Grandstanding Idiots In Congress Attack Social Media For Censoring Too Much And Too Little Without Understanding Anything

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

So, yesterday the House Judiciary Committee did what the House Judiciary Committee seems to do best: hold a stupid, nonsensical, nearly fact-free "hearing" that serves as nothing more than an opportunity for elected members of Congress to demonstrate their ignorance of an important topic, while attempting to play to their base. This time, the topic was on the content filtering practices of Facebook, Twitter and Google. Back in May there was actually a whole one day conference in Washington DC on this topic. The Judiciary Committee would have been a lot better served attending that than holding this hearing. I'd recommend not wasting three hours of your life watching this thing, but if you must:

The shortest summary would be that some Republican members of Congress think that these websites censor too much conservative speech, and some Democratic members of Congress think that they don't censor enough other speech (including hoaxes and conspiracy theories)... and almost no one wants to admit that this is not even remotely an issue that Congress should be concerned about. There's a narrative that has been picked up by many that insist that social media platforms are unfairly censoring "conservatives." There is basically zero evidence to support this. Indeed, a thorough analysis of the data back in March by Nieman Labs and Newswhip found that conservative-leaning sites get much, much, much more engagement on Facebook than liberal-leaning sites.

But, never let facts get in the way of a narrative. Since that seems to be the way many hyperpartisan sites (at either end of the spectrum) deal with these things, Congress is helping out. The only bit of sanity, perhaps bizarrely, came from Rep. Ted Lieu, who reminded everyone of the importance of free markets, free speech and the fact that private platforms get to decide how they manage their own services. Considering that Republicans often like to claim the mantle of being the "small, limited government" party who wants the government's hands out of business regulation, the fact that most of the hearing involved Republicans screaming for regulating internet platforms and a Democrat reminding everyone about the importance of a free market, capitalism and free speech, it really was quite a hearing. Lieu's remarks were some of the rare moments of sanity during the hearing -- including defending Facebook leaving Alex Jones' conspiracy theories on its site. Let's start with that high point before we dive into the awfulness. His comments come at about 2 hours and 10 minutes into the video:

... we're having this ridiculous hearing on the content of speech of private sector companies. It's stupid because there's this thing called the First Amendment. We can't regulate content! The only thing worse than an Alex Jones video is the government trying to tell Google... to prevent people from watching the Alex Jones video. We can't even do it if we tried. We can't even do any legislation out of this committee. And we're having this ridiculous second installment hearing after the first hearing about Diamond and Silk not getting enough likes on Facebook.

He then went on to ask questions "so the American public understands what a dumb hearing this is." And those questions -- again -- seemed like the kinds more expected from supposedly "free market" conservatives. Specifically he asked the companies if they were private companies aiming to maximize profits for shareholders. And he wasn't doing that to show that companies were evil, he was doing that to show that that's how the free market works. He followed up with this:

I noticed all of you talked about your own internal rules. Because that's what this should be about. You all get to come up with your own rules. But not because government tells you what to do. Or because government says you have to rule this way or that way. And the whole notion that somehow we should be interfering with these platforms from a legislative, governmental point of view is an anathema to the First Amendment. And really it's about the marketplace of ideas.

Kudos to Rep. Lieu. This is the kind of speech that you'd normally expect to hear from a "small government" conservative who talks about respecting the Constitution. But, in this case, it's a Democrat. And it's shameful that others (on both sides of the aisle) weren't making the same point. Instead, there was a ton of pure nonsense spewed from the Republicans at the hearing. It's hard to fathom that the following statements were made by people we've actually elected to our legislative body. There were so many dumb statements made that it's difficult to pick out just a few.

Let's start with Rep. Steve King, who has made quite a name for himself saying and repeating bigoted nonsense. Starting at about an hour and five minutes in the video, King seemed particularly concerned about traffic to Gateway Pundit, a site famous for trafficking in utter nonsense.

It's a matter of Congressional record that Gateway Pundit, Mr. Jim Hoft, has introduced information into the record that in the span of time between 2016 and 2018, he saw his Facebook traffic cut by 54%. Could you render an explanation to that?

Um... what? How the hell is it of any concern to Congress whatsoever the traffic a single site gets? And, as we were just discussing recently, traffic to lots of news sites from Facebook has dropped massively as Facebook has de-prioritized news. In that post, we pointed out that Slate was self-reporting a drop in Facebook traffic over that same period of time of 87%. Based on that, why isn't King asking about Slate's traffic dropping? Perhaps because Gateway Pundit publishes the kind of nonsense King supports and Slate points out that King is a bigot?

And... isn't that, again, kind of the point of the First Amendment? To protect news sites from having Congress play favorites?

Incredibly, King then concludes his time by first claiming he's all for free speech and free enterprise, but wonders about turning social media sites into regulated utilities.

I'm all for freedom of speech and free enterprise and for competition and finding a way that we can have competition itself that does its own regulation, so government doesn't have to, but if this gets further out of hand, it appears to me that Section 230 needs to be reviewed, and one of the discussions that I'm hearing is 'what about converting the large behemoth organizations that we're talking about here into public utilities.'

Are we living in an upside down world? A Democrat is praising the free market, profits and free speech, and a Republican is advocating for limiting free speech and in favor of turning some of the most successful US companies into public utilities? What is even going on here?

Around an hour and 18 minutes, we get our old friend Rep. Louis Gohmert, who has a fairly long and extensive history of making the dumbest statements possible concerning technology issues. And he lived down to his usual reputation in this hearing as well. It starts off by him trying to play down the issue of Russian interference in elections, by claiming (?!?) that the Russians helped Truman get elected, and then claiming that Russians had helped basically every Democratic President get elected in the past 70 years. And then spent a long time trying to complain that the platforms wouldn't tell him if Chinese or North Korean intelligence services had also used their platforms. Remember, these companies were asked to come and testify specifically about Russian use of their platforms to interfere with the election and Gohmert stepped in with this insane "what about other countries, huh?" argument:

Gohmert: I need to ask each of you. You've been asked specifically about Russian use of your platforms. But did you ever find any indication of use of your platform, utilized by the Chinese, North Korea, or any other foreign country intelligence or agency of that country. First, Ms. Bickert?

Bickert/Facebook: I would note, Congressman, that we're not in North Korea or China. In terms of whether we've seen attacks on our services, we do have -- we are, of course, a big target -- we do have a robust security team that works...

Gohmert: Well, but that's not my question. It's just a very direct question. Have you found... You don't have to be in North Korea to be North Korean Intelligence and use... We have foreign government intelligence agencies IN THIS COUNTRY. So have... It seems to me you were each a little bit vague about "oh yes, we found hundreds" or whatever. I'm asking specifically, were any of those other countries besides Russia that were using your platform inappropriately? It should be a yes or no.

Actually, no, it shouldn't be a yes or no. That's a dumb and misleading question for a whole long list of reasons. Of course, lots of other intelligence agencies are using Facebook, because of course they are. But, the entire point of this line of questioning seems to be Gohmert trying to play down Russian use of the platform, which is... odd. Especially after he started out by praising the fact that maybe the Russians might help "our side" get elected going forward.

Bickert: I don't have the details. I know we work to detect and repel attacks...

Gohmert: I know that. But were any of them foreign entities other than Russia?

Bickert: I can certainly follow up with you on that.

Gohmert: SO YOU DON'T KNOW?!? You sure seemed anxious to answer the Democrats questions about RUSSIA's influence. And you don't really know of all the groups that inappropriately used your platform? You don't know which were Russians and which were other foreign entities?

No, that's not what she's saying at all. She's pretty clearly saying that this hearing was specifically about Russian influence and that's what she was prepared to testify on. She didn't say that Facebook can't tell Russians from other entities, just that the other entities aren't the ones accused of messing with the election and thus there isn't that much relevant right now. But that's quite a deflection attempt by Gohmert.

Let's move on to Rep. Tom Marino at about an hour and a half into the video. Marino seems to have a fairly bizarre understanding of the law as it concerns defamation. He focuses on the guy from Twitter, Nick Pickles, and starts out by reading a definition of "libel." Then he asks

Have any of you considered libel? Or do you think you are immune from it?

This is an incredibly stupid question. Twitter is clearly not immune from libel. Marino's line of questioning is an attempt to attack CDA 230, which provides immunity to Twitter from liability for defamatory statements made by its users. This is an important distinction that Marino conveniently ignores as he continues to bug Pickles.

Pickles: We have clear rules that governs what happens on Twitter. Some of those behaviors are deplorable and we want to remove them immediately... So, terrorist content is one example, where we now detect 95% of the terrorist accounts we remove...

Marino: Okay, I understand that sir. But how about... we in Congress, we put up with it all the time. I know we're public officials, same with people in the movies... but do you specifically look for and address... republication can be used in a defamation case. Do you look at libel and defamation content?

I don't even know what that means. Do you look at libel content? What? How does Twitter know if something is libelous? Especially against public officials? How is Twitter supposed to make that judgment when that's what courts are there to figure out? And, for what it's worth, Twitter has been known to abide by court rulings on defamatory speech in deciding to take down that content, but Marino seems to be asking if they make an independent judgment outside of the courts of what's libelous. Which is both crazy and impossible. Pickles makes a valiant effort in response, noting how Twitter focuses on its rules -- which is all that it's required to do -- but Marino clearly seems to want to attack CDA 230 and magically make Twitter liable for libelous content on its platform. After Pickles again explains that it focuses on its rules, rather than making judicial rulings that it cannot make, Marino puts on a dumb smirk and makes another dumb statement:

With all due respect, I've heard you focus on your rules about 32 times. DO. YOU. LOOK. FOR. LIBEL. OR. DEFAMATION. IN. YOUR. COMPANY'S. OPINION?

You can't "look for libel or defamation" like that. That's not how it works. Marino is a lawyer. He should know this. The Facebook and YouTube representatives neatly sidestep Marino's silly line of questioning by pointing out that when informed of legal rulings determining "illegal" speech, they take it down. Marino doesn't even seem to notice this very specific distinction and asks "where do you draw the line?"

At an hour and forty minutes, we have everyone's favorite, Rep. Lamar Smith, author of SOPA back in the day. He spews more utter nonsense claiming conservatives have been more negatively impacted by the moves of these social media companies, and then (bizarrely) argues that Google employees forcing the company not to help surveillance activity is somehow an attack on conservatives. Excuse me? Conservatives don't support the 4th Amendment any more? Say what? But the real craziness is this line:

Google has also deleted or blocked references to Jesus, Chick-Fil-A and the Catholic religion.

I'm going to call time out here and note [citation needed] on that one, Smith. Google pretty clearly shows me results on all three of those things. I've been trying to figure out what the hell he's referring to, and I'm guessing that Smith -- in his usual Smithian nonsensical way -- is confusing Google for Facebook, and Facebook's bad filter that initially blocked a page about "Chick-fil-Appreciation Day," and some Catholic church pages. The "Jesus" blocking is also Facebook and was in reference to an ad for a Catholic university.

All of these examples were not, as Smith implies, evidence of "liberal bias" on behalf of Facebook, but rather evidence of why it's so problematic that governments are putting so much pressure on Facebook to magically filter out all of the bad stuff. That's not possible without making mistakes. And what happens is that you set up guidelines and those guidelines are then handed to people who don't have nearly enough time to understand the context, and sometimes they make mistakes. It's not bias. It's the nature of trying to moderate millions of pieces of content every damn day, because if they don't, these same idiots in Congress would be screaming at them about how they're letting the bad content live on. I mean, it's doubly ridiculous for Smith to use the Jesus example as even the guy who bought the ad, the university's web communications director, specifically said that he didn't believe it had anything to do with bias, but was just a bad decision by an algorithm or a low level staffer.

Finally (and there are more, but damn, this post is getting way too long) we get to Rep. Matt Gaetz. At around an hour and 55 minutes into the hearing, he suddenly decides to weigh in that the First Amendment and CDA 230 are somehow in conflict, in another bizarre exchange between Gaetz and Twitter's Pickles.

Gaetz: Is it your testimony or is it your viewpoint today that Twitter is an interactive computer service pursuant to Section 230 sub c(1).

Pickles: I'm not a lawyer, so I won't want to speak to that. But as I understand, under Section 230, we are protected by that, yes.

Gaetz: So Section 230 covers you, and that section says "no provider of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another"... is it your contention that Twitter enjoys a First Amendment right under speech, while at the same time enjoying Section 230 rights?

Pickles: Well, I think we've discussed the way the First Amendment interacts with our companies. As private companies we enforce our rules, and our rules prohibit a range of activities.

Gaetz: I'm not asking about your rules. I'm asking about whether or not you believe you have First Amendment rights. You either do or you do not.

Pickles: I'd like to follow up on that, as someone who is not a lawyer... I think it's very important...

Gaetz: Well, you're the senior public policy official for Twitter before us and you will not answer the question whether or not you believe your company enjoys rights under the First Amendment?

Pickles: Well, I believe we do, but I would like to confirm with colleagues...

Gaetz: So what I want to understand is, if you say "I enjoy rights under the First Amendment" and "I'm covered by Section 230" and Section 230 itself says "no provider shall be considered the speaker" do you see the tension that creates?

There is no tension there. The only tension is between the molecules in Gaetz's brain that seemed to think this line of nonsensical argument makes any sense at all. There is no conflict. First, yes, it's obvious that Twitter is clearly protected by both the First Amendment and CDA 230. That's been established by dozens of court rulings with not a single ruling ever holding otherwise. Second, the "tension" that Gaetz sees is purely a figment of his own misreading of the law. The "no provider shall be considered a speaker" part, read in actual context (as Gaetz did earlier) does not say that platforms are not speakers. It says that they are not considered a speaker of other people's speech. In fact, this helps protect free speech by enabling internet platforms the ability to host any speech without facing liability for that speech.

That helps protect the First Amendment by ensuring that any liability is on the speaker and not on the tool they use to distribute that speech. But Twitter has its own First Amendment rights to determine what speech it decides to keep on its site -- and which speech it decides not to allow. Gaetz then, ridiculous, tries to claim that Pickle's response to that nonsensical response is somehow in conflict with what Twitter's lawyers have said in the silly Jared Taylor lawsuit. Gaetz asks Pickles if Twitter could kick someone off the platform "for being a woman or being gay." Pickles points out that that is not against Twitter's rules... and Gaetz points out that in the Taylor case, when asked the same question, Twitter's lawyers stated (1) that Twitter has the right to do so but (2) never would.

Again, both Pickles and Twitter's lawyers are correct. They do have that right (assuming it's not a violation of discrimination laws) but of course they wouldn't do that. Pickles wasn't denying that. He was pointing out that the hypothetical is silly because that's not something Twitter would do. Twitter's lawyers in the case were, correctly, pointing out that it would have the right to do such a nonsensical thing if it chose to do so, while also making it clear it would never do that. Again, that's not in conflict, but Gaetz acts as if he's "caught" Twitter in some big admission.

Gaetz falsely then claims that Pickles is misrepresenting Twitter's position:

Right but it is not in service of transparency if Twitter sends executives to Congress to say one thing -- that you would not have the right to engage in that conduct -- and then your lawyers in litigation say precisely the opposite.

Except that's not what happened at all. Pickles and the lawyers agreed. At no point did Pickles say that Twitter did not have "the right" to kick people off its platform for any reason. He just noted that it was not a part of their policy to do so, nor would it ever be. That's entirely consistent with what Twitter's lawyers said in the Taylor case. This is Gaetz making a complete ass out of himself in completely misrepresenting the law, the constitution and what Twitter said both in the hearing and in the courthouse.

Seriously, people, we need to elect better Representatives to Congress. This is embarrassing.

Filed Under: cda 230, congress, first amendment, free speech, grandstanding, house judiciary committee, lamar smith, louis gohmert, matt gaetz, social media, steve king, ted lieu, tom marino
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

Congress So Dysfunctional, It Can't Even Fix The Errors It ADMITS It Made In Patent Reform

from the incredible dept

Okay, this one is incredible. As you may recall, back in September of 2011, the "America Invents Act" became law. This was a "patent reform" proposal that had been debated and changed and debated some more for about seven years before finally getting approved in a greatly watered down fashion. We criticized the bill for doing almost nothing to deal with the real problems of the patent system, but there were some incredible, fundamental, blatant mistakes in the final bill. You'd think that with seven years of debate and tweaking that such mistakes would have been whittled away. The first clue to some serious problems was in an analysis by Mark Lemley soon after the bill was approved in which some drafting errors were apparent just in looking at the "effective dates" of various parts of the bill.

Over time, it became clear that Congress had left significant errors in. Recently some of the key people behind the bill admitted that there were errors in the bill, with Eli Lilly's General Counsel, Bob Armitage, stating: "There are a few minor errors in the bill and one major error in the bill." What's the "maajor error"? It's the part on "estoppel" in "post grant review." Basically, there's a provision in the bill which encourages people to seek "post grant review" of questionable patents in the first nine months after they've been approved. In talking about this, Congress was clear that it wanted to encourage more people to use this, and so it wanted to remove barriers. One of those was to make it clear that failing to raise issues during the post grant review shouldn't prevent those issues from being raised later. However, the actual language of the bill says that any issue that "could have been raised" can't be raised later.

As law professors Eric Goldman and Colleen Chien note, it's clear that Congress didn't mean to include this language. The committee report on the bill and direct quotes from both House and Senate sponsors of the bill (Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy) admitted that this was a mistake:

By all accounts, in the AIA, Congress intended to remove the "could have been raised" language and provide a narrower estoppel for PGR proceedings. As the Congressional committee report explains, the PGR was designed to "remove current disincentives to current administrative processes." But something funny happened on the way to the Congressional floor, and the problematic "could have been raised" language was inadvertently inserted into the bill.

We're not the only ones to recognize the error. House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith referred to the AIA's PGR estoppel standard as "an inadvertent scrivener's error." Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, in advocating that the Senate adopt the technical corrections bill, said the PGR estoppel standard in AIA was "unintentional," and it was "regrettable" the technical corrections bill doesn't address the issue. Sen. Leahy expressed "hope we will soon address this issue so that the law accurately reflects Congress's intent." The PTO also thinks Congress made a mistake, saying "Clarity is needed to ensure that the [PGR] provision functions as Congress intended."

To fix some of the errors in the AIA, Congress rushed through a "technical corrections" bill, intended to fix some of the problems with the bill. During all the fiscal cliff mess, with some back and forth between the House and Senate, they approved this bill which will be signed any moment, if it hasn't been already.

Just one problem. For a bill about technical fixes, it didn't actually address this one *admitted* major error in the original bill. Yeah, they left that one out.

Let's recap, because this is quite incredible:

1. Congress spends seven years debating patent reform.
2. It finally approves patent reform in late 2011, and despite seven years of debate, had a ton of clear errors in the drafting of the bill.
3. The official sponsors of the bill flat out admit that there's a major error in a part of the bill that they did not intend to be in there.
4. A year plus later, Congress finally introduces a bill to "fix problems" in the original bill.
5. This "technical corrections" bill does not fix the one major problem that all admit was a flat out mistake in the original bill.

And people wonder why Congress' approval rating is so low.

Filed Under: america invents act, congress, errors, estoppel, lamar smith, patents, patrick leahy, post grant review

Surprise: Two Of Hollywood's Favorite Representatives, Howard Berman & Mary Bono Mack, Defeated

from the he-can-go-hang-out-with-rick-boucher dept

While people who just got into Congressional issues during the SOPA fight may have thought that Rep. Lamar Smith was Hollywood's favorite representative, that honor much more likely fell on Rep. Howard Berman -- who, for many years was Hollywood's guy in Congress (somewhat literally, as parts of Hollywood were covered by his district). There was, of course, no chance that Lamar Smith was going to lose his re-election campaign, as there were no serious challengers, but Berman was definitely a different story. Due to redistricting, his district was merged with another longterm Congressional Rep., Brad Sherman -- and the two had to face off. It turns out that Berman lost and Sherman won. Sherman, not surprisingly, also tends to support the entertainment industry's position on a lot of things, but never quite to the level of Berman over the years.

Another longterm favorite of the entertainment industry, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who ushered in the ridiculous Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension and has been a regular supporter of the entertainment industry's crazier plans, has lost out in a very tight race.

As for Smith, he won his election to no one's surprise -- but the margin was actually a lot lower than I expected. He took it with 60% of the vote. In 2008 he had 80% of the vote and in 2010, 69% of the vote. It may not have been enough to tip the election, but perhaps young people in his district voted for internet freedom.

Filed Under: brad sherman, congress, copyright, hollywood, howard berman, lamar smith, mary bono mack

House Approves Bill To Spy On Americans By Misrepresenting Or Lying About What's In The Bill

from the they're-just-lying dept

We recently talked about how the House voted to approve the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) by a pretty wide margin, and noted some of the more bizarre and inaccurate statements that Representatives made in support of the renewal. Julian Sanchez has put together a nice summary of some of the more outrageous claims. The key here is that many Reps. seemed to take the FISA Amendments Act at face value, that it would only be used to target foreigners in foreign lands -- in other words, those with no 4th Amendment protections. But, as Sanchez has pointed out repeatedly, former Deputy Attorney General, David Kris, more or less revealed the Act is interpreted to mean that as long as the information they get might be useful in targeting foreigners in foreign lands, it's fair game. That means -- contrary to the direct claims of many FAA supporters -- the law is used to spy on Americans.

Sanchez also highlights another sneaky interpretation. The law claims that it prohibits the interception of "purely domestic" communications. But there's an additional clause with one hell of a loophole: "Known at the time of acquisition." As Sanchez notes, you can drive quite a large truck through that loophole, because if you're, say, scooping up all email communications, you don't know -- at the time of acquisition -- if it's purely domestic... and therefore, you're good to go. Basically, ignorance is bliss for the NSA.

But these two massive loopholes and sketchy interpretations seem to be totally ignored by the Congressional reps who spoke out most strongly in favor of renewing the FAA:

The most common refrain from FAA supporters was that the law only concerned surveillance targeting “foreigners in foreign lands”—meaning it could not possibly affect the rights of Americans. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), in an impressive display of lung power, delivered a five minute floor shout to this effect. “This bill has nothing to do with Americans on American soil,” Gowdy thundered, “This bill doesn’t implicate the Bill of Rights, any more than it implicates any other part of our Constitution, unless you think that foreign nationals who are on foreign land fall within the protections of the United States Constitution.” But Gowdy has to know that this is false, because the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already ruled on at least one occasion that surveillance authorized by the FAA did violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Similarly, we've seen how the NSA absolutely refuses to say how many Americans have been spied upon using these tools, claiming that it's impossible to know (or that it would violate their privacy to find out -- seriously). But, Sanchez notes that, despite the NSA insisting it's impossible to know, that didn't stop Representatives from claiming they just knew.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) was slightly more equivocal, seemingly acknowledging that the law might permit surveillance of Americans, but that this would happen only very rarely.  The mystery here is how he could possibly know that. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has repeatedly asked the NSA for a rough ballpark estimate of how many Americans—100? 1,000? 100,000?—have had their communications caught up in the agency’s FAA dragnets. If Rep. Rogers were correct, you’d expect the answer to be “almost none”—but instead the agency has repeatedly insisted that it is unable to provide even an approximate figure. Unless Rep. Rogers somehow knows things about the NSA’s databases that the NSA does not know, he can’t have any real basis for this claim.

And then there's Rep. Dan Lungren. Earlier, we had noted that when there were discussions during hearings about the FAA, he brushed off concerns about spying on Americans by saying he hadn't seen any such evidence so it couldn't be true. Of course, he didn't bother to seek out any such evidence by asking the NSA to provide the data. And here he was even worse, making bizarre claims in support of expanding the FISA Amendments Act that seem to go completely against reality.

Finally, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) suggested that the necessity of the FAA was demonstrated by the failures of intelligence leading up to 9/11. After all, the 9/11 Commission had again and again emphasized the central failure to “connect the dots” that would have revealed an imminent attack before it occurred—and to “connect the dots,” Lungren asserted, intelligence agencies would need still more expansive power to first “collect the dots.” This is, in a way, the most breathtakingly erroneous statements heard during Wednesday’s floor debates, because turns the 9/11 Commission’s findings completely on their head. Their report conspicuously did not identify a lack of legal authority to conduct surveillance as a serious problem: If anything, the trouble was that agencies were drowning in information they lacked the capacity to analyze and put to use. Perversely, Lungren trades on a familiar phrase—”connect the dots”—to utterly invert the Commission’s diagnosis of the causes of 9/11.

So... if you're keeping track at home, the reasons the House approved this horrible bit of legislation with massive loopholes that allows the NSA to spy on us is because it can't be used to spy on us (even though it can), it bars the collection of domestic communication (except in nearly every case that it does not), it's barely been used on Americans (except that the NSA claims it's impossible to tell how many Americans it's been used on) and we need it to "connect the dots" on terrorism (even though it doesn't help connect the dots, but merely to provide even more dots, many of which will distract from the important dots).

How do these people get elected?

Filed Under: congress, dan lungren, faa, fisa amendments act, foreign targets, house of represenatives, lamar smith, mike rogers, nsa, terry gowdy

House Approves Rep. Lamar Smith's Bill To Keep Spying On Americans

from the of-course-they-did dept

As was expected, despite not knowing the details of how the feds interpret the FISA Amendmens Act, which grants massive spying and surveillance power to the feds -- in fact, while proactively stopping any efforts to find out more about the interpretation, the House of Representatives today approved Lamar Smith's FISA Amendment's Act by a vote of 301-118. You can see which representatives voted which way at that link. The bill would extend the current rules (and the secret interpretation) for another five years. Republicans, who are supposedly against bigger government, only had 7 members vote no, while the remaining 111 no votes came from Democrats.

There had been an attempt to introduce amendments, but that was shot down procedurally. And an hour debate did little to get to the heart of the matter. Rep. Zoe Lofgren fought the good fight, pointing out that "I think the government needs to comply with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution all the time... We can be safe while still complying with the Constitution of the United States." However, Rep. Dan Lungren -- who previously had insisted that there was no evidence that the NSA was abusing its powers, while refusing to even ask the NSA for basic info on how it was using the powers -- insisted based on absolutely nothing that "this is critical to the protection of the American people."

Even worse, Rep. Terry Gowdy made a ridiculously ignorant statement in response to Lofgren's highlighting of the 4th Amendment:

”Intelligence is the lifeblood of our ability to defend ourselves,” he said. Moments later, he added: “Are we to believe that the Fourth Amendment applies to the entire world?”

But, uh, the concern isn't with the rest of the world. Even without the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA already had the right to seek info on foreign communications. They have no 4th Amendment rights, so that's not even an issue. The issue is that the FISA Amendments Act appears to include some weasel words that have been twisted by the government to suggest that it can spy on Americans too. But Gowdy misleads the public by pretending, falsely, that this is about foreigners? It's not. Has he asked the NSA how many Americans it's spied on? Even the NSA has admitted that it's violated the 4th Amendment under the act in spying on Americans... but Gowdy pretends this is just about foreigners? How do you stand up and call yourself a "Representative" when you can't even get the very basics right?

Of course, House approval is just one step. The Senate version remains on hold thanks to Senator Wyden, who is one of the only elected officials who is actually asking the NSA and the Obama administration to (a) reveal the secret interpretation and (b) disclose how many Americans are being spied on under the rule.

As Julian Sanchez explained recently a former DOJ official has basically revealed part of the secret interpretation, which more or less says that if the target is al Qaeda, then anything goes:

For example, an authorization targeting “al Qaeda”—which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

Take that and expand it, and you've basically given the feds and the NSA a blank slate to spy on Americans by claiming that if it believes the spying will yield information about a threat, then it's fine. And our "Representatives" are standing up and -- either through ignorance or straight-up dishonesty -- are pretending that this is about spying on foreigners only. Shameful.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, congress, dan lungren, faa, fisa amendments act, house, lamar smith, nsa, surveillance, terry gowdy, zoe lofgren

Yes, The IPAA Is A Serious Problem: Both In Process & Substance

from the but-doesn't dept

Last week, we were among the first to call attention to the fact that Lamar Smith and the House Judiciary Committee were seeking to rush through an IP-related bill which was similar to a small part of SOPA. We noted at the time that this was a much smaller issue than the key points in SOPA that everyone objected to, but our main concern was the failure in process. The fight over SOPA was as much a complaint about the process by which IP bills get passed as it was about the substance -- and this is a point that Lamar Smith and the House Judiciary Committee clearly still have not realized.

In the wake of this, BNA's Tamlin Bason correctly noted a few factual errors in what a few of us had originally published about the bill. For example, I flipped the setup of the bill, saying that the attaches would be moving from USPTO to Commerce, rather than the other way around, as is the actual case (though, confusingly, the bill also elevates a role from the USPTO into Commerce). I admit that this was a mistake in the writeup, though one that had little bearing on the actual issues raised by the bill and the process by which it was being rushed through. In fact, the process itself was partly to blame. We were told about the existence of this bill and the fact that there would be a markup with less than 24 hours notice last Monday, giving us little time process all the fine print.

While supporters of the Judiciary Committee are now using these minor mistakes to claim that there's nothing at all wrong with the IPAA, that's simply incorrect. Gigi Sohn's careful analysis of the bill shows where there are serious concerns in the substance, mainly in the fact that the role of the IP attache continues to be to only push one side of the equation (enforcement) and completely ignore important limitations and exceptions. On top of that, it leaves the door open to massive expansion of the program. This is exactly how we described it in our original post: a way to expand this program, and a questionable way to get US diplomats doing what's in Hollywood's best interest, not the public's:

Remember when everyone thought the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) only had authority to act with regard to “enforcement” as opposed to other IP policy matters? That limitation is nowhere to be found in the 2008 legislation that created the position or in its legislative history, and there is nothing in this bill that limits the Assistant Secretary's powers either.

In addition, the Secretary of Commerce is given carte blanche to hire as many Deputy Assistant Secretaries to help as the USPTO can afford. This means that overnight, the USPTO would become the home of yet another office dedicated wholly to the protection of intellectual property.

Have we told you that the USPTO already has personnel dedicated to Intellectual Property Enforcement? It should come as no shock to anyone that these new positions, as well as the attache positions, are likely to be filled by those who believe that more IP enforcement is always better.

In fact, as Gigi points out, the role that will be elevated is the Administrator for Policy and External Affairs, which will become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Policy and External Affairs -- a much more high profile position. It's worth noting that the job is currently held by Shira Perlmutter, an infamous copyright maximalist, former executive VP of the IFPI as well as IP Policy boss at Time Warner. Think she's going to push for more exceptions and limitations? Yeah, right.

But, honestly, the bigger complaint here is still the process itself. People complained about SOPA being negotiated in back rooms without a chance for real public input. Just because Smith and the HJC chose a seemingly "boring" piece of SOPA to try to rush through without people noticing, don't think this wasn't a deliberate decision. Of course they chose a boring piece of SOPA. It was a test to see if people were really that concerned about the process, and to see if they could sneak through this bit of SOPA without anyone noticing. The fact that people spoke up stopped that temporarily, but these attacks on minor errors in the initial rushed writeups shows that the HJC is now trying to minimize the criticism -- though it still hasn't actually released the draft of the bill for public review. While Reddit has been saying that there's a vote on the IPAA on Wednesday, it doesn't appear to be on the schedule yet, though we have heard rumors of Friday or early next week from different people.

Smith and the HJC could have avoided this whole mess by doing something simple: being open and releasing the bill and letting the public react to it before rushing it through markup. Nancy Scola, over at ReadWriteWeb has a really good writeup on Lamar Smith's failings with this bill, which focus on the process failures, and the fact that Smith clearly tried to rush this through:

Fifty days.

That's the median time it took for eight legislative bills - on economic espionage, identity theft, abortion in the District of Columbia - to circulate in the House of Representatives before they were put on the agenda for Tuesday's markup session by the House Judiciary Committee.

Zero days.

That's how long the ninth bill on the agenda, a measure submitted by Judiciary chair Lamar Smith, existed before it was submitted for Tuesday's markup. Unlike the other eight (H.R. 6029, H.R. 4362, H.R. 3803... ), Smith's Intellectual Property Attaché Act didn't even have a number. It had yet to be introduced into the House legislative system.

That's legislating the future of copyright, the Internet and creative content, Lamar Smith-style.

As Scola points out, it's clear that IPAA was a "trial balloon" to see if they could sneak IP stuff through in a post-SOPA era: pick something that is good for his Hollywood backers, but which is "maybe just dry enough" that it can fly below the radar and get passed.

We apologize for making a small error in our initial post -- though, we likely wouldn't have done so if Smith had done as he supposedly promised other members of Congress and released the draft long before it went through the markup process. Instead, by trying to sneak stuff through and see if anyone was paying attention, we missed one minor detail in the bill, but not the larger concern nor the serious process issues. If the HJC and Lamar Smith don't want to see these kinds of reactions, they should be a hell of a lot more open about what they are trying to do. But, of course, that might make it more difficult to get Hollywood's agenda to move forward. I guess that's the dilemma they face.

* The initial report also stated that Darrell Issa was a co-sponsor of the bill. Scola's report quotes his office saying that it's simply untrue and that Issa is not a co-sponsor. We've heard similar things as well, and a few others named in the original report have since said they, too, were not co-sponsors.

Filed Under: copyright, diplomats, house judiciary committee, ipaa, lamar smith, process, transparency

Dear Lamar Smith & House Judiciary: Have You Learned Nothing From SOPA?

from the ridiculous dept

I've been hearing for a few months now that the staffers on the House Judiciary Committee, who were the main supporters of SOPA, haven't been able to let go of what happened (or even understand it). That's been pretty obvious from the few public statements they've made since SOPA failed. And now it's been made doubly clear. On Monday, we wrote about how Lamar Smith and the House Judiciary Committee that he chairs were looking to rush through a piece of SOPA embedded in another bill. It wasn't one of the most controversial bits, but it was an issue we had raised with SOPA, even if it took a back seat to some of the bigger problems.

What was stunning was that the SOPA protests were largely about process -- backroom deals, without public input or scrutiny -- and in this case, with this new bill (officially dubbed the Intellectual Property Attache Act) they not only did the same thing, but were trying to rush it through on a fast track significantly more extreme than SOPA. That is, they only shared the draft on Saturday and announced that there would be a markup on the bill (which they never even introduced) on Tuesday morning. That's rare. Normally, you officially introduce the bill, hold various hearings that involve experts, make some adjustments, and then hold a markup hearing to allow for additional amendments. In this case, they jumped right to that last step -- completely skipping over some rather major steps that would allow for public input and scrutiny.

In other words, they did the exact opposite of what the SOPA experience told them they should do.

However, because we and a few other sites pointed out the issues here, some of the original supporters of the bill began expressing doubts. Some others on the HJC offered up amendments -- including one that would say that the IP attaches couldn't just focus on enforcement, but also on limitations and exceptions like fair use (you know, actually focusing on what US law is, rather than what Hollywood wishes it would be). But apparently there is resistance to those amendments. However, because lots of people did speak up and let the HJC and Lamar Smith know that they would not accept them rushing through a piece of SOPA without public discussion, the bill has been (temporarily) delayed.

Of course, still not getting it, the HJC issued a petulant statement, effectively blaming us for this turn of events:

"This week, the House Judiciary Committee released a discussion draft of a bill that streamlines the IP attache program to help safeguard American intellectual property abroad. Unfortunately, some groups and blogs have misreported that this is a follow up to the Stop Online Piracy Act. That is not the case. The bill that the Committee currently is working on is a narrow piece of legislation to ensure better use of Patent and Trademark Office funds. The current draft increases organizational efficiency at the PTO and moves the IP attache program squarely within the PTO to ensure direct accountability of the IP attaches.

"Since releasing that draft, for which there is bipartisan and industry support, we are making some changes based on feedback from outside groups and Members. We plan to circulate a new draft based off those changes to ensure that the development of this bill continues to be an open and transparent process."

The statement is partially misleading and partially false. First of all, the language is quite similar to a portion of SOPA -- so claiming that it's not a "followup" to SOPA is clearly false. This was a part of SOPA, and now it's a part of a new bill -- but ignoring the fact that it was in SOPA is simply wrong. Second, the statement is incredibly misleading, in that they suggest that they were always seeking feedback. That's not true at all. It was on the markup schedule for Tuesday morning -- and that was published on the HJC website for anyone to see (though it's since been taken down). Finally, no one else saw a draft until Saturday and no one in the press got it until Monday morning -- about 24 hours before the markup (despite HJC staffers promising some members that it would release the draft at least a week before any effort to move it forward). Basically, the HJC staffers who put out this statement are creating a misinformation campaign, claiming (incorrectly) that we and a few other blogs who wrote about this were the ones spreading the misinformation.

They can't even own up to their own attempt to rush this bill through. It's shameful.

As Ernesto Falcon at Public Knowledge has written, if you want to "shake the ghost of SOPA," perhaps try to not rush through a bill that you kept secret without allowing the normal process of public comment and feedback.

The latest controversy with the Intellectual Property Attache Act, formerly a provision within the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is entirely self-inflicted by its lead sponsors.

You do not have to be a political strategist to figure out that trying to pass a piece of SOPA might in fact inflame the wide array of opposition to SOPA. You also can not cry foul when you secretly develop the legislation, hold no legislative hearing on its merits, and attempt (and thankfully fail) to move the legislation through the Committee almost 24 hours after it was leaked to the press. Each of these steps flies in the face of the request made by opponents to SOPA for more openness, inclusion, and transparency for intellectual property policy decisions. It is as if the some believe that the business of copyright legislating can proceed as usual and that the Internet Black Out never occurred.

If the House Judiciary Committee wants to shake off the ghost of SOPA and avoid having legislation blow up in their collective faces, they need to rethink how they move intellectual property bills. The Committee must proactively work at justifying to the public why a bill is necessary and win their support for its passage before voting it out. It should stop trying to move bills first and put the burden on the public to stop them from blindly moving forward.

At this point, we've heard that some Judiciary Committee staffers view sites like Techdirt as "the enemy." That's completely wrong. We'd just like them to not try to sneak bad bills through -- and to actually do their job and let the public weigh in on things. Is that so difficult to comprehend? This isn't political. We have nothing against the House Judiciary Committee as a whole. We'd just like them to actually acknowledge the public's role in the process. If they did so, perhaps people wouldn't complain and speak out. If they really are being "open" about this, then there wouldn't the this sudden surprise. There wouldn't be this attempt to rush things through... and there wouldn't be a public outcry. So it's in their own best interests to actually admit that the public exists and should be a part of the process, rather than snubbing them.

Filed Under: house judiciary committee, intellectual property attache act, lamar smith, sopa, transparency

Let The Judiciary Committee Know That Creating A Mini-SOPA Without Public Participation Is Unacceptable

from the speak-up dept

Yesterday, we wrote about how Lamar Smith was rushing through a new bill that looked to approve a piece of SOPA that would spend taxpayer money to expand the diplomatic corp with a bunch of people whose job it would be to spread Hollywood's special copyright interests around the globe... and to set up a special agency for this in the Commerce Department. Despite the public rebuke Lamar Smith got for his efforts to write SOPA in secret and then to rush it through, he apparently didn't learn much and chose to do this bill the same way. It was put on the schedule to be marked up without the bill even being announced -- basically a way to rush it through in secret.

It appears that this plan is falling apart. The markup did not happen this morning, and we're hearing that support for the bill is wavering. Some of the named co-sponsors have made it clear that they're just as unhappy that the bill was being rushed out this way without public comment and were uncomfortable with some of the specifics in the bill -- and that these concerns mean that the bill may actually be delayed. It may be a very temporary delay, but it does sound like some of the "co-sponsors" may have changed their minds and won't be supporting the bill. And, for the time being, the markup has been called off.

There is still a lot of back and forth going on, and it's still important to speak up. Public Knowledge pointed out that the House Judiciary Committee and Lamar Smith need to learn that secret bills are a non-starter, and they're absolutely right.

Before getting to the substance of the bill, perhaps the most shocking thing about it is how it is being handled by Committee Chairman Smith (who was a driving force behind SOPA). If Congress learned no other lesson from SOPA and PIPA, you would think that they got the message about not developing IP-related laws in secret. But you would be wrong. This bill leaked, fully formed, over the weekend and was scheduled for markup today. Needless to say, this came as a surprise to just about everyone not directly involved with drafting it and provided a very limited opportunity to meaningfully participate in the markup process. Step zero for any new IP bill should be a transparent drafting process.

Given that this is still a highly fluid situation, if you're represented by any of the members of the House Judiciary Committee, you might want to give them a call and let them know that you opposed SOPA and you're shocked that the HJC might push through a piece of SOPA in a process that was even more secretive than the one for SOPA itself.

Filed Under: commerce department, diplomatic corp, house judiciary committee, lamar smith, sopa, ustr

Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force

from the learned-anything? dept

While it didn't get nearly as much attention as other parts of SOPA, one section in the bill that greatly concerned us was the massive expansion of the diplomatic corp.'s "IP attaches." If you're unfamiliar with the program, basically IP attaches are "diplomats" (and I use the term loosely) who go around the globe pushing a copyright maximalist position on pretty much every other country. Their role is not to support more effective or more reasonable IP policy. It is solely to increase expansion, and basically act as Hollywood's personal thugs pressuring other countries to do the will of the major studios and labels. The role is literally defined as pushing for "aggressive support for enforcement action" throughout the world. A few years ago, we detailed how, at a meeting of these attaches, they bitched and complained about how copyright "activists" were making their lives difficult and were a "threat" who needed to be dealt with.

In other words, these people are not neutral. They do not have the best interests of the public or the country in mind. Their job is solely to push the copyright maximalist views of the legacy entertainment industry around the globe, and position it as the will of the US government.

It was good that this was defeated as a part of SOPA... but now comes the news that Lamar Smith is introducing a new bill that not only brings back this part, but appears to expand it and make it an even bigger deal. Politico has a short blurb:

SMITH, OTHERS UNVEIL IP BILL -- House Judiciary Committee chief Lamar Smith and other members are unveiling today their new Intellectual Property Attache Act, which realigns the Commerce Department a bit. The measure as proposed would move the current attache program housed with the USPTO to the full agency, complete with an assistant secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. The proposal is slated for full committee markup on Tuesday. Named as supporters on the measure are a number of panel Dems and Republicans: Reps. Bob Goodlatte, Mel Watt, Darrell Issa, Howard Berman, Howard Coble, Steve Chabot, Jason Chaffetz and Adam Schiff

You can see the current draft of the bill (pdf and embedded below), but it has not yet been officially introduced. However, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark it up in the morning, suggesting that it's on the fast track, with almost no public scrutiny. In fact, I've heard from people worried about this bill that they were only told of its existence on Saturday.

The specifics of the bill appear to go further than the version in SOPA. It is clear that the bill itself is framed from the maximalist perspective. There is nothing about the rights of the public, or of other countries to design their own IP regimes. It notes that the role of the attaches is:

to advance the intellectual property rights of United States persons and their licensees;

The bill also "elevates" the IP attaches out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, and sets them up as their own agency, including a new role: the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. Yes, we'll get another IP Czar, this time focused in the Commerce Department.

When even the USTR is recognizing the importance of limitations and exceptions to copyright, to have Congress push a bill that basically ignores limitations and exceptions and only looks to expand Hollywood's special thugs within the diplomatic corp. seems like a huge problem.

But the even bigger issue is a simple one of process. Shouldn't Lamar Smith have learned by now that you don't try to sneak through SOPA or any of its components without first getting widespread public opinion on these things?

Filed Under: commerce department, diplomatic corp, lamar smith, sopa, ustr

Lamar Smith & House Judiciary Committee Don't Want To Know How Often The NSA Spies On Americans

from the fingers-in-ears-approach dept

Once again, we are left stunned by the sheer ridiculousness of Congress. In a House Judiciary Committee markup concerning the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a proposed amendment to require the NSA to reveal how many times it had spied on Americans was voted down 20 - 11, led by chair Lamar Smith who just kept talking about how "important" it was get past the markup phase and pass the bill. Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Lungren lashed out at those who wanted the NSA to explain how often it had spied on Americans without warrants under this bill by saying (and I kid you not): "What evidence is there that it is being used to spy on Americans?"

You see, that's the problem. The NSA doesn't have to tell anyone -- and whenever officials ask, they're given ridiculous answers, like the claim that it would violate the privacy of Americans to tell Congress how many Americans' privacy the NSA violated. It's stunning that our elected officials -- many of whom don't know themselves what the NSA is doing -- seem to have no qualms passing this update to the bill without even being willing to ask a simple question: how many Americans have been spied on using this regulation?

On the Senate side, as we've noted, Senators Wyden and Udall have been indicating (within the limitations they have, due to security clearances) that the NSA is quite clearly using this law incredibly broadly -- perhaps to the level of scooping up all phone data, which goes way, way, way beyond the text of the law. If some in Congress are so sure that there's no evidence that it's being used to spy on Americans, then have the NSA answer the damn question. But, no, instead, they insist that we just have to push it through, or, as Lamar Smith says, "We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country."

You know who you have an even bigger duty to? The American public. That's who you represent. Not the intelligence community. The failure of our elected officials to give even the most basic oversight to the NSA is astonishing. It's shameful. We all deserve better.

Filed Under: congress, faa, fisa, house judiciary committee, lamar smith, marc udall, nsa, ron wyden