos" and "move on." Even if Ness complies with the terms of the ordinance the city appears to have passed just to stop her from doing what she was doing, she still faces the possibility of being subjected to further police action. And even if prosecutors refuse to press charges, there's still the hassle of the arrest, and the loss of time and freedom during the detainment. These harms aren't imaginary. The law written to make it more difficult for one Bloomington resident to engage in documentation of perceived permit violations stays on the books.

Most people will probably be fine with this outcome. After all, it mainly affects someone whose interest in park usage seems to be primarily motivated by bigotry. This is all but confirmed by her choice (or acceptance) of the American Freedom Law Center's legal representation. But bad people can still raise legitimate Constitutional complaints. This isn't a victory for Bloomington. It's a loss for its residents who are subject to a badly written law. Even if they have no desire to violate the ordinance, the law can still be wielded against citizens engaged in legitimate activities (like news gathering), thanks to this court's support.

2019 saw a record number of consumers ditch traditional cable television. 2020 was already poised to be even worse, and that was before a pandemic came to town. The pandemic not only sidelined live sports (one of the last reasons many subscribe to traditional cable in the first place), it put an additional strain on many folks' wallets, resulting cord cutting spiking even higher.

Among the hardest hit continues to be AT&T, whose customers have been fleeing hand over fist even with AT&T's attempt to pivot to streaming video. According to AT&T's latest earnings report, the company lost yet another 954,000 pay TV subscribers -- 886,000 from the company's traditional DirecTV and IPTV television offerings, and another 68,000 customers from the company's creatively named AT&T TV Now streaming video platform. All told, the losses left AT&T with 18.4 million video customers, including both Premium TV and AT&T TV Now, down from nearly 25.5 million in mid-2018.

That's a fairly amazing face plant for a company that spent more than $150 billion on megamergers (DirecTV in 2015, Time Warner in 2018) in a bid to dominate the pay TV sector. The problem is the deals saddled AT&T with an absolute mountain of debt, which the company then attempted to extract from its customers in the form of relentless price hikes. During an economic crisis and pandemic:

"Higher prices helped drive the customer losses. As it has in past quarters, AT&T said its practice of giving out fewer promotional-pricing deals contributed to the customer losses for AT&T TV Now. AT&T said the Premium TV loss was "due to competition as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

While AT&T executives are trying to pretend this was all part of some master strategy to only retain higher-revenue subscribers, this is absolutely not the sort of sector domination company executives originally envisioned. The entire point of releasing a cheaper streaming TV service is to lure cost-conscious customers fleeing traditional cable. Raising rates relentlessly sort of defeats that purpose. The company also managed to shoot itself in the foot with such a bizarre array of discordant TV brand offerings, it, at one point, managed to confuse the company's own employees.

Even AT&T's investors (who usually adore megamergers) balked at the company's spending spree and sloppy execution, and for months rumors have indicated that AT&T could wind up selling DirecTV for a pittance. Overall, just another day for a telecom and media sector that's utterly obsessed with mindless merger mania and growth for growth's sake, even when it makes absolutely no sense.

The DOJ's Civil Rights Division has wrapped up an Obama-era probe into the Alabama prison system. Initiated in 2016, the investigation covers 13 prisons in the state, containing nearly 17,000 prisoners. What the DOJ found was widespread deployment of excessive force and a resolute lack of concern for inmates' well-being. (via Huffington Post)

The report [PDF] notes that the Constitution (indirectly) gives inmates the right to be free from violence from other prisoners. The correctional facilities investigated here did almost nothing to prevent inmate-on-inmate violence.

After carefully reviewing the evidence, the Department concluded that there was reasonable cause to believe that conditions at Alabama’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and that these violations are pursuant to a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of rights protected by the Eighth Amendment. In particular, the Department informed Alabama that it had reasonable cause to believe that Alabama routinely violates the constitutional rights of prisoners housed in Alabama’s prisons by failing to protect them from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and by failing to provide safe and sanitary conditions. The serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision, and overcrowding, contribute to and exacerbate these constitutional violations.

Inmates also have the right to be free from excessive force. The pattern of excessive force deployment in Alabama correctional facilities continued right up to the DOJ's closing of its investigation.

In October 2019, correctional officers at Donaldson used force against a prisoner, resulting in his death. As part of the autopsy, an ADOC investigator informed a coroner that, after an officer opened his cell, the prisoner rushed toward another prisoner carrying two prison-made weapons. [...] The prisoner eventually went to the ground face down and officers reported that the prisoner concealed a knife between his upper torso and the floor. Numerous prisoner-witnesses, however, reported that correctional officers continued to strike the prisoner after he dropped any weapons and posed no threat. The prisoner was airlifted to a hospital due to the extent of his injuries. [...] The level of force used caused the prisoner to sustain multiple fractures to his skull, including near his nose, both eye sockets, left ear, left cheekbone, and the base of his skull, many of which caused extensive bleeding in multiple parts of his brain. The autopsy listed 16 separate and distinct injuries to the prisoner’s head and neck, in addition to multiple fractured ribs and bleeding around a kidney.

Two months later, in December 2019, a prisoner at Ventress died after the use of force by staff. The autopsy revealed that the prisoner died from blunt force trauma to the head. He sustained multiple areas of intracranial bleeding, fractures of his nose and left eye socket, and had at least six teeth knocked out. ADOC personnel informed hospital medical personnel that the injuries occurred after the prisoner fell from a bunk bed. Two correctional officers were placed on mandatory leave while ADOC investigated the circumstances surrounding the death.

The DOJ says Alabama's Department of Corrections documented 1,800 uses of force in 2017 alone. Hardly any of those were investigated. Those that did result in investigations almost never resulted in corrective action or further institutional review. Half of the prisons reviewed either referred one or zero uses of force for further investigation. And despite the fact that one prison (Bullock) had more than half the referrals (55%) despite making up only 6% of the total referred, no further investigation of the prison itself was ever initiated.

There's a distressingly long section in the report that lists documented uses of excessive force by correctional officers. Here's some brief lowlights from the DOJ's investigation:

In September 2019, a lieutenant at Ventress lifted a handcuffed prisoner up off the ground and slammed him on a concrete floor several times, knocking him unconscious. The prisoner was unable to breathe on his own, was intubated, and taken to an outside hospital, where medical personnel administered CPR several times to keep the prisoner alive.

[...]

In December 2018, a correctional officer brutally hit, kicked, and struck a handcuffed prisoner with an expandable baton in the Ventress medical unit. Two nurses saw the officer beat the prisoner, and two other nurses could hear the beating from adjacent rooms. The prisoner did not antagonize the officer before the beating and his hands were handcuffed behind his back. During the beating, all four of the nurses heard the officer yell something to the effect of, “I am the reaper of death, now say my name!” and the prisoner begged the officer to kill him. At one point, a nurse observed the officer place his palms against the wall and his right foot on the side of the prisoner’s face to grind the prisoner’s head into the floor...

[...]

The prisoner was then taken into the medical unit where he continued to thrash and gyrate his hips. The nurse believed the prisoner was unable to control his actions because he was under the influence of an illicit substance. The prisoner then fell from the examination table to the floor as the nurse tried to obtain his vital signs. The first sergeant threatened to kill the prisoner if he did not control his movements. While thrashing, the prisoner struck the sergeant’s boot. In response, the sergeant kicked the prisoner several times in the stomach and chest. Another sergeant then took a shoe and hit the prisoner multiple times in the genitals.

This goes on for nearly five pages. The DOJ points out the prisons are doing nothing to control this excessive force deployment and appear to be wholly uninterested in any form of accountability. This impression holds up under scrutiny. The DOJ investigators were stonewalled by uncooperative Departments of Corrections officials and officers nearly every step of the way.

For the June 2017 through April 2018 period, ADOC refused to produce any attachments to the incident reports, even though the attachments include critical information, including the initial, institution-level use of force investigations completed by captains or wardens, photographs documenting the aftermath of uses of force, and witness statements. ADOC also produced only I&I investigative files for closed investigations. Throughout the investigation, ADOC also prohibited us from interviewing non-supervisory correctional officers and severely restricted our access to individuals working in prison health care units.

The list of corrective actions recommended is almost longer than the list of atrocities carried out by corrections officers. The DOJ says immediate change is needed, starting with the installation of cameras anywhere corrections officers might interact with inmates, strict controls over access to this recorded footage, an influx of internal investigators, and extensive documentation for every deployment of force. Without this in place, any long-term fixes will be impossible. But given the state's corrections department's unwillingness to cooperate with this investigation, it seems unlikely a bunch of strong words from the federal government will result in immediate -- or lasting -- change.