Trump Thinks That The Government Can And Should Sue Internet Companies Because He Doesn't Like The People Who Work There

from the not-how-it-works-don dept

In a move that will surprise absolutely no one, our President once again blindly and incorrectly lashed out at big internet companies and said that they should be sued for what appears to be the illegal action of having employees who didn't vote for him. I mean, that's not what he said, but that seems to be the only real reasoning behind the argument.

President Trump on Wednesday said the U.S. government “should be suing Google and Facebook and all that,” then wagered that “perhaps we will,” in a new broadside against Silicon Valley at a moment when it already faces heightened antitrust scrutiny in Washington.

Trump did not detail the exact basis for such lawsuits, which he raised after assailing European regulators for their investigations into U.S. tech companies.

So... he's against EU regulators investigating the companies, but he wants to have the DOJ do it? On what basis. Apparently, on the basis of a laughable, out-of-context propaganda video from an organization famous for producing misleading, out-of-context propaganda videos.

In doing so, Trump also swiped at Google, claiming the search and advertising giant is “trying to rig the election.” He then claimed that Twitter has made it “very hard” for users to find and follow him. But Trump did not provide new evidence for his latest allegation that the companies exhibit bias against conservatives, which Google and Twitter long have vehemently denied.

The "rig the election" is one that's been making the rounds this week after a group of people deliberately misrepresented Google's ongoing (and very public) efforts to prevent foreign intervention in the US election. If you think that blocking foreign intervention is "rigging the election," well, then you've got much bigger issues.

As for the claim that Twitter has made it "very hard" for users to find and follow him, he currently has 61.4 million followers -- which appears to make him the twelfth most followed account on the platform. He has more followers than Kim Kardashian. I don't think anyone is making it hard to find or follow him. Or, if Twitter is doing that, please, Twitter, make it just as hard for people to find and follow me on the platform.

Look, I get that Trump and his fans don't like the fact that tech company employees overwhelmingly didn't vote for him. But, that's not any basis for making up lies about them and sending the DOJ after them. There may well be legal and regulatory issues that deserve scrutiny regarding these legal companies, but making up fantasy stories only makes it that much harder to sort out what's legitimate from what's utter nonsense.

Filed Under: antitrust, doj, donald trump, internet companies, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

As The DOJ Continues To Complain About Encryption, Cellebrite (Again) Announces It Can Crack Any IPhone

from the do-y'all-not-get-the-internet? dept

On Monday, June 17, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said this during his speech to the National Sheriffs' Association:

In recent years, criminals have become more and more adept at using technology to avoid law enforcement in what we call “going dark.” While “going dark” has many manifestations, some of its greatest impacts are in the areas of encryption, in assuring the security of information. But, as you well know, encryption also allows criminals to frustrate law enforcement's access to evidence — even where a neutral judge has found probable cause and ordered that we have access to that evidence.

I guess the "going dark" crowd doesn't get out much.

On Friday afternoon, the Israeli forensics firm and law enforcement contractor Cellebrite publicly announced a new version of its product known as a Universal Forensic Extraction Device or UFED, one that it's calling UFED Premium. In marketing that update, it says that the tool can now unlock any iOS device cops can lay their hands on, including those running iOS 12.3, released just a month ago. Cellebrite claims UFED Premium can extract files from many recent Android phones as well, including the Samsung Galaxy S9. No other law enforcement contractor has made such broad claims about a single product, at least not publicly.

It was announced very publicly. This wasn't a press release sent only to government agencies or the byproduct of leaked internal documents. It was announced on the company's Twitter account, letting everyone know Cellebrite is apparently beating almost every device maker at their own encryption game. Like GrayKey's offering, Cellebrite's updated encryption-breaker is hardware that can be used on site by purchasers, allowing law enforcement agencies to perform their own cracking and extraction.

Sure, the flaws used to bypass device security will be patched, and Cellebrite and its competitors will keep digging around in device hardware/software to find holes to exploit. The security vs. insecurity war will continue. But for all the weak arguments made by the head of the FBI -- especially the ones about Apple, etc. "profiting" from locking out law enforcement -- it would seem companies like Cellebrite are more likely to directly profit from device encryption. Encryption on phones is a standard offering, not a selling point. Tools that break encryption? Now, that's where the real money is.

Cellebrite, along with companies like GrayKey, are providing the solutions the FBI and DOJ think device manufacturers should be creating for them. We don't hear much from FBI officials about third party offerings because this agency would prefer a permanent fix delivered by Congress and the courts, rather than spend any of their own money and time trying to find a solution. The FBI has been misleading and dishonest for the entirety of its "going dark" campaign, all the while claiming tech companies would willingly give the FBI what it wants -- encryption backdoors -- if they would just engage in an "honest" conversation about the issue.

Filed Under: doj, encryption, fbi, going dark, ios, iphone
Companies: apple, cellebrite

Dish To Buy Parts of T-Mobile To Save Sprint Merger, But It's Not Likely To Help

from the ill-communication dept

We recently noted that the DOJ seemed to have shifted its thinking and is now likely to approve T-Mobile's highly problematic $25 billion merger with Sprint. Why? As it stands, the merger would eliminate one of just four major US wireless competitors, dramatically reducing any incentive to compete on price and inevitably resulting in layoffs. So T-Mobile lobbyists have launched a hail Mary pass: they're proposing spinning off a part of the company and potentially selling it to a competitor like Dish Network. This would create a new fourth carrier to (theoretically) help offset any potential competitive harm.

That theory gained traction again with yet more reports stating that Dish would buy about $6 billion in T-Mobile and Sprint assets in an attempt to force this new fourth carrier into existence:

"Dish could announce a deal as soon as this week for assets including wireless spectrum and Sprint’s Boost Mobile brand, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. The deal hasn’t been finalized and talks could still fall through, said the people.

The potential divestitures are aimed at appeasing the Justice Department, which wants T-Mobile and Sprint to sell enough assets to ensure that the U.S. maintains at least four viable wireless players.

While this is likely going to be played up by the press and loyal T-Mobile politicians as the perfect "solution" to the reduced competition issue the deal creates, that's not true. The assets Dish is buying (Sprint's prepaid brand Boost Mobile) are largely incongruent with actually building a viable fourth carrier, so while this deal might be great for Dish (which has been hoovering up and squatting on spectrum for years with zero penalty) it's not going to accomplish what T-Mobile and the government are going to claim when DOJ approval is announced this week or next.

Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett put it this way in a research note to investors:

"We’re not sure why that deal is sensible for anyone involved. Dish, remember, already has more spectrum than they know what to do with; what they lack is money and ground facilities, and the deal described on Friday wouldn’t deliver either one. Instead, it would make both problems worse. And while Boost would help provide a baseline revenue stream in return for an upfront purchase price, the fit between Boost and Dish is, at best, superficial.

Yes, Boost serves a budget-conscious consumer, as does Dish Network’s satellite business, but Boost is a mostly urban brand and Dish’s satellite business is an increasingly rural one. And, more urgently, Boost’s distribution poses a huge problem. Historically, Boost was heavily dependent on Walmart for retail gross additions, but they’ve since lost that distribution channel. They would also, presumably, lose distribution through Sprint-branded stores (and even if, as a condition of the deal, they didn’t, does anyone think that Sprint/T-Mobile store employees would direct any volume to a spun-off Boost brand?) That would leave Dish with a brand that has a churn rate as high as 5% per month to be spun off with an inadequate distribution front end, and with no realistic path to replace that front end before the subscriber base was, well, gone."

That's a lengthy way of saying the spin off and sale of assets to Dish isn't going to work, and the end product is not going to be an adequate replacement for technically killing off Sprint. The effort is theatrical, and likely to end with just three major competitors anyway.

The other major problem is regulatory accountability and follow through. Creating and maintaining an entirely new viable fourth carrier while ensuring Dish doesn't just squat on spectrum for later sale is going to require some significant regulatory guard rails and FCC oversight. Who exactly is going to shepard this process, Ajit Pai? The same Ajit Pai that has yet to stand up to any major company on any issue of substance? The same Ajit Pai who didn't think any meaningful conditions were required to protect jobs and consumers from the deal's inevitable impact? The same guy who thinks oversight of predatory natural monopolies isn't necessary? Good luck with that.

At the end of the day Dish's involvement will be sold as an amazing solution to the deal's biggest issues. But in reality the simpler, safer, and saner option remains to just block the deal outright. Just like regulators did when they blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011, and when Sprint tried the same thing in 2014. A turd is still a turd, even when you put an adorable little hat on it.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, fcc, mergers, spectrum, wireless
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

Oversight Says FBI's Facial Recognition System Has Gotten Bigger, But Not Better

from the it's-not-like-the-FBI-is-some-tiny-underfunded-agency... dept

It appears the FBI's facial recognition program will never live up to the minimal expectations its oversight has placed on it. The FBI's database went live in 2014, far preceding the Privacy Impact Assessment that was supposed to be delivered in 2012.

Two years after its debut, the Government Accountability Office found the FBI's database -- which went live with a 20% failure rate -- was still a mess. The FBI showed little interest in improving the accuracy of its searches. It also showed little interest in periodically testing the system to see if it was improving or, quite possibly, getting worse.

The FBI's hands-off approach to facial recognition only applies to its oversight of the program. Otherwise, it's an enthusiastic participant. At the time of the GAO's examination, the FBI's database contained 411 million photos, drawn from both criminal and non-criminal databases. Indicative of the FBI's lackadaisical approach to facial recognition was a bank robbery case in Colorado, where the feds pitched in to help arrest the wrong person twice.

A year later, the House Oversight Committee noted nothing had improved since the GAO's 2016 recommendations. Input and output remained flawed, and the FBI still showed little interest in fixing the problems reported by the GAO.

Two years later, it's deja vu all over again. The GAO's latest report [PDF] says the only thing that's really changed is the size of the database. Since it's last assessment, the FBI has added 230 million photos, bringing the total to 641 million face shots. But otherwise, there's been little improvement. The GAO made six recommendations in 2016. To date, the FBI has only fully implemented one, and has taken no action at all on three of them.

As for the Privacy Impact Assessment the FBI was supposed to deliver in 2012? It's still in the works seven years later.

In its May 2016 report, GAO found that DOJ did not complete or publish key privacy documents for FBI’s face recognition systems in a timely manner and made two recommendations to DOJ regarding its processes for developing these documents. These included privacy impact assessments (PIA), which analyze how personal information is collected, stored, shared, and managed in federal systems, and system of records notices, which inform the public about, among other things, the existence of the systems and the types of data collected. DOJ has taken actions to expedite the development process of the PIA.

As for the system's accuracy, little forward progress has been made. The FBI is at least engaging in limited audits of the system, but only to ensure face searches are done according to policy. The problem with accuracy remains virtually untested. The FBI's testimony claims its vendor delivers a 99% accuracy rate, but as the GAO points out, this number comes from limited testing of batch sizes that may not be representative of those most commonly seen by the system's users.

GAO found that the FBI conducted limited assessments of the accuracy of face recognition searches prior to accepting and deploying its face recognition system. The face recognition system automatically generates a list of photos containing the requested number of best matched photos. The FBI assessed accuracy when users requested a list of 50 possible matches, but did not test other list sizes. GAO recommended accuracy testing on different list sizes.

On top of that, the FBI has no idea how accurate outside systems it utilizes are. It's own vendor might be delivering 99% accuracy, but the FBI makes use of databases and software used by other federal and state agencies. Despite being notified of this issue in 2016, the FBI has yet to assess the accuracy of these external systems.

This refusal to better police its system explains why the House Oversight Committee was less than impressed with the FBI's performance since it last took a look at the agency's facial recognition tech. The FBI's testimony was constantly undercut by the GAO's report, and this resulted in plenty of criticism from members of Congress.

During a hearing, members of the House Oversight Committee questioned witnesses on the steps being taken to ensure the facial recognition tools used by their agencies aren’t infringing on individuals’ privacy and civil liberties. By and large, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seemed unsatisfied with their answers.

[...]

Lawmakers criticized Kimberly Del Greco, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division, over the bureau’s failure to correct multiple flaws in the way it evaluates its primary facial recognition tool.

Maybe this will finally prompt the FBI to follow up on the issues found in the GAO's latest assessment. But I wouldn't count on it. This same cycle of events played out in 2016 and 2017 -- a GAO report followed by Congressional tongue-lashing -- and the FBI still chose to completely ignore three of the GAO's recommendations. Maybe Congress should just tell the FBI it can't use the tech until it fixes the problems and see if that finally motivates the agency. Nothing else has worked so far. All the FBI has proven is that it can't be trusted with facial recognition tech.

Filed Under: doj, error rates, facial recognition, fbi

10 State AGs Join Forces, Will Sue To Stop T-Mobile Sprint Merger

from the bigger-ain't-better dept

While the FCC has indicated it's more than eager to approve T-Mobile's $25 billion merger with Sprint (despite an endless list of red flags), other regulators have proven to be a harder sell. The DOJ, for example, seems a bit sheepish on signing off on a deal that will reduce already semi-tepid US wireless competition by 25%. They're correct to worry: US telecom is awash with examples of how such consolidation tends to devastate employment, and results in significantly higher rates for consumers and businesses alike.

Granted with the DOJ now run by former Verizon attorney Bill Barr, it's still very possible the DOJ approves the deal anyway. But even then, the deal is going to have to get past a new coalition of 10 state attorneys general, who say they've joined forces and will file a lawsuit to block the deal whether the DOJ approves it or not. New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra were fairly blunt in a statement announcing the move:

"When it comes to corporate power, bigger isn’t always better,” said Attorney General Letitia James. “The T-Mobile and Sprint merger would not only cause irreparable harm to mobile subscribers nationwide by cutting access to affordable, reliable wireless service for millions of Americans, but would particularly affect lower-income and minority communities here in New York and in urban areas across the country. That’s why we are going to court to stop this merger and protect our consumers, because this is exactly the sort of consumer-harming, job-killing megamerger our antitrust laws were designed to prevent."

While everybody is certainly welcome to their own opinions when it comes to tech policy, there's really not much of a debate when it comes to the impact mindless M&As have had on the telecom sector.

Comcast (and it's comically terrible customer service) was born from the mindless sector obsession with growth for growth's sake. This consolidation, especially in wired broadband, has left us with a clearly unhealthy sector with little real competition, resulting in some of the highest prices and slowest speeds in the developed world. There's not a single telecom metric the US isn't mediocre in, and it's a direct reflection of two things: regulatory capture and mindless merger mania. That's now being extended to wireless, where the reduction of overall competitors from four to three will dramatically reduce any incentive to, you know, actually try.

It's also pretty clear that when government tries to "fix" these anti-competitive unions via condition, it rarely works out well. The conditions imposed in these deals are often flimsy and proposed by the companies themselves (usually because they know they don't actually do much). Even then, companies are routinely free to ignore conditions without meaningful penalty, and many bipartisan incarnations of the FCC have simply refused to enforce them anyway. Pre-merger promises (and there's plenty attached to the T-Mobile deal) aren't worth the paper they're printed on, yet US policymakers adore pretending otherwise.

With former Verizon lawyers running both the FCC and DOJ, the chance that this administration imposes and then enforces tough deal conditions is slim to none. That leaves the more simple option: blocking the deal entirely. Some variant of this deal has been blocked twice already (AT&T's attempted T-Mobile acquisition in 2011, and Sprint's attempted merger in 2014), and for obvious reasons. Still, T-Mobile and Sprint executives are hoping that the Trump administration opens the door wide to approval anyway, leaving it (yet again) up to state AGs to actually protect the market and consumers in the face of federal apathy.

Filed Under: antitrust, california, doj, mergers, new york, state ags
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

AG William Barr Doesn't Want The Government Spying On The President But Thinks It's OK If It Spies On Everyone Else

from the selective-deployment dept

Attorney General William Barr is against* domestic surveillance.

Attorney General William Barr on Friday continued to go to bat for President Donald Trump, reiterating his attempt to justify his investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into Trump campaign’s ties to Russia ― including by claiming without evidence that U.S. government “spying” on Trump’s campaign was just as grave as Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I think people have to find out what the government was doing during that period. If we’re worried about foreign influence, for the very same reason we should be worried about whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale,” he said in a Fox News interview airing Friday. “I’m not saying that happened, but I’m saying that we have to look at that.”

Let me restate that: William Barr is opposed to certain, very narrow subsets of domestic surveillance. Specifically, Barr doesn't think the government should have spied on Trump and his campaign staff, if that's what actually happened, which Barr doesn't actually seem to know.

But if you're literally anyone else, domestic surveillance is just another name for national security, whether you're a random Verizon customer or one of the world's most useful websites.

The Wikimedia Foundation sued the federal government over domestic surveillance back in 2015. The suit lives on four years later, thanks to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recognizing the Foundation had stated enough credible facts to be granted standing. The fight continues, with Barr's DOJ reiterating its original point that there's nothing wrong with spying on Americans when national security is on the line.

Wikimedia’s case could mark the first time a public court weighs in on the constitutionality of this decade-old spying operation. But in stark contrast to Barr’s public expressions of concern over the privacy of Americans, his Justice Department has thrown up a series of litigation roadblocks in an effort to prevent the court from ruling on the legality of this surveillance dragnet.

In fact, on Thursday, Justice Department lawyers argued that Wikimedia’s case should be dismissed outright. They contend that Wikimedia cannot prove with sufficient certainty that its communications are surveilled, and that it therefore lacks “standing” to sue.

We expect hypocrisy from those in the self-service business. Government officials are not expected to apply their ideals and beliefs consistently across the board. The DOJ itself, however, is completely ambivalent. It is more than willing to spy on both presidential candidates and everyone else in the country, even as it argues none of the millions of entities swept up in the NSA's dragnets have standing to sue over violated rights.

Barr wants to dig into the federal government's spying on Trump, but doesn't want the public to dig into the government's spying on everyone else. Tough, but unfair. But that's how the government operates, and AG William Barr is no exception. To use the DOJ's own argument, Barr's seemingly baseless claims about spying on the Trump campaign shouldn't be granted standing by the general public, much less the DOJ he wants to investigate itself.

*The DEA has run multiple bulk records collections for more than 20 years, given the green light by our current Attorney General, William Barr, who also ran the DOJ back in 1992.

Filed Under: doj, domestic surveillance, mass surveillance, surveillance, william barr

Trump Whines About AT&T, Ignores His FCC Has Spent Two Years Kissing The Company's Ass

from the ill-communication dept

While there are countless news outlets that justifiably criticize the President, Trump has long been particularly fixated on CNN. So fixated, in fact, that it's believed this disdain for the network (in addition to Rupert Murdoch's competitive desires) played a starring role in his DOJ's bungled effort to try and block AT&T's $86 billion merger with CNN parent company Time Warner.

This week, Trump doubled down once again, proclaiming that the public should stop using AT&T services as punishment for CNN's criticism of the President:

The tirade resulted in a fairly feeble effort to get the #DumpATT hashtag trending on Twitter, and some consternation and furrowed brows among journalists who took the rambling Tweet a bit too seriously.

The irony here, at least if you're an adult who has actually paid attention to this administration's policies, is that AT&T has received a near-endless list of favors from Trump's administration, many of which it's not entirely clear that Trump is even aware of. In fact, AT&T has probably received more regulatory handouts from this administration than any other administration in American history. Which, if you tracked the favors doled out by Bush-era FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry), that's saying something.

AT&T was a massive beneficiary of the Trump tax cuts, now saving $3 billion annually in perpetuity. According to AT&T, that money was supposed to go back into the company's network and employees, but instead resulted widespread layoffs. Trump's FCC also gave AT&T a massive regulatory handout when it helped kill broadband privacy protections, killed net neutrality rules with popular bipartisan support, and voluntarily eroded its own authority over ISPs like AT&T at lobbyist behest. Trump's FCC has also routinely turned a blind eye to AT&T scandals like its failure to police location data sales.

There's countless other favors AT&T has gleaned from the Trump administration as well, whether it's the FCC decision to weaken the very definition of broadband competition or the killing of plans to bring more competition to the cable box. The Trump administration fealty to AT&T is so severe, we're at the point that when reporters contact Trump's FCC for information, they've occasionally been directed to US Telecom, a lobbyist organization spearheaded by... AT&T.

People tend to look at the Trump DOJ's decision to sue to thwart the Time Warner merger (which again had more to do with helping Rupert Murdoch and hurting CNN than any disdain for AT&T) as a sign of Trump's "opposition" to AT&T, but you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a company that's done as well under Trump as CNN's new parent company. That quickly forgotten $600,000 AT&T's lobbyists paid now-imprisoned Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for broader access to the administration seems to have been money well spent.

The entire fracas once again highlights how Trump's Twitter tirades are only tangentially related to reality, and very rarely tethered to his administration's actual policies. In fact, based on his comments on net neutrality, it's not really clear the President of the United States has the foggiest understanding of what his own FCC is doing. If Trump really wanted to hurt AT&T and CNN, a good first step would probably be to stop kissing the Dallas-based telecom giant's massive, monopolized ass.

Filed Under: antitrust, doj, donald trump, fcc, oversight, regulations, subsidies, telcos
Companies: at&t

If 'Big Tech' Is a Huge Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom?

from the ill-communication dept

Over the last week or so, Google, Amazon, and Apple have all taken a significant beating on Wall Street amidst rumblings of looming antitrust investigations by the DOJ and FTC. Google, we're told, is subject of a looming antitrust probe by the DOJ. Amazon, we've learned, is facing growing scrutiny from the FTC. Apple stock also did a nose dive on the news that it too may soon be subject to a significant new antitrust probe.

On its surface, many of these actions aren't all that surprising. After all, experts have noted for a decade than US antitrust enforcement has grown toothless and frail, and our definitions of monopoly power need updating in the Amazon era. Facebook's repeated face plants on privacy (and basic transparency and integrity) have only added fuel to the fire amidst calls to regulate "big tech."

Oddly missing from coverage from these probes is the fact that much of this behavior by the Trump administration may (*gasp*) not be driven by a genuine interest in protecting markets and consumer welfare. For one, it's hard to believe that an administration that has shown it's little more than a rubber stamp for sectors like telecom is seriously worried about monopoly power. Two, it's hard to believe an administration obsessed with nonexistent censorship is going to come at these inquiries with integrity, and not, say, as a vessel to pursue a pointed partisan persecution complex.

I've been arguing for a while that while many of the calls to regulate big tech are driven by genuine worries about monopoly power, a lot of it is being driven by the telecom sector. For years now, telecom lobbyists and policy folks have been using the anger over Facebook to covertly call for heavier regulation of Silicon Valley. You see, these telecom lobbyists, who just got done convincing the Trump administration to neuter FCC oversight of their own natural monopolies, are looking for any advantage they can get as they try to compete with companies like Google in the online ad space.

This is how former FCC boss turned cable lobbyist Michael Powell put it at a recent conference:

"Our governmental authorities need to get a handle on what kind of market power and harm flow from companies that have an unassailable hold on large pools of big data, which serve as barriers to entry, allowing them to dominate industries throughout the economy. For years, big tech companies have been extinguishing competitive threats by buying or crushing promising new technologies just as they were emerging. They dominate their core business, and rarely have to foreclose competition by buying their peers. Competition policy must scrutinize more rigorously deals that allow dominant platforms to kill competitive technologies in the cradle."

If you've watched as telecom giants have crushed every and any competitive threat by buying state and federal government, this entire paragraph should be fairly amusing to you. Powell's clients couldn't care less about anti-competitive behavior. What they do want is, again, for government to erect regulatory barriers that hamper the Silicon Valley companies whose ad revenues giants like AT&T and Comcast have drooled over for the better part of the last fifteen years. In the Trump administration they've finally found a vessel for this agenda.

The problem, of course, is there's enough legitimate bipartisan worry about the power of big tech that this little telecom sector lobbying gambit has been able to fly under the radar as the real driver of this new Trump administration push. Even with former Verizon lawyers now at the head of the DOJ (Bill Barr) and the Trump FCC (Ajit Pai). But there's a reason the Trump administration ignores telecom's monopoly and privacy issues while amplifying Silicon Valley's, and I'd argue it has a lot more to do with protectionism than a genuine worry about healthy markets.

If you were remotely serious about addressing the US' monopoly and antitrust problems, there's no way you'd simply ignore telecom. Giants like AT&T and Comcast already enjoy natural monopolies over the on ramp to the internet. They've then increasingly hoovered up countless media companies as they also position themselves to dominate the media flowing over those connections. This conflict and the potential for anticompetitive behavior sits at the heart of the net neutrality debate. Now, giants like AT&T want to become the next Google, with data harvesting plans every bit as problematic if not more so.

Yet again, notice how telecom gets a free pass by the Trump administration? Notice how Silicon Valley is demonized, but telecom's surveillance and anti-competitive gambits see zero backlash? I don't think it's happenstance that this new Trump "big tech" antitrust push comes as big telecom has asked for just such a push to aid its own competitive agenda. A lot of folks on both sides of the political aisle who'd like to see more done to rein in "big tech" seem a touch oblivious to the possibility that this new antitrust push may not be entirely in good faith.

There's a good chance these antitrust inquiries into Google, Facebook, and Apple are little more than partisan fever dreams co-driven by telecom lobbyists, yet a lot of outlets and experts are acting as if market health and consumer welfare are genuine motivators. It's entirely unclear what the Trump administration did to suddenly earn this blanket trust, but as the net neutrality fracas and trade wars have made pretty clear, it sure as hell isn't its several year track record on coherent tech policy.

Filed Under: antitrust, broadband, competition, doj, ftc, monopoly, telcos
Companies: amazon, apple, facebook, google

Internal Report Says DOJ Did Nothing Wrong Targeting Journalists' Communications To Hunt Down Leakers

from the first-step-is-forgiving-yourself-I-guess dept

The DOJ's current prosecution of Julian Assange threatens the profession of journalism. By turning cultivating sources and publishing classified documents into acts of treason, the DOJ is undermining protections supposedly guaranteed by the First Amendment and shored up by years of case law.

But the DOJ has been undermining these protections for years. Six years ago, news surfaced that the DOJ had issued 30 subpoenas for AP journalists' phone records. The fallout from this continues, which includes the DOJ modifying (very slightly) its rules for obtaining journalists' communication records.

When it comes to leak investigations, all bets -- and all Constitutional protections -- are off, apparently. The rules have exceptions and justifications to allow the DOJ to do what it wants to do anyway: spy on journalists until it can find the leak source. A new Office of Professional Responsibility report obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation FOIA request shows the DOJ convincing itself that threatening press freedoms is a responsible use of its powers.

The report is... important for what it tells us about the Justice Department’s Media Guidelines. Specifically, the report shows how weak the guidelines are, and how, in practice, the rules may offer little protection to journalists worried about being caught up in a criminal investigation. Although the guidelines have been revised since the AP subpoenas controversy, several of its standards remain intact. Among these is the requirement that proposed subpoenas be “narrowly drawn.”

While substantial portions of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s analysis are redacted, its finding that the AP subpoenas were “as narrowly drawn as possible” appears to have hinged on the perceived seriousness of the leak; the decision not to subpoena the telephone records for employees at the Post, the Times, and ABC News; the inability of investigators to determine to which AP reporter or editor the leaker had provided classified information; and “perhaps most importantly” the fact “the subpoenas requested the records for—and not the contents of—telephonic communications.”

The report [PDF] shows more than that, though. It shows the DOJ also thought about subpoenaing records from several other news agencies, including the Washington Post and New York Times. It shows the DOJ believed its failure to locate the source of the leak using other means and methods justified targeting phone lines used by journalists. And its subpoenas didn't cover individual desks. The 30 subpoenas targeted multiple AP offices, starting with their trunk lines. Although the DOJ was only seeking info about communications with seven journalists, it decided the most efficient way to do this was to scrape phone records from the trunk, capturing every call made to and from these offices for over a month.

Ultimately, the report finds the DOJ did nothing wrong. It acknowledges the First Amendment concerns but says any collateral damage was necessary to find the source of the leak. And it will continue to do this if it feels the collateral damage to free speech protections is worth it. That appears to be almost any case where the DOJ's internal investigation of leaks reaches a dead end. Rather than redouble its internal efforts, it will target journalists' communication records.

This was always concerning. President Obama waged a war on whistleblowers, making it far more likely journalists -- those often on the receiving end of whistleblowing -- would be targeted by the federal government. This war hasn't ended. It has only intensified. President Trump's DOJ is fighting it own war on leaks, and that effort is coupled with Trump's open disdain for several news organizations. The DOJ has already justified its past abuses. It won't find it too hard to sleep at night going forward.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, communications, doj, foia, journalists, phone records, subpoenas, warrants
Companies: associated press