Author: David Kravets

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The battle between the US Senate and Backpage.com heated up again this week. Backpage demanded Wednesday that a federal appeals court continue blocking the online classified ad portal from having to comply with a Senate investigation and subpoena into how Backpage conducts its business, including providing the government with documents about the ins and outs of its editorial business model. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contends that the site is littered with ads that amount to offering sex services by women and children forced into prostitution, and it wants to know what steps the website is taking, if any, to screen ads posted to its site by third parties.

"...this case is about nothing but editorial judgement," attorneys for the site's chief executive officer, Carl Ferrer, told (PDF) the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Wednesday.

The tug of war clearly implicates the site's First Amendment rights, Backpage said. Backpage said the committee's subpoena intrudes on its editorial judgement and that the government's probe is "a limitless fishing expedition." The government said it has a legitimate interest in cracking down on human exploitation, and it argued that the law provides the committee with subpoena power to investigate matters of public concern.

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We've seen some pretty strange intellectual property litigation in our day. We can now check off one of the dumbest IP lawsuits we've seen in a while. That's because Citigroup and AT&T resolved a trademark dispute Monday concerning how they each said thanks to their customers.

Banking behemoth Citigroup had trademarked "THANKYOU" and then sued AT&T over how the technology giant thanked its own loyal customers. Citigroup called it trademark infringement, amounting to "unlawful conduct" in a federal lawsuit lodged against AT&T this summer.

A federal judge ruled she wouldn't block (PDF) AT&T from thanking its customers pending a trial. US District Judge Katherine Forrest of New York also ruled that Citigroup likely wouldn't win at a trial. It's essentially a dispute in which AT&T is being accused of creating consumer confusion because it says "THANKYOU" in a manner similar to how Citigroup says "THANKYOU" to its customers.

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Calling it "highly invasive" and "ineffective," more than two dozen rights groups urged the US Department of Homeland Security on Monday to scrap a proposal asking the millions of tourists entering the country each year to reveal their "online presence" such as social media identities. The government announced in June that it wanted to implement the plan to give the DHS "clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections."

A coalition of 28 groups are not in favor. "This program would invade individual privacy and imperil freedom of expression while being ineffective and prohibitively expensive to implement and maintain," the organizations, lead by the Center for Democracy & Technology,  wrote the government.

The plan adds a line to the paper form and the online Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application that US-bound visitors must fill out if they don't have a visa and plan on staying for up to 90 days for vacation, business, or other affairs. The agency says travelers coming to the US under the Visa Waiver Program won't be forced to disclose their social media handles. The authorities said it was "optional." However, as we all know, leaving it blank could raise red flags.

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The First Amendment has been good, really good to the online classified ads portal Backpage.com. In 2015, the US Constitution helped Backpage dodge a lawsuit from victims of sex trafficking. What's more, a federal judge invoked the First Amendment and crucified an Illinois sheriff—who labeled Backpage a "sex trafficking industry profiteer"—because the sheriff coerced Visa and Mastercard to refrain from processing payments to the site. The judge said Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart's anti-Backpage lobbying amounted to "an informal extralegal prior restraint of speech" because Dart's actions were threatening the site's financial survival.

But the legal troubles didn't end there for Backpage, which The New York Times had labeled "the leading site for trafficking of women and girls in the United States."

Thirteen months ago, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is examining sex trafficking on the Internet, subpoenaed (PDF) Carl Ferrer, Backpage's chief executive officer. But Ferrer, citing the First Amendment, has largely refused to comply with the subpoena—which essentially demands to know everything about the company's business model and profits, including how it screens ads. That screening aspect of the subpoena are similar to the one Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood issued to Google about its polices of policing third-party content. In July, however, Hood and Google settled their dispute about the subpoena, which read like a page from the anti-piracy playbook of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Gawker.com, facing a $140 million jury verdict for publishing a sex tape of Terry Bollea (better known as pro wrestling icon Hulk Hogan), is shuttering operations next week, according to a post on the site.

"Nick Denton, the company’s outgoing CEO, informed current staffers of the site’s fate on Thursday afternoon, just hours before a bankruptcy court in Manhattan will decide whether to approve Univision’s bid for Gawker Media’s other assets," the website said. "Staffers will soon be assigned to other editorial roles, either at one of the other six sites or elsewhere within Univision. Near-term plans for Gawker.com’s coverage, as well as the site’s archives, have not yet been finalized."

Univision acquired Gawker Media for $135 million on Tuesday. Gawker Media's other holdings include Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Kotaku, and Jalopnik. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy two months ago and went up for sale following the jury's verdict.

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Twitter said Thursday it has shut down 235,000 accounts linked to violent extremism in the last six months alone. That brings the total number of terminated Twitter accounts associated with terrorism to 360,000 since mid-2015.

San Francisco-based Twitter, which had come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to crack down on extremist speech on its site, said it condemns acts of terrorism and that it is "committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform."

The announcement on Twitter's blog comes as lawmakers mull legislation demanding that Internet companies report suspected terrorist activities to the government. It also comes days after Twitter fended off a lawsuit (PDF) accusing the company of providing material support to terrorists and of being a "tool for spreading extremist propaganda." Twitter's successful defense was, among other things, that the Communications Decency Act shields the company from being legally liable for content posted on its site.

A federal appeals court says the maker of an online spying tool can be sued on accusations of wiretapping. The federal lawsuit was brought by a man whose e-mail and instant messages to a woman were captured by the husband of the woman. That husband used that data as a "battering ram" as part of his 2010 divorce proceedings.

It's the second time in a week that a federal court has ruled in a wiretapping case—in favor of a person whose online communications were intercepted without consent. The other ruling was against Google. A judge ruled that a person not using Gmail who sent e-mail to another person using Gmail had not consented to Gmail's automatic scanning of the e-mail for marketing purposes. Hence, Google could be sued (PDF) for alleged wiretapping violations.

For the moment, the two outcomes are a major victory for privacy. But the reasoning in the lawsuit against the makers of the WebWatcher spy program could have ramifications far beyond the privacy context—and it places liability on the producers of spyware tools.

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An internal database used by California's police agencies chronicles some 150,000 suspected gang members. However, the CalGang database is so riddled with errors that its authenticity, and its ability to help the authorities fight gang violence, is now being questioned by the state's auditor.

Consider that an audit of the crime-fighting database—which points to gang member booking photographs, birth dates, race, gender, known addresses, tattoos, convictions, interactions with police, and so on—listed 42 people under the age of one as suspected gang members.

"We found 42 individuals in CalGang who were supposedly younger than one year of age at the time of entry—28 of whom were entered for 'admitting to being gang members,'" Elaine Howle, the state's top auditor, wrote in a recent review of the database, which is administered by police agencies across California's 58 counties.

A Tennessee county whose sheriff praised Jesus on the Bradley County department's Facebook page—and then deleted negative comments about the post—is settling a federal First Amendment lawsuit for $41,000.

Sheriff Eric Watson wrote a post titled "He is risen..." on Easter, prompting a lawsuit by an atheist group and unnamed local residents in the eastern county of about 100,000. The deal calls for $15,000 in damages to be paid to the American Atheists organization and other plaintiffs in addition to $26,000 in legal fees.

"This settlement is a clear win for the plaintiffs, whose First Amendment rights to free speech and to be free of government establishment of religion were infringed upon," Amanda Knief, the legal and policy director of American Atheists, said in a statement. "We are pleased the sheriff has agreed to do the right thing by no longer using this official government social media account to promote religion."

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Reddit says it won't give Atlantic Records the IP address of a Reddit user who posted a link on the site of a single by Twenty One Pilots a week before the song's planned release.

The song, "Heathens," was originally uploaded on June 15 to the file-sharing site Dropfile. That same day, the file landed on Reddit. According to a lawsuit (PDF) in New York State Supreme Court, the file was posted to the Twenty One Pilots subreddit with the title “[Leak] New Song – ‘Heathens' at the URL https://www.reddit.com/r/twentyonepilots/comments/4oa475/leak_new_song_heathens/." The Poster submitted the link under the username "twentyoneheathens," according to Atlantic.

Atlantic and its subsidiary label, Fueled by Ramen, want the IP address of the Reddit leaker. The company said the file fell victim to "widespread distribution" on the Internet, so the company released the single June 16, a week ahead of schedule; the label also said the early release hindered a planned rollout on Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms. Atlantic says the leaker must be an Atlantic employee who was contractually obligated not to leak the track, which is featured in the movie Suicide Squad that debuted earlier this month.