Florida Sheriff Grady Judd Decides He’s Capable Of Running An AI Crime Thingy

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the never-met-a-varmint-he-cain't-round-up dept

Sheriffs answer to no one but voters. Consequently, they often answer to no one.

Voters tend to gravitate towards names they recognize. Sheriffs count on this form of “loyalty” to ensure years or decades at the helm of a county law enforcement agency. And this loyalty continues to pay off even when sheriffs are less than desirable.

They also tend to view the position as something out of the Old West. They make the rules and everyone just needs to abide by them. Others view the office as an ideological platform. That’s how we end up with people like Joe Arpaio, who basically ran his office for the clicks by dressing inmates in pink and jacking up non-whites on the regular in hopes of scoring big with the anti-immigration crowd.

Then there’s Sheriff Grady Judd, who runs the Polk County, Florida sheriff’s office. Judd is a grandstander. He’s never met a press conference he’s not willing to hold forth at. He’s spent years pretending he’s fighting the war against sex trafficking by backing terrible laws, sending sex workers (the apparent victims of sex trafficking) to jail, and engaging in a number of questionable child sexual abuse investigations. On top of that, he relishes dragging the accused through the mud and the more sordid the accusations, the better. On top of that, he’ll seize any property he can, which means he takes cars from men purchasing sex from (of completely legal age) sex workers.

He has zero interest in ensuring he’s running a tight ship. His deputies get arrested for criminal acts fairly regularly. During a hurricane, he sent deputies to city shelters to check IDs for the sole purpose of bumping up his arrest stats. He once threatened to jail Apple CEO Tim Cook because iPhones are encrypted by default.

Now, he’s on to the next thing. The man who obviously prefers running a mic to running a legitimate law enforcement agency has somehow convinced the future of America (i.e., college kids) to hook him up with this whole AI thing in hopes of catching up with the 21st century.

Polk County Sheriff’s Office is teaming up with Florida Polytechnic University in an effort to use the latest technological trend to fight crime.

Polk Sheriff Grady Judd announced the launch of the Sheriff’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. The Sheriff’s Office has started assembling staff and resources for a new investigative unit aimed at learning the latest technologies and artificial intelligence to keep people safe.

That’s just the start of The Ledger’s deeply credulous reporting on Sheriff Judd’s latest whatever-the-fuck this is.

It’s already obvious Judd can’t run a competent law enforcement agency. If there’s any good actually being done, it’s been buried by years of Judd’s self-congratulatory press releases and press conferences. Should he be trusted to start throwing AI at the crime problem he feels warrants the addition of tech he clearly doesn’t understand? Of course not. But being rational isn’t a prerequisite for law enforcement officials. In fact, the opposite is much more useful.

And that’s why we’re blessed with this “explanation” by Sheriff Judd:

“AI is the new uncharted universe that we must sail into and chart safe navigation for all of our community,” Judd said. “We will protect you from the evils of AI.”

lol. lmao, even.

Judd can’t protect his residents from real crime because he’s too busy chasing imaginary crime. The day-to-day work goes undone while his deputies dress up like 13-year-old girls (not literally, of course) to satisfy their fantasies of appearing in an episode of “To Catch A Predator.” Whatever floats their kink, I guess. But the real problem is Judd thinks play-acting on the internet gives him the right to engage in extra-territorial arrests.

And, of course, Judd’s kink factors into the sudden and very unwelcome addition of AI to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Judd believes adding AI to the day-to-day investigative work will “prevent crimes” because… [reads and re-reads Judd’s statements] “his office is already seeing instances of AI-generated child pornography.”

wait what?

Judd clearly believes his AI will be smarter than the AI used to create faux CSAM. But not for the same reasons.

The sheriff said it will be necessary to have the intelligence to disprove future creations, where a suspect or individual could potentially create a video of themselves to be used for an alibi.

Deputy J.H. Christ on a bicycle… this is insane. Judd seems to think he can wage an AI-on-AI battle and come out the winner, rather than just the subject of multiple civil rights lawsuits. He has zero interest in protecting the people who might be exploited or abused thanks to AI-enabled CSAM creations. Instead, he thinks his computer brain thing will help him poke holes in alibis by “disproving” defendants’ alibis.

This is super weird and super stupid. I’ve covered a lot of CSAM cases over the past decade-plus here at Techdirt and the number of times a defendant has submitted video recorded evidence of their whereabouts has yet to surpass zero.

There’s plenty more stupid in this article. And it’s hard to determine exactly where the nadir lies. Is it Sheriff Judd claiming the computers the Sheriff’s Office currently has are capable of handling processor-heavy AI work? Is it when he pretends there will be almost no cost to taxpayers because a publicly-funded college is handling all the work?

Maybe it’s this, where Judd ignores everything we already know about AI and other crime-fighting tech:

When asked about a concern for bias in AI programming, Judd said the AI is “not capable of bias.” Avent said the AI programs learn the algorithms and patterns they are taught, and it’s a matter of making sure the important data is input while discriminating factors are not.

Holy hell. Folks, if you reside in this county, the time to vote this chucklefuck out of office was years ago. Don’t let the next opportunity pass you by. This man is a danger to the people he’s supposed to be serving. And he’s never going to get any better. This guy thinks verbally stroking himself off in interviews and press conferences is the same thing as providing competent law enforcement leadership. But he’s just a punchline who happens to wear a badge. The problem is that no one who’s been subjected to his particular brand of law enforcement is laughing.

Filed Under: ai, florida, grady judd, panhandler, polk county, pre-crime

U.S. Broadband Maps Suck Slightly Less, But Still Let ISPs Comically Over-State Coverage

Broadband

from the prepare-to-flush-billions-of-dollars-down-the-toilet dept

We’ve noted more than a few times that for all of the government’s talk about wanting to “bridge the digital divide,” it’s consistently struggled to even map where broadband access is or isn’t available. The government has spent more than $400 million on trying to map broadband access to date, and while there certainly have been improvements, the end result continues to be a decidedly mixed bag.

With $42 billion in looming broadband subsidies headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill, the states and feds are in a rush to finally address our shitty mapping to try and minimize waste and make sure this money goes to areas that need it most.

While the new maps are definitely an improvement, the FCC’s latest still has problems with over-stating coverage and available speeds (try it for yourself). You can input any address and watch in real time as the FCC basically hallucinates competitors and speeds, routinely claiming that areas under a Comcast monopoly actually have the option of a dozen different meaningful competitors.

The FCC also still refuses to collect and share pricing data, which industry opposes because it would only work to further highlight monopolization, consolidation, and muted competition. And the underlying data isn’t transparent or owned by the public itself, with the latest improved $44 million mapping contract doled out to a company named Costquest that won’t let anybody look under the hood.

Recently the FCC released the 4th version of its National Broadband Map, with data it claims to be accurate as of December 2023. In the 3rd version of the map, the FCC insisted there were still 10.1 million locations deemed “underserved or unserved” when it comes to broadband access. Broadband mapping gurus say that in just six months that number has dropped a whopping 11 percent to 8.8 million.

But the kind of folks who actually work with the reality on the ground, like broadband consultant Doug Dawson (who advises municipalities on how to improve regional broadband infrastructure), that quick of an improvement raises more than a few eyebrows:

“Is it believable that 1.3 million fewer unserved locations in the country got upgraded to faster technology in a six-month period? Almost by definition, most of the unserved and underserved locations are rural. While there is a lot of fiber construction underway due to broadband grants, it’s hard to picture that grants covered that many new rural locations during a six-month period.

Consider the amount of investment that would have required. If the average cost per upgrade was $6,000, this would have meant completing $7.8 billion of construction in the second half of last year in rural areas. It’s hard to think even half of that was spent in a six month period.”

So what’s actually likely to account for our sudden improvement in broadband coverage? ISPs are likely changing the areas they claim to cover and the speeds they are claiming to provide in order to elbow in on billions in looming subsidies. That’s made possible, in part, because the FCC allows ISPs to declare broadband coverage based on “advertised” speeds, not reality:

“The FCC mapping rules only require ISPs to report marketing broadband speeds. If an ISP markets to customers with speeds ‘up to 100/20 Mbps’ it is not breaking FCC rules to make that claim in the maps – even if it only delivers 30/5 Mbps to a location. This FCC rule to allow marketing speeds instead of some approximation of actual speeds has made a travesty out of the maps.”

Given I talk to a different municipality pretty much every week about broadband access, I know for a fact that the infrastructure bill’s BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program) funding is going to do a lot of good for disconnected communities. But from decades of telecom reporting experience I also know the government’s belated and clumsy rush to finally care about accuracy in broadband mapping is going to result in oodles of fraud.

This is an industry filled with clever regional monopolies that have abused federal subsidy programs for decades with very little accountability, grabbing billions upon billions of dollars in exchange for fiber networks that are always somehow mysteriously left half-deployed, if they’re deployed at all. Often managed by an FCC that, across parties, routinely redefines feckless oversight (it’s why the Biden administration chose the NTIA and states to manage BEAD funding).

The scale of the infrastructure bill broadband subsidy program is staggering, and while well intentioned and genuinely poised to do a lot of good, we’d likely have avoided a significant chunk of looming fraud if the government had shaken off lobbying influence and started caring about factual reality decades earlier.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, ntia, states

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the i-hear-you dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to someone comparing Black History Month to white power celebrations:

Black people: celebrating overcoming slavery and other historical injustices

Nazis: celebrating having white skin, and committing historical injustices

Idiots on the internet: “these are the same thing”

In second place, it’s mcinsand with some general thoughts on the concept of “woke”:

Please call BS if I’m wrong, but ‘woke’ looks to me like an effort to address our culturally-ingrained biases. The people upset with ‘woke’ look to me like they feel threatened that ‘woke’ might remove the biases that they enjoy.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a response from Samuel Abram to a complaint about Techdirt’s coverage of Elon Musk:

If you’re so upset at the writers of techdirt writing about Musk, then tell Musk not to generate headlines.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about Meta saying it won’t fight bad online child safety regulations:

Remember that phase of civil history where the telecoms and the state started sleeping with each other?

We’re watching it in real time with social media.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad, responding to a line in one of our posts in which we offered two possibilities for something going on at ExTwitter. It began “so, either Musk is learning” and Thad cut us off before the “or”:

Yeah, it’s not that one.

In second place, it’s an anonymous response to another commenter alleging we cover Musk to please our “easily riled up” audience:

I mean you are in here, day in, day out, bleating like a freshly castrated goat.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about our suggestion that every random Musk product idea doesn’t deserve an entire news cycle:

Nah. I’m eating popcorn yet again waiting for him to announce his own line of phones that are just an android clone and to watch even more of his workers ditch him because they can’t have their phones at work.

Finally, it’s Pixelation with a reaction to a former Politico owner’s anti-woke “Journalism Finishing School”:

That’s one way to finish journalism.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: June 9th – 15th

Techdirt

from the memories dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we looked at the two-sided political attacks on Section 230, while an appeals court issued a strong but easily-misrepresented Section 230 ruling, and the law was also used to begin smackin down a lawsuit from Craig Brittain. A prominent copyright troll ran away when finally challenged, the NY Times was demanding money from Google, and the news was spreading that Amazon Ring cameras are cops. We also wrote yet again about the mismatch in privacy scrutiny given to tech companies and telcos.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, the EFF published a list of the top five lies being spread by NSA defenders, while James Clapper admitted something everyone else had been saying for months, and a former NSA lawyer was trying to disappear Techdirt’s posts about him via the right to be forgotten. Copyright troll Malibu Media was slinging around some wild accusations, and we took a look at the proliferation of bogus broadband astroturf organizations.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, fashion designers were starting to realize that fashion copyright would seriously harm their business. The Canadian patent office rejected software and business model patents, video game companies were still complaining about used game sales, and there was a trademark fight over chocolate bunnies. Texas was taking an early swing at terrible internet laws, the recording industry was taking the wrong message from a study about file sharers, and a new website from NetChoice set out to track all the bad proposed internet legislation in America.

Filed Under: history, look back

11th Circuit Strips Immunity From Cop Who Shot And Killed Dog That Had Already Been Neutralized By A Taser

Legal Issues

from the but-it-took-a-dead-dog-to-get-here dept

We know cops kill dozens of dogs every day. This much has been verified by the US Department of Justice, which called it an “epidemic.” It’s not just anecdotal evidence generated by a handful of court cases.

We also know most cops who kill dogs get away with it, even though multiple courts have ruled that killing a pet is “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment — something that must be supported by probable cause to remain constitutional.

And the cops got away with this killing, too. At least until they reached the appellate level. The lower court saw nothing unconstitutional about killing a dog that no longer posed a threat (if it ever posed a threat at all) to officers because it had already been tased into submission.

The facts of the case — as recounted in the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF] — raise a lot of questions no police officer or official are willing to answer honestly.

Plowright, a resident of Miami-Dade County, called 911 to report someone trespassing in the vacant property near his home. Miami-Dade police officers Leordanis Rondon and [Sergio] Cordova responded to the call, approaching Plowright’s front door “through a dimly lit driveway.” As Plowright came out to greet the officers, they drew their guns and “immediately began shouting” at Plowright to show them his hands. When Plowright’s dog Niles, an “American Bulldog weighing less than 40 pounds,” entered the scene, the officers ordered Plowright to get control of him. Before Plowright did so, Rondon fired his taser at Niles, sending him “into shock.” Then, “[a]fter the dog was already down from the [t]aser,” Cordova “fired at least two shots from his gun, killing the dog for no reason.” The officers then ordered the “emotionally devast[ated]” Plowright to the ground as Niles “laid dying.”

Let’s start unpacking this. While it’s understandable officers might have exercised caution because the first person they approached on the property might have been the trespasser, it’s just as understandable that Plowright might have confused by being treated as a criminal suspect by the people he had called to report a crime.

Then there’s the order to “control” the dog, which was given to Plowright as soon as the dog appeared. What was not given to Plowright was any time to comply with this order. Officer Rondon tased the dog and Officer Cordova finished the job moments later. Why bother issuing orders if you’re not going to give people time to comply with them? The only thing I can think of is that officers issue orders they know they’re not going to give someone a chance to comply with for the sole reason of generating justification for any acts of violence or rights violation they engage in past that point. “Subject refused to comply,” etc.

Going beyond that, the officers still treated Plowright as a suspect even while tacitly admitting he wasn’t by ordering him to “control” his dog. If they still thought Plowright was the trespasser, they wouldn’t have given this order. They would have neutralized the dog and moved on to the rest of the stuff they did here, like ordering the person to the ground. But here, they tried to have it both ways: they treated Plowright as the owner of the dog (which would mean he was most likely the owner of the property) and as a criminal trespassing suspect by pointing guns at him and ordering him to the ground.

Logically, none of this works out. Fortunately, it didn’t work out for Officer Cordova either, despite his earlier success in the lower court. The immunity he obtained there is stripped away by the Appeals Court, which says it doesn’t even need a case on point to do so. The rights here were so clearly established by other precedent and, you know, common sense, there’s no way the officer could have honestly believed his violent actions were justified.

Here, a reasonable officer would have known that it was unlawful to shoot Niles under the circumstances alleged in the complaint—even without caselaw directly on point. Even a cursory reading of Barrow and Jacobsen reveals that shooting a domestic animal amounts to a seizure, meaning that it is subject to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement. And, because the “nature and extent” of such a seizure is so serious, Place tells us that it can be justified only by significant countervailing government interests. Although it is true that “a general standard such as ‘to act reasonably’” will seldom “put officers on notice that certain conduct will violate federal law” given the “intensely fact specific” nature of the inquiry, the facts alleged in Plowright’s complaint take Cordova’s actions “well beyond the ‘hazy border’ that sometimes separates lawful conduct from unlawful conduct.”

Even without these cases, however, Cordova’s conduct was “so obviously at the very core of what the Fourth Amendment prohibits that the unlawfulness of [his] conduct” should have been “readily apparent to [him], notwithstanding the lack of case law.” Just as “no reasonable officer could ever believe that it was appropriate” to tase a compliant, non-threatening bystander at the scene of an arrest, Fils v. City of Aventura, 647 F.3d 1272, 1276–77, 1292 (11th Cir. 2011), no reasonable officer could ever believe that it was appropriate to shoot an incapacitated, non-threatening domestic animal during a 911 investigation.

That means this case will move forward, rather than be short-circuited by a cop who was too impulsive to keep himself from killing a neutralized “threat,” but suddenly so cognizant of relevant case law he thought he could secure immunity because no cop before him had done the exact same thing he did under the exact same circumstances.

And there may be even more evidence on the way that will undercut Officer Cordova’s testimony. The appeals court decision says “body cam footage or other evidence” may introduce facts that move the officer closer to qualified immunity or favorable verdict. But, given what’s claimed here and the officers’ responses to the lawsuit, chances are any additional information will only make things worse for Officer Cordova.

In addition to the Fourth Amendment violation, the appeals court says the elements of state law are satisfied here. And that means Officer Cordova will also be facing intentional infliction of emotional distress allegations and will not be able to avail himself of immunity at the state level either.

Given this, one would expect a settlement in the near future. Then again, cops are playing with house money, so if the state of Florida considers protecting a cop from the consequences of his unconstitutional actions, this case may still have a bit of run time before it reaches a resolution.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, 4th amendment, florida, lawsuit, miami-dade pd, police violence, sergio cordova

Roku Continues To Screw With Customers Via Firmware/Software Updates

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the blurred-lines dept

Whether intentional or not, the process for tech companies to fall to the process of enshittification seems to be a very real trend. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which once good and useful technology platforms devolve to become worse and less useful as the owners of those platforms move on from creating a great user experience and turn instead towards aiming purely at profitability. This typically involves injecting advertisements anywhere possible, or altering useful features via firmware updates, or cutting cost by axing development and support teams. All of this leads to platforms pissing customers off to the point of un-adoption.

And that brings us to Roku. Roku, over recent months, appears to be fully engulfed in the process of enshittification. The platform recently began the process of layering advertisements foisted on customers where there once were none. They’re legal and communications teams are clearly not thinking things through when they pull stuff like sending out a new ToS requirement for already purchased devices with a threat to brick them if users don’t agree.

And now a recent OS update for some Roku TVs has managed to lock in users to a motion-blurring option that they may not even want.

Reports on Roku’s community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing “motion smoothing” without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered “Action Smoothing” before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV’s general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users.

When it works, a signal looks more fluid and, as the name implies, smooth. When it is left on and a more traditional signal at 24 or 30 frames per second is processed, it works somewhat too well. Shows and films look awkwardly realistic, essentially lacking the motion blur and softer movement to which we’re accustomed. Everything looks like a soap opera or like you’re watching a behind-the-scenes smartphone video of your show. It’s so persistent an issue, and often buried in a TV’s settings, that Tom Cruise did a whole PSA about it back in 2018.

If you’ve ever played around with your TVs image settings, you know all about this sort of thing. Motion blurring may have its uses, but it tends to come up as a topic when people are watching content that has fast movement on the screen, particularly with watching sports. The viewing experience suddenly looks janky, like you’re watching the screen pan in a way that makes everything look slightly fake by, ironically, looking too real compared with the rest of the content.

It can be a major frustration for those looking for the best viewing experience. So suddenly pushing out an update that locks in customers to this option they may not want is, well, certainly a choice. It would be as though you couldn’t adjust the image brightness or color scheme settings to make it the best experience for your particular device in your particular home.

Now, I have no doubt that this was done in error and that Roku will put in a fix for this. But that isn’t really the point. Roku is going down a road that often leads to ruin, simply because it’s paying less attention to the experience of its customers and instead focusing only inward.

Filed Under: enshittification, motion blurring
Companies: roku

With Multiple Deputies Headed To Jail, Sheriff Vows To Get To Bottom Of ‘Goon Squad’ Horror Show He Ignored For Years

Legal Issues

from the fox-to-henhouse:-what-up dept

Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time.

This all began because a “helpful” Mississippi resident called the cops because they had witnessed the most Mississippi of crimes: black men hanging out with a white woman. What went on from there not only chills the blood, but triggers the gag reflex:

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

[…]

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

[…]

Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.

At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.

[…]

ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.

ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.

ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

I want to set the scene for what’s been happening since then. The six members of the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” are all now facing jail time. The sheriff who oversaw this group (and by “oversaw,” I mean “ignored”) has not only received a raise that makes him the highest paid law enforcement official in the state, but is now pretending he’s capable of cleaning this mess up.

And who better to do this than the sheriff who, in 2014, abused the subpoena process to dig up info on his girlfriend. He presented a subpoena for phone records to the local DA under the pretense that he was requesting general info to present to a grand jury. But the phone records request targeted his girlfriend (who was cuurently married to someone else) and the school employee the sheriff believed she was romantically involved with. An investigation was opened, but it dead-ended after the chairman of the (LOL) House Committee on Ethics recused himself because of his “years-long friendship” with the sheriff. It was then passed on to the state attorney general who simply decided not to pursue it.

Another bombshell of bad press has rocked the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department still run by ethically-challenged sheriff Bryan Bailey. A collaborative report produced by the New York Times and Mississippi Today uncovered messages sent between deputies in the “Goon Squad” WhatsApp group.

As can be assumed from the description of the atrocities committed by Goon Squad members in the only case they’re currently facing prison time for, the contents of these messages is more of the same:

Some of the messages discuss brutalizing and demeaning suspects, as well as exchanging disturbing crime scene photos and pictures of “rotting corpses,” the report said.

In one exchange from a 2022 domestic violence arrest, then-Deputy Hunter Elward wrote, “Did you Tase him in the face!?”

Fellow Goon Squad member Daniel Opdyke asked if they had shocked the man in the anus.

Another deputy said the suspect would have “gotten more lovings,” seeming to indicate they held back because of potential witnesses, saying, “All the neighbors were outside watching.”

Chat members also “discussed taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested,” the Times reported.

Another exchange discusses deputies getting “points” for shooting someone.

One member of this chat group has already opted for the “locker room talk” defense popularized by convicted felon Donald Trump:

One member of the group chat, who no longer works for the sheriff’s department, called his messages “absolutely all jokes,” in an interview with the New York Times.

Huh. Well, they don’t look like “jokes.” Jokes are supposed to be funny. Were these messages only funny because they were true? Because, given what’s reported, the “jokes” referenced acts of violence Goon Squad members actually committed. If these were jokes, they were in-jokes that were only funny in the context of habitual acts of torture and violence committed by members of the Goon Squad group.

The state should be jumping in here to take the lead on an independent investigation of the members of this chat group. But it hasn’t done that, which has allowed none other than Sheriff Bryan Bailey to get a head start on exonerating himself, if not the rest of chat group participants not currently serving federal prison time.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office says it will conduct a review and analysis after a Wednesday report from The New York Times and Mississippi Today detailed messages in an encrypted WhatsApp group chat between known “Goon Squad” members and other law enforcement officers, some of whom are still employed by the county.

[…]

Neither the department nor Sheriff Bryan Bailey “knew of the existence of ‘a shift of officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ until a bill of information was filed in federal court,” the sheriff’s office statement said.

Bullshit. If the sheriff was truly unaware of the existence of a “Goon Squad” or the violent tactics of its members, he’s either incompetent or a liar. The acts committed by these officers were not the acts of officers who went a little off the rails when dealing with violent or extremely hostile arrestees. These are the acts of officers who felt truly comfortable torturing their fellow human beings, secure in the knowledge they would most likely get away with it — either because their boss was bad at his job or was willing to ignore their criminal acts. Neither is a good look for the person who’s supposed to be on top of everything happening in his department.

If Sheriff Bailey actually cared about this, he would have asked for an outside law enforcement agency to handle this “review and analysis.” If the state cared at all about this, it would have already initiated an independent investigation utilizing its Inspector General’s office or, at the very least, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Although the latter is still a law enforcement agency and just as prone to look for reasons to exonerate fellow officers, it still wouldn’t be the extremely compromised Sheriff Bailey pretending he can provide a competent investigation of stuff he was either too stupid or too corrupt to notice despite running this department for more than a decade.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, mississippi, police, police brutality, police violence, rankin county

The Supreme Court Continues To Struggle With How To Apply The First Amendment In Intellectual Property Cases

Trademark

from the history-and-tradition dept

For not the first time, the Supreme Court seems to regard the First Amendment as secondary when it comes to cases involving some form of intellectual property. This has happened all too frequently. Perhaps most famously, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Court more or less said that the First Amendment gets a pass in copyright cases, so long as fair use exists as a sort of (rarely used) vent.

More recently, we wrote about how the Supreme Court seemed to forget about the First Amendment entirely in the Andy Warhol Foundation case.

It just seems way too easy for the Court to somehow dance around the First Amendment when it comes to copyright law, and sometimes that extends to other areas as well. Often that’s because the First Amendment and the tests it already gives us are kind of inconvenient if they were applied properly.

Last summer, we wrote about the Vidal v. Elster case, which the Supreme Court decided on Thursday.

In this case, Steve Elster tried to register a trademark on the phrase “Trump too small” and it was rejected, based on a part of the Lanham Act that bars trademark registrations on the names of living people. For some, the case was reminiscent of Matal v. Tam, the case about the band “The Slants” not being able to get a trademark on their name, because it was deemed to be disparaging, and the USPTO would not issue disparaging trademarks under the Lanham Act.

In that case, the Court found that the Disparagement Clause of the Lanham Act violated the First Amendment. So, some thought that the “no living people” part of the Lanham Act might be similarly voided by the First Amendment. As we pointed out last year, building on an argument made in an amicus brief from Public Citizen, was that it was important not to get too caught up in whether or not the First Amendment voided the clause, but rather to make sure the court thought more broadly about what the First Amendment supported more broadly regarding speech.

And that’s because trademark law, in some ways, is in conflict with the concept of free speech. It is literally giving trademark holders at least some ability to limit the speech of others. So, in some cases, you could argue that large parts of trademark law are potentially against the First Amendment. The way to get around this is to view trademark law the way it should naturally be used: as a consumer protection law where the only issue is about protecting consumers from products that falsely claim to be from one company.

Public Citizen argued that no one should be barred from using the phrase “Trump Too Small,” because it was “core political speech.” Therefore, the First Amendment argument shouldn’t be that the “living people” clause was unconstitutional, but that this phrase specifically, as political speech, should be denied a trademark on First Amendment grounds.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decided to make this… messy. I mean:

THOMAS, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part III. ALITO and GORSUCH, JJ., joined that opinion in full; ROBERTS, C. J., and KAVANAUGH, J., joined all but Part III; and BARRETT, J., joined Parts I, II–A, and II–B. KAVANAUGH, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, in which ROBERTS, C. J., joined. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, in which KAGAN, J., joined, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to Parts I, II, and III–B, and in which JACKSON, J., joined as to Parts I and II. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which KAGAN and JACKSON, JJ., joined.

Clear as mud.

In short, all the Justices agree that the First Amendment does not restrict a prohibition on giving trademarks on the names of living people. But they really don’t agree to why the First Amendment works that way. Some point to history and tradition, while others point to existing First Amendment tests.

So only part of the opinion is actually agreed upon by enough Justices to make it matter. It starts out okay, highlighting how the court has, reasonably, in the past tossed out rules that discriminate based on viewpoints.

In the trademark context, we have twice concluded that trademark restrictions that discriminate based on viewpoint violate the First Amendment. In Matal v. Tam, 582 U. S. 218, 223 (2017), we held that the Lanham Act’s bar on disparaging trademarks violated the First Amendment. All Justices in Tam agreed that this bar was viewpoint based because it prohibited trademarks based only on one viewpoint: “[g]iving offense.” Id., at 243 (plurality opinion); see also id., at 248–249 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). And, in Brunetti, we held that the Lanham Act’s bar on trademarks containing immoral or scandalous matter likewise violated the First Amendment. 588 U. S., at 390. We concluded that the bar was viewpoint based because it prohibited trademarks based only on one viewpoint, immoral or scandalous matter, while permitting trademarks based on other viewpoints.

But, they note:

The names clause does not facially discriminate against any viewpoint

The court notes, as it has done before, that the entire concept of trademarks should be deemed constitutional. This is because they date back to the time of the Constitution and no one argued that they violate the First Amendment. But, as part of the history lesson, the Court explains that there have always been some limitations on trademarks:

This first law contained prohibitions on what could be protected as a trademark. For example, the law would not protect a trademark that contained “merely the name of a person . . . only, unaccompanied by a mark sufficient to distinguish it from the same name when used by other persons.” Id., at 211. It thus restricted a trademark based upon its content (i.e., whether it contained more than a name). As trademark disputes increased, courts continued to assess trademarks based on their content. For example, this Court’s first trademark decision explained that a trademark cannot consist of a purely geographical name, rejecting an attempt by one of several coal producers in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley to trademark “Lackawanna coal.” Canal Co. v. Clark, 13 Wall. 311, 321 (1872). Throughout its development, trademark law has required content-based distinctions.

And thus, the Supreme Court basically looks to punt on the larger issues:

We have acknowledged that trademark rights and restrictions can “play well with the First Amendment.” Jack Daniel’s, 599 U. S., at 159 (internal quotation marks omitted). In this case, we do not delineate an exhaustive framework for when a content-based trademark restriction passes muster under the First Amendment. But, in evaluating a solely content-based trademark restriction, we can consider its history and tradition, as we have done before when considering the scope of the First Amendment.

And, based on that, they say the restriction on names is probably fine, again pointing to history.

Recognizing a person’s ownership over his name, the common law restricted the trademarking of names. It prevented a person from trademarking any name—even his own—by itself. In “the early years of trademark law,” courts recognized that “there can be no trade-mark in the name of a person, because . . . every person has the right to use his own name for the purposes of trade.” 2 McCarthy §13:5 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Restatement §14, Comment e (“[A]t early common law, the recognition of an unencumbered right to use one’s name in trade effectively precluded the existence of trademark or trade name rights in personal names”); W. Browne, Law of TradeMarks §206, p. 219 (2d ed. 1885) (“The rule is, that a man cannot turn his mere name into a trade-mark”); McLean v. Fleming, 96 U. S. 245, 252 (1878) (explaining that a person cannot obtain “the exclusive use of a name, merely as such, without more”).

The common law did, however, allow a person to obtain a trademark containing his own name—with a caveat: A person could not use a mark containing his name to the exclusion of a person with the same name. “A corollary of the right to use one’s own name and identity in trade is the right to stop others from doing so—at least those who don’t share the same name.” J. Rothman, Navigating the Identity Thicket, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1271, 1306 (2022); see also Treadway 143–144. In other words, a person’s right to his name cannot be exclusive as to other people bearing the same name: John Smith cannot acquire a trademark that prohibits other John Smiths from using their own names. See McLean, 96 U. S., at 252 (“[H]e cannot have such a right, even in his own name, as against another person of the same name, unless such other person uses a form of stamp or label so like that used by the complaining party as to represent that the goods of the former are of the latter’s manufacture”); accord, Brown Chemical, 139 U. S., at 542; MeNeely v. MeNeely, 62 N. Y. 427, 432 (Ct. App. 1875); see also Treadway 143; accord, post, at 10 (opinion of BARRETT, J.). Consider the case of John L. Faber and John H. Faber, two men who independently manufactured lead pencils near Nuremberg, Germany. Both men stamped the pencils they manufactured with their shared surname. After recognizing that each man “had the right to put his own name on his own pencils,” the New York Supreme Court declined to allow one man to effectively trademark the other man’s name.

And thus:

We conclude that a tradition of restricting the trademarking of names has coexisted with the First Amendment, and the names clause fits within that tradition. Though the particulars of the doctrine have shifted over time, the consistent through line is that a person generally had a claim only to his own name. The names clause reflects this common-law tradition by prohibiting a person from obtaining a trademark of another living person’s name without consent, thereby protecting the other’s reputation and goodwill.

And… for the most part, it’s hard to argue with that point, which is why everyone agrees. It’s just that they all seem to agree for different reasons. And that creates a bit of a mess for thinking through the First Amendment.

Because, from there we get a bunch of concurrences and arguments over the specifics, which really shows how much of a mess trademark law is when it comes to the First Amendment. It’s not clear what is being protected or why. It’s not clear who is getting a benefit or why. And it’s certainly not clear what kind of test the courts should use going forward in looking over similar questions.

The various concurrences only drive home that point.

Kavanaugh thinks the history lesson is unnecessary and the same ruling can be made based on other tests. Justice Barrett also feels the history lesson is not just unnecessary, but potentially cherry-picks arguments. Rather, she feels that existing First Amendment tests bring us to this conclusion (Kagan agrees, while Sotomayor and Jackson agree to parts of it).

Sotomayor writes separately (which Kagan and Jackson signed onto) to make a similar point, again pointing out that we don’t need the history lesson and can come to the same conclusion just using First Amendment precedent.

This case involves a free-speech challenge to a viewpoint-neutral, content-based condition on trademark registration. In deciding how to evaluate this kind of challenge, the Court faces two options: Either look only to the history and tradition of the condition, or look to trademark law and settled First Amendment precedent. The first option, which asks whether the history of a particular trademark registration bar plays well with the First Amendment, leads this Court into uncharted territory that neither party requests. The other guides it through well-trodden terrain. I would follow the well-trodden path.

But… none of this gets to the underlying point that we (and Public Citizen) talked about last year regarding why core political speech shouldn’t be eligible for a trademark in the first place, because the trademark creates a way to suppress the political speech of others. That just doesn’t even get addressed.

Which is too bad.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, supreme court, trademark, trump to small, vidal v. ester

Daily Deal: The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle

Deals

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

Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no time. It’s on sale for $25.

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