This Iowa Town Is Building An Open Access Fiber Broadband Network. Google Fiber Is Its First Customer

from the open-access-ftw dept

West Des Moines, Iowa this week announced that it would be building a massive, open access fiber network. The city is one of roughly 750 towns and cities that, frustrated by high prices, limited competition, and patchy availability of US broadband, have decided to instead build their own networks. Well, assuming that AT&T and Comcast haven't bribed your state officials to pass laws banning such efforts yet.

West Des Moines' new network will be funded by taxable General Obligation bonds with low interest rates. It's too early to note what kind of speeds and prices will be on offer, but the city's announcement indicates that Google Fiber will be one of its first customers:

"We couldn’t be more pleased to work with an outstanding company like Google Fiber to help make this happen,” Gaer said. “Now more than ever, reliable high-speed internet is critical. It’s amazing that in just four years, West Des Moines is well on its way to achieving the WDM 2036 Plan goal of finding an innovative way to provide access to broadband for all our residents and businesses."

It's semi-ironic given that before Google Fiber launched, Google insisted its own network would be open access -- before immediately conducting a 180 on the decision. According to the Des Moines Register, Google Fiber would pay the city $2.25 per month for each household that connects to the network, up to a maximum of $4.5 million over 20 years. Construction of the network begins this fall, and is estimated to last around two and a half years. When completed, West Des Moines will have better broadband than many tech-centric areas like Seattle or Silicon Valley.

In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access broadband networks (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service. Of course when the FCC released its flimsy, politically timid "National Broadband Plan" back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector's limited competition) was nowhere to be found.

Such networks have driven notable broadband success in countries like Sweden. But here in America, both US political parties, awash in campaign cash from Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and others, have spent decades ignoring this data to instead embrace a singular telecom policy: kissing AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's collective ass. The result: the US remains mediocre in nearly every broadband metric that matters, and probably spends more time and resources denying this factual reality than actually addressing the problem.

Community broadband isn't some one size fits all panacea. But such options are a helpful niche solution that not only result in better connectivity, but drive incumbents to try a little bit harder, an alien concept in a country where regulatory capture and a lack of competition have been the norm for the better part of thirty years.

Instead of acknowledging this reality, telecom incumbents like AT&T, and the think tankers, lobbyists, regulators, lawmakers, consultants, and academics paid to love them, have spent years attempting to demonize community broadband, insisting such efforts are a guaranteed taxpayer boondoggle, an ominous threat to free speech, and a long list of other bullshit claims. Many of these same folks can't even acknowledge that US broadband isn't competitive, and most love ignoring the fact that these towns and cities wouldn't be considering the option if the private sector hadn't failed them, repeatedly.

There remains a rather singular solution to incumbent ISPs and their dollar per holler allies who falsely deem such efforts to be wasteful or unfair: start offering better, faster, cheaper service. If you're unwilling to do that, get the fuck out of the way.

Filed Under: competition, iowa, muni broadband, open access, west des moines

The Fastest ISP In America Is Community Owned And Operated

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

We've long noted that community broadband networks are just an organic response to the broken, uncompetitive US broadband market. While you'll occasionally see some deployment duds if the business models aren't well crafted, studies have shown such networks (there are 750 and counting now in the States) offer cheaper, faster service than many incumbents. In short, these communities grew so frustrated with America's mediocre, patchy, and expensive broadband service, they built their own.

This direct threat to incumbent revenues is a major reason why ISP lobbyists have passed protectionist laws in more than 21 states trying to block your town's ability to even consider the option. It's also why you'll often see the telecom sector and its various, obedient tendrils routinely try to claim these networks are a vile menace to free speech (they're not) or a guaranteed waste of taxpayer funds (again, not true at all).

Here in reality, many of these networks are outperforming their private sector counterparts. Chattanooga's EPB, for example, was rated one of the best ISPs in America by Consumer Reports, despite Comcast's efforts to sue the effort out of existence. And this week, PC Magazine's ratings of the fastest and most popular ISPs showed that Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU), a locally-owned utility providing broadband out of Cedar Falls, Iowa, offers the fastest averaged speed ratings the magazine's researchers have ever seen:

Verizon's Fios was the top rated private ISP, and notice where they fall in the comparison above. From the full report:

"Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) out of Cedar Falls, Iowa, has the fastest average PCMag Speed Index we've ever seen. Even individual towns with fast speeds were never capable of this in our previous tests. (Pick your jaw up off the floor so you can start searching Zillow for house listings there.) Its PSI of 1,350.4 shows what's possible when your state doesn't block municipal ISPs that are part of a town/city utility. (They are blocked in about half of the US.)

The Cedar Falls effort is one of the oldest and most successful community networks to date, and now it's the fastest -- by a wide margin. That lawmakers continue to pass and defend protectionist state laws literally written by Comcast and AT&T prohibiting such efforts where applicable continues to be a nationwide embarrassment. If ISPs really wanted to put these efforts to bed, they'd offer faster, cheaper, better service. Instead, we get FCC officials trying to falsely claim such networks trample your free speech rights.

To be clear, community networks aren't a panacea. But they're not automatic taxpayer disasters, either. In many areas, courtesy of limited competition and feckless, campaign cash compromised lawmakers and regulators, they're the only thing pressuring regional telecom monopolies to actually try and do better. And as this Harvard study illustrated quite well, because they're actually part of the community they serve, they tend to have a vested interest in their communities' welfare, resulting in better, faster, cheaper broadband and decent customer service.

Filed Under: broadband, cedar falls, competition, iowa, muni broadband
Companies: cedar falls utilities

Don't Panic, But Do Reflect: Lessons From The Iowa Democrat Debacle

from the don't-throw-in-the-towel dept

As I write this post, party officials in Iowa are still trying to figure out the results of last night's Democratic Caucus, while pundits and political opponents have wasted no time in tearing into the Democratic Party, technology, and the very idea of democracy itself. Although there is plenty of reason for criticism, much of what there has been overwrought. Professor Ed Felten's twitter thread here provides plenty of useful perspective on this:

Nevertheless, there are many lessons to draw from last night's Iowa caucus mess, but first and foremost is this one: don't panic.

The biggest reason not to panic is that only the technology supporting the tabulation of the results broke. Whereas the systems for recording the results appear to be working just fine: there was paper, instruments for marking the paper, and (eventually) a way to transmit the recorded results to a place where they could all be added together. Sure, it will take a bit longer to add up all the results for the night, but that's ok. Because there's a paper trail we can still know what they are.

That said, there are still some cautionary lessons we as Americans can learn from the experience, not just for primaries and caucuses but for every election for every office, no matter how partisan, run in America.

First, of all the things elections need to be optimized for, speed is not one of them. And should not be one of them. The most important thing elections need is accuracy. While, sure, it would certainly be nice to have accurate results also quickly (and perhaps caucus officials thought the perceived convenience of the app would help towards that end), adding to the list of things it might be nice for election results to be tends to take away from what election results MUST be. And it is not worth the compromise. Which we can understand if we take a moment to think about the consequences if something does go wrong, as something almost always will. The reality is that if election results are delayed, we can still cope. As it is, in general elections results are often not certified until weeks or even months later. There is rarely a legitimate governance need requiring us to know electoral outcomes within hours of polls closing. We can wait a while, and it would probably behoove us to all expect to wait a while, because it's our hunger for instant gratification that is creating pressure to rely on tabulation systems that are not optimized for what we can't live without: accurate results we can all believe in. Ultimately nothing else matters, and we should be dubious about any voting solution that offers to deliver anything other than that.

Next is a lesson that applies to more than just elections, which is that just adding tech does not magically make everything better. Often, and as this situation illustrates, it can instead make things worse. Which is not to say that there is no room for technological innovation at all. The world would not be a better place if it were artificially locked into a 20th, or even 19th, century technological environment. Certainly there is a role for technology to play, and for technology innovation. However, not all new technology is necessarily an improvement over what came before. Sometimes what we already had was perfectly fine, or at least good enough for what we needed. And even if a new innovation might someday be better, it won't necessarily be right away. In the case of the Iowa caucus, it appears they replaced the traditional tried-and-true telephonic support for reporting results with a brand new cell phone driven app, and it is not apparent why. True, sometimes older systems can have their own quirks and imperfections and things we might want to be better, and it's not a bad thing to want to improve them. But where systems have at least been proven and reliable, any innovation needs to at least be able to deliver that same degree of trustworthiness before it can be considered a replacement, much less an improvement. No technology is magic; no innovation will suddenly solve all of our problems. Even the technology that is now regarded as proven and reliable was once new and untested itself. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work to get a technology to a point where we can depend on it for our most important functions, like elections. Expecting any new technology to immediately be able to be an adequate substitute for what came before, let alone an improvement, is therefore a mistake.

Next, paper matters. Again, the most important thing we need any electoral system to deliver is accuracy. Having a paper record helps deliver it. First, it affords redundancy. Even if our digital systems were perfect and bug-free, it would still be a good idea to have a back-up analog record. But especially while our digital technology is still evolving so rapidly and is still so decidedly NOT bug-free, it is critical to have a way to validate the results it gives us. Even when we think technology is working properly we still need to be able to audit it to make sure it is, and paper lets us do that. And then in those instances, like this one, when the technology has come up short, as it is still very much prone to do, paper means that we can still get what we need: accurate results of how people voted.

There is also one more critical lesson for now, and it's one mentioned above: something will always go wrong, and so, by anticipating that something will go wrong, we can make it ok when it does. The more complex the system, the more likely something will go wrong. But on the other hand, a system complex enough to have problems is also complex enough to contain solutions.

Elections are complex systems, so there are plenty of opportunities for hiccups. Which is not to say that we want hiccups; naturally we should try to minimize them. The issue though is that no matter how much you try to eliminate them, hiccups will still happen, so what we need to do is be ready. And that means at least two things: one, that we design our systems to have the resiliency needed to overcome those hiccups. For instance, in the case of Iowa, the results could not be transmitted to a central accounting system via the app, and that was a problem. But because there was a paper record they will be able to overcome the problem.

And it means something else, which goes back to the first point made in this post: don't panic. Don't rush to throw away faith in our electoral systems when things go wrong, because it is almost a near certainty that something will go wrong. But just because something has gone wrong does not mean it's the end of the world. Yet if, instead of allowing our systems to self-correct, we instead jump immediately to panic, we create a new problem. The reason we need accurate election results is because we need to be able to believe in them. It won't matter how accurate they are though if we simply refuse to.

When things go wrong, as they are wont to, we need to take a deep breath and give them a chance to right themselves, which is what will happen in Iowa since they have paper records. Furthermore, as the saying goes, never attribute to malfeasance what can be more readily explained by incompetence. What happened in Iowa was the result of a poor deployment of a technological solution. It was not a conspiracy. It was not the Russians. It was plain old human error to have so heavily depended on this untested mobile app system. And the good news is that we can deal with these sorts of bad decisions. Sure, there are plenty of things we can and should do to minimize these sorts of problems and improve our electoral systems, like better fund and train local election authorities, end reliance on unproven new technologies for supporting elections, ensure we always have paper records, reinforce the franchise, and so on. But there's no point in attacking our own democracy with distrust. Especially when it is so likely so misplaced.

Filed Under: apps, caucuses, data, election security, elections, iowa, voting, voting security

Criminal Charges Finally Dropped Against Security Researchers Who Broke Into An Iowa Courthouse

from the all's-well-that-ends-unceremoniously dept

Security research isn't a criminal activity, no matter how many companies might wish otherwise when their bad security practices are exposed. But a couple of researchers working for Coalfire Security found themselves arrested and charged after performing a physical penetration test of an Iowa courthouse. Testing the physical security boundaries of the courthouse didn't go exactly as planned once the local sheriff showed up.

The two employees, Justin Wynn and Gary De Mecurio, showed Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard their credentials and the contract supposedly permitting them to perform a B&E but it didn't matter to Sheriff Leonard.

It did matter to Iowa Court officials, who said the test had been authorized... but perhaps not exactly on those terms. And it mattered to their employer, which wrote an angry letter demanding to know why Coalfire's employees were still locked up even after things had been (mostly) cleared up by courthouse officials.

The sheriff refused to budge, claiming it was his sacred duty to protect taxpayer-funded courthouses from out-of-town interlopers (or words to that effect). Coalfire's CEO, Tom McAndrew, was less than enthused with the sheriff's self-assessment. He said Sheriff Leonard was actually hurting taxpayers more than helping them by locking up people trying to increase courthouse security and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive records and documents.

Nearly three months later, prosecutors have finally backed down. Apparently, enough pressure can result in the prosecutorial discretion we hear so much about when prosecutors and politicians claim broadly-worded laws won't result in a bunch of collateral damage.

Originally charged with third-degree felonies, the charges were reduced to misdemeanor trespassing after the story began gaining traction outside of Iowa. Those charges have now been dropped as well.

Dallas County Attorney Charles Sinnard and Coalfire officials released a joint statement Thursday in which they said they agreed to drop the charges when it became clear the Coalfire employees and the responding law enforcement had the community's safety in mind.

"Ultimately, the long-term interests of justice and protection of the public are not best served by continued prosecution of the trespass charges," they wrote in a statement provided by Sinnard. "Those interests are best served by all the parties working together to ensure that there is clear communication on the actions to be taken to secure the sensitive information maintained by the judicial branch, without endangering the life or property of the citizens of Iowa, law enforcement or the persons carrying out the testing."

This is great but it seems like something that could have been cleared up three months ago and without putting felony arrests on the researchers' permanent records. The testing could have been handled a bit better by everyone involved but it's pretty tough to stress-test physical security measures without utilizing methods targets won't necessarily expect to be used. Breaking into courthouses is certainly unexpected. But once judicial reps made it clear the court system had engaged the service to test security, the researchers should have been released by the sheriff and all charges dropped. Instead, this got dragged out for another three months, providing more evidence there's nothing all that secure about a career in security research.

Filed Under: breaking and entering, chad leonard, charges, courthouse, dallas county, iowa, security, security research
Companies: coalfire security

CEO Of Security Company Behind Unorthodox Penetration Tests Wants To Know Why His Employees Are Still Being Criminally Charged

from the sheriff-determined-to-show-state's-court-who-the-biggest-dick-is dept

A couple of months ago, security researchers performing a very physical penetration test of an Iowa courthouse were arrested for breaking and entering. They were also charged with possessing burglar's tools, which they did indeed possess.

The employees of Coalfire Security said they had been employed by the state's judicial branch to test physical accessibility of courthouses. They had paperwork granting them permission to perform "physical security assessments" at multiple locations. While nothing specifically instructed the security testers to break into buildings, nothing in the documents suggested this was forbidden either. All it told the testers to do was to attempt to gain access to documents, internal systems, and areas closed off to the public.

A statement from the judicial branch suggested there had been some sort of misunderstanding and it apologized to the law enforcement officers for the "confusion" caused by this unorthodox penetration test. That apparently wasn't enough for sheriff's department and local prosecutors who moved ahead with felony charges.

Coalfire Security didn't have much to say when the news first broke, but the company has now issued a lengthy statement [PDF] that accuses the Dallas County Sheriff of turning a routine security test into a battle of wills between his office and the state's judicial branch.

[Coalfire Security employees Gary] Demercurio and [Justin] Wynn proceeded to purposefully trip the alarm to test law enforcement's response time. When they arrived, [Coalfire CEO Tom] McAndrew said, the deputies seemed delighted to be shown the tools and tactics the Coalfire employees used to enter the building.

McAndrew blamed the men's arrest on the arrival of Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard on the men's arrest, saying he failed to "de-escalate" the situation, as the deputies already on site were ready to let the men go.

"Sheriff Leonard failed to exercise common sense and good judgment and turned this engagement into a political battle between the State and the County." McAndrew wrote. "I was stunned that the next morning the issues were not resolved and were actually amplified when bail was set as $100,000."

Prosecutors have performed a slight bit of de-escalation, at least. The felony charges have been dropped, but the researchers are still facing misdemeanor trespassing charges. This prosecution continues despite the judicial branch's statement backing up the arrested men's story that they were hired to test courthouse security.

Sheriff Leonard's needless escalation began during the arrest and continued forward past that point. Emails obtained by the Des Moines Register show Sheriff Leonard refused to release the security employees when their story checked out and further aggravated the situation by promising to give a heads up to other law enforcement agencies who might be interested in capitalizing on some trouble-free arrests.

A police sergeant called one of the state employees, who confirmed what the men said: that this was a legitimate contract and that the men should be let go, according to the email.

"I advised them that this building belonged to the taxpayers of Dallas County and the State had no authority to authorize a break-in of this building," [Sheriff] Leonard wrote in the email.

Leonard wrote that he then called the state employee to tell him his contractors had been arrested and that he didn't have the authority to authorize this.

The state employee disagreed and asked Leonard not to tell other sheriffs, wrote Leonard, who said he responded by saying he was going to tell every sheriff.

It sounds like some "law is the law" bullshit being pushed by Sheriff Leonard, who isn't going to let anyone get away with security research in his jurisdiction. Coalfire's CEO wants to know if Iowans are OK with this.

If what is happening in Iowa begins to happen elsewhere, who will keep those who are supposed to protect citizens honest? This is setting a horrible precedent for the millions of information security professionals who are now wondering if they too may find themselves in jail as criminals simply for doing their job. I believe that citizens of Iowa would benefit from using their resources to fix vulnerabilities, protect their data, and secure their public buildings rather than waste time and taxpayer money on this criminal pursuit.

Joke's on all of us. This is already happening elsewhere. Security researchers constantly face the possibility of arrest, prosecution, or civil lawsuits just for doing their jobs. That this penetration test involved a physical break-in doesn't make it any less legitimate. The court system apologized for the misunderstanding, but good deeds apparently aren't going to go unpunished in this county.

Filed Under: breaking and entering, courthouse, iowa, penetration testing, security researchers
Companies: coalfire security

Devin Nunes Sues Again; He REALLY Doesn't Want You To Read This Article About His Family's Cow Farm In Iowa

from the really,-don't-read-it dept

Devin Nunes is on quite a roll with stifling free speech. The Congressman, who once co-sponsored a bill discouraging frivolous lawsuits and also voted for a House Amendment saying that free speech should be protected, has been filing a whole bunch of lawsuits that appear to serve no purpose other than to stifle free speech -- mainly free speech that criticizes Devin Nunes. Back when he filed the first of these suits (against satirical Twitter accounts, among others), we noted that he seemed particularly mad about an article by Ryan Lizza in Esquire trying to track down details about the Nunes' family's dairy farm, which is not in California where Nunes' Congressional district is, but in Iowa. Lizza noticed that Nunes appeared to go to great lengths to not have the public realize that his family's dairy farm (which is a big part of his bio) up and left California. The article is entitled Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret and it is absolutely worth reading, in part because Devin Nunes really doesn't want you to read it. But also, in part, because it had paragraphs like this:

Nunes grew up in a family of dairy farmers in Tulare, California, and as long as he has been in politics, his family dairy has been central to his identity and a feature of every major political profile written about him. A March story in National Review is emblematic. It describes how Nunes’s family emigrated from the Azores in Portugal to California’s Central Valley, “a fertile, sunny Eden,” and how the family “worked and saved enough money to buy a 640-acre farm outside Tulare.” The soil of the Central Valley is depicted as almost sacred in these articles. National Review quotes a 1912 Portuguese immigrant farmer who wrote that when he grabs a clump of dirt, “I feel as if I had just shaken hands with all my ancestors.” As recently as July 27, the lead of a Wall Street Journal editorial-page piece about Nunes, which featured a Tulare dateline, emphasized the dairy: “It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm.” Last year, Nunes noted in an interview with the Daily Beast—headline: “The Dairy Farmer Overseeing U. S. Spies and the Russia Hack Investigation”—“I’m pretty simple. I like agriculture.” The Daily Beast noted, “The cows are not far from his mind. He keeps in regular contact with his brother and father about their dairy farm.”

So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007. Devin’s uncle Gerald still owns a dairy back in Tulare, which is presumably where The Wall Street Journal’s reporter talked to Devin, and Devin is an investor in a Napa Valley winery, Alpha Omega, but his immediate family’s farm—as well as his family—is long gone.

Much of the article actually focuses on the fact that many of the farms in and around Sibley, Iowa employ undocumented workers, which seems just a wee bit hypocritical considering the strong support in the area for a President who is desperately trying to kick undocumented people out of the country, and Nunes himself, who has been a stalwart support of the Trump agenda. Lizza spends a lot of time trying to track down if the Nunes farm employs undocumented workers, and is followed around town by various Nunes family members. Other strange things happen as well, including the local newspaper suddenly disappearing a nearly decade old story after Lizza showed up in town (in part because he'd read that now gone article).

As I noted above, the original lawsuit mentions this article in passing, and the fact that some people were discussing it on Twitter, but now he's actually sued Lizza and Esquire's publisher, Hearst Magazines for $75 million. The lawsuit is filed in federal court in Iowa, with the same Virginia-based lawyer that Nunes has used in all of the other lawsuits he's been filing against journalists and critics lately, and with local representation from lawyer Joseph Feller in Sibley, Iowa, whose legal practice seems to focus mostly on estate planning and agriculture law -- not defamation.

Notably, Iowa has no anti-SLAPP law.

Also notably, none of the parties reside in or near Iowa. Sure, the article is about Iowa. And Nunes' family (as we now know) lives in Iowa. But they're not the plaintiffs. There is some argument that if there were defamation (and that seems unlikely) the "harm" to Nunes' reputation would happen in Iowa because of this article, but it seems pretty damn clear from the article, at least, that at least most of the Iowans profiled are on Nunes' side. It seems like there's a much stronger case that if (again, which is unlikely) there is any actual reputational harm, it's to those outside of Iowa. Such as Nunes' constituents. In California.

But, notably, California has a strong anti-SLAPP law.

As for the filing itself, well, it's about as ridiculous as you can imagine. Very little in Lizza's Esquire piece actually talks about Devin Nunes. It focuses much more on his family and the town where his family lives. As with past Nunes lawsuits, it seems more performative for a, well, certain audience, than for actually convincing a judge. In the very first line it calls Lizza "a left-wing political journalist, well-known for his extreme bias towards Plaintiff," highlights that Lizza lost a job at the New Yorker in a #MeToo situation, and uses that to at least, bizarrely, imply that Lizza's trip to Sibley was to stalk female members of Nunes' family.

Lizza was a fixture of the main stream media until December 2017, when his then-employer – The New Yorker magazine – summarily severed all ties and publicly terminated Lizza because of “improper sexual conduct”.... Lizza’s name had been included in the “Shitty Media Men” list that circulated in response to allegations published about Harvey Weinstein.... In June 2018, Esquire announced that it had hired Lizza as the magazine’s chief political correspondent.... Lizza only lasted a short time at Esquire. During his brief tenure, however, he physically traveled to Sibley, Iowa, where he lurked around Plaintiff’s grammar-school aged nieces and stalked members of Plaintiff’s family, reducing Plaintiff’s sister-in-law to tears.

Later in the complaint, it literally says:

... while he was in Sibley, Lizza stalked Plaintiff’s grammar-school aged nieces, behaved like a sex offender or pedophile cruising the local neighborhood for victims, frightened a family member to tears, and exploited a grieving mother.

Not that you can claim defamation based on what's filed in a lawsuit, but those suggestions seem to toe much closer to the defamation line than anything in Lizza's article.

It takes a while for the complaint to actually get around to listing what statements it believes are defamatory (spending a bunch of time pretending that each time someone linked to Lizza's piece on Twitter it meant the story was being "republished" which is... uh... not how it works). But here's what the complaint claims is defamatory:

The Lizza Hit Piece falsely accuses Plaintiff, the “head of the House Intelligence Committee and one of President Trump’s biggest defenders”, of being involved in covering-up a “secret”, to wit:

• “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret”.
• “So why did [Plaintiff’s] parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive?”
• “Devin Nunes has a secret”.
• “Which brings us back to Nunes’s secret”.
• “So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa”.
• “There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade”.
• “Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa?”
• “On the other hand, [Plaintiff] and his parents seemed to have concealed basic facts about the family’s move to Iowa. It was suspicious”.

Later on, the complaint lists out some other "false and defamatory statements:"

a. “Devin Nunes has a secret”.

b. Plaintiff used his position as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as a “battering ram to discredit the Russia investigation and protect Donald Trump at all costs, even if it means shredding his own reputation and the independence of the historically nonpartisan committee in the process”. c. Plaintiff “used the Intelligence Committee to spin a baroque theory about alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign that began with a made-up Trump tweet about how ‘Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower’”.

d. “Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007 … [W]hat is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade”.

e. “Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa?”

f. “Devin Nunes was the public figure at the heart of this, and he had no financial interest in his parents’ Iowa dairy operation. On the other hand, he and his parents seemed to have concealed basic facts about the family’s move to Iowa. It was suspicious. And his mom, who co-owns the Sibley dairy, is also the treasurer of his campaign”.

g. “I laid out the facts I had uncovered in Sibley, including the intimidation of sources and the Devin Nunes angle, and asked him for advice. ‘I’d tell that story,’ he said. He paused and added, ‘We’re a sanctuary church, if you need a place to stay. You’re safe here!’”

h. “Is it possible the Nuneses have nothing to be seriously concerned about? Of course, but I never got the chance to ask because Anthony Jr. and Representative Nunes did not respond to numerous requests for interviews.”

At least here there are some statements of fact -- but it's difficult to see how any of them are even remotely defamatory. Unless Nunes' family didn't sell their farm and didn't move to Iowa, but so far no one has denied that. Statement (e) is a question and is about Steve King and "an obscure dairy publication," not Nunes. How is that defamatory towards Nunes? Statement (g) is even less about Nunes because it's just a quote from someone else offering to protect Lizza! And is Nunes really claiming that saying he did not respond to numerous requests for interviews is defamatory? Because... that's not how it works.

Let's be clear: none of that comes anywhere even remotely in the same vicinity as a legitimate defamation claim. It all seems to center around the question of whether or not Devin Nunes has a "secret." And is he really going to argue in court that he has no secrets? And arguing over whether or not he's kept his family moving their farm from California to Iowa a secret is not defamation either. It is broadly either opinion, opinion based on disclosed facts, or substantially true. Words like "conspire" are, at worst, rhetorical hyperbole.

In other words, this is not defamatory. This is yet another SLAPP suit by Devin Nunes, who wants to claim to be a free speech supporter while suing multiple different critics over their free speech. What a hypocrite. Yet, here we are, and because Iowa has no anti-SLAPP statute, no matter what, this is going to cost at least Hearst (and possibly Lizza) a bunch of time and money.

This is why every state needs an anti-SLAPP law and why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law. If Nunes keeps filing these bullshit lawsuits against his critics, don't be surprised if other politicians decide that they too want to scare off critics with burdensome, if frivolous, lawsuits like this.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-slapp, criticism, defamation, devin nunes, farms, free speech, iowa, ryan lizza, slapp
Companies: hearst magazines