For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran's continuing efforts to throttle its citizens' access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach. Here's another, from a report by Der Spiegel (original in German):

Iran's government is introducing a biometric ID card that will function at the same time as an access card to the Web. Without registration via "smart card" the Internet will be blocked for citizens -- an insidious strategy for monitoring the opposition on the Internet.

All Iranians over the age of 14 will be required to have one of these new ID cards, which will store a digitised fingerprint and other personal information in an encrypted form. Once these cards are ubiquitous in the offline world, it's only a short step to require them to be used everywhere in the online world too, which would effectively abolish all anonymity and privacy there.

Iran's latest move is a useful reminder that wherever they are used, ID cards or their equivalent can become powerful enabling tools for perfect online surveillance. Other oppressive regimes will doubtless be watching the Iran experience closely.

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We heard rumors of this a couple weeks ago from people involved in some of the six strikes program at various ISPs, but the six strikes effort, already delayed from its original planned starting date of July until around now, has been pushed back again until "the early part of 2013." The Center for Copyright Information, which is administering the program, claims that it's due to "unexpected factors largely stemming from Hurricane Sandy," but we've heard that's mainly an excuse for some other problems that meant the plan was simply not ready for prime time. Either way, the program will certainly begin at some point... at which point ISPs and the entertainment industry will proceed to piss off some of their best customers for no good reason. Can't see how that's going to increase sales, but I guess all of those MPAA lawyers who have "anti-piracy" in their titles have to feel like they're contributing something to justify their salaries.

The Hubble space telescope isn't the only piece of equipment above our planet that can look deep into the universe at the direction of astronomers, but it's certainly the most famous. The next telescope that's expected to be as well-known as the Hubble is the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's not scheduled to launch until 2018. Here are just a few more telescopes that could be hovering above us and keeping astronomers busy.

• The US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) donated a couple of huge space telescopes to NASA. Instead of spying on earthlings, these telescopes could be outfitted with equipment to look for ETs in distant star systems. [url]
• A starshade fitted to a helium blimp could help astronomers pick out exoplanets more easily. The starshade blocks light from a parent star so that its orbiting planets can be detected directly. [url]
• NuSTAR is an orbiting space telescope that's looking for sources of high-energy X-rays that potentially come from black holes or radioactive material in supernova remnants. This telescope is still calibrating, but it should start collecting some cool data soon. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Torrentfreak notes that Prenda Law, one of the more well known copyright trolls out there these days, which has run into a series of skeptical judges lately, has been using a Torrentfreak article in its recent threat letters. The article in question is one we wrote about as well, concerning a default judgment against someone who didn't just share some random works, but had a specific watermark on the files that corresponded to his account. Of course, in the threat letter, all of the additional context about much greater evidence and a variety of other factors that made this case unique aren't mentioned at all.

Feeling that was unfair, Torrentfreak changed that page to something that Prenda might not appreciate:

We redirected the URL referenced by Prenda to a page with information about these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits.

So, instead of being scared by an article about a $1.5 million judgment, Internet bill payers can inform themselves about the steps they can take to respond to the settlement letter.

The page in question explains that increasingly judges are condemning the practices of copyright trolls, and that many mass lawsuits have been thrown out. Just recently a judge designated Prenda's ways as a “bad faith effort,” and dismissed one of their mass-BitTorrent lawsuits.

In addition to some much-needed balance we also included links to attorneys who are familiar with these lawsuits, plus links to other useful resources.

Trolling the trolls. Unfortunately, it's unlikely to have too much of an impact. It's doubtful that Prenda expects too many people to actually go read the article. They just want the basic "be afraid, settle now!" message to get through.

When we held our artists & entrepreneurs working group meeting in October, one of things that was discussed was how little discussion there is about what doesn't work. And that's kind of important, since so much is bound to fail. Some of the entrepreneurs noted that it's not unheard of (though still not exactly common) for failed entrepreneurs to write up a postmortem about their experience. However, with artists, it was almost entirely unheard of for an artist to delve into a failed experiment to say what happened (and what didn't happen!). This isn't a huge surprise. It's tough to talk about the failures -- but with entrepreneurs, they can wipe their hands clean of the startup and move on to the next thing. For a musician, they can't just walk away from themselves. So I can completely understand why artists would be hesitant to talk too much about what didn't work, because they fear it will reflect poorly on themselves.

So it's great to see that Kyle Clements has decided to post the details (over at Step2) of an experiment he helped set up with a musician that failed and to discuss where he thinks it went wrong. You should check out the full story, but, the short version is that he helped set up a plan for a musician to record a quick "improv" song each week and a more "full" song once a month, and release them all on YouTube. There was one part of the plan that immediately struck me when I was reading it. A plan to not promote this:

The first 3 months are Operation: Stay quiet. Produce and publish content, but don't advertise it. leave it for people to randomly stumble across. You don't want to advertise, have people love it, want to see more, and realize there is no backlog of content. No one wants to be the first to arrive at a party. Let the backlog build up while no one is watching.

My first reaction was that I wasn't sure the assumptions here necessarily held. While I do think that there's an "empty" room problem, where people don't necessarily want to be the first on the dance floor, I'm not sure that applies to not promoting videos for 3 months. Especially when it comes to music, there are a number of taste-makers who absolutely do want to get there first and think they found something early. So there were a number of ways I could see this part of the plan backfiring. In fact, it seemed to me like the "first to arrive" part actually is made worse after three months, because when people come in at that point, they see that no one else has watched the 3 months of videos and might assume that they're likely worthless. It seems like those three months could be used more wisely trying to bring the artist's audience to the videos and building connections around them.

And, in fact, it seems that this "don't tell anyone" aspect to the project really did hurt:

First month: Everything went as planned. 4 improved songs, 1 developed song, a few odd hits, nothing unusual.

Second Month: artist grows impatient. Is discouraged that no one is watching. Writes more songs. No developed, proper song is released this month. slightly more hits than last month, but nothing unusual.

Third Month: Artist grows impatient, begins posting new songs to facebook. A much lower than expected number of friends follow through and watch the videos (they will drive an hour and pay $10 to watch him play live, but they wont click a button in facebook?!?!) Artist is discouraged. No proper, developed song this month.

Fourth Month: only 2 improvised songs see the light of day this month. viewership drops. Artist gets discouraged.

It only goes on for a bit more before the artist gives up entirely -- and eventually blocks the videos. There are definitely lessons here -- and even though the plan was not to promote the songs, that alone led to frustration, which is reasonable. That said, almost any artistic endeavor tends to take much longer than people expect. The overnight sensations rarely are overnight sensations at all. Kyle wonders if there was just too much competition and they didn't do enough to stand out. That's entirely possible too, though I'd be curious what other people think as well.

Either way, kudos to Kyle for sharing the story, and hopefully it's something that others can learn from. Personally, my takeaway would be that you should never wait to connect with fans. That should be built in from the beginning.

We've discussed the Whistleblower Protection Act in the past. The bill provides somewhat greater protections for government employees who blow the whistle on government wrongdoing -- though it's not as strong as it could be. After a couple years of various Senators blocking the bill, it finally was approved and signed into law by Obama on Tuesday. Of course, it seems like there's a fair bit of irony that, as Obama signed the bill into law, one of the most famous whistleblowers out there, Bradley Manning, was in court to deal with the latest hearings for his actions. And, yes, I know that Manning's critics insist that he was no whistleblower, but it seems that the line here is very fine indeed. From Manning's statements, he clearly believed he was blowing the whistle on illegal activities by the US government. But he gets no protections at all. Instead, there's a decent chance he'll spend his life in jail.

Remember outdoor clothing company The North Face's ridiculously counterproductive war against The South Butt parody line of clothes? That involved a bogus lawsuit with a variety of twists and turns, eventually leading to a settlement. There was an epilogue, however, as the guy who had started The South Butt reformed as Butt Face. And, of course, all this did was make The North Face look silly and unable to take a joke.

It appears that the company has not developed a sense of humor yet. Jake Rome points us to a story of how The North Face has filed takedown notices to Flickr/Yahoo, because a guy had posted some photos of parody patches for "Hey Fuck Face." You can see the main image here. This photo was taken down, as were a few other photos, mostly of the patch attached to a gun. The fact that those images are up is because the user, "mr.smashy," filed a counter notice and so far it appears that The North Face has chosen not to go the legal route.

Dear mr.smashy,

We have received a Notice of Infringement from The North
Face
VF Outdoor, Inc. via the Yahoo! Copyright/IP Team and
have removed the following photo(s) from your photostream:

"Hey Fuck Face":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3239565297/
"hey fuck face":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/230342956/
"AR-15 A4 MWS":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3466868577/
"Buttstock Mag Pouch":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3274481679/
"BWUSA": www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/1425898484/

Subsequent Notices of Infringement filed against your
account will result in further action that may include
termination without warning.

mr.smashy notes that his counter notice claimed fair use, pointing out that the patch is a parody and that he's not actually selling anything, so there's no issue of commercial usage. He also sent the takedown to ChillingEffects (good move!). This really seems like yet another overzealous move by lawyers at the North Face misinterpreting the need to "protect" their trademark. Let the parodies live and people will love your brand. Go after them like this and it just turns people off completely.

The EU Parliament recently joined the US government in speaking out against the ITU's upcoming WCIT event, which we've been discussing. This is where the ITU -- an ancient organization designed to deal with telegraphs, and whose relevance today has been widely questioned -- is seeking to take over certain aspects of internet governance, well outside its mandate. Certain countries -- Russia and China in particular -- and certain large telcos (including many EU ones) are looking at this as a way to advance very specific interests, either for increased control and censorship over the internet, or in forcing successful internet companies to fork over money to telcos who have failed to innovate. Thankfully, the EU Parliament has now spoken up about its concerns, noting a number of key points (these are just the first half, but they give you an idea):

1. Calls on the Council and the Commission to ensure that any changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations are compatible with the EU acquis and further the Union’s objective of, and interest in, advancing the internet as a truly public place, where human rights and fundamental freedoms, particularly freedom of expression and assembly, are respected and the observance of free market principles, net neutrality and entrepreneurship are ensured;

2. Regrets the lack of transparency and inclusiveness surrounding the negotiations for WCIT-12, given that the outcomes of this meeting could substantially affect the public interest;

3. Believes that the ITU, or any other single, centralised international institution, is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows;

4. Stresses that some of the ITR reform proposals would negatively impact the internet, its architecture, operations, content and security, business relations and governance, as well as the free flow of information online;

5. Believes that, as a consequence of some of the proposals presented, the ITU itself could become the ruling power over aspects of the internet, which could end the present bottom-up, multi-stakeholder model; expresses concern that, if adopted, these proposals may seriously affect the development of, and access to, online services for end users, as well as the digital economy as a whole; believes that internet governance and related regulatory issues should continue to be defined at a comprehensive and multi-stakeholder level;

6. Is concerned that the ITU reform proposals include the establishment of new profit mechanisms that could seriously threaten the open and competitive nature of the internet, driving up prices, hampering innovation and limiting access; recalls that the internet should remain free and open;

The ITU has taken to its blog to hit back, claiming that it is deeply disappointed in the resolution. No surprise there. It tries to hit back on some of the points, but fails wildly. Take, for example, its response to the transparency issue:

However, it is important to point out that WCIT is inclusive of 193 national delegations which are participating in WCIT-12. Private sector companies and civil society organizations have also registered to attend WCIT-12 in large numbers.

Everyone attending WCIT-12 is free to lobby for their specific positions.

Added to this, in the run-up to the conference, the ITU Secretariat created a platform to allow any individual, civil society player or company to make its views known.

The very thorough and inclusive preparatory process leading up to the WCIT-12 has been completely transparent. Every European parliamentarian could have obtained all the documents from their own government, or from the European Commission.

At ITU, transparency is achieved at the national level, through national consultations in national languages. Surely this process is far more inclusive than just posting an English language text on a web page?

Note the key false equivalency here: that transparency means that you can have your voice heard (if, that is, you're willing to sign up to fly to Dubai and take part as a delegate). First of all, being heard is not transparency. Transparency is about sharing information in the other direction. It's about making the discussions and details public so everyone knows what's going on. Hearing what people are saying is listening and it's important -- but it's not transparency.

Second, the fact that parliamentarians could obtain the documents is not transparency either. It does not involve the public.

It's this kind of misleading rhetoric that makes people so concerned about the ITU. The fact that it pretends transparency is something other than it is seems like a real problem.

A natural response to the increasingly harsh enforcement of laws against unauthorized sharing of copyright files is to move to encrypted connections. It seems like a perfect solution: nobody can eavesdrop, and so nobody can find out what you are sharing. But as TorrentFreak reports, a German court has just dealt a blow to this approach.

The case involves RetroShare, which describes itself thus:

RetroShare is a Open Source cross-platform, Friend-2-Friend and secure decentralised communication platform.

It lets you to securely chat and share files with your friends and family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels

That sounds pretty safe, but TorrentFreak explains why it wasn't in the current case:

This week a Hamburg court ruled against a RetroShare user who passed on an encrypted transfer that turned out to be a copyrighted music file. The user in question was not aware of the transfer, and merely passed on the data in a way similar to how TOR works.

The court, however, ruled that the user in question, who was identified by the copyright holder, is responsible for passing on the encrypted song.

The judge ordered an injunction against the RetroShare user, who is now forbidden from transferring the song with a maximum penalty of €250,000 or a six month prison term. Since RetroShare traffic is encrypted this means that the user can no longer use the network without being at risk.

That's because the user can't know what's in an encrypted file passing through his or her system, and thus cannot guarantee that it is not the song in question. In truth, this situation is partly the user's own fault:

RetroShare derives its security from the fact that all transfers go through "trusted friends" who users themselves add. In this case, the defendant added the anti-piracy monitoring company as a friend, which allowed him to be "caught."

But even if the court case in Hamburg is a result of fairly exceptional circumstances, it creates an awful precedent: that German users are responsible for encrypted contents passing through their connection, even though there is no way they can know what they might contain. Unfortunately, this is of a piece with a previous ruling by a German court that people can be fined for what others do with their open wifi connections, regardless of whether they knew what was going on.

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It appears that the ridiculous saga of the US's baseless criminal case against Richard O'Dwyer is now ending, as O'Dwyer has effectively cut a deal to pay a small sum in exchange for avoiding extradition and trial in the US. If you don't recall, O'Dwyer, a computer science student, ran TVshack.net, one of the sites that ICE and the DOJ seized during one of their many questionable censorship days, in which they seize domain names, in direct conflict with what the law requires. Then they went the extra step of seeking to extradite O'Dwyer to face criminal charges in the US. In this case, it was doubly bizarre, because O'Dwyer, a UK citizen, was running a site that was nearly identical to some other sites that had been found to be perfectly legal in the UK -- and one of the pre-requisites for a criminal copyright charge is that the person needs to be willfully violating the law. Given that other comparable sites were found to be legal, it's difficult to see how US officials could meet that bar. There was also the fact that the US was, as it had attempted in the Rojadirecta case, trying to create a completely made up theory of criminal copyright liability for secondary infringement. In fact, as we noted in other cases, US courts have found that what TVshack was doing was not infringement.

The O'Dwyer case continued to get plenty of attention, with widespread protests in the UK, especially after UK officials approved his extradition to the US. Now, however, the case will be wrapped up under what's known as "deferred prosecution" in which O'Dwyer will pay a "small sum" and the case will be concluded. You can see why O'Dwyer would do this deal after a year and a half of fighting the extradition. It's also not too surprising that the DOJ would agree to such a deal, given how it ran from other similar cases once it realized that there was competent legal help absolutely decimating its ridiculous legal theories. The DOJ had to realize that it was likely to lose badly even if O'Dwyer was extradited -- so now they get to save face and pretend that O'Dwyer paying a small sum is a form of "victory."

It's good that the case is over and that O'Dwyer can get on with his life, though it's ridiculous that any part of this case ever happened.

Another day, another story of DRM gone wrong. Just recently, Tim Geigner posted a story about a rather expensive dictionary app that hijacked users' Twitter accounts to shame them as pirates -- even if the inadvertent tweeters had shelled out $25 for the program.

Fortunately, this situation didn't result in a bunch of paying customers outing themselves as pirates. Instead, the program in question, Game Maker Studio, permanently overwrote user-created game resources with the internationally accepted pirate symbol -- the skull and crossbones.

A recent update to Game Maker Studio has left many developers confused and frustrated after an anti-piracy system went haywire.

Those who use a legally obtained version of Studio have had game resources, such as sprites, overlayed with an image of a skull and crossbones. The resources are permanently edited, rendered useless.

While the result wasn't as publicly embarrassing, the unlucky users who had dumped hours into creating their games saw their work swiftly -- and permanently -- undone. At first, YoYo Games staff indicated affected users should run a virus scan to make sure the program hadn't been tampered with. As more bug reports poured in, it became clear that the issue wasn't on the end users' computers. Unlike some other companies whose DRM has gone wonky, YoYo Games has been proactive about fixing the issue.

Mike Dailly of Yoyo Games showed up at the original post, as well as in the Yoyo Games forums, with advice for affected users, as well as providing updates on the efforts to track the issue down. He also went the extra step of talking down a few zealous pitchfork bearers who attacked the poster reporting the problem.

Please don't ASSUME folk are using pirated copies, sometimes a virus or something can effect an exe and gives some issue like this.

The current solution is to uninstall, delete both %appdata%\GameMaker-Studio and %localappdata%\GameMaker-Studio, delete the GameMaker-Studio registry key, scan your machine in case its a virus, and then reinstall.

The program assumes a modded .exe is a crack, but this isn't always the case as a virus can also change it. I also have a feeling theres something else changing exe's.....

If your still having issues, get in touch with the help desk, let them know your key...and we'll see what we can do to help.

Unfortunately, YoYo Games isn't looking to remove its DRM scheme, despite this bug's permanent defacing of users' games. In a longer post, Dailly offers an apology, but states that Game Maker will likely never be DRM-free.

I totally understand that those who have paid for GameMaker and are getting this are feeling very upset by the whole matter, and I can only apologise for the problems. As to why it's in there should be reasonably clear. GameMaker has traditionally been one of the most pirated programs around, and it's simply not right that some pay good money for it, while others simply pirate it. We try hard to make it as smooth an experience as possible for paying users, but are constantly fighting pirates understanding of the protection systems.

We'd LOVE to be able to remove the protection completely, but we know that vast numbers would simply copy it if it was that easy. There are many levels to the current protection system, and while many are visible like this, there are also many hidden so that we can always tell when a final game was created with a crack.

We expect an update to go out tomorrow to remove this protection, and will move away from the “destructive” protection like this, to more passive methods to help protect innocent users who through no fault of their own, somehow trigger it.

This won't be much comfort to affected users and it doesn't bode well for those looking to purchase the pro version of Game Maker Studio. Moving towards a more "passive" DRM just pushes the problem to the background, rather than remove it. As in the situation mentioned at the beginning of this post, even passive DRM has its flaws -- especially when it takes it upon itself to treat paying customers as thieves.

Dailly also suggests that Game Maker might move towards some sort of "internet connection required" DRM, which is never a welcome development, no matter how inevitable.

So yes.... we can never "win". Hardware dongles can be cracked and removed, all software can be "fixed". Only "online" can reduce piracy properly, and even that can be removed by some dedicated hacker. That said, the more the world moves online, the easier it gets to block, but we're not there yet, so we do what we can.

All of this unpleasantness aside, at least this situation has altered YoYo Games' anti-piracy tactics going forward, taking it in a more pragmatic direction -- which should result in fewer paying customers being adversely affected.

Remember the goal is to drive pirates to buy, and if they think a copy will destroy their game, that's a pretty strong incentive. However, we'll make sure our concern for paying customers now takes precedence over trying to force a sale from a pirate - which will probably not happen anyway.

We've become blinkered a little in trying to stay one step ahead, and for that I totally apologise, there are certainly other ways of doing this.

As long as DRM exists, collateral damage is to be expected. Mike Dailly is to be commended for tackling this head-on, rather than shunting it off to customer service or refusing to discuss the negative impact on YoYo's customers. The only way YoYo can promise this sort of thing won't happen again is to go DRM-free, but if it's not willing to do that, an open discussion with its current (and potential) customers is at least a step in the right direction.

We've been hearing rumors of this for a few weeks, but Rep. Darrell Issa has released a draft version of his Internet American Moratorium Act (there's a joke in that name for you Reddit folks...) and appropriately (see previous parenthetical) he's doing an IAMA session on Reddit to crowdsource ideas for the bill, a la Rep. Zoe Lofgren's recent Reddit discussion concerning a bill to stop the US government from seizing domain names without a prior adversarial hearing. And, of course, he's also put the bill on his Madison legislative crowdsourcing platform, so people can discuss it there as well. The key section of the draft bill is the following:

It is resolved in the House of Representatives and Senate that they shall not pass any new legislation for a period of 2 years from the date of enactment of this Act that would require individuals or corporations engaged in activities on the Internet to meet additional requirements or activities. After 90 days of passage of this Act no Department or Agency of the United States shall publish new rules or regulations, or finalize or otherwise enforce or give lawful effect to draft rules or regulations affecting the Internet until a period of at least 2 years from the enactment of this legislation has elapsed.

Considering the worries that many of us have about bad regulations impacting the internet, you can understand how this might be appealing, but we should at least be careful of any potential unintended consequences, concerning how it might limit good bills to fix bad laws already in place. The language above appears to try to avoid that -- as it clearly allows for fixing some existing legislation so long as it doesn't create new requirements for individuals or companies, but even that could get in the way of potentially useful legislation. Not that I'm recommending this per se, but what if there is an effort to "fix copyright" by going back to a system of requiring registration to get a copyright, rather than automatically placing it on all works once fixed. There are other issues with such a proposal (mainly the Berne Convention), but let's say it was legitimately considered -- and it is an idea that many have suggested would solve a segment of the problems with today's copyright law. Yet, I could see how this moratorium would block that as imposing "additional requirements" for "individuals or corporations engaged in activities on the internet."

Also, as I'm sure some will point out, there is a slight oddity in having Congress pass a law to say that it won't do something else, and Congress could always then just pass another law rescinding the original law (or overriding it with a bill that ignores it). However, such Congressional moratoriums often are useful in at least establishing a baseline and getting Congress to avoid wading into certain waters. So I'm not necessarily against the moratorium, but I worry that it could lead to unintended consequences that don't just prevent bad laws from being passed, but also might prevent good fixes to current law from passing as well.

Kevin Gosztola has been providing detailed updates on the latest Bradley Manning hearings, focused mainly on the conditions associated with the treatment of Manning after his arrest, and whether or not it amounted to "unlawful pretrial punishment" or involved reasonable precautions by the military. Specifically, as we had discussed, Manning was held in conditions that amounted to torture under key definitions of torture -- held in "intensive solitary confinement" in total isolation, not allowed to have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Over 250 legal experts condemned his treatment and the State Department's spokesperson even lost his job for saying publicly that Manning was being mistreated, and that it wasn't productive.

The legal issue is that if this treatment was seen as punitive then that's a problem. People can be held pre-trial, but they're not supposed to be "punished" as part of the process. The Defense Department has been trying to claim that the treatment of Manning had to do with fears that he would harm himself, and the latest hearings were to figure out which version of the story is really accurate. The details look pretty damning for the Defense Department. For example, it appears that officials were more concerned about the media, not about Manning's condition:

Going through emails, it came out that Lt. Gen. George Flynn, superior officer, was concerned with media and not Bradley Manning’s conditions. For example, when David House and Firedoglake editor-in-chief Jane Hamsher were harassed at the gate of Quantico, Flynn was in on this incident. He was up on what the public affairs planned to say to any questions from media on the incident. But, he was not up on weekly updates coming from officers in the brig.

Later, the same Lt. Gen. Flynn apparently got upset that the NYTimes had information on Manning's mistreatment and he hadn't been forewarned about the media situation:

Lt. Gen. Flynn was upset that he read about Manning standing outside his cell naked in the New York Times. “It would be good to have leadership have heads up on these things before they’re read in the early bird!” Lt. Col Flynn wrote in an email. The “early bird” is a military synopsis of various news stories/press releases.

And then there's the fact that the "psychologist" relied on to assess Manning's mental state... wasn't actually a psychologist but a dentist. Huh?!?

Also, a “forensic psychiatrist” that the Brig was consulting was a Dentist. She didn’t really have qualifications as a psychologist. She was a doctor on staff there and they went to her for assessments on Manning’s condition.

On top of that, evidence was presented of guards joking about taking away Manning's underwear in response to comments Manning had made. It certainly raises significant questions about why they were treating Manning this way and if it actually had anything to do with his own safety... or if they just liked taunting him.

One Quantico Brig officer (female) sent email where he joked about the removal of Manning’s underwear after comments he made on March 2, 2011. Here’s a version the press pool currently believes we heard read in court:

“As Dr. Seuss would say I can wear them in a box, I can wear them with a fox, I can wear them with socks. I can wear them in the day so I say. I can’t wear them at night. My comments gave the staff a fright.”

It is Green Eggs & Ham.

Coombs asked Choike if he believed joking about the underwear was something that an officer should have done. Choike then said something to the effect that he realized this could be brought up by Manning with his attorney and it might become “another media issue.”

Even if you think Manning violated the law, it seems pretty damning to see him treated this way pre-trial.

Separately, prior to the discussion about Manning's conditions, the government officially opposed Manning's attempt to plead guilty to certain lesser charges (as discussed earlier) in the hopes of speeding up the trial and getting potential leniency on some of the more serious charges. This issue more or less got tabled for procedural reasons, as Manning is still arguing that the government failed to provide a speedy trial and the court notes that if it excepts the plea, that would also waive the speedy trial issue. So, the court will handle the issue of whether or not the government failed to offer a speedy trial before taking on the plea issue.

For a few years now, we've been following attempts in Germany -- mainly driven by newspaper publishers -- to create a bizarre new copyright-like right (specifically a "neighbor right") in "linking" such that a site like Google would have to pay sites that it links to. The bizarre and nonsensical argument is that because a site like Google makes some of its money by linking to sites, those sites "deserve" part of the money. This is problematic for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is it's fundamentally backwards economically. If sites like Google are making money from directing people to other sites, they're making money because they provide a valuable service in helping people find the content, not because of the content itself. It's up to the sites themselves to figure out how to monetize the traffic -- not to run to the government to force others to pay. And, if you think this is just a Google issue, you're wrong. Among the proposals was one that would impact many others, including people posting links on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites.

The final proposal would be wide reaching in impact, and make it ridiculous to run a search engine or any kind of aggregator in Germany:

The new section, if introduced, would provide the "producer of news materials" the general "exclusive right to make said materials publicly available, in whole or in part, for commercial purposes," according to an unofficial translation of the German Government's proposals.

Others would be permitted to provide "public access" to the publishers' material unless those providing that access are "commercial operators of search engines or commercial providers of services that aggregate this content in a respective fashion". News publishers' right to control the commercial exploitation of their work in this regard would extend for a year after publication. Authors of the work would be entitled to be "provided with a reasonable share of the remunerations issuing from the author’s work".

The German government is set to take up the issue on Thursday and Google has realized that maybe it should let folks in Germany know that this proposal would seriously cut into their internet services. As Google accurately notes, if the law passes it will mean "higher costs, less information and massive legal uncertainty." That's what happens when you insist that content providers who fail to monetize traffic somehow "deserve" money from a third party that is helping people find them.

The logic behind this bill makes no sense. Do we require that GPS service providers pay stores for directing people to where they're located? Of course not. The very concept is ludicrous. Yet that's exactly what this bill is doing in Germany.

Most ridiculous of all: if publishers don't like being in Google's results, they can already opt-out. So if this was really "piracy" as the publishers claim, they have a solution already at their disposal. But this isn't about piracy at all, of course. It's about publishers who haven't been able to adapt seeing Google make lots of money and getting jealous. So they're demanding a cut of the money. It's a sad statement on the nature of both publishers and German copyright law that this proposal is even being seriously considered.

In the beginning, there were dashcams. Cops utilized these to provide Fox's primetime programmers with glorious footage of high speed pursuits and the occasional drunk shirtless man falling down. It provided a record of traffic stops and PIT maneuvers, but the downside was that it failed to capture anything out of range of the windshield. Sometimes, given inter-departmental meddling, the footage showed nothing at all or ceased to exist.

Then, suddenly, everyone had a camera. Nearly every citizen with a cell phone was able to shoot credible (if shaky) footage of law enforcement events as they unfolded, rather than how they were "recalled" during depositions and courtroom appearances. This turn of events caused some consternation among some members of the law enforcement community, who felt that recorded observation was a one-way street and that street had the PD's name all over it. While it was tougher to make unwanted footage cease to exist, it was not altogether impossible.

Now, the next wave of law enforcement-related camera technology is being put into use: always-on "eyecam." Salt Lake City is rolling out a new line of eye accessories for its force, becoming the first police department in the state to do so.

The Taser AXON Flex on-officer system is a small, light-weight camera with 14 hours of a battery life that an officer clips to an item like a headband or sunglasses so it can record whatever that officer is seeing or doing.

Nationally, only about 2,000 units of the on-officer system are in the field, and Salt Lake City would be the first department in Utah to use the technology, said Rick Smith, Taser founder and CEO, who attended the presentation.

As the use of these cameras becomes more widespread, hearing a police officer offer to "fire up the Taser" may no longer cause certain citizens to instinctively curl into the fetal position. In fact, there's an (admittedly small) chance that these new cameras will keep unnecessary force to a minimum and provide useful documentation for use in investigations, court cases, etc.

"It really improves our ability to be professional and document events as they occur," (Police Chief Chris) Burbank said. "Imagine being able to capture the emotion."

Smith said any use of force is inherently high risk and controversial.

He said there are often differing accounts of what led an officer to use force in a particular situation and equipping them with cameras will help with investigations and retroactive reviews of decisions that were made, he said.

"It holds everybody accountable," Smith said.

More transparency is a good idea, but much like any recording device, it's only as trustworthy as its operator -- and those who control use of the footage. Burbank mentions that the camera has already cleared a Salt Lake City officer accused of "behaving unprofessionally" at a traffic stop. This is all well and good, but there needs to be a serious effort made to curb the tendency to turn an "always-on" camera into a very selective accomplice.

The cameras run continuously, but an officer is responsible for activating and deactivating the device. That means the department will have to set strict guidelines about camera use and making sure the cameras aren't being shut off, Burbank acknowledged.

The first step might be to change "guidelines" to "rules," so there are no grey areas surrounding the specifics of camera usage. This is not to say there's little potential for an upside, though. In fact, more law enforcement agencies should look into equipping themselves with something like this, with the caveat being that the resulting footage is treated as an "impartial record" rather than "police property." Leaving the on/off switch in control of the officer wearing the camera is both unavoidable and prone to abuse by those who would rather hide certain actions and activities. And as long as law enforcement members are interacting with the public using "always-on" cameras, there really can't be any further complaints about citizens responding in kind. The camera may be an impartial observer, but the operator very rarely is. If transparency is Burbank's ultimate aim, let's hope the guideline process is opened up for public comment.