Benjamin Wittes of the Lawfare blog has filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DOJ, hoping to force the government to put its documents where the president's mouth is. [h/t Pwn All The Things]

Back in February, President Trump made the following assertion before a joint Congressional session:

“According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

But what data? That's what Wittes is seeking. As he pointed out in April, it appears the president generated this assertion completely out of firing synapses and airborne vibrations.

I'm going to be very blunt here: I not only believe that the White House made up "alternative facts" about the substance of this matter in a Presidential address to a Joint Session of Congress, I don't believe that the National Security Division of the Justice Department provided any data or analysis to the White House that could reasonably be read to support the President's claim. In other words, I believe the President was lying not merely about the underlying facts but about his own Justice Department. Or, in the alternative, I believe it's possible that the Office of the Attorney General may have supported the White House's claim. But I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the folks at NSD actually provided data in support of this presidential statement.

Other authors at Lawfare examined the claim in detail, finding that when people extradited to America to face charges were excluded from the count, the ratio of foreign-born terrorism convicts dropped to 18-21% of the total -- not anywhere near a "vast majority."

Beyond that, there's likely zero data available to support Trump's claim. Wittes notes the DOJ doesn't actually track where convicts are born, and certainly doesn't do so when foreigners are booted from the country by immigration enforcement, only to be dragged back to face criminal charges.

Wittes filed a FOIA request for the numbers the DOJ supposedly "provided" to the president. So far, he's heard nothing back. His requests have been acknowledged but no further processing has been done, not even a determination as to whether he'd qualify for a fee waiver. Now, he's suing [PDF].

Wittes refers to this as the "friendliest lawsuit ever," given that it's not being fired off in hopes of liberating documents the DOJ would rather not part with, but instead to give the DOJ an opportunity to state -- on the record -- that it has none of the information Trump claimed was handed over to him. It would give the DOJ a way to contradict the president's claims without looking like it's intentionally undermining the president's assertions. Considered from this angle, it might be the sort of lawsuit the DOJ might welcome -- although if it was truly interested in disputing the president's statement, it might have chosen to provide Wittes with a more substantive response, rather than wait until it became a problem for the judiciary.

So for years we've examined how executives at ESPN completely whiffed at seeing the cord cutting revolution coming, and personified the industry's denial that a massive market (r)evolution was taking place. As viewers were beginning to drift away from traditional cable and erode revenues, ESPN executives were busy doubling down on bloated sports contracts and expensive Sportscenter set redesigns. Only once ESPN lost 10 million viewers in just a few years did executives finally acknowledge that cord cutting was a problem, though they subsequently have tried to downplay the threat at every opportunity.

The question now is how to fix that problem. ESPN's first step was to try and save costs by firing oodles of on-air talent, but not the executives that failed to navigate this sea change. That has since been followed by ESPN-owner Disney recently proclaiming it would be offering two direct to consumer streaming platforms -- one stocked with Disney and Pixar fare, and the other being a direct to consumer ESPN product. During a recent earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger verbalized the company's slow epiphany in the face of cord cutting:

"We’ve got this unbelievably passionate base of Disney consumers worldwide that we’ve never had the opportunity to connect with directly other than through the parks,” Iger said. “It’s high time we got into the business to accomplish that.”

Iger acknowledged that the decision to act was spurred by the disruption in the traditional TV eco-system that has been rocking ESPN for the past few years. But Disney’s blue-chip brands give them a leg up in taking a radical new approach to reaching consumers.

“It’s not just a defensive movie, it’s an offensive move,” Iger said.

Granted it's not really playing offense when you only react after worries about cord cutting and ratings slides causes a $22 billion valuation hit in just a few days, something Disney experienced last year. Still, it's good to see Disney pull its head out of the sand and embrace the idea of giving consumers what they want, even if the move is painfully belated and under-cooked. The problem for ESPN specifically, as many have been quick to point out, is that the company is still stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of navigating the transition to streaming -- even if it does everything right (which it won't).

There's plenty of reasons for that, the biggest being that streaming simply can't be as profitable as the long-standing practice of forcing cable TV customers on to bloated bundles filled with channels (like ESPN) that they may not want. ESPN currently makes $7.21 for each cable TV subscriber, many of which pay for ESPN begrudgingly. One survey found that 56% of ESPN viewers would ditch the channel if it meant saving that money off of their monthly bill. Fear of losing those customers was one of the reason ESPN sued Verizon when the company tried to take ESPN out of its core TV bundle.

And while ESPN may now be technically doing the right thing in finally offering a direct-to-consumer streaming product, such an offering will only aid to expedite viewer defections, while ESPN's sports licensing costs remain the same:

"A streaming service, while it might attract sports fans who have cut the cord, won’t solve ESPN’s profit problems. Instead it will exacerbate them. Why? Because ESPN will continue to lose the millions upon millions of cable subscribers who pay for it but never watch it. Losing $7.21 from each non-watcher is going to be a revenue killer. There is no possible way the universe of sports fans who want ESPN can make up that revenue, even if they’re charged more for a streaming service."

Traditionally, many cable and broadcast companies have tried to give the impression of adaptation by launching a streaming service, then saddling it with all manner of caveats to prevent existing, traditional cable TV customers from downgrading to the cheaper, more flexible streaming option. This really never works, but it looks like the path Iger and Disney are going to follow when it comes to ESPN's latest streaming venture:

"To make matters worse, Disney appears to be planning a streaming service that even the most rabid sports fan will be reluctant to pay for. All the good stuff — big-time college football, professional basketball, the Monday night National Football League game — will remain exclusively on ESPN’s cable channels. The streaming service will get, well, other things. It’s pretty clear that Iger is still trying to protect Disney’s legacy cable business, and that his move to the internet is not exactly a wholehearted embrace."

In other words, ESPN's epiphany and transition isn't quite as profound as many are suggesting, and ESPN still somehow believes it can control the rate of evolution; a fool's errand. Many industry insiders also have told me over the years that ESPN's contracts with many cable providers state that should ESPN offer its own streaming services, cable providers will no longer be bound by restrictions forcing them to include ESPN in their core lineups, which will only accelerate the number of skinny bundle options without ESPN.

It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario for ESPN, and even if ESPN does all the right things here and offers a truly compelling streaming platform customers really enjoy -- there's simply no getting around the fact that this transition is still going to really hurt.

It really was just last week that we were discussing the problems of telling platforms like YouTube to remove videos concerning "violent extremism" because it's often tough to tell the difference between videos that many people think are okay and ones that those same people think are not. But in that post, we also linked back to a story from 2013 in which -- after getting pressure from then Senator Joe Lieberman -- YouTube started removing "terrorist" videos, and in the process deleted a channel of people documenting atrocities in Syria.

It appears that history is now repeating itself, because YouTube is getting some grief because (you guessed it), it's effort to keep extremist content off its platform has resulted in deleting a channel that was documenting evidence of war crimes in Syria.

YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East.

Middle East Eye, the monitoring organisation Airwars and the open-source investigations site Bellingcat are among a number of sites that have had videos removed for breaching YouTube's Community Guidelines.

This comes just days after YouTube announced it was expanding its program to remove "terror content" from its platform -- including better "accuracy." Oops.

Again, there are no easy answers here. You can certainly understand why no platform wants to host actual terrorism propaganda. And platforms should have the right to host or decline to host whatever content they want. The real issue is that we have more and more people -- including politicians -- demanding that these platforms must regulate, filter and moderate the content on their platform to remove "bad" speech. But in the over 4 years I've been asking this question since that last time we wrote about the shut down of the channel documenting atrocities, no one's explained to me how these platforms can distinguish videos celebrating atrocities from those documenting atrocities. And this gets even more complicated when you realize: sometimes those are the same videos. And sometimes, letting terrorists or others post the evidence of what they're doing, people are better able to stop that activity.

There is plenty of "bad" content out there, but the kneejerk reaction that we need to censor it and take it down ignores how frequently that is likely to backfire -- as it clearly did in this case.

For years, years, the MPAA's public fight against piracy has chiefly consisted of a moral argument against it. Proclamations of the end of movies, the downtrodden future of filmmakers, and claims about piracy being equatable to outright theft were the tools of a Hollywood lobbier that itself exhibited the most underhanded sort of tactics in its attempts to get the internet to stop being the internet. It seems facile to state that this moral argument failed to find any purchase with the public, as filesharing went mainstream anyway. The reasons for this should be rather obvious: the arguments the MPAA made and the dooms it foresaw for itself and its industry were provably false. File sharing and piracy are a thing, yet movies still make gobs of money, allowing the MPAA to pay its executives the sort of handsome sums reserved for successful agencies. Still, Hollywood kept to its talking points. Piracy is wrong. Morally wrong.

But it seems that even the MPAA is ready to concede that it has fully lost this argument with the public. The latest from those that worked for the MPAA appears to be that it now wants to switch narratives from a moral argument to one of public danger.

The MPAA's former VP of Worldwide Internet Enforcement says that the industry narrative on piracy is no longer based on trying to get people to act ethically. Hemanshu Nigam says the discussion today is based around the dangers that pirate sites can pose to those who visit them. Few listened before, will they listen now?

Hemanshu Nigam is a former federal prosecutor, ex-Chief Security Officer for News Corp and Fox Interactive Media, and former VP Worldwide Internet Enforcement at the MPAA. In an interview with Deadline this week, he spoke about alleged links between pirate sites and malware distributors. He also indicated that warning people about the dangers of pirate sites has become Hollywood’s latest anti-piracy strategy.

“The industry narrative has changed. When I was at the MPAA, we would tell people that stealing content is wrong and young people would say, yeah, whatever, you guys make a lot of money, too bad,” he told the publication. “It has gone from an ethical discussion to a dangerous one. Now, your parents’ bank account can be raided, your teenage daughter can be spied on in her bedroom and extorted with the footage, or your computer can be locked up along with everything in it and held for ransom.”

Now, while Nigam works for the DCA (Digital Citizens Alliance), and the DCA is in part funded by the MPAA, it's worth carefully examining his and the MPAA's stance here to see whether this tactic will be any more effective than the previous moral argument. I think it's likely to fail, for several reasons. The first, as the TorrentFreak post points out, is that those that pirate content are consumers in the business sense. They are a form of customer for the sites that offer this sort of pirated content and they have all the same whims and wills of any paying customer. In other words, a site that lures the public in with pirated content for the purpose of deploying malware to them isn't going to keep its traffic for long.

In the Deadline piece, however, Nigam alleges that hackers have previously reached out to pirate websites offering $200 to $5000 per day “depending on the size of the pirate website” to have the site infect users with malware. If true, that’s a serious situation and people who would ordinarily use ‘pirate’ sites would definitely appreciate the details. For example, to which sites did hackers make this offer and, crucially, which sites turned down the offer and which ones accepted?

It's important to remember that pirates are just another type of consumer and they would boycott sites in a heartbeat if they discovered they'd been paid to infect them with malware. But, as usual, the claims are extremely light in detail. Instead, there's simply a blanket warning to stay away from all unauthorized sites, which isn't particularly helpful.

These sorts of blanket statements to stamp out piracy generally have the ring of a scare tactic for these reasons. Still, scare tactics can certainly work. Will this one? Again, I think not, due to a point we made earlier: file sharing is now mainstream. How many readers of Nigam's interview will be able to easily say that the doom he's warning them of hasn't happened to them as they've engaged in file sharing? The number is going to be quite large, it stands to reason. Rather than the scare tactic working, then, this will come off more like a Reefer Madness for piracy, an analogy everyone from TorrentFreak to the author of the Deadline interview seems to be making. If that happens, the DCA and MPAA take yet another hit to their credibility. There is even evidence that the public generally isn't listening to this latest argument of danger and those that are, are not particularly impressed.

Earlier this year the DCA launched a video campaign, enrolling 15 attorney generals to publish their own anti-piracy PSAs on YouTube. Thus far, interest has been minimal, to say the least. At the time of writing the 15 PSAs have 3,986 views in total, with 2,441 of those contributed by a single video contributed by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel. Despite the relative success, even that got slammed with 2 upvotes and 127 downvotes.

A few of the other videos have a couple of hundred views each but more than half have less than 70. Perhaps most worryingly for the DCA, apart from the Schimel PSA, none have any upvotes at all, only down. It’s unclear who the viewers were but it seems reasonable to conclude they weren’t entertained.

Not a great start for this narrative shift, to be sure. The public is steadily becoming more educated on the dangers of malware and viruses, as well as the proper security strategies for their electronic devices. Because of that, vague doomsayers warning of the digital apocalypse stemming from file sharing sites that have only become more popular aren't likely to find a great deal of fertile ground for their efforts.

On a related note, is all of this really easier and more effective than simply coming up with better ways to make money in the digital economy?

Many consumers are still reeling from a Charter, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable merger that left users with slower speeds, worse service, and higher prices. Other broadband consumers are still struggling with a bungled Frontier acquisition of Verizon assets that left users with prolonged outages and even worse customer service than the shitshow they already enjoyed. As we've seen for decades, this kind of mindless consolidation traditionally only benefits the companies involved, particularly in a market where real competition is in short supply.

This growth for growth's sake is one of the major reasons Comcast -- and its horrible customer service (which didn't scale with the company's expansion because that would have cost money) -- exists. And Wall Street's relentless thirst for growth at all costs is a major reason these companies can't simply focus on being the best "dumb pipes" possible, instead focusing their attentions on expanding into markets they have little expertise in (see Verizon's ingenious plan to hoover up failed 90s brands and pander to Millennials). When they can't succeed because they're out of their depth, they try to tilt the playing field (killing net neutrality).

There's oodles of history lessons here, and there's every indication we intend to learn nothing from them. With the ink barely dry on Charter's troubled deal, and the Trump administration signaling that no merger is too big or too absurd, Wall Street analysts have been positively giddy this year pondering megamergers in telecom that had previously been unthinkable on anti-competitive or antitrust grounds. That has included heavy pushes for a Sprint acquisition of T-Mobile or a Verizon bid to buy Comcast -- the massive, obvious anti-competitive impact of both deals be damned.

This week, the merger mania du jour apparently involves a plan that would involve Comcast and French-owned Altice working in concert to buy Charter Communications, whose $180 billion asking price has proven too steep for any one company to contemplate alone (Verizon made a $100 billion offer and was rejected). Citigroup has floated the idea that after acquisition, Comcast could integrate the Time Warner Cable customers they were blocked by regulators from acquiring for anti-competitive reasons, leaving us with one giant cable company to rule us all:

"Charter is pretty much an equal rival in size and scope to Comcast at this point, at least with regards to subscriber numbers. Each company has somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million customers. For the two to merge outright would leave one dominant cable company in the country, with about half of the entire nation’s subscribers — from coast to coast, and in many of the states in between — under a single umbrella."

Granted there's no guarantee such a deal will happen. Wall Street stock jocks often like to float rumors then profit off of the herk and jerk of stock prices caused by the half-truths they themselves create. But should Comcast be able to swing such a deal, we could be looking at a supernova of anti-competitive dysfunction, the likes of which made Comcast's well documented issues seem charming.

Consider that cable's monopoly was already blossoming thanks to the countless telcos which have effectively stopped trying to compete -- in large part because Wall Street thinks spending money to upgrade your networks is a fool's errand. Then ponder the fact that the current FCC is busy gutting any and all meaningful oversight of these companies, allowing them to inevitably engage in all manner of anti-competitive shenanigans, from arbitrary and punitive usage caps, to net neutrality and privacy violations.

This all may sound like hyperbole, but it's a future that's very much under construction. And the folks giddily contemplating the "looming synergies" of such monumental coagulation are building it with absolutely zero concern for the impact on consumers, startups, small businesses or the health of the internet. Telecom sector executives and the folks paid to cheer their every decision have every intention of taking the already dismal Comcast experience, injecting it with steroids, and setting it loose on a market with no organic competitive or regulatory checks and balances. And by the time most notice the negative repercussions, these same folks will already be hyping the next wave of mindless consolidation.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a long series of questionable DMCA notices I thought had been issued by online onanism portal Chaturbate. The takedown requests appeared to have been generated by a faulty algorithm with no human vetting involved. Many of those I examined appeared to target names of Chaturbate broadcasters, but without any of the precision one normally associates with the word "target." Sites named for delisting included geographical research, an Amazon page for a book about the Hadron Collider, track meet records collections, and even Chaturbate itself.

After some discussion with Chaturbate, it was determined someone is filing notices in Chaturbate's name, but without Chaturbate's official blessing. The scattershot, extremely prolific approach was now harming Chaturbate's reputation, tying it to bogus DMCA notices targeting all sort of non-infringing content. (I have since updated the original post to reflect the my conversations with Chaturbate and offer my apologies for naming the wrong party in the original post.)

Whoever's performing these bogus takedowns hasn't stopped. Chaturbate's legal rep has been asking Google for more details on the impostor requests. Google is looking into it, but so far has only provided an incredibly long list of likely auto-generated Gmail addresses as the source of these bogus notices, which now number into the thousands.

While we continue to work towards discovering who's behind these bogus notices, there have been some interesting developments. First, the impostor is now including Techdirt URLs, including the original post and my user page, in their takedown requests.

Second, whoever's doing this appears to have read my post. The issuing party has changed from Chaturbate LLC to Multi Media LLC. This is the name Chaturbate uses when it issues takedown requests. I never used the name in the updates to the post but did link to an example of a genuine Chaturbate takedown notice, as supplied to me by Chaturbate's representatives.

This would seem to indicate whoever's behind the bogus takedowns is aware multiple parties are trying to expose them. The DMCA notices containing Techdirt URLs contain almost nothing but adult-themed URLs, suggesting the TD pages may have been added in an attempt to bury the story. It still could be a faulty algorithm is flagging anything containing words like "Chaturbate," but the relative lack of unrelated sites suggests a slightly more targeted approach is being taken, even though there's still an emphasis on quantity over quality.

The other theory is the post hasn't been read, but the impostor has received challenges from Google when submitting notices under the Chaturbate LLC name. A little research may have uncovered the fact Chaturbate's legitimate takedown service only issues takedowns under the Multi Media LLC name.

If the impostor is reading these posts, they might want to remember the perjury side of it doesn't cover the URLs targeted for takedown, but rather the assertion they represent the rightsholders listed in the notices. According to Chaturbate, this impostor doesn't. All rights are retained by each individual Chaturbate broadcaster and Multi Media LLC makes no claims otherwise when issuing takedown notices on behalf of its clients. The impostor, however, makes these claims for several performers in each takedown request and does so under the names of companies they don't work for or represent. We're still trying to find out who's behind this and will keep you posted as this investigation proceeds.

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While we wait for the Mueller investigation to clearly illustrate if and how Russia meddled in the last election, there's no shortage of opinions regarding how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. While it's pretty obvious that Putin used social media and media propaganda to pour some napalm on our existing bonfires of dysfunction, just how much of an impact these efforts had on the election won't be clear until a full postmortem is done. Similarly, while Russian hackers certainly had fun probing our voting systems and may have hacked both political parties, clearly proving state involvement is something else entirely.

Quite fairly, many folks have pushed for caution in terms of waiting for hard evidence to emerge, highlighting the danger in trusting leaks from an intelligence sector with a dismal track record of integrity and honesty. There's also the obvious concern of ramping up tension escalation between two nuclear powers. But last week, many of those same individuals were quick to highlight several new stories that claimed to "completely debunk" Russia's involvement in hacking the DNC ahead of last year's election. The problem? These reports were about as flimsy -- if not flimsier -- than the Russian hacking theories they supposedly supplanted.

In fact, these reports took things one step further by claiming that the hack of the DNC was something committed solely by someone within the DNC itself. This particularly overlong, meandering piece by The Nation, for example, claimed to cite numerous anonymous intelligence sources who have supposedly grown increasingly skeptical over the "Russian hacking narrative." Quite correctly, the report starts out by noting that while there's oodles and oodles of smoke regarding Putin's involvement in the election hacks, the fire (hard evidence) has been hard to come by so far:

"Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment.

But it's then that's where things get a little weird. The report repeatedly proclaims that a laundry list of anonymous "forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed" have been hard at work "producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year." But one of the key conclusions by these experts -- and a key cornerstone for of all of these stories -- makes absolutely no sense.

The reports lean heavily on anonymous cybersecurity experts calling themselves "Forensicator" and "Adam Carter," who purportedly took a closer look at the metadata attached to the stolen files. Said metadata, we're breathlessly informed, indisputably proves that the data had to have been transferred from inside of the DNC network and not over the internet, since the internet isn't supposedly capable of such transfer speeds:

"Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds."

That reads like a semi-cogent paragraph, but it's largely nonsense. 22.7 megabytes per second (MB/s) sounds impossibly fast if you don't know any better. But if you do the simple conversion from megabytes per second to megabits per second necessary to determine the actual speed of the connection used, you get a fairly reasonable 180 megabits per second (Mbps). While the report proclaims that "no internet service provider" can provide such speeds, ISPs around the world routinely offer speeds far, far faster -- from 500 Mbps to even 1 Gbps.

And despite the report oddly pooh pooh'ing Romanian broadband's "delivery overheads," many Romanian cities actually have faster internet connectivity than either Russia or in the States (check out Akamai's global broadband rankings). Bernie Sanders learned this last year when he unintentionally pissed off many Romanians when trying to highlight the dismal state of U.S. connectivity. Even then, the hacker in question could have used any number of tricks to hide his or her location and real identity from a high-bandwidth vantage point, so the claim that the hacker couldn't achieve 180 Mbps through a VPN is simply nonsense.

Obviously this raises some questions about what kind of cyber-sleuths we're talking about when they can't do basic conversions or look at some fairly obvious broadband speed availability charts. And it also raises some questions about why reporters thought flimsy anonymous experts were the perfect remedy to the other flimsy anonymous leaks they hoped to debunk. While The Nation couldn't even be bothered to do the simple calculation to determine the speed of the connection used by the hacker was relatively ordinary, in a story titled "Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story," Bloomberg actually did the conversion to get the 180 Mbps speed, and still somehow told readers that such speeds were impossible:

"The VIPS theory relies on forensic findings by independent researchers who go by the pseudonyms "Forensicator" and "Adam Carter." The former found that 1,976 MB of Guccifer's files were copied from a DNC server on July 5 in just 87 seconds, implying a transfer rate of 22.6 megabytes per second -- or, converted to a measure most people use, about 180 megabits per second, a speed not commonly available from U.S. internet providers. Downloading such files this quickly over the internet, especially over a VPN (most hackers would use one), would have been all but impossible because the network infrastructure through which the traffic would have to pass would further slow the traffic."

Yes, all but impossible! Provided you ignore that DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades and fiber connections deliver speeds consistently faster than that all around the world every day -- including Romania. False claims and sloppy math aside, after the Bloomberg column ran, several actual, identifiable intelligence experts also came forward doubting the legitimacy of the supposed intelligence sources for these stories altogether:

Surrounded by raised eyebrows, The Nation is now apparently reviewing its story for accuracy after numerous people highlighted that a major cornerstone of the report was little more than fluff and nonsense. Bloomberg has so far failed to follow suit.

So again, there's certainly every reason to not escalate hostility between the United States and Russia with many details still obfuscated and investigations incomplete. And there's also every reason to view reports leaning heavily on anonymous intelligence insiders skeptically after generations of distortions and falsehoods from those same agencies. That said, if you want to debunk the anonymous claims of a growing number of intelligence insiders who claim Russia played pinball with our electoral process, perhaps running into the arms of even more unreliable, anonymous intelligence sources -- without checking your math -- isn't your best path toward the truth.

You may be shocked to learn this, but like most U.S. regulatory agencies, the FCC's top Commissioner spots are occassionally staffed by individuals that spend a bit too much time focused on protecting the interests of giant, incumbent, legacy companies (usually before they move on to think tanks, consultant gigs, or law firm policy work financed and steered by those same companies). In the telecom market these folks usually share some fairly consistent, telltale characteristics. One, they're usually comically incapable of admitting that there's a lack of competition in the broadband market.

Two, they go to great, sophisticated lengths -- usually via the help of economists hired for this precise purpose -- to obfuscate, modify, and twist data until it shows that broadband competition is everywhere and the market is functioning perfectly. After all, if the data shows that there's no longer a problem -- you can justify your complete and total apathy toward doing anything about it.

We've seen this cycle play out time and time again, and it's a major reason most of us have shitty broadband. Under former FCC boss Michael Powell (now shockingly the head lobbyist for the entire cable industry), the FCC repeatedly proclaimed that the broadband industry was so competitive, we didn't need rules, regulations, or consumer protections governing their behavior. And when anyone provided evidence that existing providers like Comcast were little more than walking shitshows, Powell would consistently insist that these complaints were utterly hallucinated.

This sort of behavior continued for a while under Obama-era FCC boss Julius Genachowski. But his successor, Tom Wheeler shocked a few people by actually acknowledging the industry wasn't competitive. Wheeler went so far as to raise the base definition of broadband to a more modern 25 Mbps, a decision the industry whined incessantly over. Why? By raising the bar, Wheeler was able to highlight how two-thirds of the country only have the choice of one broadband provider at current generation speeds.

But with Ajit Pai now in charge at the FCC, we've once again returned to the regulatory policy of burying your head firmly in the sand to the express benefit of Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. In addition to Pai's frontal assault on net neutrality, erosion of broadband programs for the poor, protection of prison phone monopolies, derailing of consumer broadband privacy standards and his protection of the cable industry's set top box monopoly , Pai has begun taking steps to lower the bar when it comes to determining whether or not the country is being adequately connected.

Under the Telecommunications Act, the FCC is required by law to track broadband deployment and competition and -- if things aren't up to snuff -- the agency is mandated to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." But if you fiddle with how precisely broadband penetration and competition is measured, you can avoid having to do, you know, work to improve things. Enter Ajit Pai, whose agency this week quietly began fiddling with these determinations to the benefit of industry:

"But with Republican Ajit Pai now in charge, the FCC seems poised to change that policy by declaring that mobile broadband with speeds of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs. In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the commission could take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition.

Of course determining that an area has healthy and competitive broadband if a wireless provider can offer 10 Mbps is a major gift to incumbent ISPs. AT&T and Verizon have been working tirelessly to gut rules requiring they continue to provide cheaper, more reliable fixed-line broadband to rural areas and many less affluent cities, while also wiggling out of fiber upgrade obligations in countless markets. But wireless connections are significantly more expensive and less reliable, and in many smaller and more rural cities won't be a suitable fixed line replacement for a decade or more.

And while AT&T and Verizon's own data will insist that they provide 10 Mbps wireless to pretty much everywhere already, if you've ever driven across the nation with work to do you can probably attest to the fact this uniform coverage isn't real. And because the FCC is more concerned about pleasing incumbent broadband providers than actually beefing up competition for consumers, they're not going to be running out anytime soon to do field tests and fact check wireless carrier data proclaiming 10 Mbps is sprouting up everywhere like weeds.

No, the FCC's goal here is to technically lower the standard definition of quality broadband from 25 Mbps down, 4 Mbps to, to 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. By doing this, Pai and friends can simply declare the broadband industry ultra-competitive, justifying their failure to actually do anything about the obvious fact that's simply not true. Of course it's not being explained that way in the agency's related notice of inquiry (pdf), the proposal couched under the pretense that we're simply modernizing the way the FCC operates -- or imposing new baseline wireless standards.

If you haven't carefully watched these ISPs and revolving regulators work tirelessly at protecting their uncompetitive empire for two decades, you might be inclined to believe that line of bullshit. But what the FCC's actually doing here is really quite simple: they're fucking with the math and lowering the bar to ankle height as a gift to the nation's lumbering, uncompetitive duopolies -- who'd like it very much if we left the existing, embarrassing status quo well enough alone.

Some senators are looking to turn US borders into the equivalent of London: cameras everywhere and a host of new incursions into travelers' and visitors' privacy. Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica "outed" the not-yet-introduced bill -- titled "Building America's Trust Act" [wtf] -- since the supporting lawmakers have yet to formally announce their plans to make the US a worse country to live in, much less visit.

The one-pager [PDF] for the bill [PDF] (which is 186 pages long) makes it clear what the objective is: more surveillance, more boots on the ground, and green lights for law enforcement agencies located anywhere within 100 miles of the nation's borders. The bill calls for more judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and inspectors, as well as walls, levees, fences -- whatever might further separate the US from its bordering neighbors (but only the southern one, apparently).

First off, there will be an increase in aerial surveillance. The bill calls for an increase in manned flight hours, as well as mandating drone flights at least 24 hours a day for five days a week. This would be in addition to increased use of surveillance equipment that can be mounted on vehicles or carried by humans. The DHS will also be allowed to draft the National Guard to perform border patrol duties and construct fences and walls and set up/monitor surveillance equipment.

The list goes on and on. (And on.) Customs and Border Patrol (and any agencies assisting it) will be exempted from 30 state and federal laws governing (among other things) use of public land should it be determined these ecology-protecting statutes "interfere" with the CBP's border patrolling efforts. The bill would also exempt border security efforts from the normal federal bidding process, allowing agencies to use non-competitive means to hire employees and source contractors. The bill would also raise staffing levels, providing for signing bonuses of up to $10,000 per new hire and an expanded waiver of the CBP's polygraph test requirement.

The law would allow border security agencies to obtain Defense Department surveillance gear, with an eye on round-the-clock surveillance in some form and increased gathering of biometric information. More specifically, the bill asks for this:

The Secretary shall create a system or upgrade an existing system (if a Department system already has capability and capacity for storage) to allow for storage of iris scans and voice prints of aliens that can be used by the Department, other Federal agencies, and State and local law enforcement for identification, remote authentication, and verification of aliens. The Secretary shall ensure, to the extent possible, that the system for storage of iris scans and voice prints is compatible with existing State and local law enforcement systems that are used for collection and storage of iris scans or voice prints for criminal aliens.

This will be fed by the DHS's biometric entry-exit collection, meaning it won't just be foreign visitors adding to the pile of biometric data. The law calls for the program to be put in place at all high traffic ports of entry (including major airports) within two years. As we've seen from previous pilot programs, there's no good way to ensure US persons aren't swept up in the biometric scanning. All we have are assurances these "inadvertent" collections will be siloed off from the DHS's foreigner collection.

Customs authorities will also be given power to demand biometric info from visa applicants and DNA will be collected from all detained immigrants, whether or not they're criminally charged. This information will then be shared with the State Department and the FBI.

From there, the law adds other politically-charged stipulations, like an entire subsection entitled "Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act." Also of note: the bill would allow law enforcement to seize everything from cash to bitcoins if they're suspected to be "criminal proceeds." It also strips away any mens rea protection from accusations of money laundering, allowing the government to seize money/charge suspects with a federal crime whether or not they knowingly engaged in criminal activity.

The whole package is basically a 186 pages of surveillance expansion and xenophobic legalese. The sole benefit of the bloated bill is it consolidates so many anti-foreigner objectives into a single PDF, saving opponents the trouble of having to track a few dozen similarly-minded bills. The limits on the collection and use of biometric data are almost nonexistent and there's nothing in it specifically ordering agencies to keep US citizens out of the data pile. A number of law enforcement agencies have already offered their endorsement of the bill, suggesting it's spent some time being circulated among proponents. Now, it's in the hands of the rest of the county where it's unlikely to see as unqualified support. It's a Patriot Act but for the border -- a hysteria-based bill that panders to the president's desires.