Lots Of Big Media Companies Had Access To The Facebook Files; Only Gizmodo Decided To Put In The Work To Make Them Public

from the good-for-them dept

Over the last month or so, you've probably heard a lot about the Facebook Files or the Facebook Papers, which are the documents shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen with the media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, and then a rather reluctant "consortium" of seventeen big name US-based news organizations. The reluctance was apparent in the name of the Slack group created for all of the reporters working on the project: "Apparently We're A Consortium Now."

While I've been skeptical of some of the framing of the reporting on the papers, I still do generally believe it was a good thing to get this research out to the world -- even if I have little confidence that the media could ever do a good job conveying the story.

As news of the consortium broke, many people called out the fact that all of these big journalism organizations weren't actually releasing the documents they were going through themselves, often only describing them or quoting parts of them. Given that in a few cases where we've been able to see the full documents, it has appeared that some of the reporting was misleading or confused, this was a concern. And, of course, there were other concerns about the makeup of the consortium, and the fact that it was entirely based in the US.

That doesn't mean that it made sense to freely release all the documents to the public. There are plenty of reasonable concerns about privacy when you have a giant cache of internal documents. That's why it's a good thing to find out that Gizmodo has now taken on the task of making the Facebook Papers public, and doing so in partnership with a bunch of independent experts who will help Gizmodo's reporters sift through the documents and make sure that they're okay to be released:

Today, we see a strong public need can be served by making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors who are joining us to guide our work in preparing the papers for public release. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

As Gizmodo notes, there are many reasons to carefully review the documents before releasing them:

More than for privacy, the documents require extra review to ensure we aren’t just handing groups of criminals and spies a roadmap to undermining the controls Facebook does have in place to detect propaganda aimed at spreading lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice.

The work is just beginning but we’re eager to start releasing documents as as possible. The first batch will likely consist of documents that warrant the least amount of redactions, just to get the ball rolling.

This is all good news. But it's a bit crazy that it's Gizmodo doing all this work. Gizmodo wasn't even a member of the original consortium and only joined after the first batch of stories went out. Also, Gizmodo is way smaller and with way fewer resources than many of the other members of the consortium, which includes the flush NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press, Politico, Wired and more.

The fact that it took a month for any of the members, let alone one of the smaller ones, to actually decide to put together the effort to release the papers is a damning statement on how many members of the consortium see their role in the media to be a gatekeeper to information, rather than providing the public access to information.

Filed Under: facebook files, facebook papers, reporting, transparency
Companies: facebook, gizmodo

South Korean Gov't Gave Millions Of Facial Photos Collected At Airports To Private Companies

from the PLEASE-DO-NOT-FEED-THE-ALGORITHMS dept

Facial recognition systems are becoming an expected feature in airports. Often installed under the assumption that collecting the biometric data of millions of non-terrorist travelers will prevent more terrorism, the systems are just becoming another bullet point on the list of travel inconveniences.

Rolled out by government agencies with minimal or no public input and deployed well ahead of privacy impact assessments, airports around the world are letting people know they can fly anywhere as long as they give up a bit of their freedom.

What's not expected is that the millions of images gathered by hundreds of cameras will just be handed over to private tech companies by the government that collected them. That's what happened in South Korea, where facial images (mostly of foreign nationals) were bundled up and given to private parties without ever informing travelers this had happened (or, indeed, would be happening).

The South Korean government handed over roughly 170 million photographs showing the faces of South Korean and foreign nationals to the private sector without their consent, ostensibly for the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) system to be used for screening people entering and leaving the country, it has been learned.

The agency carelessly handing out millions of facial images to private tech companies was the country's Ministry of Justice. Ironically enough, South Korean privacy activists (as well as some of the millions contained in the database) say this action is exactly the opposite of "justice."

While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a “human rights disaster” that is relatively unprecedented.  

“It’s unheard-of for state organizations—whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology—to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology,” six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The project -- one with millions of unaware participants -- began in 2019. The MOJ is in the process of obtaining better facial recognition tech to arm its hundreds of airport cameras with. To accomplish this, it apparently decided the private sector should take everything cameras had collected so far and use those images to train facial recognition AI.

The public was never informed of this by the Ministry of Justice. It took another government employee to deliver the shocking news. National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested information from the Ministry about its "Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction" project and received this bombshell in return.

Maybe the government felt this was okay because most of the images were of non-citizens. This is from South Korean news agency Hankyoreh, which broke the story:

Of the facial data transferred from the MOJ for use by private companies last year as part of this project, around 120 million images were of foreign nationals.

Companies used 100 million of these for “AI learning” and another 20 million for “algorithm testing.” The MOJ possessed over 200 million photographs showing the faces of approximately 90 million foreign nationals as of 2018, meaning that over half of them were used for learning.

With two-thirds of the freebie images being of foreigners, perhaps the South Korean government thought it would lower its incoming litigation footprint. But that still leaves nearly 58 million images of its own citizens. And there's nothing preventing foreign citizens from suing the South Korean government, even though this action can sometimes be considerably more expensive than suing locally.

Lawsuits are coming, though, according to Motherboard.

Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

The legal basis for the collection isn't being challenged. It's the distribution of the collected images, which no travelers expressly agreed to. Precedent isn't on the government's side.

“Internationally, it is difficult to find any precedent of actual immigration data from domestic and international travelers being provided to companies and used for AI development without any notification or consent,” said Chang Yeo-Kyung, executive director of the Institute for Digital Rights.

It's pretty sad when democratic governments decide the people belong to the government, rather than the other way around. But as the march towards always-on surveillance continues in travel hubs and major cities, using members of the public as guinea pigs for AI development is probably going to become just as routine as the numerous, formerly-novel, impositions placed on travelers shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

Filed Under: biometrics, facial recognition, privacy, south korea, surveillance

Daily Deal: Speakly

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

Speakly is the fastest way to learn a language. The app combines science and computational algorithms to teach you the 4,000 most statistically relevant words of your target language in order of their importance. Learn different languages such as Estonian, English, Russian, Spanish, and more. Speakly allows you to practice real-life situations right from your smartphone or computer, building your confidence when speaking a foreign language in their everyday life. It's on sale for $70.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing

from the no,-no,-it's-the-kids-who-are-wrong dept

I will admit that, until this morning, I had never heard of Ridley Scott's movie The Last Duel. It was released this fall in theaters only, which is a bold move while we're still dealing with a raging pandemic in which most people still don't want to go sit in a movie theater. And so, the box office results for the movie were somewhat weak. Indeed, it's now Scott's worst performing movie at the box office.

The issue, as many pointed out, was that The Last Duel was targeted at older movie-goers. A historical period piece film about a duel in France? Not exactly a hit among the youth market, and older folks are still the most concerned about COVID (which makes sense, considering it's a lot more deadly the older you get).

A few weeks ago, Scott admitted he was disappointed in the movie's performance at the box office, but compared it to Blade Runner, which also didn't immediately set the world on fire when it was released, and is now a classic.

But, now, having thought about it some more, Scott has decided that it must be Facebook and the kids these days who are at fault for not wanting to see his two and a half hour period piece epic. Going on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Scott insisted that he had no problems with the way the film was marketed, but ripped into "millennials" (who, um, aren't as young as he seems to think they are) and... Facebook. Because if we've learned anything these days, it's that no matter what goes wrong with your life and plans, you can always blame Facebook for those failures:

“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said.

“This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook,” Scott added. “This is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”

I honestly don't even know what any of that means. People had "the wrong kind of confidence" and that's why they didn't want to sit in an enclosed theater for nearly 3 hours to watch a movie about two French guys fighting in the 14th century? And it's because Facebook didn't tell them to go? Does that mean that the movie's social media marketing wasn't well done? Or what?

Not everything is the fault of Facebook (or millennials). Sometimes, people just don't want to watch your movie.

Filed Under: marketing, millennials, ridley scott, social media, the last duel
Companies: facebook

FAA Blocks 5G Deployments Over Safety Concerns Despite No Actual Evidence Of Harm

from the evidence-optional dept

A few weeks back, both Verizon and AT&T announced they'd be pausing some aspects of their 5G deployments over FAA concerns that those deployments would create significant safety hazards. The problem: there's absolutely no evidence that those safety concerns are legitimate.

The FAA and airline industry claim that use of the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz "C-Band" spectrum to deploy 5G wireless creates interference for avionics equipment (specifically radio altimeters). But the FCC has closely examined the claims and found no evidence of actual harm anywhere in the world, where more than 40 countries have deployed C-band spectrum for 5G use. Just to be sure, the FCC set aside a 220 MHz guard band that will remain unused as a sort of buffer to prevent this theoretical interference (double the amount Boeing requested).

None of this was enough for the FAA. That's of major annoyance to AT&T and Verizon, which paid $45.45 billion and $23.41 billion respectively earlier this year for C-band spectrum, and have been widely and justifiably critcized for underwhelming 5G network performance and availability so far. Consumer advocates and policy experts like Harold Feld are also confused as to why the FAA continues to block deployment in these bands despite no evidence of actual harm:

"...the technical evidence on which the FAA bases its interference concerns have a lot of problems — not least of which that about 40 other countries operate similar 5G deployments in the same C-Band without any interference showing up. Either physics works differently in the U.S., or the report at the center of this controversy needs to explain why this hasn’t shown up in any other country where deployments are either authorized or have already taken place."

Not only did the FAA block the deployment of 5G in the C-band based on what appears to be nonexistent evidence of harm, Feld suggests that while the FAA has been leaking their concerns to the Wall Street Journal, they've simultaneously refused to hand over needed data to the FCC (you know, the agency that actually has expertise in wireless spectrum deployment and use).

As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica notes, the FAA's own November 2 bulletin (pdf) states there's no "proven reports of harmful interference" with C-Band 5G deployments anywhere in the world. As Feld notes, the entire fracas (which began during the Trump era and continues until now) should be remedied once the FCC is finally fully staffed:

"If nothing else, this exercise should make it abundantly clear why the Senate needs to confirm Davison, Rosenworcel and Sohn as quickly as possible. We cannot have spectrum disputes between agency fought out in the press in ways that destabilize confidence in the safety of air travel. Federal policy at this level is not a game of chicken, and cannot be fought out like this in the press. We need the key agencies here at full strength and able to resolve the systemic problem — not just the existing problem."

In the interim, the dumb squabble will just contribute to the existing din of gibberish about how 5G is a health and safety hazard. Evidence of most of these claims remains entirely optional.

Filed Under: 5g, c-band, faa, safety, wireless
Companies: at&t, verizon

Baltimore Police Department Sued For Seizing Phones, Cash, And Jewelry From Crime Victims Recovering From Shootings

from the adding-insulting-of-rights-to-shooting-injuries dept

It's not enough that law enforcement can seize property if it pretends it must be linked to some criminal endeavor, even if the cops can't be bothered to actually find any direct evidence of said criminal endeavor… or even bring charges against forfeiture victims. It's not enough that almost anything can be seized when accompanied by criminal charges, which can lead to officers stripmining someone's residence while serving warrants.

When alleged criminals are difficult to find, sometimes the cops just take stuff from crime victims. Multiple people are suing the Baltimore Police Department for grabbing all sorts of property from shooting victims while they were hospitalized and recovering from their injuries.

It would seem these seizures would be illegal, but the Baltimore PD pretends it's all about rounding up evidence -- even when said "evidence" has nothing to do with the crime being investigated.

On an unusually warm spring evening in the early days of Covid-19, Amber Spencer turned out to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday at a front stoop cookout in East Baltimore.

Suddenly, bullets flew, hitting her in the chest. When she turned to run, a bullet struck the back of her head and lodged itself in her skull. Then Spencer lost consciousness.

“When I came to, I had been shot in the head. I asked, ‘Where’s my phone?’ and my mom said, ‘The police took it,’” she said.

And once this property is gone, it's gone. The BPD has no interest in giving up what it's taken, even if the crime is no longer being investigated.

To date, none of the plaintiffs or their loved ones have been able to get their property back even though none of the four is accused of a crime.

It's not just phones. It's whatever crime victims happened to have on them when they were assaulted by actual criminals. This is from the lawsuit [PDF] seeking to have these seizures found unconstitutional.

Plaintiff Damon Gray is a 23-year-old Black man who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 29, 2019, a stranger shot Mr. Gray approximately seven times in the back, neck, and chest while Mr. Gray was walking in and around Catherine Street in the southwest area of Baltimore. Mr. Gray was transported by ambulance to the hospital where BPD officers seized without consent his cell phone, a bracelet, a necklace, and several articles of clothing. These items remain in BPD custody.

While it's possible the clothing might have some evidentiary relevance in terms of recreating the crime and performing ballistic examinations, it's difficult to see how a phone adds anything to the evidentiary mix, much less the victim's jewelry.

This isn't an aberration.

Plaintiff Amber Spencer is a 27-year-old Black woman who resides in the County of Baltimore, Maryland. Just before midnight on March 20, 2020, a stranger shot Ms. Spencer in the head and chest while she was attending a cookout near 1800 North Chapel Street in Baltimore, Maryland. After the shooting, Ms. Spencer was transported by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where BPD officers seized her personal property without her consent, including her cell phone, jeans, shirt, shoes, car key, and approximately $400 in U.S. currency. These items remain in BPD custody.

The same questions are raised here, but with the addition of shoes (the victim was shot in the chest and head), car keys, yet another phone, and $400 in cash that cannot possibly have anything to do with the criminal act being investigated.

Plaintiff Faye Cottman is a 36-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On March 14, 2019, a woman that Ms. Cottman did not know shot Ms. Cottman and her then-11-year-old son in the head while he was playing with his brother at a playground in the Cherry Hill area of Baltimore, Maryland. BPD officers arrived at the scene and seized Ms. Cottman’s personal property without consent, including her jacket, cell phone, wig, and shoes. Despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her personal property from BPD, these items remain in BPD custody.

Once again, this appears to be BPD officers taking all of a hospitalized person's belongings and then refusing to return them.

One more time:

Plaintiff Audrey Carter is a 58-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 9, 2018, her son, Dwayne D. Cheeks, was shot and killed in the 2200 Block of Germania Avenue in Baltimore City. BPD officers seized, inventoried, and logged in the Evidence Control Unit (“ECU”) all of Mr. Cheeks’s effects, including his driver’s license, cell phone, a lottery ticket, keys, and cash.

In this case, the victim's mother was able to talk the BPD into giving her back her son's cash. That happened in December 2019, a year-and-a-half after officers took control of it. The BPD refused to give back anything else officers took. Worse, the department claimed the rest of "evidence" officers had seized had been destroyed.

Not only did officers take property, but they took advantage of unconscious shooting victims in other ways. Faye Cottman's phone was warrantlessly searched by officers while she recovered from surgery. The officers claimed the phone was "evidence," remarked that they were able to search "pretty far back" in her messages to see if she had had any communications with the shooting suspect, and then refused to give the phone back despite closing the investigation in September 2019.

In some cases, victims were not given inventory lists of the property seized or any receipt showing the BDP had taken their property, making it extremely difficult to talk the department into giving them back their stuff. In other cases, officers and detectives stonewalled requests, citing COVID policies or ongoing investigations. Even when investigations concluded, the BPD made no effort to return seized property. And, in the case described above, the BPD destroyed property officers knew was being sought by its previous owners, in direct contravention of their own evidence policies.

The justifications for these seizures don't work. And if the BPD expects crime victims to believe officers are operating in good faith, it would ensure property is returned as soon as an investigation concludes. It would also seek consent from fully cognizant crime victims, rather than stripping them of their belongings while they undergo surgery or recover from their wounds. And if they really need to see the contents of someone's phone, they need to obtain warrants supported by probable cause, rather than taking advantage of situations where crime victims can't actually provide consent to engage in warrantless searches.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, civil asset forfeiture, evidence, police, theft

NYPD Continues To Screw Over Its Oversight By Denying Access To Bodycam Footage

from the long-extended-middle-finger-of-the-law dept

The NYPD's war on its oversight continues. The secretive law enforcement agency has spent years fighting accountability and transparency, making up its own rules and engaging in openly hostile actions against public records requesters, city officials, internal oversight, and the somewhat-independent CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board). Journalists say the NYPD is worse than the CIA and FBI when it comes to records requests. The FBI and CIA say it's worse than a rogue state when it comes to respecting rights.

The NYPD probably doesn't wonder why it houses bad cops. In fact, it probably doesn't not even consider the worst of its ranks to actually be "bad" cops. Making things worse on the accountability side, the NYPD answers to two very powerful law enforcement unions, which makes it all but impossible for the department to punish bad cops, even if it wanted to. And while it's subject to public oversight via the CCRB, it has the power to override the board's decisions to ensure cops engaged in misconduct aren't punished too harshly for violating rights and destroying the public's trust.

The NYPD began wearing body cameras in 2017 as part of comprehensive reforms put in place by consent decrees issued by federal courts presiding over civil rights lawsuits over the NYPD's surveillance of Muslims and its minority-targeting "stop and frisk" program.

But body cameras continue to be mostly useful to prosecutors and of negligible value to the general public that was supposed to benefit from this new accountability tool. As ProPublica reports, even the civilian oversight board can't get the NYPD to hand over footage crucial to investigations of misconduct.

In some instances, the NYPD has told CCRB investigators no footage of an incident exists, only for the CCRB to later learn that it does. For example, during one investigation of an incident for which the NYPD said there was no footage, an officer later told investigators that she had her camera on.

Other times, the NYPD has acknowledged footage exists but refused to turn it over, citing privacy issues. In one case, an officer slammed a young man into the pavement, sending him to the hospital with a brain bleed. Seven body cameras worn by officers captured parts of the incident. But the NYPD withheld almost all the footage from CCRB investigators, on the grounds that a minor’s face could be seen in some of it.

This stonewalling is detailed in the NYPD Inspector General's latest report [PDF], which finds yet again that the NYPD has zero interest in holding its officers accountable. The NYPD is supposed to be subject to its oversight, but the reality is the oversight is subject to the NYPD.

The agency must rely on NYPD to produce BWC footage that is responsive to a request, making the progress of investigations dependent on NYPD’s capacity and discretion. As mentioned above, and discussed further below, capacity and manpower issues at NYPD have caused extensive delay in the past, and easily could again. But the problems are also substantive. For example, an NYPD searcher may consider certain tags to be not relevant or responsive even if the requesting CCRB investigator would have disagreed. This is problematic since only the investigator has complete knowledge of the investigation, and therefore is best suited to know what may be relevant. In such a case, not only might relevant BWC footage be withheld, but the CCRB investigator would never even know that such footage existed in the first place.

Even when the CCRB obtains footage, it could be redacted into abstraction by NYPD liaisons, who everyone has to assume are acting in good faith, even when it appears apparent they aren't.

When only NYPD has seen the unredacted footage, the redaction analysis, legal or otherwise, is impaired because NYPD has sole discretion regarding handling of the footage, but incomplete information as to the facts of the investigation and its procedural posture. This is especially problematic when the grounds asserted by NYPD for redaction are disputed or otherwise in doubt. Given the information disparities, the requesting investigative agency may find it difficult to effectively challenge the redactions, which can produce inaccurate or unnecessary redactions, cause additional delay, or force the requesting agency to make disclosures that may infringe on the independence or confidentiality of its investigations.

And, instead of things improving as time goes on, the NYPD's cooperation with its oversight appears to be getting worse.

CCRB reported that in the second quarter of 2019, 99 percent of BWC video requests remained open for 20 or more business days, or longer than one month. From the beginning of 2018 through the second Quarter of 2019, the percentage of footage returned redacted grew from six to 63 percent. CCRB also reports that there were occasions in which it was not notified that video had been redacted, nor was it provided an explanation for such redactions.

Since the NYPD retains control of all body worn camera footage, it can claim no relevant footage exists, even when it does. And there's no way for the CCRB to challenge this claim unless it comes up with evidence elsewhere that points to the existence of footage the NYPD claims is nonexistent.

Moreover, current (pre-MOU-implementation) procedures have resulted in a number of “false negative” returns. False negatives are defined as instances in which NYPD reports there is no relevant footage for a particular search, yet CCRB later learns that a pertinent video does exist. CCRB reports learning about false negatives through other police documents, during interviews, or via footage provided to the media, and attributes these false negatives in part to potential incompleteness of NYPD search criteria, incomplete tagging of videos in the system, as well as lack of geotagging of footage. Due to the inability to conduct its own searches, CCRB cannot be certain how many negative search results are accurate.

The solution is -- as the IG suggests -- that CCRB be given direct access to body camera footage. Quite obviously, the NYPD will never agree to this. And, since it runs its footage through Evidence.com -- Axon's proprietary portal -- the NYPD will be able to stonewall future requests by pointing to the fine print in Axon's contract or simply refusing to provide CCRB with access licenses.

Unless the city is willing to give the CCRB some teeth, it will continue to be nothing more than the illusion of oversight. The NYPD has to answer to the public, and it has shown it's unwilling to do that on any level. New York legislators need to be willing to stare down the blue-uniformed 800-lb gorilla in its midst. If it can't, the NYPD will continue to be as awful as it has been for decades.

Filed Under: bodycams, nypd, oversight, transparency

Rock Band Doomscroll Has Trademark App Opposed By id Software

from the knee-deep-in-the-dumb dept

id Software is not a complete stranger to silly IP enforcement actions. Between trying to own concepts that are un-ownable and occasionally trying to throw its legal muscle around to bully others into not using common words in their own video game titles, the company has proven that it is perfectly capable of playing the IP bully. But at least in those specific instances, if you squint at them, they kinda sorta seem like industry-related, almost understandable IP disputes.

When it comes to how id Software enforces its venerated Doom trademarks, however, that is not the case. The company has a history of opposing and/or sending C&Ds to all kinds of barely related or unrelated commercial entities for trying to register anything that has to do with the word "doom": podcasts, festivals, and entertainment properties. And now, it appears, thrash metal bands too.

Dustin Mitchell, like many of us in recent years, came across the term "doomscrolling" and decided that "Doomscroll" would be a cool name for his next metal band. After having the idea, he decided to apply for a trademark on the name for musical acts. And then came the opposition from id Software.

In October, Mitchell was noodling around on his guitar before bed when he decided to check his email one last time. A message from a lawyer appeared in his inbox. “Dear Mr. Mitchell,” it read. “My law firm represents Id Software LLC which owns the video game DOOM and related registered trademarks.” That day, October 13, it continued, was the deadline for Id Software LLC, or anyone else, to oppose his trademark application to register “doomscroll.” The lawyer asked Mitchell to agree to extend the deadline. That way, Mitchell and the Doom developer could find time to reach a resolution before any legal action went down.

Mitchell immediately felt funny; even a little sour. He was 10 in 1993, when Doom took the gaming world by storm, empowering edgelord gamers to head-pop demons with a bevy of firearms against the background of fiery hell. He had played Doom and Doom 2 back in the day, both of which he describes as “awesome,” and had listened to the metal-inspired soundtrack for 2020’s Doom Eternal, which he describes as “not bad.” Now Mitchell found himself in an unexpected standoff with its developer. He loved those games as a kid, he says, but “they're trying to take something away from me that is completely unrelated to them.”

Unrelated in every way. No matter what soundtracks id Software has produced for Doom titles, unless it registered its mark for the music space, that's entirely besides the point. And even if it did register its mark for musical acts or productions, that still probably doesn't make this a valid opposition. "Doomscroll" is not in any way a reference to the video game series. Instead, it's become a common slang term for how everyday folk use social media. They're not related. Also, the words are not the same and I'm finding it very hard to believe that the metal-thrashing public would somehow be confused into thinking that id Software is somehow involved.

And yet id Software is simply making trouble for a musician because it can.

The company owns several trademarks around the word “doom” and video games; in the last month, the company has also filed oppositions to trademarks for “ODoom” and “Doomlings.” Prior to that, Id Software filed oppositions to entertainment properties the Maryland Doom Fest, Garden of Doom, and Doomsday Happy Hour. JB, the guy behind the Maryland Doom Fest, says he didn’t pursue the trademark after Id’s initial opposition. It would have been too expensive, he guesses. Jeff, who tried to trademark Garden of Doom, his podcast, says he came to an agreement with the lawyers representing Id Software; he says he just can’t make a movie or video game called Garden of Doom.

Right now, the fate of Doomscroll is in the hands of Id Software and the Patent Office. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board is processing the Doom developer's opposition. A hefty trial schedule was sent out mid-October, which stretches deep into 2023. It may not be that Id Software even wants the Doomscroll trademark; it might just not want Mitchell to form a progressive thrash metal band that, maybe, someone will confuse with the storied game series.

Except that's not going to happen. Either Mitchell, who works at Amazon during the day, is going to fight a likely long and arduous process at the TTAB or, more likely, is going to realize that such a fight isn't worth the personal cost it would take. And, therefore, id Software's bullying will work as likely intended, to simply make a smaller entity give up the fight.

Which is why, as we so often say, trademark bullying works. Which sucks.

Filed Under: doom, doomscroll, music, rock bands, trademark, video games
Companies: id software

More Than 100 Hertz Customers Are Suing The Company For Falsely Reporting Rented Vehicles As Stolen

from the welcome-to-the-Hertz-Locker dept

Earlier this year, a man, wrongfully arrested and imprisoned for murder, was finally able to prove his innocence by producing rental car receipts showing he could not have possibly committed the crime. When the murder occurred, Herbert Alford was twenty minutes away from the scene of the crime, renting a car from Hertz.

He requested this exculpatory evidence from Hertz, but it took the company three years to locate the receipts that proved his innocence. All told, Alford spent five years in jail on the bogus charge. Hertz apologized for spending more than 1,000 days "searching" for the rental records, but that apology doesn't put years back on Alford's life, a half-decade of which he lost to the penal system for a crime he didn't commit.

This isn't Hertz's only problem. The company is apparently pretty lax when it comes to record-keeping, which has resulted in people being accosted -- often at gunpoint -- by police officers who've been (wrongly) informed the rental car they've pulled over is stolen. The proliferation of automatic license plate readers means these stops will only become more frequent as time goes on, as hotlists hit cameras capable of collecting millions of plate/location records a year. And that proliferation comes with a cost: the potential killing of innocent people because law enforcement has been misinformed about the status of a rented car.

Hertz is apparently still trying to get people killed. As it emerges from bankruptcy, it is facing lawsuits over its potentially deadly mistakes. The company is still sending out hotlists to law enforcement, misinforming armed officers that legally-rented vehicles are actually stolen. This appears to be a long-running problem for the rental agency.

In March 2019, KATV reported that a man from Searcy had filed suit against the company after it falsely reported that a rental car had been stolen. In May 2020, Francis Alexander Malofiy, an attorney out of Pennsylvania with clients in Arkansas, filed cases against the company. The following day Hertz filed for bankruptcy.

That's KATV's update on some older cases. Its latest story deals with another falsely accused customer who's now suing the company. Dozens of Hertz customers were interviewed. Many of them are currently seeking compensation via the company's bankruptcy proceedings.

Some excerpts from those interviews:

“I was incarcerated for seven months because of Hertz, it’s not fair in the least especially when you have a receipt saying I paid you. Hertz I paid you $2,300,” said Julius Burnside.

“The police man said you stole the car and I said it’s a rental car –it’s from my company and they handle everything, I just go pick it up,” Nancy Cullen-Smits said.

“The police officer asked for my driver’s license and then when he runs my license, he says there is a warrant out for your arrest for a Hertz vehicle that was stolen,” said Michelle Jones. “I informed them I returned a Hertz vehicle two months ago and paid them $2,000 but I didn’t steal it.”

Another man who was engaged in a long-term lease contract with Hertz suffered a similar fate: a wrongful accusation and the destruction of his life by the criminal justice system.

Hanna “John” Ayoub is one of those former customers. He rented a truck in April 2019 from the Hertz Car Rental office at the Wilmington train station, a transaction that eventually turned into him being jailed for months before criminal charges against him were dropped, he said.

“I lost everything, my life, my reputation, everything,” said Ayoub, who spent some three months incarcerated after being charged with stealing the truck he had rented from Hertz, according to court documents.

Here's another of the 165 claimants attempting to have Hertz belatedly right the wrongs its perpetrated against some of its customers.

One of the claimants, James Tolen, said a surprise traffic stop in Houston late last year turned into a frightening police encounter that made him fear for his life. After completing a project for one of the customers at his renovation company, Tolen was heading home Dec. 23 in a pickup truck rented from Hertz.

He and his fiancée, Krystal Carter, who is also a claimant, say they had rented from Hertz about a dozen times last year — but that didn't prevent him from being stopped by police for driving a car reported stolen by the company. Around 10 p.m. that night, police pulled him over and ordered him out of the car over a loudspeaker, telling him to lift his shirt and back up toward them.

"As I turn around, I see both officers train the guns on me," Tolen told CBS News' Consumer Investigative Correspondent Anna Werner.

"It was just terrifying. It was bad. Actually, I was really thinking that I wasn't gonna make it home," he said.

Tolen, like others suing Hertz, said officers told him he was driving a stolen vehicle -- a claim they made based on bad information from the rental company. Tolen managed to escape this with his life, liberty, and livelihood intact, however. It was the cops that were pissed off when Tolen showed them his rental paperwork.

Tolen begged the officers to look at his rental contract, in which he says he was listed as an authorized driver. He says after seeing the document, one of the officers called Hertz and told the company it needed to get a better system.

Hertz rents to millions of people without incident every year. But even though this only happens to what's likely a rounding error percentage-wise, it's still unacceptable. Mistakenly claiming someone has stolen a vehicle can lead to -- at the very least -- a potentially dangerous traffic stop where the truly innocent are confronted by people authorized to use deadly force and who, for the most part, assume genuine confusion is actually criminal evasion and react accordingly. Even if the outcome isn't deadly, it can still destroy lives by feeding innocent drivers into a legal system built on the presumption of innocence but tends to ignore that fact once someone is accused of a crime.

Hertz claims this is just a bunch of scofflaws misrepresenting the inevitable outcomes of their own bad faith efforts.

"Unfortunately, in the legal matters being discussed, the attorneys have a track record of making baseless claims that blatantly misrepresent the facts," the company said. "The vast majority of these cases involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with us well beyond the scheduled due date. Situations where vehicles are reported to the authorities are very rare and happen only after exhaustive attempts to reach the customer."

A bunch of sworn affidavits say otherwise. If the company really wants to wade into discovery, it's probably going to expose some shoddy recordkeeping it would rather keep hidden from current and potential customers. That this has happened so often says something specific about Hertz. No other rental company is facing similar lawsuits so it's not speculative to infer Hertz has some internal issues that need to be addressed as it attempts to move back to profitability, if not respectability.

Filed Under: car theft, record keeping, rental cars, wrongful arrest
Companies: hertz

Hikvision's Director Of Cybersecurity And Privacy Says IoT Devices With Backdoors 'Can't Be Used To Spy On Companies, Individuals Or Nations'

from the O-RLY? dept

Hikvision describes itself as "an IoT solution provider with video as its core competency". It hasn't cropped up much here on Techdirt: it was mentioned earlier this year as one of two surveillance camera manufacturers that had been blacklisted by the US government because they were accused of being "implicated in human rights violations and abuses" in Xinjiang. Although little-known in the West, Hikvision is big: it has "more than 42,000 employees, over 20,000 of which are R&D engineers." Given the many engineers Hikvision employs, the following comment by Fred Streefland, Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Hikvision EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), reported by IPVM, is rather remarkable:

even devices with backdoors can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations. The security features built into devices, networks, and data centres, combined with end-users data-protection responsibilities, make espionage and other misuses of backdoors impossible.

Streefland expanded on why data protection laws make espionage "impossible":

the end-users who buy these cameras are responsible for the data/video footage they generate. In other words, they're the data custodians who process the data and control the video footage, which is legally required to be kept private. Secret access to video footage on these devices is impossible without the consent of the end-user.

An interesting theory, but not one that security guru Bruce Schneier has much time for. IPVM asked him to comment on Streefland's statements:

I would say that only someone who doesn't understand cybersecurity at all would say something like that. But he's a CSO [Chief Security Officer], so he's probably deliberately saying something that stupid in order to sell you something.

That's a polite way to put it. As many stories on Techdirt attest, IoT products in general, and video cameras in particular, have huge security problems, often caused by backdoors, that have led to all kinds of spying at every level.

It seems that someone at Hikvision has realized just how ludicrous Streefland's comments were. The original source for the IPVM story is an interview with Streefland published by Benchmark Magazine. That interview is taken almost verbatim from a post on Hikvision's own blog, called "Debunking myths in the security industry." By an amazing coincidence, both the original interview and the blog post now lead to "404 not found" messages. Happily, the Internet Archive's indispensable Wayback Machine still has copies of both the interview and the blog post, where Streefland's words of wisdom quoted above can be found, along with some other choice thoughts on security.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: backdoors, cybersecurity, fred streefland, iot, privacy, surveillance
Companies: hikvision