This Week In Techdirt History: November 18th - 23rd

from the thanks-for-the-memories dept

While we're off for the Thanksgiving long weekend, we're shuffling things around a little bit — so even though it's Friday, here's the weekly history post! We'll be back to our regular posting schedule on Monday.

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, the USTR was trying to defend the TPP following the leak of the IP chapter, by claiming it was the most transparent trade negotiation in history (an announcement made from a Hollywood studio) and telling the lie that it is no different from US law. Then, while Bloomberg was suggesting that the utter lack of transparency could kill the deal, another leak happened and we got to see the copyright maximalist talking points regarding the leaked IP chapter.

Meanwhile, new leaks and declassified documents were giving us more information about the NSA, including more abuse of bulk email collection and the exploitation of pen register statutes, plus a surveillance deal with the UK's GCHQ. The DOJ was resisting the FISA court order to reveal the feds' secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, leading the court to demand an explanation. And more internet companies were moving to up their security in response to NSA meddling, with Yahoo working on encrypting all data center traffic and Twitter implementing forward secrecy. There was still a lot of work to do at a lot of companies though, as illustrated by a handy scorecard from the EFF (which would have a lot more checkmarks today than it did then, so I guess we can call that a silver lining to the government compromising tech companies).

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, we were beginning to learn more about the soon-to-be-famous Joel Tenenbaum case over the RIAA's music sharing lawsuits, most notably its all-star witness list. At the same time, another racketeering lawsuit was filed against the agency over its threat letters, but we weren't optimistic about it going anywhere. And the RIAA also convinced Tennessee to pass a law forcing universities to filter their networks.

Meanwhile, a judge threw out Psytar's antitrust claims against Apple, a German politician's attempt to block Wikipedia initiated the Streisand Effect, an Australian ISP was agreeing to the government's filtering plan just to collect data on how bad it was, and Nintendo was cruelly trying to prevent the resale of used Wii peripherals.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, the war on spam and scams continued, with the House and the Senate reaching a compromise on anti-spam legislation (definitely better than one senator's proposed tax on every email you send), while the DOJ announced that since October it had arrested 125 people for online scamming and other online crimes — though we had some serious questions about that, since they seemed to be flinging a lot of stuff under the umbrella of "cybercrimes" without good reason, such as a guy who replied to spam with angry, threatening emails. Perhaps a better strategy was the newly-emerging sport of 419 baiting.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 11th - 17th

from the then-and-now dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, we learned more about the UK's GCHQ and its use of a packet injection attack to hack an internet exchange, garnering a combined response of "no comment but by the way that would be totally legal" from the agency. John McCain said in an interview that Keith Alexander should be fired (for the wrong reasons) then nonsensically denied the comments. And while the author of the PATRIOT act was telling the EU Parliament that the NSA is out of control, some people were looking at the agency's customer list and noticing that its denials of economic espionage were suspect at best.

Meanwhile, this was also the week that the the TPP's IP chapter leaked for the first time, and it was as bad as expected (and even worse than ACTA). Law professors called on Obama to open up the TPP process while Congress was showing signs of being a bit more reluctant to grant fast track authority, and perhaps the most nefarious part of the chapter was its attempt to make copyright reform impossible.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, broadband providers were rolling out usage caps and patronizingly advertising the number of emails that could be sent under the limits, while the industry's apologists pushed the narrative that there was a growing bandwidth crunch (there wasn't). The EU was giving bogus excuses for keeping ACTA secret while another bad copyright deal, the Broadcasting Treaty, was apparently coming back from the dead again. China officially recognized the concept of internet addiction and it was quickly used as a defense in a murder trial. And the FBI's expensive crusade to catch the leakers of the Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy ended ignominiously with a blogger pleading guilty to a misdemeanor.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, as we marked the 20th anniversary of the computer virus, and internet advertising started recovering from an early collapse, it was beginning to look like a lot of '90s promises about the internet were beginning to arrive, just a little late. Not every offering was impressive, of course, such as Sprint's introduction of TV on mobile phones... at two framers per second. People were blaming Microsoft for the failure of one new product category that wouldn't take off until Apple stepped in several years later: tablet computers. But there was also a new, curious and exciting trend on the rise, referred to sometimes as "social software" and sometimes "social networking". As you know, it never really took off.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 4th - 10th

from the can-we-fix-voting-machines-please dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, UK officials were going a bit nuts in response to the fallout from their detention of David Miranda, first arguing that he was, in fact, a terrorist, then that they didn't know he was a journalist, and then that the Snowden leaks would help pedophiles — leading us to wonder of the State Department would condemn their stifling of journalism (okay, not really wonder...)

Stateside, Mike Rogers was claiming that more NSA transparency would hurt privacy, while also being opportunistically concerned about the privacy implications of the Affordable Care Act. The agency was positively comparing metadata searches to stop-and-frisk, and making a similar argument that curbing metadata protection would harm privacy. And of course the Inspector General was rejecting a request from Congress to investigate the agency, while the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a bill to give the NSA more funding.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, while we were wondering why the MPAA gets to review and approve DVD players, the Copyright Alliance was fighting to outlaw remote DVRs. A UK ISP was threatening to disconnect anyone who has open wifi, the French Senate approved the three strikes law that would create the infamous Hadopi, and Italian authors were fighting for a piracy tax on DSL connections (while Italian officials were moving forward with criminal charges against Google executives over a user's video).

Today, there's a lot of concern about issues with electronic voting machines and their poor security. Naturally, if people had known about this ten years ago, it would have been fixed by now. Oh, wait...

Fifteen Years Ago

But certainly if we'd known about it all the way back in 2003, it'd definitely be fixed by now, right? It's not like we'd need advocacy groups and law clinics to fight to stop Diebold from C&D-ing people who talk about its security issues, right? Oh...

Well anyway, also this week in 2003, we saw the first big record label merger of the 21st century, with Sony and BMG turning the Big Five into the Big Four. The RIAA was bragging about the success of its lawsuits based on dubious causality, while studies showed they were somewhat effective in making people delete MP3s and really, really hate the record industry.

It was also around this time that the trend of making computers look cool started taking root beyond the world of Apple.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: More NSA Madness

from the closer-look dept

Five Years Ago

The ongoing fallout of the Edward Snowden leaks heated up again this week, so we're taking another break from the five/ten/fifteen-year retrospective to dig into what happened this week in 2013.

The feds had waited until late the previous Friday to quietly release details of a criminal case that used information from NSA surveillance, but this news was quickly overshadowed by new leaks showing the NSA had collected millions of phone records in Italy and Spain, in addition to the previous revelations about France, and of course about spying on world leaders. Speaking of which, Obama was denying that he knew anything about the NSA spying on Angela Merkel's phone, and was apparently quietly telling the NSA to quit spying so much on the UN (or perhaps just quit getting caught). The Merkel scandal was threatening to scuttle the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, while the NSA was apparently pretty furious at the administration for denying knowledge — and Mike Rogers was insisting Congress knew about it to, and attacking (with video!) the lawmakers who said that wasn't the case. As for the European bulk collection targets, Mike Rogers was saying they should be thrilled that the US is helping to keep them safe, though it later turned out that those countries' own intelligence agencies were heavily involved. This was one of many conflicting messages though, with the NSA constantly revising its own exact position.

Congress, however, was trying to push back, with a bill that would stop the worst of the NSA's excesses. They had no ally in Dianne Feinstein though — she started preparing another bill that would largely codify current practices, then later decided she had changed her mind and agreed the NSA had gone too far, leading NSA officials to admit they were screwed... except then she released her bill anyway and, as expected, it looked like it might even make it easier for the NSA to spy on people.

Of course, there was still more to learn about the NSA this week. James Clapper begrudgingly declassified documents that showed the NSA believed it could spy on everyone's location data based on existing approvals (something they had previously denied they do at all). And then the latest realization from the Snowden docs: the NSA had infiltrated Yahoo and Google servers without the companies knowing. Keith Alexander was on stage at an event while the story broke, and quickly cooked up a misleading response that was later formalized with an official non-denial from the agency. While people tried to figure out how the NSA pulled it off, we figured there was one small silver lining: some tech companies were finally starting to realize they should oppose the NSA.

Believe it or not, that's not even every NSA post from this week in 2013, but it's the important news. As a final note, the creator of a parody NSA t-shirt also sued the agency over the legal threats it was sending to him.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 21st - 27th

from the back-in-the-day dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, the latest NSA leak showed that the agency grabbed data on 70 million French phone calls in less than 30 days, leading James Clapper to play word games in issuing a denial, while the White House was trying to assuage Angela Merkel with a dodgy promise that they are not and will not monitor her phone calls (no word on the past, though). Government officials were continuing their long history of calling journalists traitors for reporting on the leaks, while Keith Alexander said the government needs to find a way to stop them. And Dianne Feinstein was trying to paint metadata gathering as not true surveillance, garnering a direct rebuttal from Ed Snowden. Also, we learned the Senate was sitting on a devastating report about CIA torture...

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, while the EFF and ACLU were asking news networks to stop sending DMCA notices over political ads, we were wondering whether this experience would prompt either McCain or Obama to support DMCA reform. The RIAA was establishing "vexatious" as its new favorite word to lob at its critics and opponents, and a really dumb ISP takedown of a record label showed why ISPs shouldn't be copyright cops.

Meanwhile, we had a big failure at Techdirt that wiped out half a day's worth of comments, but were saved by archives from the comment search engine BackType (which would go on to be acquired by Twitter in 2011).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, critics were rebelling against the MPAA's ban on screener DVDs, leading the association to finally back down a bit — though not on Jack Valenti's crowing about the moral obligation to stop piracy, or the association's new program to brainwash school children with its copyright maximalism which finally launched this week. Two different writers in the same newspaper reached opposite conclusions about the same study on file sharing, while others debated whether iTunes would put a dent in it, and we wondered if the entertainment industry's many copyright initiatives were a way of starting so many fights about complex policy that their opponents appear to be crying wolf.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 14th - 20th

from the what-was dept

Five Years Ago

There was plenty of NSA apologia again this week in 2013. Keith Alexander was claiming that he was protecting civil liberties by violating them and playing the fear card by claiming people will die due to the Snowden leaks, while the lawyer who helped give legal cover to Bush's warrantless wiretapping was claiming everyone will grow to love the intrusive NSA, and Dianne Feinstein was playing the 9/11 card (and being debunked by the ACLU).

Meanwhile, the latest information from the leaks revealed that the NSA was collecting email contact lists and instant messaging friend lists overseas with no oversight, that the agency was involved in the drone strike program, and of course that the agency was in fact drowning in a glut of data.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, the president finally signed the ProIP bill and created America's copyright czar position. We took a closer look at the MPAA's lawsuit against RealNetworks (and how it was all about controlling innovation), while the RIAA was appealing the mistrial ruling in the Jammie Thomas trial, and a German court was finding Google Images thumbnails to be a copyright violation. Unexpectedly, the McCain campaign sent a letter to YouTube urging them to consider and protect fair use when processing DMCA requests, and YouTube offered up the excellent response that they can't give the campaign special treatment, but they hope McCain will fix the law. Meanwhile, Larry Lessig was giving his own impassioned defense of fair use and remix culture.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, the EFF found another person who was wrongly accused of file-sharing and sued by the RIAA (they wouldn't be the last), just as the RIAA was commencing round two of its shakedown scheme by, as promised, offering people a chance to pay up before being sued (how nice of them). We also took a closer look at the RIAA's lawsuits against Grokster and Morpheus, and how their true ambitious goal was to overturn the Betamax precedent that makes video tape machines legal. Also this week, Brewster Kahle was fighting against the DMCA in an attempt to preserve old software.

Meanwhile, lots of companies and industries were really struggling to adapt. Some people were discussing possible futures for usual-consumer-electronics-leader Sony after Apple beat it to the punch on smartphones, print publishers were basically dragging their heels about this whole internet thing, and Polaroid reached the highly questionable conclusion that its future was in digital photo kiosks.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 7th - 13th

from the what-went-down dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, the US government shut down. Former CIA director Morell used that as an excuse to skip an NSA surveillance review board meeting, while James Clapper warned that failing to pay the agency's mercenary contractors might lead to security problems. The TSA similarly used the shutdown as an excuse for letting a nine-year-old sneak on to a flight, and a lawsuit by tech companies over NSA surveillance was put on hold. Outside the government, some folks were having fun with the shutdown, such as the Russian pirates offering to host the NASA website, someone submitting a bug report to GitHub describing how "government occasionally shuts down", and Good Old Games started offering some free thematically-appropriate games to furloughed government workers.

But hey, at least Congress's members-only gym was deemed essential and kept open.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, it was still the early days of the global financial crisis. Many self-serving and/or bizarre explanations popped up, blaming things like short selling and Wikipedia edit wars or, most strangely, flickering computer screens (according to author Tom Wolfe). Cooler heads took a closer look at the real causes: leverage and derivatives and a toxic, complex financial system.

Meanwhile, bogus stats and arguments were coming strong from the US Chamber of Commerce and members of congress in a push to get the president to sign the bill creating a copyright czar. At the same time, a judge ordered an injunction against Real's DVD copying software and for some inexplicable reason kept it secret, then extended it.

Also, long before the Snowden leaks and following Congress's capitulation on warrantless wiretapping, early leaks were already documenting NSA surveillance abuse.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, as we took a look at the role of music retailers in the industry's failure to adapt, the record companies were trying to ape the success of DVDs by adding "extras" to CDs. That's extra content — not extras like BMG's new DRM system, which a researcher discovered could be defeated by holding down the shift key while inserting the disk. SunnComm, the company that made the laughably useless DRM, naturally announced plans to sue the researcher for besmirching their good name — but reversed course in less than 24 hours in the face of public outcry. The software industry, on the other hand, was just beginning to dip its toe into the waters of a DRM approach that would gain much more traction (even while still being quite easily circumvented): product activation codes.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 30th - October 6th

from the what-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, as we discussed how the NSA had essentially built its own "shadow" social network, we learned and then confirmed that the agency was collecting GPS data from mobile phones. A We The People petition calling for a pardon for Ed Snowden was being quietly ignored, while Michael Hayden was joking about putting Snowden on a 'kill list'. We also learned that the NSA was storing all metadata for at least a year, and performing man-in-the-middle attacks with the help of telcos. Plus, it was working hard to compromise Tor, despite James Clapper's claims that they were just trying to "understand" it.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, the House followed the Senate in creating a copyright czar position, even as it let orphan works legislation die and the Senate moved on to more international piracy shaming. Cox was quietly adopting a copyright three strikes policy and lying about it being required by the DMCA, a comprehensive review of the RIAA's lawsuit strategy showed just how much of a failure it was, and The Pirate Bay was launching its own copyright lawsuit to expose the absurdity of the system.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years earlier in 2003, in the early days of the RIAA's lawsuits, another 63 people gave in to its shakedown letters this week, while the agency concluded a Senate hearing by promising to at least leave a little time in between the letters and the lawsuits in future — but at least one senator wanted much more substantial change. There was talk about compulsory licensing for music and a lot of questions about how it could be abused depending on how you define "music" — not to mention talk about how the cost of making music was going way, way down. It was also around this time that the practice of bundling TV, internet and phone service was picking up steam.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 23rd - 29th

from the that-which-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013 we learned that, despite the White House's denials, the review of NSA surveillance was indeed overseen by James Clapper. The NSA was complaining about how it had to spend time closing leaks while its apologists were out in force, with some trotting out the old "privacy is dead" argument and, of course, incoming FBI director James Comey saying it was all good and legal. The critics were out in greater force, though: the New York Times called for the NSA to be barred from requiring surveillance backdoors, the president of Brazil blasted the US in front of the United Nations, Senator Leahy gave a speech condemning the agency's practices, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced comprehensive surveillance reform legislation.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, while companies were waking up to the absurd trademark restrictions around the Olympics, Major League Baseball surprised us by backing down from a takedown notice in the face of a well-crafted fair use defense. A Spanish court upheld the idea that deep linking is not infringement, a Ugandan composer was suing the government for copyright infringement over the national anthem, and the European Parliament rejected the idea of three strikes laws for file sharing. Back in the US, the judge in the Jammie Thomas case declared a mistrial, the Senate passed the bill creating a copyright czar, and Arts+Labs emerged as a new anti-piracy lobbying supergroup.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, we talked once again about how infringement isn't theft, and also how in fact what the RIAA does is a lot closer to stealing. Of course, studies unsurprisingly showed that file sharing wasn't going away, and smarter upstart record labels were starting to see it as an ally, but the RIAA was still stuck keeping an eye on innocent people. We also took a look at how the MPAA's mistakes were uniquely flavored and different from the RIAA's, but the BSA was taking a direct lesson from the RIAA with its offer of amnesty to confessed pirates (and its doom-and-gloom soothsaying about software piracy).

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 16th - 22nd

from the for-the-record dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, we learned that in addition to communications the NSA was keeping millions of credit card transaction records, and then we finally got a look at the secrett FISA court ruling that permitted bulk phone data collection, in which it was revealed that Verizon and AT&T never fought back. The court also made the untrue claim that all of congress already knew all the details, and of course we wondered why the ruling was ever secret to begin with. Meanwhile, Michael Hayden was making some crazy claims about terrorists using Gmail and the US's right to spy on the internet it invented, while also making some childish prognostications about Ed Snowden's likely future of alcoholism — though other defenders of the agency were sticking to the same tired talking points, plus the new euphemism that Snowden's activities were "masked by his job duties".

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, Apple made the decision to block a competitive podcast app from the App Store, leading to significant backlash, while a court in Germany was getting in on similar action in its own way by banning VOIP on the iPhone at the behest of T-Mobile. NBC was bragging about its ability to lock down online Olympic footage, the movie industry was making yet another attempt to build the mythical "good" DRM, and the cops were continuing to bring in the RIAA to help with investigations where it would clearly be biased. There was a glimmer of light for online entertainment though: this was also the week that BandCamp launched, and its easy-to-build pages quickly became one of the best tools for musicians to distribute their work online.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, as file-sharers were going deeper underground, a study showed that most online copies of movies were coming from industry insiders — which perhaps explains the industry's insane plan for self-destructing DVDs. While RIAA head Carey Sherman was struggling to defend the agency's lawsuit strategy (and totally missing the point), the Senate was gearing up for hearings over the lawsuits, and considering a bill to close the DMCA's special subpoena powers — also a major issue in the ongoing court battle between the RIAA and Verizon.

Filed Under: history, look back