Survey Says… More Than Half Of Households With LAPD Officers Support Dismantling The LAPD

Studies

from the we-live-with-you-and-even-we-think-you're-a-problem dept

Ever since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, there has been a lot of discussion about dismantling or defunding police departments. Some of this discussion occurred at the flashpoint. But it wasn’t limited to Minneapolis. Efforts to limit the damage caused by law enforcement by, say, farming out mental health calls to health care professionals (rather than people with guns trained to view everything as a threat) began to spread.

Following these calls for actions, police officials (and government officials unwilling to go head-to-head against powerful police unions) began claiming any effort to limit funding or power would result in massive spikes in criminal activity. Any anomaly in crime rates (but only those showing an increase) was presented as proof that merely discussing defunding was emboldening criminals. Other opportunistic politicians declared any proffered streamlining of police departments to be the action of radicals unworthy of being included in discussions of societal welfare.

The dividing line in discussions often appeared to be limited to those who had felt the oppressive weight of decades of policing and those who had never experienced this oppression, either because they were white males or police officers — two categories with a sizable Venn diagram overlap.

But even people who know, love, and otherwise support cops are starting to realize law enforcement agencies — as they exist now — may not be the answer going forward. A recent survey of 1,755 households in Los Angeles, California — performed by Loyola Marymount University — shows even cop households support severe alterations of the current cop paradigm.

There’s plenty of interesting and useful information in this survey [PDF], much of which shows there’s still overall support for law enforcement in Los Angeles. But there’s also a lot of desire for change and plenty of recognition that ongoing issues with day-to-day policing (selective enforcement, racial profiling) still need to be addressed.

But perhaps the most stunning survey result is this: households that are home to law enforcement officers are showing plenty of support for defunding or dismantling the LAPD. (h/t Stop LAPD Spying Coalition)

The LAPD has chosen to highlight only certain results from this survey, including one data point that shows those surveyed support the presence of more LAPD officers in their neighborhoods. But the LAPD has yet to respond to these devastating results, which show LAPD officers’ families believe the LAPD should be subjected to some form of budgetary overhaul:

Survey results for respondents with a “police force member in the household” support proposals to “dismantle the police,” compiling a 52.2% majority that either “strongly” or “somewhat” support these proposals. When it comes to defunding the police, the percentage is somewhat smaller (49.6%) but still surprising, showing nearly half of all households housing a cop support defunding efforts. The least extreme of these options — redirecting money from the LAPD budget to other city services — sees even more support from cop households: 63.7%.

This shows there’s plenty of support for efforts like these in places police and government officials insist there isn’t: in families who rely on a cop’s income. It is not solely the product of over-heated radicals who prefer anarchy to the “thin blue line.” Even cop families realize police officers are not the solution to a most societal issues and support efforts that rethink how police work is done and move money to other entities that can better serve those who have been underserved by cops for decades.

Filed Under: defund the police, lapd, police

Medieval Times Tries To Bully Its Workers Out Of Unionizing With A Bullshit Trademark Lawsuit

Trademark

from the more-like-mid-evil,-amirite? dept

Trademark bullying usually takes a pretty typical form. Someone with a trademark decides to interpret the need to enforce their mark in an extreme way and goes off threatening and/or suing everyone that even comes mildly close to using the registered trademark. It’s annoying, although perhaps mildly understandable if you squint your eyes just right.

But then there are bullies that wield trademark for purposes that are completely illegitimate. You may recall that Walmart, exemplar of virtuous corporate ideology to be sure, went after some of its Canadian workers for trademark infringement, even though the real aim was to try to tamp down those workers’ plans to unionize. The bullshit claim was that the union’s name and its websites name, Walmart Workers Canada, were going to cause the public to think that the union was endorsed by Walmart itself. This is hilariously unlikely for any number of reasons, but also flies in the face of the fact that it cannot be trademark infringement to accurately title the name of your organization based on its purpose.

Well, it looks like someone is trying this in the United States now. Medieval Times, the company that sets up fake castles where you go and eat, drink, and watch jousting matches, has sued its own employees that are attempting to unionize under the exact same trademark infringement scenario.

In its lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court, Medieval Times said the union, the American Guild of Variety Artists, had created “consumer confusion” by allowing workers to use the name “Medieval Times Performers United.” The company claims the union is “threatening the established goodwill of Medieval Times” by including the chain’s name and medieval-themed imagery in its name and logo.

“The elements featured in the Medieval Times Performers Logo (i.e., castle, swords, old script style text) all resemble elements of Medieval Times’s branding and middle ages-themed décor, which are clearly meant to evoke Medieval Times’ unique image,” the company said in its lawsuit.

Yes, of course they are. These workers work for Medieval Times. As for the claims that the branding is similar, you can see everything the company lays out in the embedded filing below. That being said, here is one example the company provides.

Uh, no, not similar font styles. Like… at all. They’re completely different fonts and in different coloration. The other examples are just as bad. For example, the union logo has two swords crossing behind the emblem. The company claims this is trademark infringement because in the gift shops at the “castles” the company often has a display where multiple swords are pointed inward. Think I’m exaggerating? Well…

Add to all of that the fact that the union’s proposed name is an accurate description of the organization and you’re left with the notion that this is all clearly protected speech and/or fair use of the company’s trademarked name.

So, what’s going on here? Like we said from the top: bullying. The company is looking to make the process of unionizing as painful as possible for its workers. For its part, the union is discussing whether to get the National Labor Relations Board involved, which it damned well should. Especially considering that there are similar unions that have sprung up in other companies where this so-called trademark infringement has never been at issue.

Many workers have been organizing new unions lately under a variation of the “united” theme. Some examples are Starbucks Workers United, Trader Joe’s United and Home Depot Workers United. To HuffPost’s knowledge, none of those companies have sued the worker organizations for alleged trademark infringement.

Same. Maybe it’s time for Medievel Times to get with the modern times and stop trying to keep the union from forming by abusing trademark law.

Filed Under: bullying, medieval times performers united, trademark, unions
Companies: american guild of variety artists, medieval times

European Commission Says Pharma Company Teva Abused The Patent System To Violate Antitrust Laws

Patents

from the once-a-monopoly,-always-a-monopoly dept

I always find it vaguely amusing when the government realizes that the system of monopoly rights it created is used to restrain competition. The latest is over in the EU, where the European Commission has gone after pharmaceutical giant Teva, for abusing the patent system to limit competition for its multiple sclerosis medicine. Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, we’ve written about Teva a few times, and many of them involve the FTC and various states going after Teva and other pharma companies for sketchy practices to limit competition and inflate prices.

The FTC case was about Teva using “pay-for-delay” tactics, where its drugs would be on the verge of going off patent, but it would engage in a variety of scammy behaviors, including paying competitors (via bogus lawsuits leading to pre-planned “settlements”) not to enter the market, in order to retain the monopoly for longer than the law allowed.

It appears that Teva was up to similar tricks in Europe. Here’s the summary from the Commission of what Teva did to retain its ability to extract monopoly rents for drugs that were going off patent:

• Misused patent procedures: after the original, basic patent expired, Teva artificially extended glatiramer acetate’s basic patent protection by filing and withdrawing secondary patent applications, thereby forcing its competitors to file new lengthy legal challenges each time. This scheme is sometimes referred to as the “divisionals game”. This is because the strategy implies filing so-called “divisional patents” which are patents derived from an earlier secondary patent and whose subject matter is already contained in the earlier patent. This artificially prolongs legal uncertainty to the benefit of the patent holder, and can effectively block or delay entry of generic or generic-like medicines.
• Implemented a systematic disparagement campaign targeting healthcare professionals and casting doubts about the safety and efficacy of a competing glatiramer acetate medicine and its therapeutic equivalence with Copaxone.

Of course, all of this seems quite ironic, given that Teva rose to fame by being one of the biggest makers of generic drugs after those drugs went off-patent from other pharma companies. Hell, just last week Teva asked the Supreme Court in the US to hear an appeal on a case regarding whether or not its use of “skinny labels” (marketing generic drugs by leaving out still patented uses) violates patents or not. So, for Teva to be such a giant in the generic market, while simultaneously trying to block other generics from coming to market seems mighty hypocritical.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, drug patents, european commission, generics, patents, pharma
Companies: teva

Comedians Eric Andre, Clayton English Sue Atlanta Airport Cops Over Racially Motivated Stops

Legal Issues

from the bias-cherry-on-the-forfeiture-cake dept

Lawsuits like these are filed all the time. Why? Because, just like out in the open world, opportunistic officers find it easy to coerce people into questioning and searches with the implication they’ll be delayed reaching their destination (or worse) if they don’t.

And, like everywhere else in the US, many of these stops are racially motivated, disproportionately targeting minorities. Minorities have more at stake and, consequently, are often more likely to view the searches and questioning as an inevitable part of the American experience.

But few lawsuits alleging racial bias and unconstitutional searches are filed by famous people. That’s because most cops know better than to screw with people with the resources to fight back.

Last year, comedian Eric Andre was quasi-apprehended by Clayton County law enforcement officers while trying to board a flight in Atlanta. The tactics used by law enforcement in this airport aren’t unusual. But they are especially devious. Cops hang out on the jet bridges connecting the terminal to the airplane, giving their targets limited options. There’s really nowhere else to go. And officers know it.

Andre complained about his involuntary encounter after it occurred early last year, claiming it was racial profiling. The Clayton County Police Department responded with a statement perhaps prematurely exonerating it of any wrongdoing.

“Mr. Andre chose to speak with investigators during the initial encounter,” the department said in a statement released to local news outlets. “During the encounter, Mr. Andre voluntarily provided the investigators information as to his travel plans. Mr. Andre also voluntarily consented to a search of his luggage but the investigators chose not to do so. Investigators identified that there was no reason to continue a conversation and therefore terminated the encounter.”

The department’s use of the word “voluntary” is incredibly suspect. On a narrow jet bridge, people are going to feel compelled to cooperate, even if officers don’t make any explicit threats.

The same thing apparently happened to another black comedian, Clayton (no relation to the county) English. Both comedians make the same allegation: cops stopped them on jet bridges because they were the only black people boarding these flights. Both were subjected to questioning about drug trafficking and multiple requests for consent to search them and their carry-on luggage. (h/t Josie Duffy Rice)

These two encounters are the subject matter of this recent lawsuit [PDF], helpfully provided to us by Axios. (The Associated Press delivered some of the earliest reporting but apparently found it impossible to secure a copy of the lawsuit.)

The lawsuit targets both the county and the individual officers who performed these stops, alleging the Clayton County PD’s “drug interdiction” program is nothing more than a big bag of constitutional violations that allow officers to pretend its biased stops are actually “random.”

But there’s nothing about these stops that’s random. That pretense is easily destroyed by actual statistics.

Although CCPD officers reportedly tell stopped passengers that they have been chosen at “random,” CCPD’s own records make clear that the officers conducting the jet bridge interdiction program select their targets based on race. From September 2020 through April 2021—a period that captures the stops of Plaintiffs Eric André and Clayton English—CCPD conducted 378 passenger interdictions in jet bridges where department records list the race of the passenger stopped. Of those, 56% of stopped passengers were Black. Given that only 8% of American airline passengers are Black (and given that the Atlanta Airport fairly represents that population), the probability of this happening randomly is staggering: significantly less than one in one hundred trillion.

Not only is it racially biased, the interdiction program is completely useless.

With regard to drugs, CCPD records show that, over an eight-month span that captures the period at issue in this complaint, CCPD officers conducting jet bridge stops found fewer than 0.08 pounds (36 grams) of illegal drugs, plus 6 prescription pills with no valid prescription, and CCPD only brought charges against two passengers.

Maybe it’s useless because officer bias leads them to stop the sort of people they think look like criminals (darker, swarthier, etc.) rather than actual criminals. Or maybe it’s because the drug interdiction program isn’t really about interdicting drugs. It’s about intercepting cash.

As for the currency seized in this same time frame by officers implementing the jet bridge interdiction program—totaling over $1,000,000—all but one of the passengers from whom CCPD seized money were allowed to continue on their travels. These seizures do not meaningfully combat drug trafficking, but they do provide a financial windfall for the department by taking advantage of the permissive civil standards for asset forfeitures and the reluctance of individuals (particularly individuals of color) to challenge seizures.

Hopefully, Clayton County’s finest and whatever representatives it sends to represent the elected will be given a chance to explain away all of these inconvenient facts.

And hopefully it will get a chance to explain how actions like these contribute to the claimed voluntary-ness of these sky bridge stops.

After moving him to the side of the jet bridge, one officer stood on Mr. English’s left while the other stood on his right, effectively blocking his path onto the plane.

One officer asked Mr. English to hand over his ID and boarding pass. Mr. English complied. He understood that he did not have any choice.

While holding his ID and boarding pass, the officers continued to ask Mr. English if he was carrying illegal drugs and began to ask questions about his profession, his reason for traveling to Los Angeles, and how long he planned to stay.

Possibly free to go… but to where? The officers had his ID and boarding pass. Beyond English was the plane he wanted to board. Behind him was a terminal that would become a particularly hellish purgatory without an ID or boarding pass. Only after English “consented” to a search of his luggage was he given back his ID and boarding pass and allowed to board the plane.

It’s a compulsory experience, purposely designed to appear consensual — one that uses all the right words and phrases that stop just short of demanding compliance while implying very explicitly that refusal isn’t really an option.

By ambushing passengers in this manner, the Unit’s officers compound the enormous, preexisting compulsion to cooperate with airport law enforcement by exploiting the passengers’ fear that they will create an untoward scene or will appear guilty, subversive, or dangerous to their fellow passengers. By design, all of these factors exert tremendous coercive pressure on an individual passenger in the jet bridge to acquiesce to the officers’ wishes. Those pressures are even greater for persons of color, given the history of racial profiling by airport security officers.

The comedians are hoping to find the drug interdiction program run by the CCPD to be declared unconstitutional. And they want each involved officer held personally responsible for violating their rights. We’ll see how many of these claims survive the first motion to dismiss (immunity of multiple varieties will be invoked), but the lawsuit — even if it ends up being tossed — puts plenty of uncomfortable facts on the record. And hopefully, if nothing else, it will lead to Clayton County abandoning this useless cash grab of a program, or at least, engaging in more oversight of officers’ actions.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, ccpd, civil asset forfeiture, clayton county, clayton english, drug interdiction, eric andre, georgia, legalized theft, racism, tsa

Federal Judge Says FBI Misled Magistrate When Seeking Safe Deposit Warrants, OKs Searches Anyway

Legal Issues

from the probable-cause-means-pretty-much-fine dept

Last March, the FBI raided a storefront safety deposit box service owned by US Private Vaults. US Private Vaults is all about privacy. It offers customers something akin to end-to-end encryption for their physical goods. Very little customer information is retained and only customers have access to their possessions. The company does not carry a master key.

This apparently led the FBI to believe the vault service was being used to store proceeds of criminal activity. It obtained a search warrant and yanked out the entire contents of the company’s Los Angeles storefront. Then it searched the contents of the boxes it had taken for evidence of criminal activity.

That would normally be fine, considering the FBI is in the busting criminals business. But it pointedly told the judge who approved the warrant that it wouldn’t do the very thing it began doing as soon as the boxes were in its possession. This is from the FBI’s warrant affidavit:

This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the safety deposit boxes. In seizing the nests of safety deposit boxes, agents shall follow their written inventory policies to protect their agencies and the contents of the boxes. Also in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property.

The FBI did actually notify some owners, but only via forfeiture proceedings under the theory the property was illegally obtained. It was a major haul for the agency — nearly $86 million in cash alone — and all from a single raid.

Some box owners sued in an attempt to block the FBI from seizing their property. Some of this litigation was successful. Most of the seizures, however, went unchallenged. The Institute for Justice stepped in to challenge seizures, pointing out the FBI’s seemingly deliberate lie about its plans for the boxes it had seized.

Unfortunately, the federal court handling this case doesn’t think the FBI’s lie matters, at least not in terms of determining probable cause. The court apparently agrees the magistrate was misled by the warrant affidavit which swore the FBI would not search the boxes to further its criminal investigation. But misleading another court is fine with this court, since the FBI probably would have just come up with another satisfactory excuse for its pretextual searches.

Here’s what little the court [PDF] has to say about the FBI’s true motives — the ones it concealed from the magistrate judge:

Given this evidence, there can be no question that the Government expected, or even hoped, to find criminal evidence during its inventory [of the seized boxes].

But that apparently doesn’t matter. A pretext still works if there’s a legitimate excuse for continuing to rummage through the boxes even after finding identifying info that would allow the FBI to notify the property’s owners. The FBI was also performing an inventory of box contents, and that’s all the pretext the government needed to turn an innocuous search for people’s info into a search for criminal evidence.

An impermissible investigatory motive must be the only reason the agents conducted the inventory.

[…]

Once the nests were seized, the warrant authorized the agents to inventory their contents, an inventory which was intended to “protect the FBI, [] to get an accounting of what’s actually there, [] to protect us against an accusation of theft or loss, [] to protect us against hazardous material, and … to get a full, you know, accounting of what’s there when we return it.”

[…]

It beggars belief that agents would have worked in this manner solely to invent a pretext for a criminal search of the box contents.

Yeah, well, I don’t think that really beggars belief. It sounds like the sort of thing law enforcement officers do all the time — work backwards to probable cause from mere pretexts, occasionally dressing things up with plausible deniability and/or parallel construction. Certainly none of this was presented to the judge when the warrant was sought. In fact, the opposite was asserted: the government would not be looking for criminal evidence, something it immediately began doing under the pretense it wanted to protect itself against accusations of wrongdoing.

As for the probable cause, the court says it still exists even if the government’s misleading statements about only caring about identifying box owners were excised.

The affidavit was rife with details of prior investigations into individual USPV boxholders that resulted in forfeiture, and it noted that the agents would have inferred that the inventory could lead to the potential discovery of criminal proceeds in certain boxes, which would then lead to forfeiture.

Probable cause to seize was probable cause to search, even if the FBI misled a judge and ignored its own policies. That’s the final call. This ruling does nothing for those challenging the searches. All it really does is refine the blueprint the government uses to bypass Fourth Amendment protections.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, civil asset forfeiture, fbi, safe deposit box
Companies: us private vaults

Daily Deal: Apple iPad 6th Gen (Refurbished: Wi-Fi Only) + Accessories Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

This refurbished iPad 6th Gen features a full-sized 9.7″ tablet with a 2048×1536 LED-backlit Retina display, allowing you to surf the web, stream videos, or read files on a sharper, wider screen. It contains a dual-core 2.3 GHz Apple A10 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of flash memory storage, allowing the iPad to run smoothly in the background. It also includes dual cameras, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connectivity. Powered by a 32.4Whr Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery, you can take your browsing anywhere for up to 10 hours. Get all these quality Apple features for only a fraction of what you’d pay buying new. Plus it comes with a snap-on case, a lightning cable, and an AC wall adapter. It’s all on sale for $240.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Multiple New Studies Again Suggest The Internet Is Not Creating An ‘Infodemic’; Cable News, On The Other Hand…

Studies

from the but-of-course dept

Early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the world was facing an “infodemic,” a mass outbreak of false and misleading information. While the WHO did not coin the term, it certainly made it popular, and contributed to the idea that it was the internet that was the leading cause of this infodemic. Today, it seems set in stone that the internet is the main vector for the spread of false information, and this is leading to all sorts of regulatory pushes by people all around the globe who think that the internet is to blame for all the bad stuff that is happening.

However, as we’ve noted over the years, the data… rarely seems to back up these claims. In 2019, we wrote about the book, Network Propaganda, written by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, which presents a ton of evidence that lies about the 2016 election would go viral not because of the internet, but because of Fox News pushing them. In 2020 (pre-election), they released some follow-up research concerning disinformation about mail-in ballots and again found that the spread of misinformation was “elite-driven, mass-media led” and that social media “played only a secondary role.”

But maybe you question their methodology (though, you should read the details, because it’s pretty comprehensive and thorough). Nirit Weiss-Blatt points us to an article by journalists-turned-academics Nick Mathews and Mark Coddington, highlighting a bundle of recent research that again suggests little evidence of an online “infodemic,” but at least some evidence of Fox News being the real main venue for spreading disinformation.

They point to a few different studies, with the first one showing that most people actually turned to trustworthy sources of news during the pandemic, rather than less trustworthy sources.

We find that in 2020 online news consumption increased. Trustworthy news outlets benefited the most from the increase in web traffic. In the UK trustworthy news outlets also benefited the most from the increase in Facebook engagement, but in other countries both trustworthy and untrustworthy news outlets benefited from the increase in Facebook engagement. Overall, untrustworthy news outlets captured 2.3% of web traffic and 14.0% of Facebook engagement, while news outlets regularly publishing false content accounted for 1.4% of web traffic and 6.8% of Facebook engagement. People largely turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

Next up was a study that involved surveying 14,000 people exploring whether or not the pandemic drove people into their own echo chambers. Again, we’ve highlighted other research in the past that suggests the internet actually decreases echo chambers, rather than increases them. Here, this new research more or less confirms the same thing regarding COVID info. The research looked at whether or not people focused on “like-minded” information (echo chambers) or explored more “cross cutting” (diverse) sources of information, and it showed a strong indication of cross-cutting information — though that was even stronger where citizens were most concerned about COVID and where governments were screwing up. In other words, when the government is incompetent, people inherently know it’s not healthy to stick in information bubbles.

A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to test the extent to which citizens were exposed to information from cross-cutting sources on traditional and social media after the outbreak. Utilizing a two-wave panel survey among 14,218 participants across 17 countries – conducted before and after the initial outbreak – we show that citizens concerned about COVID-19 were more exposed to cross-cutting information on traditional and social media. The positive relationship with cross-cutting exposure to traditional news was stronger in countries where governments adopted less stringent policy responses, and in countries with greater pandemic severity and weaker democratic institutions. Our comparative approach thus sheds light on the social and political contexts in which cross-cutting exposure can occur.

I don’t think we should look at that as a ringing endorsement of incompetent governments, but it is still an interesting all around finding.

The final study looks at how one’s media consumption habits impacted their views on COVID mitigation strategies. Here they found that (after controlling for a bunch of factors), cable TV seemed to contribute the most to shaping one’s views, not the internet.

This research assesses how the environment for coronavirus disease (COVID) information contributed to the public’s willingness to support measures intended to mitigate the spread and transmission of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. A representative sample of 600 Floridians was surveyed in April 2020. After controlling for sociodemographic factors, COVID anxiety, and knowledge about the virus, we find that components of the information environment mattered for public opinion related to mitigation policies. Television news sources, including local and national network news, center-left cable news (i.e., CNN, MSNBC), and Fox News, contributed to shaping policy support. The results highlight the importance of televised news coverage in shaping public opinion toward healthcare-related policies.

As Coddington and Mathews note, with the controls for partisanship, this study shows that this is not just correlation between conservatives pre-disposed to one view all watching Fox News, and liberals pre-disposed to the opposite view watching MSNBC. Instead, it strongly suggests that cable news contributes to their views:

The control for partisanship is a key factor here. It indicates that the influence of Fox News is not simply a product of conservatives being more likely to oppose mitigation and also more likely to watch Fox News. It suggests, instead, that the cable channels (and network TV news) may have had an influence apart from simple partisan audience self-selection. On the flip side, neither Facebook nor government communication (e.g., press conferences by Donald Trump and other elected officials) were significantly associated with views on mitigation.

So, now the studies seem to be coming fast and furious suggesting that cable news has much more of an impact on our views than the internet. And yet, I can bet that we’re just going to keep hearing about how everything is the fault of the internet. Of course, it seems worth noting that it’s often the very same mainstream media, either cable news itself, or publications owned by the same companies who own cable news… pushing these “infodemic” stories. It’s almost as if they have a reason to attack the internet, while ignoring their own culpability.

Filed Under: cable news, disinformation, infodemic, internet, misinformation, propaganda, social media
Companies: facebook, fox news, meta, msnbc

5G Airplane Interference Worries Were Largely Overhyped

Overhype

from the the-sky-is-falling dept

Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety.

The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference with certain radio altimeters. But the FCC conducted its own study showing minimal issues, and pointed to the more than 40 countries have deployed 5G in this bandwidth with no evidence of harm. Lifelong wireless spectrum policy experts like Harold Feld also blogged about how this was a an overheated controversy, and any real harm could be mitigated.

It didn’t much matter. It didn’t take long before the news wires were filled with reports about how 5G was going to be a diabolical public safety menace when it came to air travel. In part, thanks to folks at the FAA, who leaked scary stories to outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

A year later, and a new NTIA study has found that yeah, most of the potential harm 5G can cause to altimeters can be mitigated with some software updates and careful strategizing of tower placement around airports, just as the FCC and numerous other countries had already stated years earlier:

Researchers found that 5G transmissions stay safely within their assigned frequencies and mostly don’t point signals skyward where aircraft operate, according to the report released Tuesday, the first of several from the government on the new high-speed mobile phone service.

There is a “low level of unwanted 5G emissions” in frequencies used by so-called radar altimeters — which calculate a plane’s distance from the ground and are critical to landing in low visibility — the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in the report.

The findings offer the the strongest indication to date that the patches being applied to some aircraft models should work well to protect them. 

The fact that this always was a minor, fixable problem probably won’t get anywhere near the coverage you saw last year when countless news outlets proclaimed that airliners could soon start falling from the sky thanks to 5G. This was also a weird instance where the FAA failed to cooperatively heed the insights of the FCC, the one regulator specifically tasked with understanding how wireless spectrum actually works.

Filed Under: 5g, airelines, faa, fcc, hype, interference, safety