Chia Cryptocurrency, Started By BitTorrent Creator Bram Cohen, Engaging In Obnoxiously Bogus Trademark Bullying

from the not-how-it's-done dept

It seems these days you can't mention anything to do with cryptocurrency without someone jumping in and insisting that cryptocurrency is a disaster for the environment. There are differing opinions on all of this, but a few years ago, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen set out to build a more "eco friendly" cryptocurrency called Chia. The basic idea was that, rather than using a proof-of-work system -- which involves using up a ridiculous amount of computing power, it would use a proof-of-space system, looking at how much hard drive space you're allocating. After many years of development, Chiacoin finally launched a few weeks ago. And, to pretty much prove the old axiom that there's no such thing as a free lunch, while it may not be directly wasting CPU cycles, it's impacted the world differently: by destroying the global hard disc supply chain, driving prices for hard disks through the roof -- leading people to point out that even if it's not wasting electricity like Bitcoin, it may be wasting hard drives. Some may challenge the question of whether or not this is wasteful (those hard drives are doing something...) but there are multiple reports of running Chia on SSDs is wearing them out in ridiculously short periods of time -- even to the point that some SSD makers are saying that using their hard drives for Chia will void the warranty. Yikes!

All that said, this post is not so much about Chia's setup or its impact on the global supply chain for hard drives. It's about trademark bullying. You'd think that a company started by Bram Cohen -- someone all too frequently falsely accused of being responsible for music and video piracy from his BitTorrent days -- would be extra sensitive to coming across as an "IP bully" of any sort. And this is true of some of the other folks who work on Chia -- some of whom I know are Techdirt regulars.

But, for whatever reason, Chia Networks has decided to be an obnoxious trademark bully. Chris Dupres, another Techdirt regular, started a blog to cover news about Chia Networks and ChiaCoin called The Chia Plot. It's got a bunch of interesting articles about what's been happening on the Chia front.

And apparently the folks at Chia decided to threaten him with legal action.

Last week, "the head of IP for the Chia Network," Belle Borovik (who appears to be a recent law school grad), sent Chia a legal nastygram, insisting that the site violated Chia's trademark. Admittedly, the letter was at least somewhat friendlier that your typical cease and desist or threat letter. It thanked Chris for educating the public about Chia, and asked him to get a license to use the Chia name, which it offered up on a "royalty free" basis.

Chris,

I write to you on behalf of the Chia Network Inc. First and foremost, allow me to thank you for your efforts in educating and expanding the Chia community through your blog and discussions. We support open discourse and free exchange of information.

Still, it is important to Chia Network to protect its trademarks. Unauthorized use of Chia Network’s registered CHIA mark, or iits logos exposes community members to potential scammers, misleading and confusing them. Therefore, it is essential that all users of the CHIA marks, logos, or the Chia Network name obtain a royalty free permission to use the CHIA marks. Simply put, you may not continue using the CHIA mark in your domain name, or anywhere, without securing a written permission from Chia Network.

We must ask you to contact us immediately, and no later than May 28, 2021 by replying to this email, so that we may resolve this matter amicably, and you are able to continue to strengthen the community we all care about.

Except, that's not how any of this works. There is a very, very, very long line of cases, going back years, that say that websites about a trademarked brand, do not infringe on the trademark if they use the trademark in their URLs. Chris basically told them to pound sand, but did say he would clarify in his site's tagline that it was "an unofficial site." He also posted the legal threat and his response to his site.

And then, the Chia folks took away the "nicer" part of their threats, and... incredibly... became even more obnoxiously threatening and censorial. Beyond insisting that his changes were not enough and continuing to add to the false claims of trademark infringement, it also accused him of violating the GDPR by posting Belle Borovik's name in association with the letter that Belle Borovik sent to Chris. I only wish I were joking.

Dear Mr. Dupres,

It has come to our attention that your EU-registered website has recently engaged in a series of privacy violations under the General Data Protection Regulation Act (the “GDPR”) involving a Chia Network employee. To date, you have revealed our employee’s personal data, including their Name and Location, and aided in doxing behaviors of others directed toward this individual through your blog.

Despite this unbecoming behavior, you have reached out to us with the following inquiry regarding permissions to use the CHIA marks on your website:

I have added “unofficial” to the tag line of my blog to ensure that there is no confusion. Can you please confirm that this acceptable and that we are able to move on from here?

Unfortunately, adding the word “unofficial” is not enough to obviate the likelihood of confusion. Moreover, Chia Network cannot support violations of privacy laws, and cannot condone behaviors that target or endanger any member of the Chia community. This is precisely the reason for Chia Network’s vigilance in enforcing its trademark rights; the Chia Network guidelines make it easy for the community to remain connected, while maintaining a respectful and professional relationship with each other.

That said, Chia Network stands by its mission to support the Chia community, and is still willing to consider a relationship with your blog. Understandably, this can only happen if you remove all Protected Personal Information (“PPI”), including the doxing comments or references to any Chia Network employee, whether made by you or by others via your platform.

Once you have removed the doxing and PPI content from your platform, we can “move on from” there, with you obtaining a free license from Chia Network.

Sincerely,
The Chia Network Legal Team

That's uh, not how any of this works again. Chris again responded, pointing out how crazy this was, noting correctly that publishing the name of an employee who sends a threat letter is not a privacy violation (and noting that the site is registered in Canada anyway, and not the EU). Out of unnecessary courtesy, he still removed Borovik's name.

The latest is that Public Citizen Litigation Group's Paul Levy has stepped up to provide an official response from Chris to Chia Networks. And, if you're a long time reader of Techdirt, by now you should know that you basically never want to be on the receiving end of a Paul Levy letter. The letter is, in typical Levy fashion, worth reading. I was going to post just a snippet, but the whole thing is too good not to share:

Dear Ms. Borovik:

I write in response to your demands to Chris Dupres, contending that he has violated the trademark laws by using "The Chia Plot" as the name of his new web site about your company and by registering the domain name www.thechiaplot.net to be used as the internet address for the site. You contend that he needs your permission to use these names, that he needs to apply to you for a royalty-free license, and that, if he wants to resolve this situation on an amicable basis, he needs to submit his request to you immediately.

Dupres is not going to comply with your demand. Your company has no right to give (or withhold) approval for any and all uses of its unregistered trademark on web sites that discuss your company. What's more it is unreasonable for you to expect a journalist to ask for permission to use the company's name to talk about the company. Your attempt to condition his use of the name on his agreement to delete certain information from the site shows why no self-respecting journalist would give in to such a demand. See WCVB-TV v. Boston Athletic Associaton, 926 F.2d 42 (1st Cir. 1991).

Your assumption that Chia Network has a right to forbid use fits mark to denominate a web site as being about the company, or to demand the right to give or withhold such permission, is belied by longstanding precedent, set by series of cases decided by the federal courts more than ten year ago. Given the fact that your company is located in San Francisco, the decisions in Bosley Medical v. Kremer, 405 F.3d 672 (9th Cir 2005), and Nissan Motor Co v. Nissan Computer Co., 378 F.3d 1002 (9th 2004), are the most teling: Both cases squarely preclude the use of trademark law to stop Dupres's use of a web site posted at a domain name that uses your trademark as a site for non-commercial commentary about your company. Several cases in other circuits protect the right to use a domain name in the form www.trademark.com for a web site about the trademark holder against a variety of trademark claims. Utah Lighthouse Ministry v. Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, 527 F.3d 1045 (10 Cir. 2008); Lamparello v. Falwell, 420 F.3d 309 (4th Cir. 2005); TMI v. Maxwell, 368 F.3d 433, 436-438 (5th Cir. 2004); Lucas Nursery and Landscaping Inc. v. Grosse, 359 F.3d 806 (6th Cir. 2004); Taubman v. WebFeats 319 F3d 770 (6th Cir. 2003).

Trademark law aside, the First Amendment protects Dupres's right to use your company‘s name to denominate, accurately, the subject of this web site. Any effort that your company made to invoke trademark law as a reason to shut down his site, or to alter its name, would be an invocation of government power that would be subject to First Amendment scrutiny and would violate the First Amendment.

You suggest that you believe that some of your customers might be confused by the name or domain name of the web site into believing that the site is sponsored by your clients. Just how gullible do you expect your potential customers to be? I daresay that even the proverbial moron in a hurry would recognize, immediately upon visiting The Chia Plot, that it is a web site devoted to journalism about your company rather than being sponsored by your company. Dupres's site expressly states that it is not affiliated with your company, indeed, it proclaims its independence.

Moreover, Dupres has helpfully provided viewers of his site with a prominent hyperlink to your site just as, for example, did the Shops at Willow Bend site at issue in Taubman, the web site attacking Bosley Medical Group at issue in Kremer, and the site condemning Jerry Falwell's homophobia at issue in Lamparello. As a result even if Internet users mistakenly looking for your company, rather than looking for information about your company, wandered onto The Chia Plot by name-guessing, they would be quickly disabused of any notion that the site belongs to or has the approval of your company. As this very letter is propagated around the Internet, readers will gain further information dissociating Dupres's news site from your own commercial site.

Finally, I note that one of your demand emails included the preposterous contention that Dupres violated European privacy rules by identifying you as the person who sent the demand email. Although Dupres took your name off his site as a friendly gesture, you have persisted in pursuing trademark claims that have no legal bass. Accordingly, your name will likely appear in stories written about your claims.

I am giving you until June 9 to retract your demand that Dupres stop using the word "chia" in the domain name for his web site and in the title of the site. Dupres is not willing to keep operating his web site subject to the threat of a claim for trademark damages. Consequently, failing a prompt retraction, a request for waiver of service could well be the next communication you receive on this topic

Whatever you might think of Chia as a cryptocurrency, it's silly legal threats -- both about trademark and (even more ridiculously) about the GDPR -- seem to raise questions about what the hell is going on over there...

Filed Under: belle borovik, bram cohen, chia, chris dupres, cryptocurrency, gdpr, hard drives, paul levy, trademark, trademark bullying
Companies: chia networks

Supreme Court Says The Community Caretaking Exception Doesn't Apply To Warrantless Searches Of People's Homes

from the rolling-back-a-blown-call dept

The Supreme Court has been on a bit of roll lately. After years of making things worse for plaintiffs suing law enforcement officers over rights violations, the Supreme Court has begun reversing qualified immunity decisions finding in favor of the rights violators. It still has a lot of damage to undo from its decades of expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine but it's a start.

A new, very short decision [PDF] from the Supreme Court reverses another blown call by an appellate court and restores some Fourth Amendment protections that decision stripped away.

In March of last year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals decided to do something a little different: it extended the limits of the poorly defined "community caretaker" function to cover warrantless searches and seizures that involved someone's home. The decision it relied on -- Cady v. Dombrowski (1973) -- previously only covered vehicles already in law enforcement possession or on public roads.

In that case, a man's wife called for a welfare check on her husband. The previous night, her husband had asked her to "shoot him now and get it over with." She left and he stayed in the house with the gun. When she couldn't reach him by phone the next day, she asked the police to check in with him.

The police spoke to the man and expressed his wife's concerns. They then went to his house. He voluntarily departed via an ambulance to check in at the local hospital to see what help they could be in dealing with the mental breakdown he seemed to be experiencing. The officers took it upon themselves to enter the home and seize any guns they found. They did this despite the man (now hospitalized and posing no threat to anyone) expressly refusing to consent to this seizure.

Too bad, said the First Circuit. The home is now a car and "community caretaking" function excuses the lack of warrant or express permission to take personal property.

We hold today — as a matter of first impression in this circuit — that this measure of protection extends to police officers performing community caretaking functions on private premises (including homes). Based on this holding and on our other conclusions, we affirm the district court's entry of summary judgment for the defendants in this highly charged case.

Wrong, says the Supreme Court, in a four-page opinion written by Clarence Thomas (and joined by three concurrences). The First Circuit had no business extending the reach of the Cady decision into someone's home -- especially when it was clear there was no community caretaking to be done.

The First Circuit’s “community caretaking” rule... goes beyond anything this Court has recognized. The decision below assumed that respondents lacked a warrant or consent, and it expressly disclaimed the possibility that they were reacting to a crime. The court also declined to consider whether any recognized exigent circumstances were present because respondents had forfeited the point.

Nor did it find that respondents’ actions were akin to what a private citizen might have had authority to do if petitioner’s wife had approached a neighbor for assistance instead of the police.

This case isn't Cady but for houses. There were some crucial differences, the most important being who was in control of the property that was searched.

True, Cady also involved a warrantless search for a firearm. But the location of that search was an impounded vehicle—not a home—“‘a constitutional difference’” that the opinion repeatedly stressed.

And that decision even went so far as to inform law enforcement that they weren't exactly welcome to warrantless searches of cars either, even with the community caretaking function in play.

In fact, Cady expressly contrasted its treatment of a vehicle already under police control with a search of a car “parked adjacent to the dwelling place of the owner.”

How the First Circuit saw this and still decided the Supreme Court actually meant to allow cops to search homes and seize property without a warrant is something only the First can explain. It didn't do much explaining in its opinion. Perhaps it will do a bit more when it handles this case for the second time.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, community caretaker, supreme court, warrantless searches

A Conversation About Video Game Preservation In The Gaming Industry Is Long, Long Overdue

from the we-need-some-speed dept

There has been quite an uptick recently when it comes to the conversation around video game preservation. There are probably several reasons for this. First and most notably, the confluence of the trend toward the gaming public primarily purchasing digital games rather than shiny disks, and the emergence of the latest generation of video game consoles has brought the question of what happens to older games into stark relief for many in the gaming public. Second, America has been in something of a love affair over the last decade or so with all things "retro". And, finally, the concept of video games as works of creative art, rather than wastes of time to be sneered at, has found firm purchase within our society. All of this has combined to make the public much, much more interested in preserving antiquated video games. And, frankly, very disappointed at how often the gaming industry doesn't take preservation at all seriously.

Well, it's happening again. In the near future, Electronic Arts will be shutting down the servers and online portions of several Need For Speed games.

Today, via Reddit (while most the English-speaking world is on a holiday), it’s been announced that Need For Speed: Carbon, Need For Speed: Undercover, Need For Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and Need For Speed: The Run will be “retired”. Which I suppose is an apposite word, given they’ll be limping off the tracks as they leave digital storefronts today, and their servers switched off come the end of August.

The reasons given are the usual: that maintaining servers for the few remaining players is prohibitively expensive, and hey, look, they’ve released loads of (astoundingly poor) NFS games since then, so you could buy those instead!

Note a couple of things on this. While the offline portions of the games will still be playable for those who have already purchased them, new buyers will no longer have a place to legitimately buy them. Also, while there is a single player component, a big draw of the games was and continues to be the ability to race against friends online. Finally, note that this announcement comes with absolutely no plan to make the game or online play available in any other way.

Which is where the preservation conversation comes in. Once again, we have a game publisher that enjoys full rights controls over its property choosing to simply deprive the public of some or all of that property. A more perfect antithesis of the concepts of the public domain and copyright law generally probably can't be found. While EA explained away its decision to "retire" these games as the expense that comes along with maintaining servers and backend infrastructure for relatively fewer players -- along with a suggestion that disappointed gamers simply by new games in the Need For Speed series -- it's not like there aren't steps it could take to play nicely with its fans if it wanted to.

It’s always this way. “Shrug! What else could we do?!” Well, here are some other things they could do:

They could release the source code for the 10-15 year old games, and allow others to continue their development in the public domain. They could release the server code for the games, to allow enthusiasts to continue to host the few dedicated players remaining. They could offer to upgrade players to one of the many NFS games of the 2010s (although this may be crueller than just nothing at all). They could recognise that last year EA made a revenue of $5.5bn, and it’s likely they could just about afford to leave the servers on with minimal maintenance, without taking too big of a hit

Delisting them from stores just seems... petty! Sure, they don’t offer all the available features when the servers are off, but come on. Quarter the prices—hell, be decent enough to make them free—and let people buy them as single-player artefacts of the past.

In other words, either preserve the games for fans yourselves, EA, or let the fans do it for you. Either option is viable. But simply switching off the servers and making the games no longer available for purchase at any price is probably not so much a petty thing to do as it is a callous thing to do.

And when a company starts acting callous towards its dedicated fans, well, that's not a good plan for building either goodwill or more buying fans.

Filed Under: archive, need for speed, preservation, video games
Companies: electronic arts

Leaked Emails Show Chicago PD Bought, Deployed Drones Using Off-The-Books Forfeiture Funds

from the forced-transparency-still-more-effective-than-voluntary-transparency dept

Thanks to the efforts of transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), residents of Chicago are learning more about the activities of their sworn protectors, the Chicago Police Department. Stuff the PD never wanted the public to see is now in the public's hands. The Chicago Sun Times has started digging into the stash provided by DDoS and has revealed the PD's secret drone program, paid for with off-the-books funds.

Details of the police department’s drone program were included in an email sent last summer by Karen Conway, director of police research and development. In the email, Conway told other high-ranking police officials that the department’s counter-terrorism bureau “utilized 1505 funds for a pilot Drone program that operates within the parameters of current laws.”

1505 funds are funds the city doesn't control or track. The funds belong solely to the Police Department -- something that happens shortly after the PD takes the funds from the people they used to belong to.

The department’s “1505” fund is made up of forfeiture proceeds — money and other assets seized in connection to criminal investigations. The money isn’t included in the department’s official budget and has reportedly been used in the past to purchase other controversial technology, like Stingrays, which mimic cell towers and send out signals to trick phones into transmitting their locations and other information.

Asset forfeiture is a great way to get cops the things they want without having to worry about oversight from either the city or its residents. Purchases are almost always "controversial" when they're made with funds that are all but invisible to outsiders.

And there's quite a bit of cash to be spent. The Chicago PD has taken in nearly $26 million in forfeiture funds in the last two years alone. It managed to spend nearly $8 million over that same period, some of it on "operating expenses," witness protection, and controlled drug buys. Some of that also went towards training programs and conferences, as well as their attendant expenses (travel, meals, lodging).

But some of it went towards new tech not specifically approved by the city. Emails included in the leaked documents suggest the PD wants its drones to participate in vehicle pursuits. One email references "Starchase" and "engine stop technology." This would allow pursuit vehicles to launch GPS trackers at pursued vehicles, allowing officers to stop chasing and start tracking. Drones would presumably be used to track vehicles from the air and put airborne eyes on suspects if and when the tracked vehicle is abandoned.

The only hang up appears to be the city's drone policies, which restrict how they can be used. The PD has obtained some waivers and relaxation of drone guidelines, but it appears this part of the program is still in the exploratory phase rather than in actual use at this time. However, other emails in the same stash claim the drones will be (or are being) used to search for missing persons, take crime scene photos, or assist in "terrorist-related issues."

But this isn't the only time the Chicago PD has expressed interest in airborne surveillance. While this email references vehicle pursuits (something the PD doesn't handle particularly well), there's no reason to believe the PD won't find other uses for the new eyes in the sky.

In 2018, the ACLU accused former Mayor Rahm Emanuel of being the heavy hand behind legislation in Springfield that would have allowed police officers to use drones equipped with facial recognition technology to monitor protests. Versions of the legislation passed both the state house and senate but a final bill was never signed into law.

“Given that the city not so long ago sought legislation to permit using drones to surveil public gatherings, including those engaged in First Amendment activity, it is worth questioning its motivations,” [ACLU spokesman Ed] Yohnka said of the new revelation.

The CPD may be looking at pursuit options but state law enforcement has its own drones and sent them skyward during protests last year sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. The Illinois State Police said the drones were launched to capture footage of "potential uses of force and arrests," but the same recordings could easily have been used to identify and track people engaged in protected First Amendment activity.

This is just one of many problems with asset forfeiture programs. Not only does the government take control of citizens' property with almost no justification, but the direct beneficiaries of these programs are often allowed to spend the funds however they want with almost no oversight. That's how the Chicago PD gets into the drone business without ruffling feathers downtown or feeling any obligation to inform the public about their latest surveillance plans.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, chicago, chicago police department, drones, emails, leaks, surveillance

Trump Bans Himself From His Own Blog; Upset That Everyone Mocked Its Terrible Traffic

from the such-cancel-culture dept

It's been quite a month for the former President, Donald Trump, and his attempts to speak out. Almost a month ago, Trump launced a Twitter-like blog, with very limited interactive features, a silly terms of service (which said they could moderate whatever they wanted, like every other site). As we noted, lots of people mocked it for being just a standard old blog, but it did make the point that despite what other social media platforms might do, Trump was not being "censored." He had lots of ways to speak up. Of course, after a couple of weeks, reports noted that the site wasn't getting very much traffic, we highlighted that this showed what the issue really was: Trump wasn't upset about a lack of ability to speak. He was upset about the lack of a free audience.

As more and more reports came out about the dwindling traffic on the site, Trump (in standard Trump fashion) insisted that the site was actually getting huge traffic, even more than last year during the election:

“The Washington Post also incorrectly reported about my DonaldJTrump.com website viewership. We have not yet launched our own social media “platform,” but even the very basic site we have to post our statements has received 36.7 million views over the past month alone, and we’re getting more traffic to our website now than in 2020, an Election year! This number would be even greater if we were still on Twitter and Facebook, but since Big Tech has illegally banned me, tens of millions of our supporters have stopped using these platforms because they’ve become “boring” and nasty.”

Of course, even if that 36.7 million number is correct -- which it likely is -- most of that was probably on the day or two after launch when people came to check it out. All of the data suggests that the traffic was a one time deal and wasn't coming back:

“As a matter of metrics, audience, readers, every single way they measure blogs—it’s a failure,” with lower traffic than sites like Petfinder and Eat This, Not That, Melber said on The Beat with Ari Melber. Citing a report by the Washington Post, Melber noted that not one of Trump’s posts on the “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” site has gotten more than 15,000 interactions.

And now, following the bans from Twitter and Facebook, it appears that Donald Trump has banned himself from his own blog, shutting it down permanently. Trump and his spokespeople are claiming that this was part of "broader efforts" to have the former President engaged more directly with social media, and promised that details of these new efforts would be revealed soon.

Of course, the fact that they launched the blog with such hype, and talked it up so much less than a month ago, makes all of this seem (again, as per so much that is Trump) to be them just making shit up as they go along. Meanwhile, a Trump advisor admitted to the Washington Post that the reason it was shut down was that Trump was embarrassed by how little traffic it was getting and how everyone was mocking the site:

An adviser told The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey that the former president wanted to open a new “platform” and didn’t like that this platform was being mocked and had so few readers. The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about Trump’s plans.

Obviously, Trump has every right to kick himself off his own platform, just like every other website has every right to kick him off their platforms as well. I'm assuming we won't be seeing stories about Trump's "anti-conservative bias" though, huh?

In the meantime, all of this reinforces a few important things: (1) Trump has every ability to speak out if he wants to, but (2) that doesn't guarantee him an audience, and (3) building a successful website that gets traffic is hard work, and simply assuming that you can easily replicate a successful website and its audience is rarely going to work.

Filed Under: audience, blog, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, social media

Europe's Human Rights Court Says UK Mass Surveillance Violated Rights, Unlawfully Obtained Journalists' Communications

from the leaking-works dept

Another court case prompted by the Snowden leaks has reached its conclusion. And the findings are that Snowden's revelations were accurate: the NSA's Five Eyes partners were breaking laws and ignoring people's rights when engaging in mass surveillance. That's just a natural side effect of grabbing communications and data in bulk and pretending it's lawful if you sort through it after you've already acquired it.

The UK spy agency GCHQ’s methods for bulk interception of online communications violated the right to privacy and the regime for collection of data was unlawful, the grand chamber of the European court of human rights has ruled.

In what was described as a “landmark victory” by Liberty, one of the applicants, the judges also found the bulk interception regime breached the right to freedom of expression and contained insufficient protections for confidential journalistic material but said the decision to operate a bulk interception regime did not of itself violate the European convention on human rights.

Another one of the claimants -- the Bureau for Investigative Journalism -- says this is a win for journalists all over Europe. The ruling institutes more protections for news gatherers, which should hopefully prevent some of these violations from reoccurring.

The UK government violated the freedom of the press for decades under its mass spying programme and must now seek independent permission to access any confidential journalistic material, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

In a significant victory for press freedom, the new protections will apply to all confidential material collected by journalists in their reporting, not just the identity of sources. The judgment covers state authorities across Europe, including intelligence agencies, government departments and the police.

Unfortunately, it takes lots of plaintiffs and millions of dollars just to obtain a common sense ruling that intercepting journalists' communications and metadata is a violation of rights. It also takes whistleblowers willing to come forward and expose what they've seen while working for surveillance agencies. It's very unlikely a case would have been brought -- much less won -- without the Snowden leaks. This legal process began in 2013, shortly after Snowden started releasing material to journalists. And some of the recipients of these leaks saw themselves attacked and surveilled by their governments for reporting on these documents.

From now on, any surveillance targeting journalists or inadvertent collection of their communications and data must be run by an independent entity before it can be used in investigations or prosecutions. The spy agencies must prove their interests are greater than the public's interest in whatever the journalists are reporting on. They also must show there's no other way to obtain this same information without utilizing data and communications obtained from journalists. Yes, this may encourage parallel construction and other data laundering, but at least it should deter the direct targeting of journalists.

There may be more favorable rulings in the future. One of the complainants says this win will allow some of its other legal challenges against mass surveillance to move forward. And some of the 17(!) dissenting judges said this ruling -- while a landmark decision -- does not go far enough to protect journalists and other innocent people from bulk surveillance.

Then there's the UK's "Snooper's Charter" -- one that's been in the works for nearly a half-decade -- which would expand surveillance powers in the UK. The UK exited the European Union, making it unclear what effect this decision would have on domestic surveillance. And the UK government's ongoing war on encryption makes it clear many of those currently writing and approving legislation don't really care if rights are violated -- not if those rights stand in the way of law enforcement investigations and vague national security interests.

But it's still a significant win. While it may do little for UK journalists now or in the future, it does erect additional protections for journalists located elsewhere in Europe. And it shows whistleblowing works and, indirectly, why far too many governments have decided whistleblowers are threats to be eradicated, rather than protected.

Filed Under: ed snowden, eu, european court of human rights, gchq, human rights, snowden leaks, surveillance, uk

Daily Deal: Setapp 1-Year Subscription

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

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Filed Under: daily deal