The Oakland PD's Dramatic Drop In Use-Of-Force Incidents Is All Bullshit

from the numbers-massaged-and-manually-pleasured dept

Well, this post of mine has aged terribly.

Back in 2014, I breathlessly reported the Oakland PD's adoption of body cameras had resulted in sweeping improvements to its use of force. Deadly force usage had dropped to nothing, reducing the number of people killed by cops from eight per year to zero.

That still holds. If you just look at dead bodies, you'll see that the Oakland PD had produced zero corpses in the 18 months following the installation of body cameras. But other stats in that report are a bit more questionable.

[Mayor] Jean Quan said Oakland police officers had 2,186 use-of-force incidents in 2009, the last year that no officers wore body cameras, and that number declined to 836 such incidents last year and to only 572 incidents so far this year, with just two weeks remaining.

Were body cams really the panacea? Did this program actually introduce accountability?

Unfortunately, it appears the body cams changed nothing. Precipitous drops in use of force incidents have continued. Year after year, the Oakland PD appeared to improve its relationship to the public in terms of subjecting them to physical restraint or bullets.

But the drop observed here has turned out to be too good to be true. Turns out the easiest way to reduce use of force stats is to… stop reporting uses of force.

[I]n September 2018, the Oakland police’s inspector general, an internal watchdog, found that officers under-reported the number of times they pointed their guns at people. In November, the department’s independent monitor confirmed the inspector general’s determination while also noting multiple cases in which officers struck or wrestled with people and failed to report it.

The report [PDF] by the Oakland PD's Inspector General shows officers fudging numbers to make it appear as though the force was using less force. There may have been little to no improvement whatsoever, even with the addition of body cameras. I mean, thank god the force didn't keep killing eight people a year, but beyond the periodic homicide, there has been little improvement.

Substantial drops in several use of force stats prompted this IG investigation, as well as an internal review initiated by the PD itself. What investigators found was very little change in use of force habits, but a lot of change in use of force documentation.

Pulling a sample of incidents in which use of force would be expected, the OIG found officers simply weren't documenting their force deployments.

All documentation and available video footage for the 47 incidents were reviewed. Of these 47 incidents, the auditors identified 17 in which a reportable use of force went unreported (no use of force form was completed).

You've heard the "bad apples" excuse. It appears the rotten apples within the Oakland PD tend to gravitate towards each other.

Twelve of the 17 incidents of underreporting involved four squads of officers.

It's not all bad news, though. The department was at least forward-thinking enough to believe certain cases might need additional review. This policy would at least give a second pass to "contempt of cop" arrests.

The Chief published a Special Order requiring supervisory review of PDRD footage for incidents involving Penal Code 69, 148, and 243(b)(c) arrests (threatening an officer, resisting arrest, battery on an officer) in late November 2018.

But there's plenty of bad news. The Oakland PD instituted policies meant to compile objective reporting of use of force incidents. But then it undermined its own policies by allowing officers to make judgment calls on reporting.

In practice, a police officer’s “intention” is a dominant factor in determining whether the pointing of the firearm at the subject(s) is reportable, a result of an inadequately designed policy.

Because of these deficiencies, the Oakland PD revamped its policies in 2018. This resulted in a dramatic change in use of force stats, albeit not in the direction one would hope.

[B]eginning in October 2018, the total number of reported uses of force (all types of force) increased dramatically, by nearly 300% between January and May 2018 and January and May 2019.

So, it's mostly bad news, highlighted by the uptick in force deployment post-policy fix. Even with the fixes, the OIG found even more under-reporting.

Upon review of the associated video recordings for the 47 incidents likely to involve force in which the arrests were more probable to have involved a use of force, there were 177 incidents in which the Lead Auditors deemed a reportable weaponless defense technique or pointing of a firearm(s) was used and not reported and documented.

It's not just about guns. These are a few cases the OIG highlights in its report, showing even use of less-than-deadly force went unreported despite the new policies.

1. Officers were in a foot pursuit of a subject and an officer forcefully pushed the subject, causing him to fall on the ground against a fence. The reporting officer stated in his report “no known witnesses.” OIG’s review of the associated video footage identified multiple witnesses on scene when the force in question was used.

2. Officers were attempting to place a subject in handcuffs, and the subject stood up and punched an officer in the face. Another officer wrapped his arms around the subject, physically lifting him off the ground causing them both to fall backwards onto a glass table and then lifted the subject back onto a couch.

3. A detained subject started to run from an officer, and the officer grabbed the subject by the hair and pulled him to the ground. The officer failed to articulate and document in his report that he pulled the subject by his hair.

4. During the search of a subject, the subject turned to run, and the officer grabbed him, causing them both to fall to the ground. The officer also delivered an intentional forearm strike to the subject’s right tricep area while attempting to handcuff the subject.

Cops may complain body cameras are nothing more than "gotcha" devices meant to catch them abusing people and violating their rights. The flow of these policemen's tears would mean oh so much more if the body cameras didn't catch them abusing people and violating their rights. So, if nothing else, the body cameras are exposing what officers hoped to cover up by not filing use of force reports.

Then there's this: cops may argue they don't engaged in biased policing, but the stats belie their protestations of "fair and balanced" enforcement.

There were 12 incidents involving 19 subjects in which the audit found the pointing of the firearm should have been reported as a use of force but was not. Of the 19 subjects, 17 were African American (89%) and 2 were Hispanic (11%).

So, every time a white person has a gun pointed at them by an Oakland PD officer, it gets reported. That seems a bit troublesome.

And there's little reason to believe the ongoing use of body cameras will result in more conscientious policing. Officers apparently believe recording interactions with the public is optional.

Upon review of the associated video recordings for the 47 incidents likely to involve force in which the arrests were more probable to have involved a use of force, the lead auditors determined there were PDRD concerns in 19 incidents. However, 18 of the 19 incidents involved officers not complying with PDRD policy requirements.

Fortunately, the large number of cameras issued ensure there was at least some footage of every use of force incident. Unfortunately for officers who "forgot" to activate their cameras, other officers activated theirs, giving investigators all they needed to discover multiple violations of the PD's body camera policies.

The Oakland PD only looks better on paper. It has barely changed at all since the institution of body cameras and use of force reporting requirements. Some cops hate accountability and many apparently view this as damage to be routed around. Until the PD steps up and starts firing people for violating policy, the practice of fudging the numbers and neglecting camera obligations will continue.

Filed Under: body cameras, lies, oakland, police, statistics, use of force

Unsealed Warrant Shows SFPD Officer Misled Court About Journalist's Occupation

from the law-enforcement-still-the-best-at-law-stuff dept

One of the search warrants used by the San Francisco police department to go after a journalist for documents a PD employee leaked has been released. This is only one of the five warrants targeting "stringer" Bryan Carmody, whose house was raided by the SFPD back in May.

This search warrant targeted Carmody's phone records. It was granted on March 1st, allowing the SFPD to obtain records from Verizon. This was done supposedly to track down which cop called Carmody over a two-day period prior to the release of the leaked document to California news agencies.

Earlier this month, Judge Rochelle East quashed the warrant, saying it showed the SFPD omitted key info that would have made it clear it was targeting a journalist -- something forbidden by California's journalist shield law. The judge also unsealed the warrant. It has finally been released and it shows SFPD Sgt. Joseph Obidi writing his way around the fact that Carmody is a journalist.

In the application [PDF], Sgt. Obidi cut-and-pasted part of Carmody's LinkedIn profile. The officer included the part that said Carmody was a "Freelance Videographer." But he excluded the part that said Carmody "has decades of experience shooting, editing and reporting news," as well as the long list of new agencies he had worked with. It also excluded the fact that the SFPD had issued a press pass to Carmody -- one that was still current when the warrant was obtained.

This was pointed out during the hearing about the warrant by Judge East, who said the existence of a press pass should have told the SFPD to steer its investigation away from Carmody.

While under other circumstances in other cases there may be some question as to what a journalist is. In this case I think there is none. The fact that he has a press pass from the San Francisco Police Department indicates to this Court that he is a journalist.

The narrative in the application shows the SFPD suspected an officer or SFPD employee. Yet, the Department decided to go after a journalist for possessing and distributing a document that was illegally leaked by one of its own. It could have limited its investigation to its own staff and their phone records. But it didn't, and now it's only a few weeks away from seeing all of its warrants tossed (and hopefully unsealed) and presumably less than 365 days away from being sued by Bryan Carmody.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, bryan carmody, journalism, lies, sfpd, warrants

AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making 'Friends' Exclusive

from the who-could-have-predicted-it dept

Last year AT&T defeated the DOJ's challenge to the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his original 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality and neutered FCC oversight to dominate smaller competitors and tilt the entire internet ecosystem in its favor.

While the DOJ lost its original case, it was quick to appeal late last year, highlighting how within weeks of the deal AT&T had jacked up prices on consumers and competitors like Dish Network, which says it was forced to pull HBO from its lineup because it could no longer afford the higher rates.

Critics of the merger had also pointed out how AT&T would likely use the deal to increasingly make content exclusive to its own service, making it harder for competitors to access it. If you'll recall, this was something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson also insisted wouldn't happen when addressing a Senate antitrust subcommittee pre-merger:

"Nor is there any reason to believe we could use Time Warner programming or AT&T networks to hurt related markets. Simply put, it would be irrational business behavior to do so. Time Warner's programming is more valuable when distributed to as many eyes as possible. Moreover, in order to have great programming, it is imperative that we attract great creative talent to develop it. The best way to attract that talent is through widespread distribution of Time Warner content."

Of course this week AT&T announced it would be taking content like Friends and making it exclusive to its own streaming platforms, including its new looming HBO Max service:

"AT&T will start restricting some Time Warner shows to its own streaming service, despite previously telling the government that it would distribute Time Warner content as widely as possible.

WarnerMedia, the division AT&T created when it bought Time Warner, today announced a new online streaming service called "HBO Max." HBO Max will debut in the spring of 2020 and include exclusives that will no longer be available on other streaming platforms."

On its surface this doesn't seem like that big of a deal. After all, Friends is an old show, and most users probably won't care. And it's certainly not the only show getting this treatment (Comcast NBC Universal just made The Office exclusive to its streaming platform, and Disney is also pulling Netflix content for exclusive use on its own looming Disney+ service). But more broadly, the more essential content AT&T makes exclusive to its own platform (especially and likely inevitably, HBO), the more difficult it will be to compete with AT&T. Knowing AT&T, there's going to be far more exclusives where this came from.

This is all before you even get to net neutrality and AT&T's domination in broadband, which has allowed it to behave anti-competitively in different, even more problematic ways (like only imposing arbitrary usage caps if you use a competitor's service). Letting companies like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T Time Warner dominate both the conduit and the content will ultimately result in a universe of headaches for competitors and consumers alike. And Judge Leon's failure to see (or acknowledge) this will be a "gift" that keeps on giving for the next decade.

The other major problem these ongoing exclusives have is they increasingly force consumers to hunt and peck through a growing, cumbersome list of subscription services just to find the content they're looking for. And if subscription price and ease of use isn't managed carefully, it's simply going to drive frustrated users back to piracy. And when that happens, history suggests these companies will blame everybody and everything (ban VPNS!) but themselves for it.

All of that said, I'm not sure banning exclusive content deals is the answer. What would be at least part the answer for maintaining healthier markets? Finally realizing that endless media consolidation and mindless mega-mergers are generally harmful to the media and telecom sector (as now AT&T owned HBO and DC comics employees are just starting to figure out post merger). And that the long list of promises made in the ramp up to such super unions are almost always uniformly empty. There are fifty years of data for clear supporting evidence, especially in telecom.

Filed Under: content, friends, lies, mergers, promises, silos, streaming
Companies: at&t, hbo, netflix, time warner

Getting Worse Part 1: Intuit Routinely Lies To Customers To Avoid Paying Refunds For Tax Prep Work

from the free-as-in-free dept

It appears Intuit has decided to make things worse rather than better. Just after tax season, we discussed ProPublica's excellent research article on the extreme lengths Intuit had gone to keep its Free File service an unknown to the public. This service is the result of an agreement the top tax prep companies out there reached with the IRS. Essentially, by promising to allow members of the public that earn under a certain amount of money to use their services to file their taxes for free, the IRS in turn has agreed not to pursue its own free to file service. It's an extremely dumb deal for any number of reasons, one of which being how much more efficient it would be for the IRS to carry the weight here, given that it already has all the information most taxpayers need to file.

The other reason, as it turns out, is because Intuit has decided to behave pretty much as cynically as it possibly can. As we detailed in our previous post, the company engaged in a strategy coupling the buying of ads for Google searches and hiding the free to file via the robot.txt file. As a result, something like 3% of eligible taxpayers file for free using the system, while Intuit set up a layer of websites and landing pages all designed to direct the public to paid services, without ever telling them they qualified for free to file tax prep.

As a result of the ProPublica post, many who paid for these services called up Intuit and asked for refunds. If you thought that this public light on shady behavior would lead to an attitude adjustment for Intuit, you're sadly mistaken.

We’ve heard from 16 people who say they were denied refunds and told that the truly free version — Free File — is a government product that’s not run by TurboTax. Ten others reported being told that ProPublica’s stories were inaccurate, or that our coverage is “fake news” or “fictitious.”

None of that is true.

It's quite hard to see how this isn't fraud. Having Intuit reps tell consumers that the free to file program is run by the IRS and not Intuit is a lie. Saying the program is "owned" by the IRS is another lie. Saying that the news organization that is currently airing all of this dirty laundry was so mistaken that a retraction was about to be run is a lie.

Laurie from Washington said she was told by a TurboTax agent that ProPublica was going to run a retraction. (Our stories are accurate, so there’s nothing to retract.) Laurie was charged $130 by TurboTax. Her adjusted gross income was just $376.

An Intuit spokesperson previously said that no material provided to call agents included “derogatory terms about ProPublica.”

Which may be technically true. However, it strains credulity for anyone to suggest that all of these stories are not the result of some centralized communication customer service reps have been instructed to use. It's far more likely that these are talking points given to reps as a way to try to stave off a wave of refunds for services that ought never have been rendered. That becomes all the more likely having seen some of Intuit's internal communications about this whole story (more on that in a separate post).

If true, that would be extremely stupid, considering that Intuit is already in legal hot water over all of this.

In a separate development on Monday, the Los Angeles city attorney sued Intuit and H&R Block under California’s unfair competition law. The two suits, which cite ProPublica’s reporting, demand that the companies pay penalties and restitution for deceiving customers.

“Low-income people without someone to stand up for them have not been able to take advantage of what should be a free service,” City Attorney Mike Feuer said in an interview. “That’s wrong.”

It appears to be an open question just how deep a hole Intuit wants to dig for itself. As we'll see in the separate post, it appears those in charge still have shovels in their hands.

Filed Under: customer service, free file, free tax filings, lies, turbotax
Companies: intuit, propublica

Clapper Continues To Pretend He Didn't Lie To Congress About Domestic Surveillance Programs

from the six-years-of-deflection dept

James Clapper is going to take his Section 215 lie to his grave. One day after the first Snowden leak exposed the breadth of the NSA's phone metadata program, Sen. Ron Wyden asked the then-Director of National Intelligence if the agency collected data on Americans. Despite published documents clearly showing otherwise, Clapper went with this answer:

Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Clapper: No sir.

Wyden: It does not?

Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect—but not wittingly.

Since everyone clearly knew he was lying, Clapper spent the next several days claiming he wasn't. First, he said he meant the NSA wasn't "voyeurestically" reading everyone's emails. Good, but not what Wyden asked. Then he said it was the only response he could give to Wyden's "when did you stop beating your wife" question. Then he claimed he thought Wyden was asking about another collection entirely: the foreign-facing Section 702 program (which does, inadvertently, collect a lot of US person data/communications).

This is the legacy Clapper has secured for himself. He won't be remembered for his IC leadership or his post-IC career talking headmanship. Nope, it will be his super-weak, super-transparent lie, delivered to a US Senator against a backdrop of leaked documents showing the NSA did "wittingly" collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.

Nearly six years later, Clapper is telling the same story to anyone who asks him about this hearing, ensuring the word "Clapper" and "lie" will remain inseparable. The Section 215 program Clapper was alluding to -- the program exposed in the first Snowden leak -- is back in the news, thanks to an unexpected early retirement.

In an interview with CNN about the surprise Section 215 shutdown, Clapper again pretended he didn't know what program he was being asked about.

“As far as the comment, the allegation about my lying, I didn’t lie, I made a big mistake and I just simply didn’t understand what I was being asked about. I thought of another surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when I was being asked about Section 215 of the Patriot Act at the time, I just didn’t understand that...”

Clapper's repetition of this excuse hasn't made it any more believable. None other than Senator Ron Wyden popped up on Twitter to point out Clapper's lies about his lie.

If you can't see/read the tweet, it says:

James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand.

That's the face of IC leadership, as portrayed by James Clapper. Clapper managed to exit the public sector unscathed, turning over a limping surveillance ship to his successor while stepping into the private sector with no threat of punishment hanging over his head. He lied to Congress and got away with it. And he's going to spend the rest of his life pretending he didn't.

Filed Under: james clapper, lies, mass surveillance, nsa, ron wyden, section 215

Why Is The EU Parliament Pushing Fake Propaganda From Hollywood?

from the a-hollywood-story dept

What the hell is going on in the EU these days? The EU Commission put out a Medium post that literally mocked the public as an "angry mob" for raising legitimate concerns about the EU's proposed Copyright Directive. And that followed a bizarrely incoherent "Q & A" page put out by the EU Parliament's Legislative Affairs Committee (JURI), spewing pure nonsense about the Copyright Directive. In both cases, those involved were publicly mocked for this (to the point that the Commission even took down its post, but blaming others for misunderstanding it as the reason).

But now the EU Parliament is doubling down on this absurdity. Its official Twitter feed posted this bit of pure propaganda:

If, for some reason, you can't read that, it says:

Your memes are safe 🙌 Freedom of expression is not affected 👌 It's all about fair payment to content creators 💶

And then urges people to watch a short video that is simply bullshit propaganda put forth by an industry association, called "Europe for Creators." Think about this for a second. Here is the official feed of the entire European Parliament -- which has not yet voted on the EU Copyright Directive -- posting corporate propaganda from a trade group, pushing misleading to outright false messages, in support of a bill that is designed to financially benefit that industry.

In what world is that okay?

MEP Julia Reda has gone through and highlighted many of the problems with the video in a detailed Twitter thread. To make it easier to read, I'm turning that thread into plaintext here:

This video by @Europarl_EN on the draft #copyright directive has sparked a lot of outrage, and rightfully so! First, the Commission called critics of the reform as a mob, now the Parliament chimes in.... The Parliament should maintain neutrality in its communication until the final version of the #copyright directive is adopted. The video not only creates the impression that the directive has already been agreed, there are several factual mistakes and problematic aspects:

In the beginning of the video a balloon is shown, carrying the “Europe for Creators” logo. It belongs to a controversial lobby campaign by a group of collecting societies, music publishers and record producers. The logo of Europe for Creators tries to rip off the logo of @EFF, possibly to create the impression that this is a civil society campaign. Advertisements for commercial interest groups have no place in a video of a political institution.

The video claims that the reform is directed at “large platforms”: In fact, the size of the platform does not matter for the application of #article13, merely whether it hosts “large amounts” of protected content. This can also be the case for a platform run by a single person. The video says a lighter regime applies to platfoms that have an turnover below 10 Million *or* less than 5 million unique visitors. This is just wrong. Actually, the lighter regime only applies if both criteria are met, and platforms are also younger than 3 years old.

Another false statement is that “there is no requirement for platforms to put filters in place”: Yes there is, as soon as a rightholder does not wish to offer a license, para 4 (b) and (c) require platforms to use an #uploadfilter in order to escape liability.

The video says “your memes are safe”: This is misleading. #Article13 says that member states should allow parodies, but the criticism is not that memes will be illegal, but that filters will block them automatically, because they can’t distinguish a parody from ©️ infringement.

At the end, @AxelVossMdEP says that any change to a copyrighted work is allowed under #Article13. It’s not. There’s a list of exceptions in Article 13 (5) that should apply: quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody & pastiche. Other transformative uses remain forbidden.

Reda then notes that, as a member of Parliament, she has submitted a request to inspect the internal documents that resulted in this video being made and published on the official EU Parliament Twitter feed. I actually think Reda could have gone even further. Beyond the flat out lies by Axel Voss in the video (saying 10 million Euros "or" less than 5 million uniques, and leaving out that those only apply to companies less than 3 years old), Voss also makes this odd statement, saying that if a company qualifies they are "a little bit exempted." How is one "a little bit exempted"? He's actually choosing his words carefully, because he knows that even if you qualify for all three conditions (which will only cover a very small number of platforms) you're not really exempted at all. You just have slightly less onerous conditions thrust upon you.

Of course, with elections coming up in just a few months, it does seem like the EU Parliament may regret this decision. Just skimming through most of the responses to this tweet, it doesn't seem to be convincing anyone of anything... other than that they want to vote the bums out in May.

And there are a lot more like that. Indeed, I don't seem to see anyone actually praising the EU Parliament's decision to post this nonsense, which makes you wonder why they even bothered.

Filed Under: article 13, axel voss, bias, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, julia reda, lies, propaganda

Hollywood Accounting Rears Its Ugly Head Again: Fox's 'False Testimony' And 'Aversion For The Truth' Leads To $179M Fine

from the this-is-endemic dept

For years, we've talked about bullshit Hollywood Accounting, in which the big studios make boatloads of money on films and TV shows while declaring publicly that those works never made a dime in profit. As we've discussed, in its simplest terms, the studios set up a separate "corporation" for the film or TV project, which then it charges massive fees -- and the sole purpose of those fees seem to be to send all the money to the studio, while claiming that the film or TV project is "losing money" and thus they don't have to pay out any profits to the actual creative people.

Remember this the next time the MPAA goes around talking about how its mission is to "protect creators."

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner has the latest bombshell example of Hollywood Accounting, which has resulted in Fox being told by an arbitrator to pay $179 million for repeated and obviously intentional dishonesty in reporting on the profits of the TV show Bones:

In coming to a decision, Lichtman describes how some of Fox’s top executives, including 21st Century Fox president Peter Rice and Fox TV CEO Dana Walden (soon to be top executives at Disney) plus Fox TV chairman Gary Newman (leaving Fox) “appear to have given false testimony in an attempt to conceal their wrongful acts.” According to the ruling, Fox has taken a “cavalier attitude toward its wrongdoing" and exhibits a "company-wide culture and an accepted climate that enveloped an aversion for the truth."

What is clear in reading through the details is that this scam works because everyone at the studio is on it. This is not some scam that came out of nowhere. This is the standard operating procedure used by the big Hollywood studios to screw over the people who were actually behind the creative aspects of the show, who were promised a cut of the profits that never arrive.

In this version of the scam, Fox also roped in Hulu, the online streaming platform it owns 30% of. In this case, it used Hulu to suppress the money coming in for the show, so it could show lower income for the sake of hiding profits.

In arbitration, Fox attempted to justify the low license fees that Fox Broadcasting, Hulu and Fox’s foreign affiliates were paying its studio division for rights to air the series.

“Bones was a middling show with middling ratings,” wrote Fox’s lawyers in an opening brief, adding that a higher fee from the $2 million per episode paid would have led to the show’s cancellation.

As Lichtman discovered in the course of the arbitration, though, Fox’s studio executives were never really interested in finding out the series’ fair market value.

“We were not allowed to get that information from the network,” testified Walden, who at the time ran the Fox studio but not Fox Broadcasting, when asked about the possibility of finding out what the network paid for similar shows in their middle seasons.

Given that the profit participants had self-dealing protection in their contracts that “deals must be as good as marketplace deals,” the arbitrator found Walden's lack of knowledge to be “either shocking if true, or disingenuous if false,” adding, “Interestingly, both Ms. Walden and Mr. Newman testified that they engaged in tough negotiations and fought for the [Profit] Participants. However, the evidence belies these assertions. How could they fight if they were not properly armed with the requisite information? What negotiations were there if the information mandated by the contract was not examined, called for or even investigated?”

It also comes out that Fox threatened to cancel the show unless those who contractually were supposed to get a cut of the profits signed a special agreement promising not to challenge the self-dealing licensing fees that Fox negotiated. As the story notes, other Fox actions at the time -- including signing on the showrunner of Bones at an expensive new contract to continue the show -- made it clear that this was a total bluff by Fox just to get the profit participants forced into a position where they couldn't challenge the sham licensing deals. The arbitrator calls this out directly:

The answer is self-evident: The show was not going to be canceled and there never was an intent to do so. The intent was to continue with the show and at the same time bar any chance for a lawsuit to be brought.

Also, there appears to be significant evidence to suggest that Fox tried to buy off a former executive who had organized a plan to avoid paying out profit sharing, by offering him insanely lucrative "deal" right before he was set to testify about the Bones situation:

And all of this activity was coming as Fox Entertainment’s then-chairman Peter Liguori sent a memo in 2009 to Fox Broadcasting’s then-chairman Peter Chernin outlining a “legal action plan” to avoid paying license fees covering the full cost of show production.

Shortly after sending this plan, Liguori would leave Fox and would later become CEO of Tribune Media, stepping down in 2017. The ruling reveals something new and startling: After his stint at Tribune and in the heat of this arbitration, Liguori signed a "First Look Agreement" with FX, which provided him contingent compensation far exceeding that of top executive producers in Hollywood. According to IMDb, Liguori's sole credit is a 1996 film, Big Night. Nevertheless, and with absolutely no public fanfare whatsoever that he now has a deal with FX, he is apparently getting profit points surpassing the industry's top showrunners.

"Why and how did this come about?" asks the arbitrator. "FX apparently issued no press release reporting its deal with Liguori. When viewed in light of these circumstances, the Liguori 'legal action plan' is far from innocuous. If one juxtaposes the First Look Agreement with Mr. Liguori's testimony at the hearing (where he downplays the significance of the plan itself), it seems coincidental that Mr. Liguori disappears for nine years (from Fox's radar) and then magically reappears with a First Look Agreement seven months before he is to testify in these proceedings with a deal in hand that most producers in Hollywood have strived to have their entire entertainment career."

There is a lot more in Gardner's article, which makes it incredibly clear that this was all standard operating procedure at Fox. Basically, the company appears to do anything possible to avoid an official "profit" on its works, to avoid paying out to the creatives involved in the show who signed on to participate in any profit. From this story alone, the company clearly had a detailed plan to avoid such payouts, and then bolstered it with sham deals, bogus threats, forced contracts, multiple levels of lying, and even potentially buying off a key witness.

Yeah, and Hollywood wants to paint the internet companies as bad?

Perhaps it shouldn't be shocking that the very same people who rush to the press and politicians to whine about some kids getting a free copy of their tv show or movie online would be in the midst of a massive multi-million dollar scam to defraud actual creators -- but it does seem like maybe (just maybe) we shouldn't be so quick to take those folks at their word when they complain about the internet and "piracy."

Filed Under: bones, fees, hollywood, hollywood accounting, lies, profits, scams, self-dealing
Companies: disney, fox, hulu

Remember When Ajit Pai Said Killing Net Neutrality Would Boost Network Investment? About That...

from the head-fake dept

You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that they had somehow supposedly crushed broadband industry network investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproved this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would explode since carriers would be "unchained" from "burdensome regulation."

You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.

A few months ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors from the Trump FCC. Both AT&T and Verizon have similarly announced massive workforce reductions as well. Some investment growth is happening in wireless as carriers prepare for fifth-generation (5G) wireless service (which they would have deployed regardless of the attacks on net neutrality). But even that's a bit lower than Wall Street and sector analysis expected.

And according to the latest analysis from MoffettNathanson, both fixed-line telcos and cablecos are expected to see notable declines in CAPEX and investment:

"Telco-related wireline capex, meanwhile, is slated to fall from $20.3 billion in 2018 to $19.6 billion this year. That slight drop comes as AT&T completes the fiber buildout commitments originally promised when it acquired DirecTV by July, and as Verizon redirects capital to wireless, Moffett said. Capital spending among the four publicly traded cable operators covered by the MoffettNathanson -- Comcast, Charter, Altice USA and Cable One Inc. -- is expected to decline significantly this year -- some 5.8%.

My math may be shaky, but a 5.8% decline in cable industry CAPEX doesn't quite sound like the investment revolution Ajit Pai and his squad of industry allies promised.

To be clear, there's a lot of reasons that ISP CAPEX rises and falls. When Pai and friends were trying to claim that net neutrality killed network investment back in 2017, we noted extensively how they were cherry picking very narrow windows of CAPEX decline that had nothing to do with net neutrality. For example, one company's CAPEX had dipped under net neutrality because it had just finished a cable set top box upgrade project.

The same is true here. As MoffettNathanson notes, some of this dip is thanks to AT&T shifting its focus toward paying off debt for its megamergers. Another chunk of it is because streaming competition is reducing the desire for the clunky old cable box. And in the case of the biggest dip at Charter Communications (Spectrum), it was in large part thanks to the completion of an all-digital transition in the wake of its costly acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

None of that changes the fact that Ajit Pai and a chorus of telecom industry sycophants repeatedly misled the public and Congress about the net benefits of their historically-unpopular policies. Repeatedly. Now, we're left with the end result; a coalition of natural monopolies with even less competition or accountability than ever, eager to get to work not on investing back into the network, but extracting higher and higher consumer and competitor costs courtesy of limited competition. Limited competition Ajit Pai and friends can't even admit is real, much less have a plan to do anything about.

I know this is a crazy thought, but it's almost as if when you appoint industry sycophants to positions of oversight, their primary goal is to improve carrier revenues, leaving everything else (competition, consumer welfare, innovation) foundering in the rear view mirror.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, capex, fcc, investment, lies, net neutrality
Companies: at&t, verizon

AT&T Execs Think It's Really Funny They Misled Consumers About 5G Availability

from the too-clever-by-half dept

So earlier this month, we noted how AT&T had pissed off competitors and consumers alike by pretending its existing fourth generation wireless network (4G) was actually 5G. More specifically, AT&T has been changing the "4G" icon on its customers phones to say "5G E," despite the fact that actual 5G service at scale is still probably several years away. Technically, AT&T simply took some of the improvements it recently added to its 4G networks (like better MIMO antennas and more efficient 256 QAM technologies), and decided to call this "5G Evolution" in a bid to pretend it was the first to launch actual 5G.

Competitors and consumers noticed.

Competitors like T-Mobile have been having fun making fun of AT&T's head fake on Twitter:

Here's where a normal company would acknowledge it had been overly creative and announce that in a bid to avoid confusing customers, it would walk back what was fairly obviously a bad, misleading idea. But that's not how AT&T rolls. When pressed for comment, AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan decided instead to double down, and expressed glee at the level of consternation AT&T's fake 5G created:

"Every company is guilty of building a narrative of how you want the world to work, and I love the fact that we broke our industry's narrative two days ago, and so they're frustrated and they're going to do what they do," Donovan said.

Except it's not just AT&T's competitors that are frustrated. Customers also think AT&T's moves are misleading, something that harms AT&T since consumers are being trained to see AT&T's 5G promises as horse shit at this juncture. Donovan though remained undaunted in his excitement over the confusion his marketing gambit sowed:

"I think the result of last month, beating the industry out [with the 5G hotspot], and this 5G E launch a couple of days ago, our competitors are frustrated," Donovan said. "if I have now occupied beachfront real estate in my competitors' heads, that makes me smile."

Granted if you've watched AT&T mislead the press, public, and government on subjects like net neutrality or misleading billing, this is certainly well in character for the telecom giant. AT&T's not likely to learn the underlying lesson here: instead of getting consumers excited about the real potential for 5G, they've fixated consumers and the press on the fact that AT&T's promises surrounding this technology shouldn't be believed.

Customers were already skeptical of wireless carrier claims given years of misleading coverage maps, and this sort of behavior will only support the belief that, for lack of a more technical term, the wireless sector is often aggressively full of shit.

Filed Under: 5g, 5g evolution, john noovan, lies, wireless
Companies: at&t

DOJ Says It Knows It Fudged Numbers On Its Dangerous Immigrants Report, But Refuses To Correct Them Or Release Underlying Data

from the another-federal-level-shrug dept

The DOJ doesn't care if it lies to the American people. This isn't exactly a shocking accusation. The DOJ isn't anyone's idea of honest, no matter what its name implies. The DOJ has encouraged and supported parallel construction, entrapment (ATF stash house stings, almost every FBI terrorism bust), and shown itself to be a willing extension of every administration it's attached to. If a narrative needs bolstering, the DOJ will comply.

When the Trump administration wanted to push its narrative about the southern border crawling with dangerous terrorists and criminals, the DOJ leapt in to help. It had to, since the agency charged with immigration enforcement (ICE) couldn't actually find very many dangerous criminals to detain and deport, even as the President continued to make daily assertions about the national security threat directly across the border.

The DOJ and DHS presented its "findings" to Congress and the American public -- a bunch of paper masquerading as a set of facts that contained very little factual information. It claimed a "vast majority" of terrorist acts were perpetrated by foreigners illegally in the United States. This was not simply wrong, but an apparently deliberate attempt to inflate numbers into a national security threat-sized problem. To do this, the DOJ and DHS added in foreign citizens who had been extradited to the US to face trial for terrorism-related charges. Subtracting these, the actual percentage was closer to 20% -- not anywhere near the "majority" the agencies claimed.

This was only part of the report's misrepresentations. Another assertion claimed immigrants were convicted of almost 70,000 sex offenses from 2003 to 2009. Again, the facts did not back this claim up.

The nearly 70,000 offenses spanned a period from 1955 to 2010 — 55 years, not six; the data covered arrests, not convictions…

The DOJ has finally admitted it screwed up when compiling this fact hack job. This admission isn't going to help it fare any better in the litigation that resulted from the release of the DOJ/DHS's fact-free report. The agencies are being sued under a little-used law called the Information Quality Act. But larger than this problem is the DOJ's refusal to truly own its skewed report and the misinformation it spread to support the President's xenophobic agenda.

Now, after two rounds, the Justice Department has told the groups it will not retract or correct the document. Rather, “in future reports, the department can strive to minimize the potential for misinterpretation,” Michael H. Allen, deputy assistant attorney general for policy, management and planning, wrote in a Dec. 21 letter to the groups.

The DOJ's counsel claims the misrepresentations were merely "editorial errors." That hardly seems likely. The addition of extradited individuals to bring up the percentage of foreign-born persons charged for terrorist acts could not have been accidental. And perhaps someone may have slipped up when tallying sexual offenses by foreigners, but it would be a whole lot more believable if the error had been a couple of extra years, rather than five additional decades.

The DOJ and DHS -- despite admitting error -- also refuse to release the underlying data used to compile the disingenuous report. Certainly the numbers won't back up the government's claims, which is likely the reason it won't hand those numbers over. But the DOJ is being even more obtuse than it needs to be. Here's the DOJ's counsel explaining why the DOJ won't be providing anyone with the underlying data.

“There is no requirement in either the [law or department guidelines] that agencies must always provide underlying data when disseminating information to the public,” Allen wrote.

Well, fuck you too. That's a hell of a reason to refuse to own up to your misrepresentations. The law doesn't prevent the DOJ from handing over this info. It simply doesn't make it mandatory. The DOJ could claw back a bit of goodwill by openly admitting its errors and allowing the public to view the data for itself. But it won't because no one's making it. This is what it looks like at the top of the governmental org chart: a bunch of children who've spent their free time looking for legal loopholes. What a disgrace, especially for an agency with the word "justice" in its title.

Filed Under: doj, immigrants, lies