The UK's Freedom of Information law is pretty straightforward when it comes to residency requirements. There aren't any.

Anyone can make a freedom of information request – they do not have to be UK citizens, or resident in the UK. Freedom of information requests can also be made by organisations, for example a newspaper, a campaign group, or a company.

And yet, some UK government agencies have decided to read a residency requirement into a law that doesn't contain one. As Owen Bowcott reports for The Guardian, these seemingly illegal non-responses to requests are about to be tested in court.

A combined hearing involving the Home Office, Metropolitan police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and 13 separate cases is to be held at an information tribunal in London.

At issue is whether applicants overseas are entitled to a response when submitting freedom of information requests to UK government departments and agencies.

Nothing in the UK's Freedom of Information law appears to institute a residency requirement for FOI requesters. Nor does it hint at territorial limitations that could allow agencies to withhold documents from certain requesters. But the agencies handling these 13 cases seem to feel there is a residency requirement and they appear to be applying this novel interpretation to screw with requesters they'd rather not respond to.

One set of requests deals with the UK's government's involvement with attempts to extradite Julian Assange for prosecution.

One of the blocked cases is an appeal by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who works for daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and writes about WikiLeaks.

She has been pursuing information about how the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with its Swedish counterpart during initial attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden.

So, it appears that at least one of the 13 cases is about documents being withheld because the agency doesn't want to release them, not because there's a genuine question about whether the agency is obligated to respond to non-UK residents. Meanwhile, the government says it's going to continue following the law… by not following the law in these 13 cases -- at least until the tribunal says otherwise.

For years, the city of Baltimore has handed out settlements to victims of government abuse. And for years, the city has forced them to remain silent about these settlements. The city tied every settlement to an extensive non-disparagement clause that effectively bought people's silence. If you can't say anything nice, you can't have half your settlement, as the old saying goes.

Ashley Overbey chose not to remain silent. She sued the city after her call to report a burglary resulted in officers beating, tasing, verbally abusing, and then finally arresting her. She received a $63,000 settlement that came with strings attached. She yanked some strings in response to the city choosing to disparage her as "hostile" in its public statements about the lawsuit. After her public statements, the city decided she owed it $31,500 for opening her mouth.

Her case made its way to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court was not amused by the city's multiple arguments in favor of its extortion tactics.

[W]hen the government (1) makes a police-misconduct claimant’s silence about her claims a condition of settlement; (2) obtains the claimant’s promise of silence; (3) retains for itself the unilateral ability to determine whether the claimant has broken her promise; and (4) enforces the claimant’s promise by, in essence, holding her civilly liable to itself, there can be no serious doubt that the government has used its power in an effort to curb speech that is not to its liking.

It's a First Amendment violation. And an obvious one at that. The case has returned to the lower court and the district court is far less receptive of the government's arguments the second time around. (h/t Baltimore Sun)

On remand, the city argued it did not owe Overbey the other $31,500 it clawed back when she chose to speak up about the city's actions. Instead, it claimed the breach of contract claims were time-barred by the statute of limitations, leaving Overbey only the option of recovering nominal damages. And how nominal those damages are!

From the decision [PDF]:

Instead, it asserts the “better view” is that Ms. Overbey is only entitled to “nominal damages of one dollar” for an infringement of her First Amendment right to speak, “perhaps coupled with a formal declaration to that effect.”

Wrong, says the district court. The contract was violated by the city, thanks to its egregious First Amendment violations. Subtracting half the settlement caused damages to Overbey equal to the half the city withheld for her violation a contract that was unable to be enforced Constitutionally.

The City owes Ms. Overbey the other $31,500. By its conduct in unconstitutionally enforcing the now discredited clause, the City withheld half of the settlement proceeds. Thus, the civil rights violation caused $31,500 in economic harm.

Overbey will also be collecting interest accrued since October 8, 2014. The court has further comments on the city's inexcusable defense of its inexcusable settlement policy.

The City continues to defend its use of the non-disparagement clause and the “real and substantial questions presented” by facts that led to the settlement agreement in the first place. Therefore, it cites shock that “that the challenge would bear fruit” here and that the serendipity that allowed Ms. Overby’s claim to survive was akin to a “virtual lightning strike.” The seeming inference is that their illegal act should not be undone simply because no one thought, or even suspected, it was illegal at the time. Even if true, all this is beside the point. The City entered the settlement agreement it helped craft knowing that its severability provision contemplated this exact scenario: that a clause may be deemed “invalid, void and illegal,” and that it would subsequently be stricken from the agreement.

Almost six years after the city decided to punish Overbey for her refusal to remain silent, it will finally pay her what she's owed. Fortunately, future plaintiffs won't have to put up with this bullshit.

You may recall that, last year, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard decided to file a ridiculously silly lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company had "violated her First Amendment rights" because it temporarily shut down her advertising account, and also because it filtered some of her campaign emails to spam. In a lawsuit that read remarkably similar to the various people arguing that "anti-conservative bias" was the basis for a lawsuit, it made a whole bunch of silly claims that any good lawyer would recognize as frivolous (hold that thought).

The lawsuit was easily tossed out on 1st Amendment grounds. And when I say "1st Amendment grounds," I mean the court had to explain to Gabbard -- a sitting Congressional Representative -- that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government and Google is not the government. This is really embarrassing:

Google is not now, nor (to the Court’s knowledge) has it ever been, an arm of the United States government....

[....]

To support its contention that a private actor can regulate elections, Plaintiff directs the Court to Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461, 463 (1953). However, Terry is utterly inapposite to Plaintiff’s contention. In 1954, the Supreme Court held that the Fifteenth Amendment was implicated when a political party effectively prevented black citizens from voting. Terry, 345 U.S. at 463. The Court held: “The evil here is that the State, through the action and abdication of those whom it has clothed with authority, has permitted white voters to go through a procedure which predetermines the legally devised primary.” Id. at 477. But Terry bears no relation to the current dispute, where Google, an undisputedly private company, temporarily suspended Plaintiff’s Google advertising account for a matter of hours, allegedly based on viewpoint bias.

What Plaintiff fails to establish is how Google’s regulation of its own platform is in any way equivalent to a governmental regulation of an election. Google does not hold primaries, it does not select candidates, and it does not prevent anyone from running for office or voting in elections. To the extent Google “regulates” anything, it regulates its own private speech and platform. Plaintiff’s “national security” argument similarly fails. Google protects itself from foreign interference; it does not act as an agent of the United States. Nearly every media or technology company has some form of cybersecurity procedure. Under Plaintiff’s theory, every media organization that took steps to prevent foreign cybercrimes could potentially implicate the First Amendment. Google’s self-regulation, even of topics that may be of public concern, does not implicate the First Amendment.

Pretty embarrassing for a court to need to explain how the 1st Amendment works to someone in Congress, but hey, it's 2020.

The court jumped straight to the 1st Amendment issue, though it could have easily tossed out the case on Section 230 grounds as well, and it appears that Tulsi has now joined the "destroy Section 230" crowd, teaming up with Rep. Paul Gosar to introduce yet another anti-Section 230 bill in the House. If Gosar's name rings a bell, he's the representative from Arizona whose politics are so Trumpian and ridiculous that six of his own siblings took out an ad that told people not to vote for their brother.

So these two have now teamed up to introduce the Don't Push My Buttons Act. If that sounds familiar, it's because Senator John Kennedy introduced the same thing in the Senate last week. When that was introduced, we explained just how awful the bill was and that analysis stands. It would take Section 230 immunity away from sites that do some fairly basic data tracking, or if they use an algorithmically generated feed. It makes no sense and seems to serve only one purpose: to frustrate social media companies with annoying nuisance regulation.

The bill seems unlikely to go anywhere, and Gabbard is not running for re-election, so this again seems more for show than anything else, but what a terrible bill to go out on. Gabbard failed in her wacky legal attack on social media, and so as a parting gift she tries to remove their Section 230 protections. Disgusting.

Oh, as a side note: in Gabbard's original lawsuit she was represented by the lawyers at Pierce Bainbridge. While the specific lawyers working on her case appear to have jumped ship from that firm during the collapse of that firm, the founder of the firm John Pierce, was a "high profile" addition to the defense team of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager facing murder charges in Wisconsin. This seemed weird, given that Pierce's experience is in civil litigation, not criminal, and had to resign from the board of the foundation that he and Lin Wood (another lawyer with quite the recent reputation) had set up to seek funds for Rittenhouse's defense, after questions were raised about how Pierce presided over the mess that was his disgraced law firm. The full article is worth reading, but just a snippet:

The firm’s financial woes have involved Pierce himself. In March 2020, John Pierce and Pierce Bainbridge were sued by a payday-lender-style financial business called Karish Kapital, which offers emergency cash for businesses. Karish Kapital alleged that Pierce had personally taken out a loan worth nearly $4 million from them and signed over the firm’s assets as collateral.

In a statement to The American Lawyer, a Pierce Bainbridge spokesperson said Pierce was on an “indefinite leave of absence” and had “accepted money from Karish Kapital LLC for his personal use.” In May, Pierce told Law360 that he had gone to rehab for unspecified issues.

Pierce’s loan from Karish Kapital marked the start of a cascade of bad news for the firm. On April 9, three named partners left the firm. James Bainbridge, the last remaining named partner aside from Pierce, set up his own separate firm in July, although he remains a partner at Pierce Bainbridge. As of May, Law360 reported, more than 60 lawyers had left the firm in the last six months.

So beyond an embarrassing legal loss, the fact that this was the firm Gabbard chose to file her ridiculous lawsuit against Google seems to raise significant questions about her own judgment in understanding not just the law she's now seeking to change, but also the people she chose as her lawyers. Perhaps she really should sit out questions regarding internet law.

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PR crisis management is not an easy gig. When a company suffers through a tumultuous period, it is all too easy for a company to try to combat the bad press through all kinds of means that are, in the end, a detriment to the effort. Instead, good PR crisis management follows three chief axioms: don't lie, don't try to downplay the severity of the crisis, don't be afraid to say you screwed up.

Nikola Motor Company is doing a shit job of following this advice. As we detailed recently over the course of a couple of posts, the company is very much in the middle of a PR crises. It began when a hedge fund revealed that Nikoa founder Trevor Milton allegedly flat-out lied to the world about having a working Nikola 1 model in 2016, with the obfuscation going so far as to put out a video of the truck driving down a highway, when the reality was that the truck was rolling down a hill not under its own power. After that public report, Nikola missed the first deadline to have a major partnership deal with General Motors. The stock tanked, massively. Milton suddenly found himself facing two charges of sexual assault, one of them from his own cousin.

If ever there was a time when a company needed to follow good crisis PR protocols, this was it. Instead, the company is apparently quite busy trying to use the DMCA process to silence critics on YouTube.

As noted in a Financial Times report, a number of financial commentator channels on YouTube have reported that they received takedown notices from the hydrogen truck maker, resulting in several videos being removed from the video-sharing platform. In a statement to the publication, Sam Alexander, a Nikola critic and YouTube host, stated that he received notifications on Wednesday that at least four of his videos were reported for copyright infringement. All four of the videos featured sections of the “Nikola One in Motion” ad.

The same was true for fellow content creator Tom Nash, whose finance-themed channel has 41,000 subscribers. According to Nash, he was required to take down three critical Nikola videos including one that featured sections of the rolling Nikola One prototype. Nikola reportedly took issue with Nash’s use of videos that featured its prototype jet ski and hydrogen station as well. “It’s what you would call a death sentence for a creator. This is my livelihood. I have three kids. I quit my job to do this,” Nash told the FT.

Honestly, it's more that this is what you would call a death sentence for the company trying to abuse copyright law to silence critics who's critiques clearly fall under fair Uue. Put another way: if the company had a fallback position other than trying to censor its critics, it would have played to that position. Instead, Nikola is very much opening itself to both liability for bullshit DMCA claims and, more importantly, to even further public criticism as a result of the company trying to bury the public's head in the sand.

Now we're in pure Streisand territory. As a result of the company trying to bury criticism, that criticism is getting even more play and attention than it already had. If this strategy was thought to be a good idea by those in charge of Nikola, then maybe it truly would be best if the company just bad-acted itself into oblivion.

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We've discussed in the past Yochai Benkler's excellent book "Network Propaganda," (and had Benkler on our podcast) showing (with a ton of data) how the inclination many have to immediately blame social media for the spread of disinformation is, in its own way, misinformation itself. What the research found was that crazy conspiracy theories didn't really spread as fast until they showed up on Fox News. That was basically the catalyst for them to then spread wildly on social media.

Benkler and his team are back with a new study, specifically regarding how disinformation about mail-in ballots has spread. And, again, the details show that mass media was the key in making it spread, with social media "playing a secondary role."

Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.

Using the same methods in Network Propaganda, they found that this time it went beyond Fox News, but that the President was basically using his position at President, to harness the big mainstream media operations -- which still have simply failed to contend with how to cover a President who deliberately lies, who deliberately tries to bully the media into spreading utter nonsense. The report shows that he's been very, very successful in turning the media -- who he frequently accuses of publishing "fake news" -- into actual purveyors of fake news: namely the fake news Donald Trump himself wants them to spread.

Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation.

Of course, Fox News and the wider Republican Party and media ecosystem also remains a key issue:

The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.

Benkler wrote a detailed post for the Columbia Journalism Review that gives you a more reader friendly version of the paper's findings. In it, he notes that when it comes to mail-in ballot disinformation, it's not happening because of foreign interference or social media algorithms. The disinformation is coming from inside the White House.

What this means is that the “usual suspects” in public debates about disinformation are not the central actors in voting disinformation. We found no examples where clickbait factories, fake pages (Russian or otherwise), or Facebook’s algorithms could explain any peak in engagement that was not better explained as having been set in motion and heavily promoted by political figures and elite right-wing media personalities, and disseminated to millions by major media outlets. On Twitter, if bots or trolls played any role, it was dwarfed by tweets from the president, his staff, and other institutional and media allies.

While the information does eventually spread on social media, that happens after the mainstream media discusses it. As Benkler notes, all the worries and attacks about social media appear to be somewhat misguided:

There is a profound disconnect between the broad public concern with social media disinformation, the persistent scientific evidence that exposure to online fake news is concentrated in a tiny minority of users, and survey evidence that repeatedly shows that less than 20 percent of US respondents say they rely on social media as a major source of political news. Network and local TV, by contrast, are the primary source of political news for about 30 percent of the population, and news websites or apps accounted for another 25 percent, according to the most recent Pew survey. When arranged according to the degree to which they report believing mail-in voter fraud is a major problem, adults who get their news from ABC, CBS, and NBC occupy an intermediate position between Fox News viewers, on one end, and readers of the New York Times, viewers of MSNBC, or NPR listeners, on the other. Local TV news viewers, in turn, form the least politically knowledgeable group of Americans, edging out the much younger respondents who mostly rely on social media. When we analyzed the stories about mail-in voter fraud, we observed that peaks in media coverage usually consisted of large numbers of syndicated stories reported by the online sites of local papers and television stations.

There's a lot more in the full paper, but the underlying message is that perhaps we should stop blaming social media for disinformation. That does not appear to be the root of the problem at all.

We've noted for years that the U.S. simply adores throwing billions in tax breaks and subsidies at telecom monopolies in exchange for broadband networks that somehow, mysteriously, only wind up half deployed. AT&T's particularly gifted at this particular grift, routinely promising a massive boost in network investment if it gets merger approval, deregulation, or subsidization. Like most recently when it nabbed a $42 billion tax break from the Trump administration in exchange for not only network investment that never happened -- but 41,000 layoffs.

Because AT&T's so politically powerful -- and of course all but bone grafted to the intelligence and law enforcement communities -- the company never faces more than a wrist slap for its empty promises, if that. This month it's the state of Mississippi that's pissed off, accusing AT&T of taking $283 million from the FCC's Connect America Fund to deploy broadband to 133,000 locations in Mississippi, then once again failing to deliver. More specifically, AT&T promised it would use the money to expand fixed wireless service to these locations, then falsely reported the locations served when they weren't.

The Mississippi Public Service didn't really mince words in a letter (pdf) spotted by Ars Technica sent to the FCC:

"Our investigation has found concrete, specific examples that show AT&T Mississippi has reported location addresses... as being served when, in fact, the addresses are without service under their [Connect America Fund] obligations," said a letter to the FCC sent Tuesday by all three Mississippi PSC commissioners. "This pattern of submitting false data to the USAC [the Universal Service Administrative Company, which administers the program on the FCC's behalf] merits a full compliance audit by the FCC, USAC, or whichever appropriate agency. We feel it is our duty to alert you to this issue."

This is far from the first time AT&T has misrepresented its broadband availability. The company back in April was forced to admit to the FCC it misrepresented broadband availability across 20 states in its territories. AT&T's also fighting efforts to improve broadband map accuracy on several fronts. In a news release, Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley urged the FCC to investigate what it called a history of inconsistencies and falsehoods:

"Our investigation has revealed a wide array of inconsistencies in what AT&T advertises as available and what actually exists when consumers try to get Internet service," Presley said. "All the while, AT&T has submitted data saying that they have used federal funds to bring Internet service to these specific homes. AT&T knows, for a fact, that information that they have provided regarding where their Internet service exists is false. They know that through their own, internal records. It's imperative that the FCC and other appropriate federal agencies work with us to hold them accountable."

Of course this is where an independent federal regulator would investigate AT&T more deeply, especially given more than two decades of similar complaints. But that of course isn't going to happen at Ajit Pai's FCC, which is not only a glorified rubber stamp for the industry it's supposed to be holding accountable to the public, but routinely participates in the industry's willful misrepresentation of broadband availability to try and hide the patchy coverage and muted competition that is the hallmark of the U.S. telecom industry.

Understand this: the FCC actively and routinely helps telecom monopolies misrepresent broadband availability and downplay high prices to try and obfuscate market failure. Regulatory capture remains a massive problem, no matter how many telecom-funded consultants, think tankers, and politicians try to convince you that U.S. broadband is a miracle of free market innovation.

A Texas Sheriff's Office with a history of questionable hiring practices and a fondness for excessive force deployment has covered itself with infamy again. The Williamson County Sheriff's Office was formerly best known for appearing on Live PD, a "Cops" knockoff that followed deputies around as they enforced the law and -- on one occasion -- tased someone to death in front of Live PD's cameras. (A&E "helpfully" destroyed the footage.)

This led to some speculation that Sheriff Robert Chody was hiring deputies that would make for must-see TV, rather than good public servants. Questionable work histories were ignored if candidates appeared willing to engage in aggressive tactics with the cameras rolling. Sheriff Chody's quest to find TV stars resulted in things like the following:

Mark Luera joined the force in November 2017, about 10 months before TV cameras began rolling on patrols in the largely suburban county north of Austin, Texas.

[...]

“A true leader,” Chody captioned a selfie of the two in June 2019. In another post, Chody called Luera a “Wilco Rock Star.”

The department’s star is also a disgraced former city of Austin police officer whom Chody hired days after the city had been set to fire him for using his special airport access to bypass security, then repeatedly lying about it.

The bad news keeps coming. An investigation into use-of-force incidents by deputies has uncovered another unseemly fact about the Sheriff's Office. A culture of violence has been carefully cultivated by Office officials -- one that appears to lead directly to incidents like the one caught on Live PD's cameras. One "good" beating equals a free meal. That's the mindset of the WCSO.

Williamson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office leaders rewarded deputies who used force on the job with steakhouse gift cards, according to two former employees, one of whom made the admission to Texas Rangers investigating the agency’s aggressive tactics.

Among the deputies who received gift cards to places such as Logan’s Roadhouse were J.J. Johnson and Zach Camden, the officers involved in the March 2019 death of Javier Ambler. The Black 40-year-old father was Tased four times as he shouted that he had a heart condition and could not breathe.

In a recorded interview with Texas Rangers, former Deputy Christopher Pisa said Cmdr. Steve Deaton awarded deputies he considered “WilCo badass.”

This recording was given to the American-Statesman by Deputy Pisa's lawyer. This allegation was immediately denied by Sheriff Chody, who claimed he has only given out one gift card for "recovering some excellent fingerprints." This may be true. But it was apparently used by other supervisors and Chody did nothing to stop it.

Deputy Pisa's statements allege Commander Deaton handed out cards for "good uses of force." It was something mentioned during shift meetings so it wasn't exactly a secret. And it's the sort of thing you'd expect from a supervisor who left the force under his own bigoted cloud.

Deaton resigned in September 2019, months after social media posts of his surfaced with objectionable images showing dolls depicting actions, such as rape and kidnapping and the mutilation of a Black football player.

Sheriff Chody may be maintaining plausible deniability by distancing himself from this specific encouragement of bad behavior. But history shows he's as much to blame as his recently-departed commander. If you want to turn cops into badge-wearing thugs, all you have to do in most cases is just fail to discipline them. But Chody and his supervisors appear to want to accelerate that process. And for the most ridiculous of reasons: for the TV clicks. Live PD no longer shoots in Williamson County. But the damage has been done.