As any internet platform matures, the growth it undergoes will inevitably lead to experimenting with revenue models. For a healthy chunk of the internet, advertising plays some role in those experiments. And, like anything else, there are good experiments and bad experiments.

But I am very much struggling to understand who in the hell at Twitch thought that breaking away from live streams to force viewers to watch commercials, all without the control or input of Twitch streamers, could possibly be a good idea.

“Beginning in September, as part of an ad experiment, some viewers may begin to notice that they are receiving ads during streams that others in a channel aren’t receiving,” the company wrote on its website. “Like pre-rolls, these are ads triggered by Twitch, not by the creator.”

Crucially, these ads utilize Twitch’s “picture-by-picture” functionality, which basically means that the stream you’re watching pops out into a smaller window while the ad rolls in the main window. However, ads will still steal the show from some viewers, with streamers none the wiser as to who can hear what they’re saying (picture-by-picture mutes streams) and, therefore, understand what’s happening on stream while ads are playing.

If this reads as though Twitch were trying to turn its platform into some flavor of broadcast television, where the content is broken away from in the service of displaying advertising, that's because that's exactly what this is. Which doesn't make any sense. Twitch is not television. Sure, some streamers choose to break away from their own content for advertising. In fact, doing so staves off this new process of forced breakaways. But many streamers don't do that. For a viewer to be torn away from the content that continues on, muted, all while they're forced to view ads, would be stupid on its own. To give streamers not only almost zero control over whether this happens, but also zero visibility into when and to whom it's happening, can only serve to piss everyone off.

Which is exactly what it did.

“You’re not YouTube,” said Twitch partner ThatBronzeGirl on Twitter in response to Twitch’s announcement. “When ads play in the middle of the stream, viewers actively miss out on content (muted or not). Add this to the fact that viewers are hit with an ad as soon as they enter a stream, so channel surfing is cumbersome. Idk why y’all hate viewer retention.”

“This means either one of two things happens: 1) I schedule a break in the stream to have control over ads running that are proven to drive viewers away. 2) Viewers get an ad randomly that is all but guaranteed to drive them away. Which of those is for us though?” said variety streamer Deejay Knight.

“If I don’t play enough ads, Jeff Bezos literally comes to my stream and pushes the ad button, what do I do,” said former Overwatch pro Seagull.

Let's be clear, Twitch is a thing because of the talent that chooses to use it. It's bad enough to put a new advertising model in place that pisses off viewers. But piss the talent off and they'll simply go somewhere else, particularly when the viewers voice their frustration by removing their eyeballs. Some of this seems to also be Twitch not understanding that the platform is no longer video game let's-plays. The content is wide and varied and much of it cannot function with this sort of intrusive advertising.

“A streamer could be talking about suicide prevention, and up pops an ad,” said Scottish Twitch partner Limmy. “Depending on the implementation, the streamer would either be unaware, which is bad, or the streamer has to announce a forced ad break at an inappropriate time.”

“We’re not all Overwatch and Fortnite,” said dungeon master MontyGlu. “In narrative streams such as DnD live shows and RPG game streams, 10-30 seconds removed could completely deprive people of story, context and investment.”

As the Kotaku post notes, part of the problem here is that all the monetary incentives for streamers compared with the platform are horribly misaligned. Many streamers make most of their money through subscriptions and brand partnerships. The money they get from Twitch is mostly an afterthought. Twitch, on the other hand, makes gobs of money from advertisements. It's a scenario in which the platform is incentivized by advertising while the talent is very specifically incentivized by a lack of advertising. More ads drive eyeballs away, which means less lucrative partnerships and subscriptions.

If Twitch wants to push more ads, it desperately needs to get the streamers on board.

“While I’m not allowed to say specifics, Twitch has the worst CPM ad-revenue share to creators with their standard contracts (read: not the big shots with custom negotiated rates),” said Minecraft YouTuber and Twitch streamer KurtJMac. “They want ads to run because they make bank. Pay a fair rate to creators and we’d be glad to run ads!”

Somewhat amazingly, Twitch has stated that it isn't backing down. The experiment will run its course, the company said, and it will review the data afterwards. I simply can't imagine that said data will show that intrusive ads that everyone hates are good for the company.

Cops lie. Cops lie enough there's a term for it: testilying. Honest prosecutors don't want lying cops on the stand dirtying up their case with their impeachable testimony. Unfortunately, police unions are powerful enough to thwart this small bit of accountability. "Brady lists" are compiled by prosecutors. They contain the names of officers whose track record for telling the truth is so terrible prosecutors don't want to have to rely on their... shall we say... misstatements in court.

Unfortunately, these lists are often closely-guarded secrets. Judges aren't made aware of officers' penchant for lying. Neither are defendants in many cases. But they're called "Brady" lists because they're supposed to be disclosed to defendants. The "Brady" refers to Brady v. Maryland, where it was decided prosecutors are obligated to turn over possibly exculpatory information to defendants to ensure their right to a fair trial. This includes anything that might indicate the cop offering testimony might not be telling the truth.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled [PDF] prosecutors have an obligation to inform defendants of officers who have made their "Brady" lists. Two cops who made false statements in a use-of-force report were granted immunity for their testimony in front of a grand jury. The district attorney prosecuting a different criminal case handed this information over to the defendant. The cops challenged this move, claiming their grand jury immunity should have prevented this exculpatory information from being given to the defendant and discussed in open court. (h/t Matthew Segal)

The cops argued there's no constitutional duty to disclose this information (under the US Constitution or the Commonwealth's) unless failing to do so would alter the outcome of the trial by creating reasonable doubt where none previously existed. The Supreme Judicial Court says that argument is wrong under both Constitutions.

First, prosecutors have more than a constitutional duty to disclose exculpatory information; they also have a broad duty under Mass. R. Crim. P. 14 (a)(1)(iii) to disclose "[a]ny facts of an exculpatory nature." This duty is not limited to information so important that its disclosure would create a reasonable doubt that otherwise would not exist; it includes all information that would "tend to" indicate that the defendant might not be guilty or "tend to" show that a lesser conviction or sentence would be appropriate.

[...]

Second, even if prosecutors had only their constitutional obligation to disclose, and not the broad duty under our rules, we would not want prosecutors to withhold exculpatory information if they thought they could do so without crossing the line into a violation of the defendant's right to a fair trial.

The acceptable standard under the Constitution is not "see what you can get away with." This is an obligation, not a nicety to be deployed at the prosecutor's discretion.

A prosecutor should not attempt to determine how much exculpatory information can be withheld without violating a defendant's right to a fair trial. Rather, once the information is determined to be exculpatory, it should be disclosed -- period. And where a prosecutor is uncertain whether information is exculpatory, the prosecutor should err on the side of caution and disclose it.

In this case, the information was definitely of the possibly exculpatory variety. Lying cops who've admitted before a grand jury they falsified reports should definitely be considered impeachable witnesses. Whether or not the information is determined admissible at trial is beside the point.

[T]he ultimate admissibility of the information is not determinative of the prosecutor's Brady obligation to disclose it. Where the information, as here, demonstrates that a potential police witness lied to conceal a fellow officer's unlawful use of excessive force or lied about a defendant's conduct and thereby allowed a false or inflated criminal charge to be prosecuted, disclosing such information may cause defense counsel, or his or her investigator, to probe more deeply into the prior statements and conduct of the officer to determine whether the officer might again have lied to conceal the misconduct of a fellow police officer or to fabricate or exaggerate the criminal conduct of the accused.

The cops also argued their immunity from prosecution during their grand jury testimony should shield them from any adverse consequences. Wrong again, says the court. The immunity only covers prosecution for the admitted crimes. It is not a shield against reputational damage that may result from this information being made public or handed over to defendants.

An immunized witness, like others who are not immunized, may prefer that the testimony not be disseminated by the prosecutor, especially if it would reveal the witness's dirty deeds, but that preference does not affect whether the information is exculpatory or whether it should be furnished to other defendants. Once disclosed, the immunized testimony may be used to impeach the immunized witness, provided that the testimony is not being used against the witness in a criminal or civil prosecution other than for perjury. In sum, a prosecutor's obligation to disclose exculpatory information is the same for immunized testimony as for all other testimony. There is no higher Brady standard applied for a prosecutor to disclose immunized testimony.

The Court wraps this up by laying down the law: this is Brady info and it needs to be disclosed to defendants. The SJC is not fucking around.

[W]e conclude, as did the district attorney, that the prosecutors here have a Brady obligation to disclose the exculpatory information at issue to unrelated criminal defendants in cases where a petitioner is a potential witness or prepared a report in the criminal investigation. That obligation remains even though that information was obtained in grand jury testimony compelled by an immunity order. And the district attorney may fulfill that obligation without prior judicial approval; a judge's order is needed only for issuance of a protective order limiting the dissemination of grand jury information.

More broadly, we conclude that where a prosecutor determines from information in his or her possession that a police officer lied to conceal the unlawful use of excessive force, whether by him or herself or another officer, or lied about a defendant's conduct and thereby allowed a false or inflated criminal charge to be prosecuted, the prosecutor's obligation to disclose exculpatory information requires that the information be disclosed to defense counsel in any criminal case where the officer is a potential witness or prepared a report in the criminal investigation.

That's the standard in Massachusetts. And bad cops are on notice there's pretty much nothing they can do to escape the consequences of their own actions. This is as it should be. Now, if the courts could just make sure prosecutors and police departments are actually compiling Brady lists, we'd be set. At least in this Commonwealth.

While the TikTok part of Trump's original August Executive Order got all the attention, we pointed out that it was fairly notable that he issued a nearly identical order to also effectively ban WeChat by blocking any transactions related to WeChat. While WeChat is not that well known or widely used in the US, it is basically central to the Chinese internet, and, as such, is a key part of how many Chinese Americans stay in touch with relatives, friends, and colleagues back in China. So it was perhaps not that surprising that a group of WeChat users in the US quickly sued to try to block the order:

Neither the Executive Order itself nor the White House provided concrete evidence to support the contention that using WeChat in the United States compromises national security. Notably, no other nation has implemented a comprehensive WeChat ban on the basis of any like-finding that WeChat is a threat to national security. The Executive Order was, however, issued in the midst of the 2020 election cycle, during a time when President Trump has made numerous anti-Chinese statements that have contributed to and incited racial animus against persons of Chinese descent—all outside of the national security context.

In a stark violation of the First Amendment, the Executive Order targets and silences WeChat users, the overwhelming majority of whom are members of the Chinese and Chinese-speaking communities. It regulates constitutionally protected speech, expression, and association and is not narrowly tailored to restrict only that speech which presents national security risks to the United States. Accordingly, it is unconstitutionally overbroad. Indeed, banning the use of WeChat in the United States has the effect of foreclosing all meaningful access to social media for members of the Chinese-speaking community, such as Plaintiffs, who rely on it to communicate and interact with others like themselves. The ban on WeChat, because it substantially burdens the free exercise of religion, also violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Executive Order runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by failing to provide notice of the specific conduct that is prohibited; because of this uncertainty, WeChat users in the United States are justifiably fearful of using WeChat in any way and for any purpose—and also of losing access to WeChat. Since the Executive Order, numerous users, including Plaintiffs, have scrambled to seek alternatives without success. They are now afraid that by merely communicating with their families, they may violate the law and face sanctions.

As the complaint highlights, just the issuing of the Executive Order has created panic among people who rely on it to communicate with people in China:

The U.S. WeChat Users Alliance (“USWUA”), Chihuo, Inc., Brent Coulter, Fangyi Duan, Jinneng Bao, Elaine Peng, and Xiao Zhang (collectively, “Plaintiffs”), bring this suit to challenge the Executive Order, which eviscerates an irreplaceable cultural bridge that connects Plaintiffs to family members, friends, business partners, customers, religious community members, and other individuals with common interests within the Chinese diaspora, located both in and outside of the United States. The Executive Order has already harmed Plaintiffs, who are plagued with fear for the loss of their beloved connections, whether it be with friends, family, community, customers, aid recipients of the charities they run, or even strangers whose ideas enrich their lives. They have been forced to divert time, energy, and money to seek alternative communication platforms, download and save irreplaceable digital histories, plan for business closures, find other sources of information, and try to obtain alternative contact information for those from whom they will soon be separated. Even if they succeed to some extent in their mitigation efforts, Plaintiffs will never be able to replace the full spectrum of the social interactivity that WeChat offers, nor will they be able to find any social networking platform with anything close to the same level of participation by the global Chinese diaspora—this is because WeChat’s network effects, generated by its 1 billion-plus daily users, is irreplaceable

The plaintiffs have also filed for a preliminary injunction against the Executive Order (which is set to go into effect on Sunday). There's a hearing on Thursday. So far, the plaintiffs have failed to get expedited discovery, as the judge notes that pretty much everything so far relies clearly on public information, and there's no need for discovery at this point -- not to mention there would be a pretty big argument over what things are actually subject to discovery anyway.

The government's opposition to the injunction request is... weird? It basically starts out with a big attack on China that's just sort of priming the pump and hand-waving around the idea that if China is bad then it's self-evident that any app that comes out of China must also be bad. This part of the argument focuses on... companies that are not Tencent/WeChat, but instead does the fear mongering about Huawei and ZTE that (we've noted many times) has never presented any actual evidence of bad behavior by those companies. Also, Huawei and ZTE are not... Tencent.

So then the DOJ just points to a random Australian think tank white paper that says Tencent/WeChat is also bad. They cite a few other such reports, but the "bad" seems to be that China heavily censors WeChat and... duh? But how does that mean it's dangerous in the US and should be banned? Incredibly -- given the frequency with which the President himself has retweeted conspiracy theories pushed by Russian troll accounts -- the DOJ actually argues that because some disinformation is found on WeChat, that's reason enough to ban it:

The Report also observed that the WeChat app is a key tool for China’s disinformation campaigns, citing as one example Australia’s May 2019 election, in which “fake news on WeChat was such a problem that Australia’s Labor Party contacted WeChat owner Tencent to express frustration about posts spreading disinformation.” Id. at 406-07. The Report cautioned that “use of [WeChat] had spread beyond the Chinese Australian community, with about 3 million Australians using WeChat by 2017,” id., and that “almost the entire Mandarin-speaking community in Australia . . . used WeChat,” allowing “Beijing [to] ‘promote particular issues [as] a way of controlling public debate.’”

I find it pretty fucking ironic that at the same time our government is using claims of "fake news" on a social media platform as an excuse to ban it, it is also trying to force American social media companies to no longer be able to moderate "fake news" and foreign propaganda.

Where the government may have more success is by arguing that the claims are "not ripe" because the executive order hasn't been implemented yet. But, that's just kicking the can down the road. Because once it is implemented, the same basic claims will remain. It does argue that the 1st Amendment claim will fail because its content neutral. That is, the DOJ is saying "we're not targeting specific speech, we're just banning an app used for speech.... that happens to be used by lots of Chinese speaking people." I think that's... pretty weak. That's "we're not blocking the printing of your magazine, just ordering the destruction of your printing presses, which might be used to print any magazine." That's not allowed under the 1st Amendment, and it shouldn't be allowed under this order.

Anyway, we should get a ruling at least on the preliminary injunction relatively quickly (given that it's slated to go into effect on Sunday). I hope the court does grant the injunction, but I'd be surprised if it does. It seems much more likely to punt based on ripeness for now. However, this case (unlike the TikTok cases, which may not matter if a deal is reached) could go on for quite a while, and could be pretty damn important in determining if the White House can just up and ban a foreign software application.

The perennial make-PACER-free legislation has arrived. If you're not familiar with PACER, count yourself among the lucky ones. PACER performs an essential task: it provides electronic access to federal court dockets and documents. That's all it does and it barely does it.

PACER charges taxpayers (who've already paid taxes to fund the federal court system) $0.10/page for EVERYTHING. Dockets? $0.10/page. (And that "page" is very loosely defined.) Every document is $0.10/page, as though the court system was running a copier and chewing up expensive toner. So is every search result page, even those that fail to find any responsive results. The user interface would barely have been considered "friendly" 30 years ago, never mind in the year of our lord two thousand twenty. Paying $0.10/page for everything while attempting to navigate an counterintuitive interface draped over something that looks like it's being hosted by Angelfire is no one's idea of a nostalgic good time.

Legislation attempting to make PACER access free was initiated in 2018. And again in 2019. We're still paying for access, thanks to the inability of legislators to get these passed. Maybe this is the year it happens, what with a bunch of courtroom precedent being built up suggesting some illegal use of PACER fees by the US Courts system. We'll see. Here's what's on tap for this year's legislative session:

Representatives Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Doug Collins (R-Ga.) are hoping to drastically change all of the above with their bipartisan reform effort, the Open Courts Act (OCA).

The bill would make online access to federal court records free to the public. It also contains language that would effectively improve upon PACER’s current and wildly out-of-date search functionality, increase third-party accessibility to the entire system, and upgrade and maintain the database using modern data standards.

This is a good bill. It aims for something more than just free access. (To be honest, that would at least offset the frustration of subjecting yourself to PACER's hideous charms in an attempt to talk it out of some filings.) Free access is a necessity. At this point, the presumed openness of the court still hides behind a paywall, separating citizens from courtroom documents under the naive theory that it's impossible to give something away if it costs money to produce. (And that assumption ignores the tax dollars already earmarked for running the court system.)

This bill would also drag the PACER system (presumably kicking and screaming) into the future… or at least a much more recent past. The 1995-esque front end would be updated, along with all the other stuff that doesn't work well… which is pretty much everything.

It would be a bit more future-proofed. The bill [PDF] demands transparent coding that will incorporate "non-proprietary, full text searchable, platform-independent" elements. This means documents will finally be searchable by the text they contain, rather than limited to locating documents by finding the right docket and going from there. And this will hopefully fix another problem with PACER: search issues baked into the system by jurisdiction divisions. Each federal court has its own login page and, while it's possible to search all jurisdictions, it's far more likely you'll be dimed to death by useless searches before you find what you need.

But who's going to pay for this, I hear the US Courts system asking? Well, like any other FTP service, it will be mostly supported by whales.

On its own terms, the OCA would take two to three years to modernize the overall CM/ECF so that all court documents are searchable, readily accessible and machine-readable regardless of an end user’s browser setup. During this period, so-called institutional “power users” would still be subject to PACER fees–if they charge over $25,000 annually.

But not forever.

After that, fees would vanish entirely.

Will this be the bill that sticks? Maybe. Courts are finding the PACER system questionable -- not just the barrier it places between the public and court documents, but the uses of the fees as well, very little of which has actually been spent on improving PACER itself. If there's something almost everyone agrees with, it's that PACER sucks. Being asked to pay for the dubious privilege of using a barely working system is the insult piled on top of the $0.10/page injury.

As was rumored late last week, the White House is, in fact, nominating Nathan Simington to the FCC, taking over the seat of of Mike O'Riely, whose nomination was withdrawn just days after O'Rielly expressed his strong support for the 1st Amendment and made it clear what he thought of idiots calling for the government to force websites to host content:

The First Amendment protects us from limits on speech imposed by the government—not private actors—and we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way. Like it or not, the First Amendment’s protections apply to corporate entities, especially when they engage in editorial decision making. I shudder to think of a day in which the Fairness Doctrine could be reincarnated for the Internet, especially at the ironic behest of so-called free speech “defenders.” It is time to stop allowing purveyors of First Amendment gibberish to claim they support more speech, when their actions make clear that they would actually curtail it through government action. These individuals demean and denigrate the values of our Constitution and must be held accountable for their doublespeak and dishonesty. This institution and its members have long been unwavering in defending the First Amendment, and it is the duty of each of us to continue to uphold this precious protection.

While there are many things we've disagreed with O'Rielly about, on this one, we agree 100%. And, the thanks he gets is effectively being fired by the President... and then replaced with someone who appears to believe the exact opposite.

Simington is apparently the guy who wrote the utterly nonsensical, blatantly unconstitutional Executive Order that President Trump signed after he got mad that Twitter placed two fact checking notices on his dangerous and misleading tweets.

Note the situation here. Twitter (and the rest of the internet) is now being punished for providing more speech. This is, of course, what people like Simington like to claim they support. But when it comes down to reality, they seem to want to just force the internet to host the speech of their friends, and never to do anything such as present counterarguments. On top of that, they wish to force private companies to host speech they do not support and do not believe in. All of this is unconstitutional.

Yet, now the author of this nonsense gets rewarded with a potential FCC Commissionership.

It's not clear if the Senate would find the time to do confirmation hearings before the election, but there's a decent chance that now rather than there being just one (Hi, Brendan Carr) FCC Commissioner who relishes using the power of the FCC to punish companies he doesn't like, we'll have two FCC Commissioners who have abandoned all pretenses that the Republican FCC Commissioners support the 1st Amendment and favor a "light touch" regulatory regime. They seem to only favor that for the telcos so many FCC Commissioners end up going to work for after leaving the FCC. For internet companies? They seem to think the opposite.

Considering Simington's direct role in writing the executive order, and then working at NTIA while it crafted the petition for the current FCC review of Section 230, you would think that, should he actually be approved by the Senate, he should at the very least recuse himself from this particular matter. But, given this particular administration and their unwillingness to actually obey the law and follow the rules when it comes to "owning the libs" or whatever their motivation is, it wouldn't surprise me to see him take part in any vote.

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If Attorney General Bill Barr is ever gifted with superlatives, the one that will stick will be "worst."

After presiding over some civil liberties violations under Bush I, Barr has returned to AG work under Trump and seems dead set on making everyone forget his first reign of far-more-limited terror. Barr wants encryption backdoors, the end of Section 230 immunity, and law enforcement officers promoted to the rank of demigod. The public will be expected to absorb the collateral damage.

Bill Barr does know how to deliver a good speech, whether he's preaching to the converted or, in this recent speech, preaching to some developing converts. Speaking to Hillsdale College students during their Constitution Day event, Barr said he's trying to build a kinder, gentler DOJ.

In exercising our prosecutorial discretion, one area in which I think the Department of Justice has some work to do is recalibrating how we interpret criminal statutes.

In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules. In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it.

[...]

To be clear, what I am describing is not the Al Capone situation — where you have someone who committed countless crimes and you decide to prosecute him for only the clearest violation that carries a sufficient penalty. I am talking about taking vague statutory language and then applying it to a criminal target in a novel way that is, at a minimum, hardly the clear consequence of the statutory text.

This is definitely something that could use improvement. The DOJ has engaged in plenty of bad-faith, overly-aggressive prosecutions. Almost anything involving the CFAA comes to mind.

But Barr can't lead this reform. He doesn't even really want it. As he was delivering this speech about prosecutorial discretion, news broke detailing the contents of a phone call Barr had with DOJ prosecutors:

Attorney General William Barr expressed frustration with some local and state prosecutors' handling of riot-related crimes, telling top Justice Department prosecutors that he wants them to be aggressive in bringing charges related to protest violence, including exploring using a rarely used sedition law, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This isn't discretion. This is [checks Barr's Constitution Day speech] a "hyper-aggressive extension of criminal law," the "taking" of "vague statutory language and applying it to a criminal target in a novel way." Barr's not going to practice what he preached at Hillsdale College and he doesn't want his prosecutors engaging in restraint either.

Proving sedition is difficult. That's why we haven't historically charged violent protesters with sedition. There are a bunch of other federal and local statutes that capably address acts of violence or vandalism. There's no reason federal prosecutors should start pretending violence or vandalism occuring during/adjacent to anti-police brutality protests is a conspiracy to overthrow the government or "oppose by force" federal laws and statutes. There has only been one successful sedition prosecution in the last 25 years. It seems unlikely using this law to ensure protest-related prosecutions are federal is going to work.

But that's not all. Barr also wanted DOJ prosecutors to find some way to go after Seattle's mayor over her handling of protests in her city.

Attorney General William Barr asked Justice Department prosecutors to explore charging Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) over a protest zone in the city, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Barr asked prosecutors in the department's civil rights division to explore charging Durkan during a call with prosecutors last week, the Times reported citing two people briefed on those discussions.

Barr's nice words about dialing back aggressive prosecutions were aimed solely at DOJ prosecutors who have made the mistake of going after Trump or his underlings in the administration. Barr doesn't care about the victims of over-prosecution who don't have connections to the White House. Those people are still on their own and still subject to the whims of prosecutors who have been given free reign to interpret the law for maximum prosecutorial efficiency. Barr said the quiet part loud later in his Hillsdale speech:

Rather than root out true crimes — while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters — our prosecutors have all too often inserted themselves into the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and again, with prosecutors bringing ill-conceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the Justice Department into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide.

On one hand, this is a sickening display of sycophancy. On the other hand, it will save the taxpayers some money. No sense wasting time prosecuting someone Trump's just going to pardon.

Barr's day of awfulness finally came to end with this unbelievably hot take in response to a student's question about COVID-19 lockdowns. There's no way to really brace yourself for his response:

"You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Barr said as a round of applause came from the crowd.

The Greatest Intrusion. Well. OK then.

Bill Barr can no longer be satirized. He'd be an unsubtle farce capable of gathering only the cheapest laughs if he wasn't actually in charge of the goddamn Department of Justice. This makes him frightening, rather than pitiable.

AT&T is telling Reuters that it's considering offering wireless customers a "$5 to $10 reduction in their bill" in exchange for some targeted ads:

"I believe there’s a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill,” Stankey said. Various companies including Amazon.com Inc, Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint’s Boost Mobile have tested advertising supported phone services since the early 2000s but they have not caught on. AT&T is hoping that better advertising targeting could revive the idea."

Doling out discounts in exchange for ads doesn't sound like a bad idea on its face. The problem is that's not quite what AT&T is planning. AT&T's goal here is to create a paradigm where people willing to be tracked and hammered with behavioral ads will pay less than those who want to have their privacy respected. In recent years, AT&T has made it very clear the company wants a paradigm whereby opting out of snoopvertising and tracking will cost you more, effectively making privacy a luxury line item (not great for a country already in a broadband affordability crisis).

AT&T already tried some variation of this idea once, and it wasn't just "discounts for ads." The company spent several years charging its broadband subscribers up to $500 more (!) per year to opt out of its snoopvertising systems. The kicker: it only opted you out of receiving behavioral ads, not out of being tracked. This was then passed off to consumers and the press as some kind of discount, when again it was simply making privacy (more accurately the illusion of privacy) only possible with an additional charge.

The other problem, of course, is that this is AT&T. A government-pampered telecom monopoly with a very long history of talking a lot about innovation, then inevitably falling flat on its face once it actually attempts it. It's also a company with a very long history of cozying up to the NSA, repeatedly violating consumer privacy, and undermining absolutely any effort whatsoever to craft even modestly serious privacy guidelines. It's been particularly opposed to any privacy guidelines that would prohibit companies charging a surcharge for privacy protection.

This is all fairly important context Reuters' scoop oddly fails to mention.

AT&T's new pivot to ad-sponsored plans, which is still a year or two out, involves hoovering up an awful lot of location, viewing, and other data from the company's wireless, broadband, phone, and TV customers. AT&T's been a little slow to capitalize on all this data due to a heavy debt load, executive dysfunction, and an investor revolt, but the scope of what they're building from a consumer tracking perspective should be fully understood:

"AT&T engineers are creating “unified customer identifiers,” Stankey said. Such technology would allow marketers to identify users across multiple devices and serve them relevant advertising. The ability to fine tune ad targeting would allow AT&T to sell ads at higher rates, he said. AT&T has invested in developing targeted advertising on its own media properties using data from its phone, TV and internet customers, but the company has been “slower in coming up the curve” on expanding its marketplace that allows advertisers to use AT&T data to target other media companies’ audiences, Stankey said."

AT&T policy folks and lobbyists have (with the GOP's help) managed to convince a big chunk of DC and tech policy Twitter that when we talk about privacy, monopolization, and the health of the internet that "big tech" is the root of all evil. As a result we're launching a slew of "antitrust inquiries" into "big tech," while effectively gutting all meaningful oversight of telecom giants that have the same ad and consumer tracking ambitions but access to as much if not more data than the biggest Silicon Valley giants. I'm sure that kind of accountability vacuum and wholly asymmetrical tech policy won't be a problem down the road though, right?

The UK government is fine with press freedom as long as the press confines itself to the unwritten guidelines the government uses to restrict it. Publish too many leaked documents? Well, the government will show up and destroy your computer equipment. Report on the wrong stuff? The government will kick you out of Parliament and tell you not to talk about why you've been kicked out. Publish names of people targeted by UK government investigations in the Land of the First Amendment and across the pond from the UK? Expect a UK court to issue a ruling telling you to abide by laws that don't govern the country you're actually publishing in.

The UK government is again stepping on free press toes. And human rights organizations have noticed. Independent journalism outfit Declassified UK was recently told its journalistic services were no longer required… or would at least no longer be respected by the Ministry of Defence.

The UK government has been formally warned for threatening press freedom after it blacklisted a group of investigative journalists and denied them access to information.

The Council of Europe issued the Level 2 "media freedom alert" after Ministry of Defence press officers refused to deal with Declassified UK, a website focusing on foreign and defence policy stories.

As the Independent reports, this aligns the UK government with Russia and Turkey, which received similar alerts recently for, respectively, beating and jailing journalists critical of their governments.

Here's the chain of events that led to the Level 2 alert, as reported by Marcela Kunova of journalism.co.uk.

On 25 August, Declassify UK journalist Phil Miller contacted the MoD’s press office to request a comment about the arrest of Ahmed al Babati, a serving soldier, near Downing Street for protesting the United Kingdom’s involvement in Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen.

Miller was promised information at first but the press office later called him to enquire about the publication’s editorial coverage of the conflict.

"What sort of angle have you taken on the war in Yemen?” the MoD spokesperson asked.

[...]

Not long after, Miller received an email telling him that the MoD was not going to send him anything that day, but that he should "submit an FOI [Freedom of Information request] for anything that you require".

[...]

When Miller enquired with his contact at the press office, he was told: "My understanding from the office is that we no longer deal with your publication."

Declassified UK feels this blacklisting is the result of its earlier reporting on questionable Ministry of Defence activities, like training Saudi pilots who were involved with bombings of civilians in Yemen.

It's not just the Council of Europe that's noticed the UK government's decision to refuse to respond to journalists it apparently doesn't care for. The International Press Institute has sent a letter to MoD officials criticizing the agency for its actions.

It goes without saying that the exclusion of a media publication by a government ministry due to its investigative reporting would undermine press freedom and set a worrying precedent for other journalists whose job it is to report in the public interest on the British military.

Criticism should be no reason to discriminate against a media publication. In contrast, tough journalism by outlets such as Declassified UK on matters such as the UK’s foreign and military affairs, uncomfortable though it often may be for those in power, is crucial for a transparent and functioning democracy.

The letter also asks for "clarification" on the decision by the MoD's press office. Presumably, no explanation will be provided. If anything, the MoD will just go back to handing out "no comments" to Declassified UK, rather than call any more attention to itself by cutting the independent journalists out of the minimal info loop.

But, for now, the MoD has aligned itself with Russia and Turkey. It may not be demanding the jailing/beating of critics (at least, not out loud), but it's shown it's unwilling to handle criticism like a free world government agency.