Chinese Gov't Inflicts Its Selective Amnesia On Hong Kong, Forcing The Removal Of Tiananmen Square Massacre Monuments

from the gaslighting-at-gunpoint dept

To be subservient to the Chinese government is to be in a constant state of (mandated) denial. The government has a narrative to project. No, that's not an accurate depiction. The state has a narrative to enforce.

An obscene amount of oppression and death is apparently nothing to be ashamed of. And how could the government be ashamed of it? It never happened. Whatever violence Chinese citizens saw perpetrated against them was merely the actions of a heroic and patriotic government, inflicting death and misery for the greater good. Of course, the only beneficiaries of this "greater good" are those inflicting death and misery. Hence the friction between fact and government fiction.

To make things easier for the people who serve the government (rather than the other way around), the Chinese government has spent years trying to eliminate the friction. Having a singular narrative may not fool people, but it at least gives them an official timeline to follow, which makes it easier to maintain "citizen scores" and stay off the radar of a government more interested in curbing thoughtcrime than actual crime.

The Chinese government's steady incursion into the day-to-day activities of Hong Kong residents has been greeted with heated, sustained protests from residents of the region, as well as international condemnation. Neither of these reactions have slowed the Chinese government's roll. Neither has its tacit agreement with the British government to leave Hong Kong unmolested until 2049. Since 1999, the Chinese government has inflicted its will on the extremely profitable region, stripping it of the democracy and independence that allowed it to flourish.

When regular laws just weren't effective enough in shutting down Hong Kong protests, the Chinese government introduced a new national security law. With this vague and easily abused justification for crushing dissent, the Chinese government made resistance untenable by threatening protesters and critics with life sentences for daring to challenge the narrative.

Then it began erasing history. The Chinese government had already cleared the slate in China, eliminating its past misdeeds by rewriting textbooks, jailing dissenters, and creating an insular web overseen by multitudinous censors. Then it came for Hong Kong, using its "national security" pretext to jail journalists, target documentarians, and prevent artistic works challenging the official narrative from being displayed.

Now, it has come for the last physical remnants of its checkered past. Erasure is here if you want it. If you have no monument to atrocities, did the atrocities even happen?

Two more Hong Kong universities have removed works of art marking Beijing’s deadly 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square democracy protesters, as authorities move to erase memorials to the event.

The removals come a day after Hong Kong’s oldest university took down a statue named the Pillar of Shame, commemorating the events of 1989, sparking outcry by activists and dissident artists in the city and abroad.

Hong Kong used to be the one place in China where mass remembrance of Tiananmen was still tolerated, with thousands gathering each year to mourn the hundreds of democracy protesters killed by Chinese troops in 1989.

Excuses were made. Some were more honest than others. But the writing is on the wall. And those who are unwilling to read it are headed towards a lifetime of misery. The heads of these universities can see what the future holds. Dissent and criticism are one-way tickets to hard labor or reeducation.

CUHK said it removed the “unauthorised statue” after an internal assessment, adding that the groups responsible for moving it to the campus in 2010 were no longer functional.

Lingnan University said it had taken down a wall relief, also created by Chen, after having “reviewed and assessed items on campus that may pose legal and safety risks to the university community”.

The first excuse is bullshit. But it's bullshit the Chinese government will find acceptable, especially since it resulted in the removal of a monument to its brutality. The second assessment is far more realistic. It at least informs readers that the university has accepted its fate as the neck under the heel of the Chinese government's boot. Rather than subject administrators, teachers, and students to future brutality from the Chinese government, the school has decided to remove the inanimate provocateur. This cedes ground to the Chinese government's narrative but at least prevents punishment for "misremembering" the Tiananmen Square Massacre. There is a clever backup plan for remembrance -- a crowdsourced 3D model that would allow for swift, cheap replication of one of these monuments -- but it's clear Hong Kong entities will never officially host any version of these sculptures.

Having spent years making itself essential to supply chains -- both as a producer and a consumer -- the Chinese government is now openly mocking every critical statement, sanction, or tariff issued by foreign governments. It has demonstrated the strength of its convictions. And it has yet to see anything in response that would deter it from becoming its worst self. If it decides certain parts of its history no longer exist inside its borders, then that's the way it's going to be. The outcry coming from beyond its borders is just background noise.

But even though it means nothing to the Chinese government, it still means something to everyone else. World leaders need to confront the Chinese government about its actions and draw attention to its oppressive efforts and erasure of history when meeting with Chinese officials or addressing supply chain issues. The Chinese government may choose to remember its history selectively, but the rest of the world should be under no obligation to indulge in its fantasies.

Filed Under: china, hong kong

Daily Deal: The Complete Video Production Super Bundle

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

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Filed Under: daily deal

AT&T Exits The Ad Business As Merger Ambitions Continue To Unravel

from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept

We've noted for years how U.S. telecom giants aren't particularly competent when it comes to wandering outside of their core competencies (building and running networks, lobbying the government to hamstring competitors). As government pampered regional monopolies who haven't had to try particularly hard for decades, stuff like competition, innovation, adaptation, and creativity are often alien constructs.

It routinely shows in the failed products they try to launch: mobile payment platforms that share names with terrorist organizations; Millennial-targeting streaming video platforms nobody actually wanted to watch; news websites that aren't allowed to write about the news; "me too" apps, app stores, and other products that can't compete.

AT&T in particular has showcased telecom's knack for face plants with its $200 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which was supposed to cement the telecom's place as an advertising and mobile media giant. Instead, the company somehow managed to lose millions of subscribers while laying off tens of thousands of employees, despite receiving no shortage of regulatory favors and tax breaks to make it easier to succeed.

After recently spinning off the entire media fiasco, AT&T's now jumping ship from its ad ambitions as well as it tries to recover from the massive debt load creating by its megamerger fiasco. The company last week quietly announced it would be selling Xandr, its programmatic advertising marketplace, to Microsoft:

"AT&T formed Xandr in September 2018, combining its TV and digital advertising businesses, including digital ad marketplace AppNexus, which the telco bought for a reported $1.6 billion that year. ...Xandr had ambitions of becoming a dominant player in cross-platform advertising."

Again though, none of AT&T's ambitions worked out. In part, employees have consistently noted, because AT&T executives were cocksure, thought they knew better, and generally didn't bother to listen to folks with expertise in the markets they were trying to disrupt. A year out past the wreckage and AT&T executives still haven't really accepted their role in the entire mess, spending a lot of time claiming they're not getting enough credit.

That hubris stems from being an industry that historically hasn't had to listen to anybody, compete, or generally innovate (outside of which network technologies to adapt, or which anti-competitive lobbying strategies to adopt). But investors demand their pound of flesh in the form of quarter over quarter results. Having cut as many corners as they can on broadband deployment and customer service, that growth has to come from somewhere, so it routinely comes from pushing into business sectors telecoms lack the core competency to play in.

Filed Under: advertising, telcos
Companies: at&t

Weeks After Blasting Twitter For 'Strangling Free Expression' GETTR Bans The Term 'Groyper' In Effort To Stop White Nationalist Spam

from the content-moderation-speed-run dept

It's always fun to watch each new entrant into the social media market that rushes in claiming that it is the "true" supporter of "free speech" learn about the necessity of some level of content moderation. We watched it happen with Parler, the site set up by Trump benefactor Rebekah Mercer. And now we're watching it happen with former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller -- who is so supportive of "free speech" that he once sued a news org for reporting on something he didn't want public (he lost badly and was told to pay legal fees). GETTR has already had some fun learning that content moderation is necessary (and not a necessary "evil" -- just necessary). But now it's gone up a level.

Of course, it was just a month ago that Miller was running his mouth, attacking Twitter and claiming that Jack Dorsey was "strangling free expression" at Twitter and "censoring opinions he doesn't like."

So it seems noteworthy that just a few weeks later, it's Miller who is... doing the same thing. Specifically, GETTR banned Nick Fuentes, a pathetic wannabe neo-Nazi, who seems to spend all of his time just trying to troll people into being mad about what a sad little white nationalist he is. GETTR claimed that Fuentes violated its terms of service which, um, is the same thing that Twitter does when it bans people because that's how it works.

But then GETTR went even further -- including much further than anything I've seen Twitter ever do. It started banning a word associated with Fuentes and his followers: "groyper." It's not worth getting into the history of groyper, but suffice it to say, it started as an alternative to the old alt-right co-opting of the Pepe the frog cartoon, and then just became a truly pathetic chant that Fuentes' followers chant as a sort of talisman to make sure they ward off anyone with more than a dozen brain cells. Anyway, Fuentes' little band of misfit children started filling up GETTR with "groyper spam" to protest the ban of Fuentes, and so Miller and GETTR just... decide to ban the word "groyper" from the site entirely. As the Daily Beast discovered, it's just not allowed at all.

Say what you want about Twitter "strangling free expression" but I don't recall the company ever blocking your ability to post a single word in an effort to stop a bunch of sad edgelord teenagers from overflowing the site with protest spam. And, of course, as anyone with more than a little bit of experience in the content moderation space knows, doing simple word filter bans is not just silly, but also totally ineffective, as Arizona's dumber-than-you-can-believe State Senator Wendy Rogers highlighted with the addition of a few "o's":

The key point here is that every website needs some level of content moderation or it becomes a total and complete cesspool that is basically unusable. Every website realizes that eventually. The idea that GETTR is any more "supportive of free speech" is nonsense. It just has a different set of rules that it will enforce somewhat arbitrarily, and it will make mistakes just as Twitter, Facebook, and other sites make mistakes. Of course, as a marketing tool, GETTR will continue to lie and claim that it is somehow uniquely more supportive of free speech, when that's all a bunch of nonsense.

Filed Under: content moderation, groyper, jason miller, nick fuentes
Companies: gettr, twitter

Dallas PD Brags About Stealing Money From A Woman At An Airport, Is Now Facing Scrutiny From Its Oversight Board

from the might-need-that-cash-to-treat-all-those-bullet-wounds-in-your-feet dept

In a spectacular bit of self-ownership, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) took to Facebook to brag about stealing money from a person at Love Field Airport.

If you can't read the text or see the picture, it's a photograph of a Dallas PD drug dog standing next to several piles of money. The caption, written by the DPD, says:

We need to get him some treats! K9 Officer Ballentine does it again! On 12/2/21, the Lovefield Interdiction Squad seized over $100,000 with the help of Ballentine. Good job Ballentine!

The post made no mention of what criminal activity was suspected nor why the person was approached and had her money taken from her. Here's how Dallas' CBS affiliate first covered the news:

High praise for a K-9 officer at Dallas Love Field Airport after more than $100,000 was found in a passenger’s luggage.

On December 2 the canine — named ‘Ballentine’ — alerted on an individual checked suitcase. It turns out the bag, that belonged to 25-year-old woman from Chicago who was on a layover at the airport, contained blankets and two large bubble envelopes filled with $106,829 in cash.

A drug dog alerting on cash means nothing. A large percentage of cash in circulation contains trace amounts of illegal substances. The dog was the excuse for taking the cash. The fawning coverage by CBS DFW at least took the time to mention that the woman had not been arrested and that the Dallas PD was pursuing civil asset forfeiture.

Fortunately, the coverage didn't end there. The CBS affiliate asked for more details from the PD. It also sought comment from critics of asset forfeiture, like Dan Alban of the Institute for Justice.

Perhaps the best part of the follow-up coverage -- beyond having most of its runtime given over to critics of civil forfeiture -- is the bold misstatement of the law by the law enforcement agency involved.

A DPD spokesperson also alleged that travelers are not allowed to board a plane with more than $10,000 of cash without declaring it, even on domestic flights.

This simply isn't true. Cash only needs to be declared if it's exiting or entering the country. That's part of customs work. It has nothing to do with the "drug interdiction" these cops were performing. And, obviously, the officers found no drugs so nothing appears to have been interdicted. Instead, the cops walked away with a domestic traveler's money, all because their trained 4-legged stooge did the thing when it detected the odor of drugs on an item often tainted with trace amounts of drugs.

Even better, the follow-up contains a ridiculous statement from another law enforcement officer:

Jody Barr, also with WJZY, asked TSA spokesperson Mark Howell about asset forfeiture, pointing out that TSA rules do not prohibit traveling with large amounts of cash.

“It says here, TSA rule 100.4, is traveling with large amounts of currency is not illegal,” Barr told Howell.

“Yeah, it’s not, it’s not. And that’s why I said it’s allowed. But again, when it’s in the screening checkpoint, again, like I said, if there is a large amount of cash, or if the way that it’s packaged, it looks strange, then we’re going to contact law enforcement,” Howell responded.

That's an admission by the TSA that it looks for cash -- something that's not illegal or dangerous. It should be keeping an eye out for contraband and terrorists. But that part of the job is something it doesn't do particularly well. However, it does seem to be able to locate cash for cops or federal officers to take -- something that doesn't do anything to improve the security of transportation.

The DPD also offered another comment, one that said little more than its drug interdiction team hangs out at the airport with Ballantine and goes sniffing around until they find something. Cash is always a welcome discovery, since it can be taken without all the hassle of determining criminal charges or actually engaging in an investigation.

There's a bit more to add to this story. The local oversight board wants the PD to explain why it took this person's cash.

“What I want to know are what are the rules? And did this woman break them? And it’s not clear to me that she did,” said Brandon Friedman, who sits on the city’s Community Police Oversight Board.

At its meeting Tuesday night, he expressed alarm at the lack of explanation from Dallas Police.

“I understand that they’re sensitive, confidential topics that may be part of an investigation that they can’t divulge to the public. But, somebody with oversight responsibility needs to be told,” said Friedman.

The DPD is supposed to send someone to attend next month's meeting of the oversight board and answer questions about this seizure. And lawmakers in the state have offered their criticism of the DPD's actions, meaning it is now facing more scrutiny than usual. Whether or not this will result in any changes to DPD procedures remains to be seen. But one thing is certain to be altered. We can pretty much guarantee this will be the last time the PD brags about taking money from people on social media. Future seizures will go unreported, at least by the Dallas PD, which means it will be a bit more difficult to determine how often it utilizes civil asset forfeiture to take property from people on domestic flights.

Filed Under: civil asset forfeiture, dallas police, legalized theft

California Police Officers' Bigoted Text Messages Have Just Undone Dozens Of Felony Cases

from the it's-time-to-keep-the-streets-free-of...-racist-cops dept

Racism and policing go hand-in-hand. It's been this way ever since police forces were created for the purpose of tracking down escaped slaves and returning them to their owners. Flash forward 150 years and very little has changed other than the ending of slavery.

Unsurprisingly, the advent of social media platforms and the increase in smartphone use has exposed the racism that still flows through far too many law enforcement agencies. Multiple investigations have been triggered by the exposure of bigoted communications between officers. It hasn't exactly resulted in a nationwide reckoning for racist officers, but it has at least seen a few bad apples tossed from barrels across the country.

If cops aren't worried about what happens to them -- as is evidenced by their carefree deployment of casual racism -- it's doubtful they're too worried about what happens to the general public. They claim to be the thin blue line standing between us and criminal chaos, but their racist words are erasing that line, allowing criminal suspects to return to the streets.

The Torrance Police Department in California is the epicenter of the latest garbage racist cop shitstorm. And rightfully so, given what's been uncovered there. Convictions and pending criminal cases are now in jeopardy because of officers texting each other things like this:

The caption read “hanging with the homies.”

The picture above it showed several Black men who had been lynched.

Another photo asked what someone should do if their girlfriend was having an affair with a Black man. The answer, according to the caption, was to break “a tail light on his car so the police will stop him and shoot him.”

Someone else sent a picture of a candy cane, a Christmas tree ornament, a star for the top of the tree and an “enslaved person.”

“Which one doesn’t belong?” the caption asked.

“You don’t hang the star,” someone wrote back.

Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times -- which includes open investigations into some of these officers -- shows the Torrance PD has a racism problem, one it is now forced to confront. It's one thing when it's officers being lousy human beings. That can be swept under the rug. It's quite another when dozens of criminal cases might be tossed because these officers have shown they can't be trusted on the streets, much less in court.

While no officers currently face criminal charges in direct relation to the text messages, the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal. County prosecutors had tossed 35 felony cases as of mid-November, and the Torrance city attorney’s office has dismissed an additional 50, officials said.

The bleeding is unlikely to stop there. Records from the District Attorney's office shows the officers implicated in this new scandal are (or were) listed as potential witnesses in nearly 1,400 cases spanning the last decade. The LA County public defender's office has been swamped since this information came to light, receiving nearly 300 letters disclosing possible misconduct by officers during one single week in November.

The officers didn't just target black people with these texts. They also joked about "gassing" Jews, assaulting (sexually or otherwise) LGBTQ persons, assaulting suspects, and lying during investigations.

It's possible this hatred and misconduct would never have been exposed. But two officers apparently felt untouchable enough that they felt comfortable spray-painting a swastika on a vehicle they towed following a report of mail theft. An investigation into the actions of Officers Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic uncovered racist messages originating from Tomsic.

District attorney’s records reviewed by The Times showed Tomsic sent a slew of racist images and messages, including a picture of former President Reagan feeding a monkey with a caption stating Reagan “used to babysit [former President] Obama.”

Another picture he sent referred to an “African American baby” as a “Pet Niguana,” according to the records, and he also sent a message mocking the fact that he was the subject of a racial profiling complaint.

“So we totally racially profiled his ass, haha … Shopping at 7/11 while Black, he didn’t know the rules lol,” Tomsic wrote, according to the records.

That led to the exposure of more bigoted messages from cops. There are a total of 18 officers implicated. The names of thirteen of those officers are known and have been published by the LA Times. Several of those officers have been investigated for deploying excessive force or killing citizens. In almost every case, they've been cleared of wrongdoing.

Fortunately, the Torrance PD seems to be taking this seriously. It has given the DA's office 200 gigabytes of data covering officers' text messages. And the DA's office has been ensuring this information is passed on to the public defender's office, so both parties can determine what cases might be affected by these cops and their racist attitudes.

But cops don't just start sending racist texts to each other without feeling comfortable doing it. At some level, the Torrance PD made it clear this sort of behavior was, at minimum, ignored, if not actively tolerated. Now, these self-proclaimed protectors of the innocent have shown they only care about certain people, and are apparently willing to set criminals free rather than reign in their bigoted impulses.

Filed Under: bigotry, california, police, torrance, torrance police

Unsecured Data Leak Shows Predicitive Policing Is Just Tech-Washed, Old School Biased Policing

from the hey-that-data-isn't-accurate-says-AI-company-confirming-data's-accuracy dept

Don't kid yourselves, techbros. Predictive policing is regular policing, only with confirmation bias built in. The only question for citizens is whether or not they want to pay tech companies millions to give them the same racist policing they've been dealing with since policing began.

Gizmodo (working with The Markup) was able to access predictive policing data stored on an unsecured server. The data they obtained reinforces everything that's been reported about this form of "smarter" policing, confirming its utility as a law enforcement echo chamber that allows cops to harass more minorities because that's always what they've done in the past.

Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime-prediction software called PredPol.

The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.

Gizmodo and The Markup analyzed them and found persistent patterns.

Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.

By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.

Targeted more? In some cases, that's an understatement. Predictive policing algorithms compound existing problems. If cops patrolled neighborhoods mainly populated by minorities frequently in the past due to biased pre-predictive policing habits, the introduction of that data into the system returns "predictions" that "predict" more crime to be committed in areas where officers have most often been located historically.

The end result is what you see summarized above: non-white neighborhoods receive the most police attention, resulting in more data to feed to the machine, which results in more outputs that say cops should do the same thing they've been doing for decades more often. Run this feedback loop through enough iterations and it results in the continued infliction of misery on certain members of the population.

These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases, they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years.

That's the aggregate. This is the personal cost.

Take the 111-unit Buena Vista low-income housing complex in Elgin. Six times as many Black people live in the neighborhood where Buena Vista is located than the city average.

Police made 121 arrests at the complex between Jan. 1, 2018, and Oct. 15, 2020, according to records provided by the city, many for domestic abuse, several for outstanding warrants, and some for minor offenses, including a handful for trespassing by people excluded from the complex.

Those incidents, along with 911 calls, fed the algorithm, according to Schuessler, the Elgin Police Department’s deputy chief.

As a result, PredPol’s software predicted that burglaries, vehicle crimes, robberies, and violent crimes would occur there every day, sometimes multiple times a day—2,900 crime predictions over 29 months.

That's not policing. That's oppression. Both law enforcement and a percentage of the general public still believe cops are capable of preventing crime, even though that has never been a feature of American law enforcement. PredPol software leans into this delusion, building on bad assumptions fueled by biased data to claim that data-based policing can convert police omnipresence into crime reduction. The reality is far more dire: residents in over-policed areas are confronted, detained, or rung up on bullshit charges with alarming frequency. And this data gets fed back into the software to generate more of the same abuse.

None of this seems to matter to law enforcement agencies paying for this software paid for with federal and local tax dollars. Only one law enforcement official -- Elgin (IL) PD's deputy police chief -- called the software "bias by proxy." For everyone else, it was law enforcement business as usual.

That also goes for the company supplying the software. PredPol -- perhaps recognizing some people might assume the "Pred" stands for "Predatory" -- rebranded to the much more banal "Geolitica" earlier this year. The logo swap doesn't change the underlying algorithms, which have accurately predicted biased policing will result in more biased policing.

When confronted with the alarming findings following Gizmodo's and The Markup's examination of Geolitica predictive policing data, the company's first move was to claim (hilariously) that data found on unsecured servers couldn't be trusted.

PredPol, which renamed itself Geolitica in March, criticized our analysis as based on reports “found on the internet.”

Finding an unsecured server with data isn't the same thing as finding someone's speculative YouTube video about police patrol habits. What makes this bizarre accusation about the supposed inherent untrustworthiness of the data truly laughable is Geolitica's follow-up:

But the company did not dispute the authenticity of the prediction reports, which we provided, acknowledging that they “appeared to be generated by PredPol.”

Geolitica says everything is good. Its customers aren't so sure. Gizmodo received responses from 13 of 38 departments listed in the data and most sent back written statements that they no longer used PredPol. That includes the Los Angeles Police Department, an early adopter that sent PredPol packing after discovering it was more effective at generating lawsuits and complaints from residents than actually predicting or preventing crime.

This report -- which is extremely detailed and well-worth reading in full -- shows PredPol is just another boondoggle, albeit one that's able to take away people's freedoms along with their tax dollars. Until someone's willing to build a system that doesn't consider all cop data to be created equally, so-called "smart" policing is just putting a shiny tech sheen on old-school cop work that relies on harassing minorities to generate biased busywork for police officers.

Filed Under: biased policing, garbage in, garbage out, police tech, predictive policing, predpol
Companies: geolitica

Google Will Cripple OnHub Routers Starting Next Year

from the you-don't-own-what-you-buy dept

We've long written about how you don't really own what you buy in the modern era. Books, games, and other entertainment can stop working on a dime due to crappy DRM. Game consoles you've purchased can find themselves suddenly with fewer features. Or worse, hardware you've bought thinking you'd own it for a decade can wind up being little more than a pricey paperweight.

But quite often, products that should work for years just slowly stop being supported, leaving you with hardware that gradually becomes less and less useful. We saw this recently when Sonos initially bricked still working (and expensive) speakers. The phenomenon popped up again this week when Google announced that its OnHub router, launched back in 2015, will no longer be supported starting next year. The products will still technically function as a basic router, but they'll no longer see security updates, and many of the cloud-based functionality and advanced features will be stripped from the devices.

To be clear this isn't an end of the world type of scandal. Google's providing 40% discounts to OnHub owners off of new Google routers (which will experience the same fate in a few years). The Hub also had some initial performance problems, and was quickly supplanted in Google's lineup by its Google WiFi (now Nest) products a year after they launched. But the downgrades are still part of an annoying shift in which companies hype all manner of cloud-based functionality at launch, then gradually strip functionality away once they no longer want to pay to support their own products:

"That Google can take an aging but perfectly functional router and switch off big parts of its functionality is one of the downsides of networking hardware that requires you to sign up for an account or use an app to administer it. While most advanced mesh routers are moving in this direction, offerings from Asus, Netgear, Linksys, and others at least retain some kind of web administration interface so you can continue to handle basic configuration tasks if those companies discontinue support or cease to exist."

It's not only annoying, but it's obviously not great for the environment to be routinely discarding fully functional kit. This may be less of an issue for more technologically sophisticated users who keep tabs on trends like this, but it's much more of a headache for Luddites who barely understood how their old router worked in the first place -- and now suddenly have to navigate the fact that perfectly good hardware has been crippled remotely.

Filed Under: end of life, iot, onhub, onhub router, ownership, smart devices
Companies: google

Judge Wants To Know If DOJ Ignored Its Own Journalist-Targeting Guidelines When Investigating An Infowars Host Who Raided The Capitol

from the terrible-actions,-pertinent-questions dept

Sometimes tough questions about rights have to be asked even when central figures are far from sympathetic. Good case law is sometimes made by bad people (or, at least, people accused of doing terrible things).

But the questions must be asked. That's what the courts are for. They're a check against government overreach. And this case, coming via the Volokh Conspiracy, involves a defendant who's unlikely to gain much mainstream support.

Jonathon Shroyer is a talk show host who works for Infowars. He's also -- according to the DOJ -- one of thousands who raided the Capitol building last January. Technically, he's a journalist, given that he collects information and reports it on his Infowars show. He may not be a journalist in the traditional sense, but there are many people who perform "non-traditional" journalism, even if they haven't hitched their wagon to an entity mostly known for pushing outrageous conspiracy theories.

Shroyer joined other Infowars figures in a demonstration on January 6th, calling for the election to be overturned. Then he went further. This is from the magistrate's order [PDF] asking the DOJ to explain itself:

Law enforcement’s review of the videos further revealed that Shroyer entered the restricted area of the Capitol building. In fact, Shroyer was “standing above the crowd on the west side of the Capitol next to the inauguration stage.” Later on January 6, 2021, Shroyer called into an Infowars broadcast from the Capitol grounds and stated that he was on “one side of the Capitol, so we can’t see both sides, but on this side alone there’s probably about 100,000 people. They’ve taken the Capitol grounds, they’ve surrounded the building itself, they’re on the actual building structure. . . . We literally own these streets right now.”

Shroyer definitely shouldn't have done this. At this time this happened, he was already facing criminal charges for disrupting a House Judiciary Committee hearing. His deferred prosecution agreement forbade him from engaging in any "disorderly or disruptive conduct" on the US Capitol grounds. He also agreed not to engage in any protests or picketing inside any Capitol building.

But Shroyer is technically a journalist, which raises questions about how the DOJ has handled his case. Following Trump's election loss, plenty of information came to light showing the DOJ was targeting journalists and their sources while supposedly engaging in internal leak investigations. Following these revelations, the DOJ changed its policies and announced it would no longer target journalists during investigations.

Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui wants to know whether the DOJ followed its own guidelines during this investigation. The First Amendment doesn't protect Shroyer's trespass or prosecution agreement violations, but there are concerns about the investigation the DOJ apparently didn't choose to address directly.

In August, the magistrate asked the DOJ to clarify a few things. First, did it consider Shroyer to be a journalist? And, if it did, did it comply with its policies regarding the targeting of members of the media when it went after Shroyer? Finally, the judge asked the DOJ to memorialize its answers to these questions. The DOJ refused to do any of this to the judge's satisfaction.

The USAO represented that it had followed its internal guidelines but was unwilling to memorialize that or explain the bases for its determinations.

Hence the need for this reiteration of the court's previous request, one the judge makes clear isn't voluntary despite the DOJ's apparent belief otherwise.

The Court issues this addendum opinion in response to the USAO’s break with prior practice, and to ensure that the judicial record accurately reflects: 1) the conversations between the Court and the USAO; and 2) the undersigned’s understanding of the steps taken by the Department to comply with 28 C.F.R. § 50.10.

The government has had no problem doing this in other cases. The magistrate cites two prior January 6th investigations that may have targeted members of the press and the steps the DOJ took to justify the seeking of warrants in these cases -- justifications that clearly stayed within the confines of the DOJ's new press guidelines.

It didn't do that in this case and Judge Farqui wants to know why. That the underlying criminal acts were unprecedented and extremely alarming does not excuse the DOJ's lack of compliance in this case.

Yet here the government is unwilling to address its compliance with its internal regulations regarding the press. When questioned by the Court, the USAO’s representatives respectfully stated that they had followed such guidelines but would not formally state this in their pleadings; nor would they memorialize the reasons underlying their determination that Shroyer was not “a member of the news media” who had committed the instant offenses “in the course of, or arising out of, newsgathering activities.” 28 C.F.R. § 50.10(f)(2). The events of January 6th were an attack on the foundation of our democracy. But this does not relieve the Department of Justice from following its own guidelines, written to preserve the very same democracy.

And, while the court says there's enough evidence on the record now to justify the DOJ's actions in hindsight, the open question pertains to what the DOJ did to obtain this evidence and how those efforts complied (or didn't) with its directives on handling cases involving journalists.

The undersigned finds there was probable cause to believe Shroyer committed the above-described violations.

As to the question of whether and how the Department of Justice complied with its policies, the court received an unsatisfactory answer. Yet even if a credentialed journalist engaged in the instant conduct, there would be no question of probable cause for arrest.

The Department of Justice appears to believe that it is the sole enforcer of its regulations. That leaves the court to wonder who watches the watchmen.

As unsympathetic as an alleged Capitol raider who works for a conspiracy theory outlet is, the court -- and the public -- deserves to know if the DOJ handled this correctly. Journalism can occur anywhere, even within the confines of Alex Jones' batshit-crazy outrage generation machine. Shroyer may very well have engaged in illegal activity within the Capitol building, but the first steps of any investigation matter, especially when First Amendment rights may be involved.

If the DOJ doesn't want to discuss its efforts in cases like these, the judge is right to pause proceedings until the court receives a satisfactory answer. If the DOJ ran off its own rails, this is cause for concern.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, alex jones, doj, freedom of the press, january 6, jonathon shroyer, journalism
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