1. The FISA Amendments Act, which was passed in association with the Patriot Act, supposedly to give the NSA more powers to scoop up communications of folks involved in terrorist activity. Now, the NSA is -- by mandate -- not allowed to spy on Americans. And yet, multiple whistleblowers and hints from folks who know in Congress have made it quite clear that the NSA has interpreted the FISA Amendments Act to allow exactly that -- even as many in Congress clearly don't understand how the bill is being used.
   
   While it's still not official, enough information has been revealed to show that the NSA interprets the requirement that its surveillance target foreign persons to mean that as long as it's looking for foreign terrorist activity, it can spy on everyone. Get that? It's a sneaky trick that many have not realized. The NSA argues -- likely with agreement from a secret court ruling -- that so long as it can claim that it is investigating a foreign threat somewhere, somehow, the prohibition on spying on Americans does not apply. There is increasing evidence that this now means that the NSA is scooping up pretty much all data it can get its hands on. While it may not be going through it in real time, it appears to believe that as long as it can make the argument that it's searching for a foreign threat, that it can delve into that treasure chest of, well, everything.
   
   
2. Next: the "national security letters" (NSL) issue. While a court recently ruled these unconstitutional, this process has been widely abused by the FBI for years to get private information on people without a warrant and with a gag order on recipients. Every time it's been investigated, it's been shown that the FBI has widely abused its NSL powers. However, since there's almost no oversight, the FBI still feels free to make widespread use of the tool, which was only supposed to be used in extreme circumstances.
   
   Along those lines, the FBI has gotten so comfortable with asking companies for data without a warrant or any formal oversight process, that it was revealed a few years ago that, rather than going through the drudge of actually processing paperwork to get private info from AT&T, some agents simply used Post-It Notes to make their requests, which AT&T readily coughed up without question.

The review by the state's legislative auditor — highly anticipated by legislators and privacy advocates — said officers need better training in allowed uses of the protected data, and local and state agencies should do more to monitor use. Beyond 88 incidents of misuse documented in state records last year, auditors found even more suspicious activity buried in audit trails.

More than half of the 11,000 law enforcement users of the Driver and Vehicle Services (DVS) website in that time frame queried themselves or people with the same last name, for example, or disproportionately searched for people of one sex.

The legislation came on the heels of news that a former employee at the Department of Natural Resources had viewed thousands of drivers license records — almost exclusively of women — without a permissible use. That employee, John Hunt, is now facing criminal charges, and his actions have spurred five federal lawsuits against the state.

The report also recommended that because audits by the DPS largely detect heavy users, rather than suspicious use, local agencies should conduct more proactive monitoring. They suggested the department beef up its abilities to assist local agencies.

[Public safety commissioner Mona] Dohman said in an interview that the queries were so spread out that he did not emerge in their monthly review of the top 50 users.

During the 18 months ending June 30, 2012, 13 users conducted queries using access privileges associated with law enforcement agencies that no longer existed. Over the same time period, three former employees of state law enforcement agencies, as well as four former employees of local law enforcement agencies, accessed the DVS Web site using usernames and passwords that should have been disabled.

DPS (Dept. of Public Safety) has not implemented other access management practices for all users. For example, DPS does not require a user agreement for sworn officers with access to the DVS Web site. Civilian law enforcement employees must sign a user agreement justifying their need for driver's license information, including their specific needs for access to driver's license photographs. DVS staff review the agreements before granting access. BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) has a signed intra-agency agreement with DVS. Agencies with employees who access BCA systems sign an agreement taking responsibility for access by their staff, among other things. Thus, it is only sworn officers who use the DVS Web site for whom DPS does not require an agreement, signed by the user or his or her employer, taking responsibility for appropriate access.

House author Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, R-Lakeville, said she has already met resistance from some law enforcement entities.

"If you have bad actors in your bunch, then why shouldn't the public know about it?" Holberg said. "It seems like nobody wants any sunshine around this issue. And I think it would do a lot to rebuild the public trust if there was more public awareness of misuse and consequences."

Encana Corp, Canada's largest natural gas producer, apologized on Thursday because one of its executives cursed after an analyst asked about whether new Canadian investment rules would prohibit its takeover by foreign state-owned entities.

When asked the question by Canaccord Genuity analyst Phil Skolnick, interim CEO Clayton Woitas said: "The answer would be no." Then, in a whispered comment that was clearly audible on a replay of the call, someone can be heard saying, "fucking asshole."

On Thursday, Chirbit founder Ivan Reyes said he has received a takedown request from Encana. Mr. Reyes has declined, citing fair use provisions in copyright law and a site policy directing that such requests be sent to the poster of audio.

Encana, in its request, says:

“Encana is the copyright owner of the Recording. It was expressly stated at the outset of the Conference Call that 'this conference call may not be recorded or rebroadcast without the express consent of Encana Corporation',” the letter states.

“The Recording has been posted without Encana’s consent. The unauthorized use of this Recording clearly constitutes copyright infringement. ... Encana views this matter extremely seriously and requests that you respond to the undersigned on or before the close of business on Friday, February 22, 2013, failing which, Encana will have no other recourse but to take all actions as may be available to it to protect its proprietary rights.”

“I think any individual or organization that has something embarrassing broadcast over the web without proper permissions would make any attempt to have that content eventually removed as, understandably, we do not wish to have that clip living on in perpetuity on the web,” he said.

To be clear, assuming there is no agreement to the contrary, the only aspect of the conversation posted that Encana may be able to claim copyright over is the three words said by its employees. Copyright to the question posed by the third party would belong to that third party unless the person who posed the question assigned it in writing to Encana.

For copyright to exist in a statement, the statement being copyrighted must be an “original… work”. The test for originality in Canada requires the author to exercise skill and judgement, where the skill and judgement exercised must not be so trivial as to be characterized as purely mechanical. While the qualitative test for a statement to be a “work” is low, there is a quantitative minimum that must be met for copyright protection.

The statements made by the Encana executives in this scenario do not qualify for copyright protection as they fail to meet both the criteria for a copyrightable work. The obscenity was not an exercise of skill and judgement. It was an impulsive response to a question that the speaker found insulting. In fact, if the speaker had exercised skill and judgement, it is likely that the he wouldn't have said the obscenity at all.

And not just any login page, but the barely-modified default login page of an open source website platform, which the operators of iPhotographyCourse.com claim infringes on... their own barely-modified default login page of a different open source website platform. Yeah. Jenny McCann, who runs the Institute of Photography website built on the Moodle content management system, received a takedown notice claiming that her login page was infringing. When she asked for clarification, she was simply told "entire page copied". Here's the supposedly infringing page:

And here's the "original":

Even at first glance, the claim is obviously idiotic. There is nothing similar about the pages beyond the purely functional login page elements. But things get really amusing when you realize that the iPhotographyCourse page is virtually unaltered from the default Wordpress login page:

The only expressive choices—a requirement of copyright protection—are the inclusion of the logo (the rather poor inclusion, as there are visible artifacts at the top of the image that show the logo was sloppily clipped from the site's front page banner, meaning the designer didn't even have a copy of it on hand) and the rounding of the button corners (which may actually just be a Wordpress version discrepancy). As if that wasn't enough, the supposedly infringing login page is itself just a minor modification of the default Moodle page:

A new frame, color scheme and accent image—nothing major, but actually significantly more design changes than the iPhotographyCourse page, and far more likely to qualify for some level of copyright protection. And, quite clearly, in no way an infringing copy.

According to later comments from McCann on the Moodle forum thread, the login page was specifically included among other items in the takedown which related to actual content on the site. It could be that there is more merit to the other complaints, but McCann does not believe there is, and judging from the utter stupidity of this example, I'm inclined to suspect she's right. Either way, the people behind iPhotographyCourse, like so many before them, have exposed their true intentions by targeting such an obviously non-infringing page: this isn't about protecting intellectual property, but interfering with competition by abusing the DMCA process. Either that, or they are tragic victims of our ownership culture who also haven't logged into a website in the past ten years.

The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded "intelligence" of uneven quality - oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS officials' public claims about fusion centers were not always accurate. For instance, DHS officials asserted that some fusion centers existed when they did not. At times, DHS officials overstated fusion centers' "success stories." At other times, DHS officials failed to disclose or acknowledge non-public evaluations highlighting a host of problems at fusion centers and in DHS' own operations.

The Subcommittee investigation also reviewed how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a component of DHS, distributed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support state and local fusion centers. DHS revealed that it was unable to provide an accurate tally of how much it had granted to states and cities to support fusion centers efforts, instead producing broad estimates of the total amount of federal dollars spent on fusion center activities from 2003 to 2011, estimates which ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS failed to adequately police how states and municipalities used the money intended for fusion centers. The investigation found that DHS did not know with any accuracy how much grant money it has spent on specific fusion centers, nor could it say how most of those grant funds were spent, nor has it examined the effectiveness of those grant dollars. The Subcommittee conducted a more detailed case study review of expenditures of DHS grant funds at five fusion centers, all of which lacked basic, "must-have" intelligence capabilities, according to assessments conducted by and for DHS. The Subcommittee investigation found that the state and local agencies used some of the federal grant money to purchase: dozens of flat-screen TVs; Sport Utility Vehicles they then gave away to other local agencies; and hidden "shirt button" cameras, cell phone tracking devices, and other surveillance equipment unrelated to the analytical mission of a fusion center.

The inappropriate reporting appears to have been a regular problem. An April 2009 email from an alarmed senior I&A official stated: “[State and Local Fusion Center officials] are collecting open-source intelligence (OSINT) on U.S. persons (USPER), without proper vetting, and improperly reporting this information through homeland information reporting (HIR) channels,” wrote Barbara Alexander, then director of the Collection and Requirements Division, which oversaw HIR reporting. “The improper reporting of this information through HIR channels is likely a result of a lack of training on proper collection and reporting procedures . . . they are inadvertently causing problems.” In an interview with the Subcommittee, Ms. Alexander said she recalled being told the Reporting Branch was “flooded” with inappropriate reporting. “A lot of information was coming in inappropriately,” she remembered. “The information was not reportable.”

[....] Ms. Schlanger’s presentation, a copy of which DHS provided to the Subcommittee, indicated that areas in which DHS intelligence reporters had overstepped legal boundaries included: Reporting on First Amendment-protected activities lacking a nexus to violence or criminality; reporting on or improperly characterizing political, religious or ideological speech that is not explicitly violent or criminal; and attributing to an entire group the violent or criminal acts of one or a limited number of the group’s members.

One way the police did this was by falsifying statements made to them after the disaster, to remove negative comments about how they had handled the situation. But another way involved trying to suggest the deaths were caused in part by the drunken behavior of fans. One attempt to bolster this view apparently involved the use of the UK's main Police National Computer system. Here's what the Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (pdf) wrote about new evidence that had come to light:

2.5.112 The document indicates that a Police National Computer (PNC) check was conducted on all who died at Hillsborough for whom a blood alcohol reading above zero was recorded. It includes a handwritten list of the names, dates of birth, blood alcohol readings and home addresses of 51 of the deceased and provides screen-prints apparently drawn from the PNC. A summary of the results appears on the front page, establishing the number 'with cons' (convictions).

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Meet the administrative subpoena (.pdf): With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books (.pdf) passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports. (.pdf)

We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings.

The head of the U.S. government’s vast spying apparatus has conceded that recent surveillance efforts on at least one occasion violated the Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.

The admission comes in a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassifying statements that a top U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to call attention to the government’s 2008 expansion of its key surveillance law.

• It is also true that on at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
• I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

But, perhaps worse still, there is the fact that police don't always need a law to protect them from the public's lenses—they can just take matters into their own hands. There are plenty of examples of police harassing people who film them, often threatening to arrest them or going ahead and doing it. It's an intimidation tactic, and really just part of a much larger problem, which is that no matter how much a person is in the right (and how much they know it), the police have plenty of ways to make their life hell for a long time before they see justice, if they ever do. This appears to be the case in a recent Chicago lawsuit, where two men allege they were battered, strip-searched and falsely charged for filming a traffic accident caused by a police car.

Benjamin Perez and Bobby Milton sued Chicago and nine police officers in Federal Court.

The men say they were talking outside with some friends in an early morning in August 2011 when a friend rode by on a motorcycle, heading south on Chicago Avenue.

"At the same time, defendant Captain [Kevin Navarro] was driving a marked Chicago Police Department vehicle, an SUV, northbound on South Chicago Avenue in the wrong lane of traffic, heading northbound in the southbound lane," according to the complaint.

"Defendant Captain drove his police vehicle into plaintiffs' friend, who was traveling southbound on his motorcycle, causing plaintiffs' friend to suffer serious injury."

Numerous police officers arrived quickly.

"Defendant officers observed plaintiffs using their cell phones to record the collision scene, and immediately took plaintiff Perez's cell phone and placed handcuffs on him, taking him into custody even though Perez was not doing anything illegal," the complaint states.

"Defendant officers placed Perez in the back of a police car and demanded that Perez show them how to delete the photographs he had taken with his cell phone.

"After plaintiff Perez was taken into custody, plaintiff Milton, who had also been using his cell phone to record the scene, was seated on his motorcycle, when defendant [Officers] Frahm and Hernandez approached him.

"Defendants Frahm and Hernandez grabbed plaintiff Milton, forced him off of his motorcycle, and threw him to the ground.

The suit continues, claiming that the men were taken to the police station and threatened with felony charges if they didn't help officers delete the recording, and one was strip-searched to check for "other cameras and recording devices" (because most people keep a spare iPhone taped to their inner thigh, of course). They are seeking damages for "false arrest, excessive force, unlawful search, conspiracy, false imprisonment, battery, and malicious prosecution".

Now, we don't have the officers' side of the story yet, but the allegations certainly look bad—and it's not hard to find plenty of instances of similar actions by the police. Assuming the complaint is even close to true, hopefully the court recognizes the affront to justice that this kind of police behavior represents, and joins the growing ranks of courts that are affirming the right to record the police and hold them accountable for their actions.

The resulting prosecution is a depressing display of abuse of government authority. It’s hard to comprehensively catalog all of the lawless aspects of the US government’s prosecution of Megaupload, so I’ll just focus on two:

1) Trying to hold Megaupload criminally liable for its users' actions. Criminal copyright infringement requires willful infringement, a very rigorous scienter level. I discuss the implications of this high scienter requirement in more detail in my decade-old article on warez trading. Megaupload’s business choices may not have been ideal, but Megaupload has a number of strong potential defenses for its users' activities, including 512(c), lack of volitional conduct and more. Whether it actually qualified for these is irrelevant; Megaupload’s subjective belief in these defenses should destroy the willfulness requirement. Thus, the government is simply making up the law to try to hold Megaupload accountable for its users' uploading/downloading.

2) Taking Megaupload offline. Megaupload's website is analogous to a printing press that constantly published new content. Under our Constitution, the government can’t simply shut down a printing press, but that's basically what our government did when it turned Megaupload off and seized all of the assets. Not surprisingly, shutting down a printing press suppresses countless legitimate content publications by legitimate users of Megaupload. Surprisingly (shockingly, even), the government apparently doesn't care about this “collateral,” entirely foreseeable and deeply unconstitutional effect. The government's further insistence that all user data, even legitimate data, should be destroyed is even more shocking. Destroying the evidence not only screws over the legitimate users, but it may make it impossible for Megaupload to mount a proper defense. It's depressing our government isn't above such cheap tricks in its zeal to win.

The government has also been shockingly cavalier about the collateral consequences of its prosecution on the marketplace. Legitimate web hosts, and their investors, are quaking in their boots that they will be next. It doesn’t help that the content industry is circulating a “kill chart” of its next desired targets.

A number of bills being considered by Congress, including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR 3523), would make it easier for Facebook and other companies to receive critical threat data from the U.S. government. Importantly, HR 3523 would impose no new obligations on us to share data with anyone –- and ensure that if we do share data about specific cyber threats, we are able to continue to safeguard our users’ private information, just as we do today.

That said, we recognize that a number of privacy and civil liberties groups have raised concerns about the bill – in particular about provisions that enable private companies to voluntarily share cyber threat data with the government. The concern is that companies will share sensitive personal information with the government in the name of protecting cybersecurity. Facebook has no intention of doing this and it is unrelated to the things we liked about HR 3523 in the first place -- the additional information it would provide us about specific cyber threats to our systems and users.

Kaplan then goes on to say that Facebook is engaging lawmakers to see about amending the bill to address people's concerns. But that creates a pretty big question: why are they still supporting the bill if they recognize its problems? Based on this statement, Facebook wants to use cybersecurity laws the right way—to give and receive anonymized and minimized data about specific threats, to be used solely in relation to those and similar threats. But CISPA does not require any of that. It's nice that Facebook is "able to" protect private information, but why aren't they and all other companies forced to? If the authors of the bill want to tout its "strong privacy protections", then a requirement to eliminate personal user information from shared data seems like a necessity.

Moreover, while Facebook may only be worried about specific cyber-threats, they can't control what the government does with the information. As currently written, CISPA basically allows the feds to keep whatever data Facebook shares on file, and search it whenever they want, for anything they want, as long as there is a "cybersecurity" or "national security" purpose. And "cybersecurity" is very broadly described, and includes things like intellectual property. If this bill is supposed to be about protecting networks from disruptive attacks, why aren't the terms and limitations narrowly defined to ensure that's the only thing it can be used for?

If Facebook's cybersecurity motivations are good—and I'm willing to grant them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are—then they should withdraw their support of CISPA until it is fixed to exclude the broad provisions that go well beyond what Facebook wants to use it for. If the company is so proud of its commitment to user privacy, then surely it has to acknowledge that there are other companies which are not so responsible, and which will abuse the same powers and immunities that Facebook promises to handle responsibly. Unless they can show us that they are making meaningful demands of Congress, this attempt to soften their support of CISPA is just hot air.

1. Explain how it made the decision to issue a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube.
2. Promptly inform YouTube that it is withdrawing its takedown notice.
3. Express regret to Mr. Vega for the takedown notice.
4. Put procedures into place to ensure that fair use receives full consideration before any takedown notice is issued.
5. Disclose publicly both what procedures have been adopted, and what standards MLS is providing to its representatives to ensure that they give proper consideration to fair use before issuing takedown notices in the future.

Judge Glasser ran through the “likelihood of confusion” factors (opinion pages 13 to 16) as has become de rigeur in all trademark cases even though they are ill-suited to deciding cases where the real issue is fair use (and despite Barton Beebe’s demonstration of the ways in which courts manipulate the test to justify pre-determined outcomes).  But the more important part of the opinion is its focus on whether a reasonable consumer, seeing the web pages at issue, would have any doubt about whether the pages they were reviewing were sponsored by Ascentive – and even a moron in a hurry would not be so confused (pages 16 to 20).   Ultimately, then, the issue comes down to a claim of initial interest confusion, but Judge Glasser rejected that argument (pages 20 to 28). 

Initial interest confusion is unlikely even on its own terms, both because PissedConsumer.com is not in competition with Ascentive’s web sites, and because search engines generally do not take keyword meta tags into account.  Moreover, the meta tags and title tags are used accurately in this case – they lead to pages that are about Ascentive’s products, albeit unflattering ones.  Judge Glasser also embraced later decisions that have questioned the very premises of the Ninth Circuit’s decision in its once-seminal Brookfield Communications decision, and have noted that the “harm” created by a misleading meta tag — being taken to a web site that the searcher finds unrelated to his actual search objectives — is easily remedied by clicking back to the search engine results.  Finally, Judge Glasser expressed impatience with the notion that trademark law should provide a remedy for unethical and excessive search engine optimization tactics — the search engines themselves take a dim view of being gamed, he noted, and their remedies can be much more effective than a court's.  In this instance, however, it is hard to see any impropriety in Opinion Corp.’s SEO techniques, because the complaints about Ascentive’s products are just what the average consumer might want to see when searching online for information to help decide whether to risk entrusting her credit card number to Ascentive’s billing department and her computer to Ascentive’s software.

Judge Glasser also rejected Ascentive’s contention that the display of advertising by its competitors adjacent to the critical comments violated its trademark rights (pages 28 to 32).  As on most advertising-supported web sites, advertising is placed at the discretion of the advertising service to which the space has been rented, so if Ascentive has a cause of action it would be against the advertising service. Of course, it did not sue that service because the remedy it seeks is the removal of critical comments, and the service cannot do that.

"[A]ny property used ... in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of an offense [such as criminal copyright infringement]" is subject to forfeiture.... Moreover, it is "[i]rrelevant whether the property's role in the crime is integral, essential or indispensable,"... and a single incident of facilitating criminal activity is sufficient to trigger forfeiture.

He was a sweet and tender hooligan, hooligan

He said that he'd never, never do it again

And of course he won't, oh, not until the next time

The critical point is that WoWGilder did not contributorily or vicariously lead to violating any rights granted under the Copyright Act. Unlike speed-up kits, there was no creation of an unauthorized derivative work, nor was a copy made even under the Ninth Circuit's misinterpretation of RAM copying in the MAI v. Peak case. How one might ask can there be a violation of the Copyright Act if no rights granted under the Act have been violated? Good question.

To get to its result, the court had to first find that WoW, even though sold over the counter, was licensed not sold. In so finding, the court declined to follow the recent Vernor opinion in the Western District of Washington, believing it had to follow other Ninth Circuit precedent. I agree with the Vernor court that the other precedent (MAI, Triad, Wall Data) do not hold that over the counter software is licensed, not sold. (WoW may be purchased online too, but I don't think this changes the analysis.). Having found there was license not a sale, there still had to be a breach of the license in order to permit an infringement action to lie, and recall here that the claim is not one for direct infringement, but rather secondary liability; there was no privity between the parties. There was in fact no provision in the license that barred use of WoWGlider. The court took the extraordinary step of stitching together two unrelated provisions to create one. You have to read it to believe it, but it took the court 8 pages to go through this hard work, and why? Was the court offended by what it regarded to be cheating? If so, God help us if law is being reduced to such subjective, non-statutory grounds.

When users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer's RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II.

The GAO has the capacity Congress lacks: as of last year, the office had 199 staffers cleared at the top-secret level, with 96 holding still more rarefied "sensitive compartmented information" clearances. And those cleared staff have a proven record of working to oversee highly classified Defense Department programs without generating leaks. Gen. Clapper, the prospective DNI, has testified that the GAO "held our feet to the fire" at the Pentagon with thorough analysis and constructive criticism.

Unlike the inspectors general at the various agencies--which also do vital oversight work--the GAO is directly answerable to Congress, not to the executive branch. And while it's in a position to take a broad, pangovernmental view, the GAO also hosts analysts with highly specialized economic and management expertise the IG offices lack. Unleashing GAO would be the first step in discovering what the Post couldn't: whether the billions we're pouring into building a surveillance and national security state are really making us safer.

Its lawsuits go far beyond curbing piracy and end up limiting how we can talk about pop culture.

The law may be on Summit's side in some cases, but the spirit of what the company is doing -- shutting down almost anyone referencing Twilight without its permission -- shows the shortcomings in how we understand and interpret copyright law.

In its lawsuits, Summit essentially argues that it should control almost any expressive activity related to the Twilight franchise because it has copyrighted the material and acquired trademarks associated with the movies. The studio might win its cases, but it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of intellectual property law. Trademarks exist to prevent customer confusion about the source of a product, not to prevent discussion of the product or the trademark itself.

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the state's electronic surveillance law -- aka recording a police encounter -- the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. In dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated, "Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals...." (Note: In some states it is the audio alone that makes the recording illegal.)

The selection of "shooters" targeted for prosecution do, indeed, suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate.