This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Damien with a simple summary of the lack of logic behind link taxes:

You know, I have yet to see a single source explain how a snippet tax is anything more than trying to charge people for talking about a news story and directing others who are interested to the original source. Apparently "on the internet" really does change everything.

In second place, we've got a response from That Anonymous Coward to the FCC's aggressive demands for personal info from someone who made a pseudonymous FOIA request for information about Ajit Pai's Reese's Pieces mug:

"In order to proceed with your request, please provide us with your name, your personal mailing address, and a phone number where you can be reached...."

Aren't these the same assholes who had no problem with letters of support submitted in the name of the dead, people who submitted nothing, people who knew nothing about net neutrality, and people who opposed what the FCC was doing but someone used their names to give glowing copypasta support?

Also can someone cite the part of the FOIA law that demands all of this information be turned over on demand?? Or is the FCC still making shit up as they go...

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got ArkieGuy with a take on the link tax's cousin — the snippet tax — inspired by German publishers comparing quoting to stealing a pound of butter:

The snippet tax is like wanting to charge cookbook publishers for recipes that call for butter. If you start charging people to recommend butter in their recipes, you won't sell as much butter.

Next, we've got a comment from any moose cow word about the absurdity of the EU Copyright Directive's upload filtering requirements:

There's no centralized database of copyright licensees, only copyright holders have access to those records. Yet, not even the largest copyright holders are able to verify which users were granted permission with the accuracy they demand be enshrined in law. How do they expect anyone else to do something only they have the capacity to do, and even they are incapable of doing?

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Ehud Gavron responding to the FCC's FOIA resistance with a bit of a low-blow that is hard not to giggle at:

Yes, Ajit Pai has a stupid mug.

He also has a funny coffee cup :)

E

In second place, we've got an anonymous response to a commenter who tried to portray our criticism of Google's recent patent attempts as further proof that we are Google shills:

Mike: "Google should be shot in the head."

You: "Look at Masnick wanting us to donate bullets to Google as if they don't have enough. Shill!"

Also you: "Corporations are bad...unless they're intellectual property maximalists who have cheated actual artists and creators out of the fruits of their labors since the time of Queen Anne."

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from tanj about a South Carolina drug task force serving regular warrants like no-knock warrants:

They did knock. Once, with a battering ram.

They did announced their presence, quite loudly.

Finally, we've got a comment from Ninja confessing to an appropriate misreading of something in our post about the FCC's fake DDoS attack:

"There's likely several more layers to this story"

At first I read LAWYERS instead of layers. Which would be pretty accurate as well.

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week, instead of going through the usual look at what was happening five, ten and fifteen years ago, we're going to put all the focus on the events of this week in 2013. Why? Because it's the week that the revelations of NSA spying, which dropped last week, truly hit the fan. There was a whole lot of news about it, almost completely dominating Techdirt, and it's worth a closer look.

As the leaks kept coming, it was revealed that the source was Edward Snowden, who described his ability to wiretap anyone from his desk. As politicians scrambled to defend the program, the DOJ was trying to cover up the secret court ruling about it, and we realized the big scandal wasn't that the NSA did something illegal, but that it probably didn't.

Some defenders of the PRISM program tried to claim it helped stop an NYC subway bombing, but the evidence was lacking and even the Associated Press soon called bullshit. James Clapper was simultaneously claiming that the leaks were a danger to us all, and also no big deal, while the author of the Patriot Act stepped up to say NSA surveillance must end, and that the law was supposed to prevent data mining. It started becoming clear that the metadata story was the biggest one.

Some politicians began speaking out, with Senator Rand Paul calling for a class-action lawsuit against the NSA, and Senator Ron Wyden calling for congressional hearings, before a group of Senators got together to introduce a bill to end the secrecy of the FISA courts. One Senator had previously predicted a lot of this, but unfortunately he got voted out of office in 2010.

Meanwhile, a former NSA boss said the leaks show America can't keep secrets, even though they really showed the opposite. The public was divided in its opinion on the program, depending heavily on how the question was asked. And we pointed out that the leaks show the importance of Wikileaks and similar operations.

The backlash grew, with Derek Khanna calling for James Clapper to be impeached for lying, a team of 86 companies and other groups called on Congress to end the spying, and the ACLU suing the government for 4th amendment violations. Various former NSA whistleblowers spoke up in defense of Snowden and against the agency's practices. Of course, there was also some pathetic backlash in the other direction, with Rep. Peter King calling for the prosecution of journalists who report on the leaks, and Congress moving to improve secrecy instead of fixing the problem.

Then things began getting even worse, with the possibility emerging that the PRISM program enabled espionage against allies. A new leak at the end of the week revealed the NSA's talking points for defending itself, and sales of George Orwell's 1984 began to skyrocket, and... well, let's just say there's plenty more on the way in the coming weeks.

Crowdsourcing has obviously now been a thing for some time. Along internet timelines, in fact, crowdsourcing is now something close to a mature business practice and it's used for all manner of things, from the payment for goods created, to serving as a form of market research for new products and services, all the way up to and including getting fans involved in the creation and shaping of an end product. The video game industry was naturally an early adopter of this business model, given how well-suited the industry is to technological innovation. Here too we have seen a range of crowdsourcing efforts, from funding game creation through platforms like Kickstarter to empowering supporters to shape the development of the game.

In that last example, it was Double Fine and Tim Schafer getting gamers involved in what would otherwise be the job of the creative team behind their game. The personalities here may matter greatly, because Ubisoft has recently unveiled an attempt to further get their fans involved in the game-creation process, yet many people are up in arms over it. Let's start with what Ubisoft is attempting with its anticipated next installment in the Beyond Good & Evil franchise.

The long-awaited sequel to a 2003 Ubisoft game that was critically loved but flopped at retail, Beyond Good and Evil 2 will take place in an open universe full of strange creatures and cultures. During its E3 press conference, Ubisoft said that fans will be able to help populate that universe with their own music and artwork through a partnership with a company called HitRECord, with that company’s founder, actor-turned-entrepreneur Joseph Gordon-Levitt, appearing on stage.

The HitRECord-powered Space Monkey Program allows fans to submit ideas and works into a series of musical and visual categories like “devotional music,” “anti-hybrid propaganda,” and “anti-establishment art.” Other fans can then comment on and remix those works, which will ultimately be evaluated by HitRECord and—if they fit the game well enough—sent along to Ubisoft. Everybody who’s contributed at all to an accepted work will be paid.

If you're anything like me, your reaction to this was purely positive. Fans of Ubisoft titles and Beyond Good & Evil get to contribute to the game in a way they will recognize and be paid some amount of money for? How cool is that? Collaboration with fans on the creation of art is squarely in the realm of our CwF+RtB formula. To add some compensation to that makes this all the better. And, in my opinion, if this were anyone but Ubisoft doing this kind of thing, nobody would be pushing back on it at all. But because of Ubisoft's sketchy reputation, many are viewing this through purely cynical glasses and seeing nothing other than a company trying to avoid paying the full rate for the creation of its game.

Almost immediately after Ubisoft’s conference, critics and developers started asking questions: Why not just pay full-time, salaried developers to do this work? What happens if fans’ work doesn’t get accepted? Do they not get paid? Did they do it all for nothing?

Scott Benson, the co-creator of the indie game Night in the Woods and a vocal advocate for workers’ rights, pointed out that HitRECord’s business model seems to rely on what’s known as “spec work,” short for “speculation.” This is a common but nonetheless ethically muddy practice in creative and design fields. When you do work “on spec,” you’re producing something that a buyer might decide to pick up and then pay you for.

Great, except this isn't being done in the "creative industry" at all, but rather directly with fans of the game franchise. Were Ubisoft trying to strong-arm artists for content it would otherwise pay for up front, then, yeah, this would suck. That's not what it's doing at all, though. Instead, the company is going directly to fans and asking them, rather than coercing them, to get involved in the project in a way those fans will find meaningful. Does this have the happy coincidence of being somewhat less costly? Sure. There's no denying that. But so what? If fans of a game are able to compete with the art created by the creative industry and want to do that type of thing under this platform, where exactly is the ethical dilemma? Were Benson to have his way, fans should be denied this opportunity because... why? Because someone else might not get paid? Where is the sense in that?

There's also something to be said for HitRECord's meta-crowdsourcing experiment here and how interesting it will be to see if it can be pulled off.

“At HR, people build on each other’s ideas, and our website (and community) keeps track of how projects evolve—and how ideas influence one another,” HitRECord executive producer Jared Geller said in an email, noting that the company has paid out a total of nearly $3 million since it was founded in 2010. “So any contribution that is included in any of the songs or visuals (guitar parts, vocal stems, etc) delivered to the Beyond Good and Evil 2 dev team will get credited and paid. If your contribution isn’t used, you don’t get paid.”

So it's not just milking a fanbase for cheap labor, but allowing that fanbase to them play off of one another and build a community product, which will then be injected into the game and for which they will be paid. I mean, come on, if everyone could take their labor union hats off for just a second, they'd have to admit how cool an experiment this is. And, while HitRECord will have the ultimate decision-making authority on how compensation is divvied up between creators, it even takes feedback from multiple creators into account when making those decisions.

The one area where there might be real concern is copyright infringement.

There are other possible complications, as well, said a representative of NoSpec, an organization that advocates against the practice of spec work.

“When people who participate in spec work know that the chance of payment is slim-to-none, it invites the fastest possible turnaround, and we’ve found that spec websites (those that sell design contest listings) are rife with plagiarism,” wrote the rep in an email.

There is truth to this and Ubisoft and HitRECord have better have their shit in order if they don't want to turn this into some hellscape of accusations about plagiarism and copyright infringement. But if they can pull this off, the end result is going to be the injection of the voice of the fan directly into its game, which is about all we could hope for coming from a content producer.

I'll end this with a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment if I had written this same post, except I did a find/replace for "Ubisoft" and replaced it with "Sole game creator." Does anyone really think the same level of outrage would exist? If not, then this isn't a moral question at all, but a monetary one. And if that's the case, it should go without saying that Ubisoft's reputation shouldn't prevent it from being able to try something good and cool with its fans.

Yet another Florida sheriff with a penchant for publicity is using his office (and manpower) to start some garbage viral War on Drugs. Hence, every bust made by his department -- utilizing armored vehicles and deputies that look like they shop at military surplus stores -- is splashed across the department's Facebook page. Fine, if that's what gets your blood flowing, but these scenes of busts, featuring the Sheriff front and center, contain claims that just aren't backed up by the actual paperwork. George Joseph of The Appeal has the details.

The video finds Sheriff [Darryl] Daniels, who announces to the viewer that criminals must leave his county or face the consequences. The camera follows him to the house, briefly focusing on a broken window before Daniels opens the door. Standing in the raided home, Daniels takes a large swig of his morning cup of coffee and declares, “Fifteen going to jail, three big gulps.”

Despite the sheriff’s announcement, the “raid” resulted in only five adult arrests and one juvenile arrest, according to Elaine Brown, a lead records specialist at the sheriff’s office.

At best, maybe five will be going to jail. The sheriff depicts this as a raid on a "narcotics house" targeting opioids. The records obtained by The Appeal show no opioids were found during the raid. Four of the five adults were arrested for marijuana possession. The fifth was charged with MDMA and cocaine possession. But chances are those drugs might vanish along with the nonexistent opioids Sheriff Daniels proudly proclaims were taken out of circulation.

Note the line about the field drug tests performed. These have already been proven bogus. A sheriff's office spokesman informed The Appeal that the 1.2 grams of heroin and fentanyl seized during the raid turned out not be opioids after being lab-tested. But the field tests told Sheriff Daniels everything he wanted to hear.

The reliance on cheap, terrible drug field tests is part of Sheriff Daniels' drug-raiding tradition. Arrests and seizures sound great when you're dragging a camera through someone's house for a Facebook video, but when nothing holds up in court, you're left with an empty charade using citizens as clickbait.

A former deputy contacted by The Appeal points out that cheap drug tests are just another tool for abusive police work.

“The really good ones cost money, but those take away your probable cause,” he said, referring to arrests and police searches for which error-prone drug test field kits can provide legal pretext. “It’s probably the cheapest ones they could get to do the minimum standards for an investigation.”

This same former deputy also pointed out the marijuana charges were trumped up. According to reports, 35 grams of marijuana were seized during the raid, but somehow two people are being charged with possession of more than 20 grams.

Cheap tests, cheap vicarious thrills, and a whole lot of hype over drug charges that will likely dissipate into minimal punishment (if anything) once the lab tests arrive. That's how America's drug warriors roll. Sheriff Daniels rolls a little harder than most, but that's because tough-on-crime sheriffs are newscaster favorites. As The Appeal points out, Daniels has leveraged these videos to appear on national news networks and say ridiculous things like he's planning to treat all drug overdoses as homicides.

This report points out some very unpleasant things about our war on drugs. Law enforcement officials may claim to recognize drug addiction as a sickness, but they're still far more interested in rounding up users than dealers. Faulty field drug tests allow officials to exaggerate their successes (and misrepresent the amount of dangerous drugs in the community), when not allowing them to perform searches they otherwise wouldn't have probable cause to perform. They're part permission slip, part unpaid PR rep. And this constant failure of field drug tests to accurately identify drugs gets ignored but local media, for the most part, isn't willing to follow up on high-profile drug raids to correct the record. And it keeps working because many Americans love the image of "tough on drugs" officers kicking in doors and waving guns around. But, far too often, "tough" just means dumb, brutish, and unconstitutional.

The New York State Senate just keeps pitching unconstitutional law-balls over the plate, apparently assuming legislators' good intentions will overwhelm judges asked to determine just how much the new laws violate the First Amendment.

The senate recently passed an anti-cyberbullying bill -- its fifth attempt to push this across the governor's desk. The law couldn't be bothered to cite which definition of "cyberbullying" it was using, but once the definition was uncovered, it became apparent the bill has zero chance of surviving a Constitutional challenge should it become law.

Eugene Volokh's post on the bill passed along several examples of criminalized speech the bill would result in, including one with its finger directly on social media's pulse.

An under-18-year-old high school student becomes a nationally known activist, for instance for gun control or transgender rights or some such. People repeatedly mock his arguments online, and condemn his as an idiot, which a prosecutor thinks is "verbal abuse" and "would reasonably be expected to cause ... emotional harm" to him. The people can be prosecuted, and will be convicted if the jury agrees with the prosecutor.

The law makes this a Class A misdemeanor, which can be redeemed for a full year in jail if the prosecutor can get a judge to agree on handing out the maximum sentence. That law protects only minors from a variety of protected speech because everyone knows cyberbullying ends once victims turn 18.

The new law that's looking to steamroll protected speech addresses the other side of this generational gap. Eric Turkewitz was again the first person to spot the bad bill, pointing out it would criminalize the posting of photos of grandparents to social media if the photo's subjects suffer from any form of incapacitation and have not given explicit permission for their photos to be posted publicly. His post takes on the First Amendment ramifications of the NY Senate's latest oblique assault on free speech.

Elder Abuse Bill (S.409) that makes it a crime for caregivers (including family) to post photos on social media if elderly, vulnerable seniors aren’t able to give consent.

[...]

First off, while the First Amendment says that Congress “shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,” and the amendment applies to the states, there are still some very limited exceptions to it. But this just isn’t one of them.

The First Amendment is no defense to conspiracy discussions about committing a crime, or defamation, or inciting imminent lawless action, or obscenity or copyright.

I don’t see posting pictures of elderly Ma or Pa on that list. For this bill, if signed, to pass constitutional muster, the Supreme Court would have to create a wholly new category of restricted speech. Do you think they will do that? Or more importantly, did you even analyze that?

My guess is no since this bill passed 61-0, and there are more than a few lawyers in the Senate.

Here's what's being criminalized by this law:

A PERSON IS GUILTY OF UNLAWFUL POSTING OF A VULNERABLE ELDERLY PERSON ON SOCIAL MEDIA WHEN, BEING A CAREGIVER WHILE PERFORMING THEIR DUTY OF CARE FOR A VULNERABLE ELDERLY PERSON, HE OR SHE POSTS AN IMAGE OR VIDEO OF SUCH PERSON ON SOCIAL MEDIA INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE, TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, SNAPCHAT, TUMBLR, FLICKR AND VINE, WITHOUT SUCH PERSON'S CONSENT.

So, like the law says, if you act as a caretaker for an elderly person -- someone who might be your parent, grandparent, or close friend -- you can be charged with a misdemeanor for posting photos of them without their consent. "Vulnerable" in this bill simply means about the age of sixty and "suffering from a disease or infirmity" which prevents them from providing for their own health or personal care. That's a whole lot of gray area to cover with a vaguely-worded bill. As Turkewitz points out in his post, this would criminalize a wide swath of social media sharing simply because someone in the photo did not explicitly consent to publication. He also notes it does not simply criminalize sharing photos of elderly people in incapacitated states. It criminalizes the publication of any photos taken at any point in time.

[L]et’s say that on Veteran’s Day you share a photo of your disabled WW II father for whom you sometimes care. He’s 20 years old in that long-ago-taken pic and in uniform. You are proud of his service as part of the Greatest Generation. Guilty of a misdemeanor.

The bill's supporters will almost certainly claim they never intended the law to be read that way. But the best way to prevent laws from being read this way is to craft them carefully, rather than just toss word salad on the senate floor and hope for the best.

But it's all cool with the senators who voted (again!) for an unconstitutional bill that criminalizes protected speech, because one time this bad thing happened.

Recent media reports have highlighted occurrences of a caretaker taking unauthorized photographs or video recordings of a vulnerable elderly person, sometimes in compromised positions. The photographs are then posted on social media networks, or sent through multimedia messages.

There's no better way to craft a bad law than typing something up quick to criminalize a thing you saw on Facebook. Jesus Christ. This is almost too stupid to be true. [Sobs into tattered copy of US Constitution.] You cannot use the First Amendment as a doormat just because some people are assholes.

The internet is many things to many people. Some of these things are good, while others are bad. Still, it should be fairly uncontroversial to say that the internet has generally done a good job of empowering ordinary people. With the advent of a platform sans gatekeepers, millions of people suddenly had a voice that they would not otherwise have been afforded. The result of this has been the explosion in blogs, podcasts, forums, and other outlets. The internet brings the ability to reach others and that has resulted in an explosion of thought and speech.

It will come as no surprise that plenty of national governments throughout the world aren't huge fans of their people suddenly having this sort of voice and reach. After all, that kind of free expression can often times come in the form of critiques of those very governments, and that kind of reach can create movements of dissent. You may recall back in April when Glyn Moody detailed Tanzania's attempt to tamp down this critical speech by forcing bloggers to register with the government at a cost greater than the average per capita income of its citizens. While this was a fairly naked attempt to keep the voices of its citizens from being heard, Glyn pointed out that the Tanzanian government was at least attempting to be cynically subtle about it.

The current Tanzanian government is not very happy about this uncontrolled flow of information to the people. But instead of anything so crude as shutting down blogs directly, it has come up with a more subtle, but no less effective, approach.

What a difference a few months make in the actions of an authoritarian regime. It seems this more subtle approach did not have the desired effect, as the Tanzanian government has now ordered that all unregistered bloggers simply shut themselves down or face criminal prosecution.

Tanzania ordered all unregistered bloggers and online forums on Monday to suspend their websites immediately or face criminal prosecution, as critics accuse the government of tightening control of internet content. Several sites, including popular online discussion platform Jamiiforums, said on Monday they had temporarily shut down after the state-run Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) warned it would take legal action against all unlicensed websites.

Digital activists say the law is part of a crackdown on dissent and free speech by the government of President John Magufuli, who was elected in 2015. Government officials argue the new rules are aimed at tackling hate speech and other online crimes, including cyberbullying and pornography.

If this all sounds familiar to you, it should, because actions like these were very much the precursors to the Arab Spring. These types of attempts to control the internet, a platform that is well-designed to route around this type of control, rarely work for exactly that reason. People will generally find a way if they are motivated enough, which is what makes trying to disappear dissent a government's first reaction so potentially disastrous.

Critics of this move are predicting the demise of Tanzanian blogging.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders group has said the new online content rules “will kill off Tanzania’s blogosphere”.

Perhaps that's right. Or, perhaps, a move like this does more to spell the end of an authoritarian regime than the demise of a commonplace internet function that is ingrained into the human spirit.

SESTA/FOSTA was pushed through with the fiction it would be used to target sex traffickers. This obviously was never its intent. It faced pushback from the DOJ and law enforcement agencies because pushing traffickers off mainstream sites would make it much more difficult to track them down. The law was really written for one reason: to take down Backpage and its owners, who had survived numerous similar attempts in the past. The DOJ managed to do this without SESTA, which was still waiting for presidential approval when the feds hits the site's principal executives with a 93-count indictment.

The law is in force and all it's doing is hurting efforts to track down sex traffickers and harming sex workers whose protections were already minimal. Sex traffickers, however, don't appear to be bothered by the new law. But that's because the law wasn't written to target sex traffickers, as a top DOJ official made clear at a law enforcement conference on child exploitation. Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan's comments make it clear SESTA/FOSTA won't be used to dismantle criminal organizations and rescue victims of sex traffickers. It's there to give the government easy wins over websites while sex traffickers continue unmolested.

In April, Backpage.com – the internet’s leading forum to advertise child prostitution – was seized and shut down, thanks to the collective action by CEOS and our federal and state partners. The Backpage website was a criminal haven where sex traffickers marketed their young victims. The Backpage takedown – and the contemporaneous arrests of individuals allegedly responsible for administering the site – struck a monumental blow against child sex traffickers.

But other sites inevitably will seek to fill the void left by Backpage, and we must be vigilant in bringing those criminals to justice as well. With the recent passage of the SESTA-FOSTA legislation, state and local prosecutors are now positioned to more effectively prosecute criminals that host online sex trafficking markets that victimize our children.

"Criminals" that "host sex trafficking markets." That's the target. That's any website that might be used by actual sex traffickers to engage in actual sex trafficking. There's no dedicated web service for sex trafficking -- at least not out in the open where Section 230 immunity used to matter. This is all about taking down websites for hosting any content perceived as sex trafficking-related. It wasn't enough to hang Backpage and its execs. The government will be scanning sites for this content and then targeting the website for content posted by third parties it seems mostly uninterested in pursuing.

Hosts of third-party content are usually easy to find. The actual third parties are far more difficult to track down. Intermediary liability is back. Section 230 is no longer an effective defense. The edges have been trimmed back and the government knows it can rack up easy wins over web hosts and slowly start destroying the web under the facade of saving sex trafficking victims. The DOJ knew this law would make it harder to track down traffickers. But it also knows the law allows it to target websites instead. And here it is touting the law it fought against to a conference full of law enforcement officials, letting them know targeting websites will give them wins and accolades and far fewer headaches than tracking down the individuals actually engaged in illegal activity.

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Large ISPs like Comcast, Charter, Verizon and AT&T this week uniformly proclaimed that the death of net neutrality is going to be a really wonderful thing for American consumers. Charter Spectrum, for example, took to the company's policy blog to insist that the neutering of historically popular consumer protections on this front will somehow result in everybody getting better broadband. The ISP's argument, as it has throughout this entire little dog and pony show, focused on the repeatedly debunked claim that the FCC's pretty modest net neutrality rules demolished telecom industry investment:

"Without the regulatory overhang of these rules however, businesses like ours will have the certainty they need to make infrastructure investments over the long-term, helping more people get online and enabling even faster broadband. This includes bringing high speed broadband to more hard to serve areas, including rural communities."

Which is something you might be inclined to actually believe if Charter's own executives weren't on record publicly stating that the rules had absolutely no meaningful impact on Charter's bottom line:

"Title II, it didn't really hurt us; it hasn't hurt us," Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said at an investor event in December 2016, according to a report by advocacy group Free Press. Publicly traded companies like Charter are required to give investors accurate financial information, including a description of risk factors involved in investing in the company."

In fact, dozens of industry CEOs have publicly admitted to investors and media outlets that the whole "net neutrality hurt broadband investment" is completely baseless, something proven by anybody willing to spend five minutes with industry SEC filings and earnings reports. And while industry-hired economists tried to cherry pick very specific windows of investment to try and claim the exact opposite, the data here is pretty clear. In fact, an analysis by consumer groups (pdf) found that Charter's overall CAPEX actually went up in the wake of the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rule creation:

"Charter’s capital investments went up 15 percent after the FCC’s Open Internet vote (when we include the pre-merger investments made by Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks). And not only are Charter’s investments up, they’re 12 percent higher than the estimates Charter gave to investors prior to closing that merger.

This being post-truth America however, facts don't appear to carry quite the same weight as they used to, and it's abundantly clear that some of the least-liked companies in America are confident in their belief that repetition forges reality. Apparently, said companies hope that if they repeat this nonsense often enough, people won't notice the government sold them, and the health of the internet, down river without a second thought (and in some instances, that's pretty clearly working).

Granted Charter then gets to the real point of the company's blog post; to push for a new net neutrality law the company knows that in this political climate, they'll be the ones writing:

""Charter’s commitment to our customers is our top priority. We urge Congress to pass new legislation that preserves an open internet and ensures a regulatory framework made for the 21st century, so we can continue to improve and invest in our networks and provide more people access to a fast, reliable, and open internet."

We've noted how ISPs are worried about losing the looming court case over net neutrality, as well as the dozens of states that are now imposing state-level net neutrality protections. As such, the hope is that they can push forth a loophole-filled net neutrality law in name only; one with so many loopholes as to effectively be useless, but which will pre-empt any tougher state or federal rules (including the restoration of the FCC's 2015 rules). It's a gambit that's not really working, in large part because these companies have obliterated any last vestiges of public trust they may have had with this latest lobbying assault.

The damning report the President has been waiting for has arrived. The Inspector General's report covering everything from James Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation (terribly with bonus insubordination) to a couple of FBI agents forming a two-person #Resistance (stupid and made the FBI look bad, but not illegal) runs almost 600 pages and won't make anyone looking to pin blame solely on one side of the partisan divide very happy.

It's been claimed the report would finally show the FBI to be an agency filled with partisan hacks, further solidifying "Deep State" conspiracy theories that the government Trump runs is out to destroy Trump. It was somehow going to accomplish this despite many people feeling the FBI's late October dive back into the Clinton email investigation handed the election to Trump.

Whatever the case -- and whatever side of the political divide you cheer for -- the only entity that comes out of this looking terrible is the FBI. That the FBI would engage in questionable behavior shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but the anti-Trump "resistance" has taken Trump's attacks on the FBI as a reason to convert Comey, the FBI, and the DOJ into folk heroes of democracy.

The summary of the report [PDF] runs 15 pages by itself and hands out enough damning bullet points to keep readers occupied for hours. Then there's the rest of the report, which provides the details and may take several days to fully parse.

Here are some of the low lights from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, possibly the only person who should be touting "Deep State" theories since he's spent his IG career being dicked around by the DEA, DOJ, FBI, and DEA.

The report says everything about the Clinton email investigation was unusual. Termed the "Midyear Exam" by the FBI, the investigation was mostly a voluntary affair. Most of the evidence and testimony obtained was obtained from consenting witnesses and participants. The FBI rarely felt the need to compel testimony or evidence with subpoenas. It also did not access the contents of multiple devices used by Clinton's senior aides, devices that may have contained classified info that had been circulated through a private email server. As the report notes, this is at odds with Comey's sudden interest in Anthony Weiner's laptop, where his estranged wife (and former Clinton personal assistant) Huma Abedin apparently had stored copies of Clinton emails.

The IG says the tactics used were unusual but does not pass official judgment on them. However, the actions of five FBI employees involved in the investigation did further damage to the FBI and its reputation by taking an investigation already viewed as politically-questionable and aggravating the perception.

In undertaking our analysis, our task was made significantly more difficult because of text and instant messages exchanged on FBI devices and systems by five FBI employees involved in the Midyear investigation. These messages reflected political opinions in support of former Secretary Clinton and against her then political opponent, Donald Trump. Some of these text messages and instant messages mixed political commentary with discussions about the Midyear investigation, and raised concerns that political bias may have impacted investigative decisions.

However, the IG did not uncover evidence suggesting any of these FBI employees had the power to steer the investigation. Some of those engaged in anti-Trump texts actually pushed for additional subpoenas and search warrants in an investigation that seemingly had little use for any testimony not obtained voluntarily. But that doesn't mean these actions were harmless.

Nonetheless, these messages cast a cloud over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation and the investigation’s credibility.

From there, it moves on to James Comey's surprising decision to go public with the email investigation's conclusions in July of 2016. This followed the softening of language in the FBI's investigative report. Clinton's handling of classified info went from "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless." The possibility of hostile actors accessing Clinton's email server went from "reasonably likely" to "possible." Then Comey decided to go public, cutting plenty of people out of the loop so they wouldn't prevent him from doing so.

Comey acknowledged that he made a conscious decision not to tell Department leadership about his plans to make a separate statement because he was concerned that they would instruct him not to do it. He also acknowledged that he made this decision when he first conceived of the idea to do the statement, even as he continued to engage the Department in discussions about the “endgame” for the investigation.

Comey admitted that he concealed his intentions from the Department until the morning of his press conference on July 5, and instructed his staff to do the same, to make it impracticable for Department leadership to prevent him from delivering his statement. We found that it was extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to do so, and we found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions.

[...]

We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct. We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the Attorney General, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of Department prosecutors.

The late October letter to Congress about the reopening of the investigation isn't viewed as any better by the OIG. Comey claimed he needed to do this because withholding the discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop might have been viewed as swinging the election in Clinton's favor. The IG disagrees.

Much like with his July 5 announcement, we found that in making this decision, Comey engaged in ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views even if it meant rejecting longstanding Department policy or practice. We found unpersuasive Comey’s explanation as to why transparency was more important than Department policy and practice with regard to the reactivated Midyear investigation while, by contrast, Department policy and practice were more important to follow with regard to the Clinton Foundation and Russia investigations.

Comey’s description of his choice as being between “two doors,” one labeled “speak” and one labeled “conceal,” was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled “follow policy/practice” and “depart from policy/practice.” Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment.

Then comes the irony. As Comey became the front-mouth for an investigation he shouldn't have been talking about, he routinely engaged in the same behavior he was currently investigating.

We identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account to conduct unclassified FBI business. We found that, given the absence of exigent circumstances and the frequency with which the use of personal email occurred, Comey’s use of a personal email account for unclassified FBI business to be inconsistent with Department policy.

In addition to being a violation of FBI policy, James Comey -- currently idolized by some as a speaker of truth to power for being fired by the president -- also violated FOIA law by using a private email account for government communications. Comey wasn't the only one -- other agents involved in the investigation routinely used private email accounts -- but he was the FBI's personification of the Clinton email investigation. On top of this, he told other FBI agents the use of personal email accounts would subject them to harsh punishment.

In an October 2016 speech at an FBI conference in San Diego, Comey said, "I have gotten emails from some employees about this, who said if I did what Hillary Clinton did I'd be in huge trouble. My response is you bet your ass you'd be in huge trouble. If you used a personal email, Gmail or if you [had] the capabilities to set up your own email domain, if you used an unclassified personal email system to do our business... you would be in huge trouble in the FBI."

Some may quibble about the lack of classified info being circulated by these agents and their Gmail accounts, but the fact remains the use of private email accounts increases the risk of circulation exponentially. Sticking to government accounts reduces this possibility to zero.

There's much more in the report, including some discussion about the propriety of the Russian influence investigation that Trump claims is a witch hunt. Nothing in the report suggests the investigation isn't valid, even if the actions of agents (the anti-Trump texting) and Andrew McCabe's non-recusal (his wife took money from a Clinton-connected PAC) managed to cover everything with a slimy gloss of impropriety.

The upshot of the report is this: James Comey deserved to be fired, although probably not for the reasons Trump had in mind when he did it. The people employed by the FBI are not always able to set aside their personal biases when engaged in investigations. But the FBI is no one party's political tool. It's a blend of both sides, which makes it unlikely anything was done intentionally to harm Trump or Clinton's political prospects. For all the complaining done by Trump, he's the one in office. If the election was "thrown" by Comey's fourth quarter audible in the email investigation, Trump was the beneficiary of the FBI's actions. This makes complaints about a Russian investigation "witch hunt" incoherent, as it tries to retcon the FBI's actions to portray them as being #NeverTrump even when they were (not officially) helping him. The simultaneous investigations of Clinton and Trump make it difficult to craft a coherent conspiracy theory, but it certainly isn't stopping anyone from trying. The FBI is untrustworthy, but it's not a kingmaker.