This Week In Techdirt History: November 23rd – 29th

from the as-i-recall dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, Portland, Maine passed a facial recognition ban that said the city can fire employees who violate it, which might have been useful in Seattle where a police detective took Clearview for a spin and possibly violated local laws. The FBI pulled another one of its manufacture-a-terrorist schemes, and was elsewhere seeking to perform an intrusive search of a phone for evidence it didn’t need. Nintendo was trying to crack down on creative uses of Animal Crossing, while the developers of Cyberpunk 2077 were adding a special mode to help streamers avoid DMCA notices. And Comcast decided that the middle of a pandemic was a good time to expand its bullshit usage caps.

Ten Years Ago

Speaking of Comcast, this week in 2015 they were testing net neutrality by letting their own streaming service bypass usage caps, and then they wished everyone an early happy new year by announcing price hikes and new misleading fees. The Telegraph published an extremely dumb article defending encryption by David Cameron’s former speechwriter, and Dianne Feinstein was flip-flopping on her previous concerns about cybersecurity by calling for encryption backdoors, while it came out that the “ISIS encryption training manual” about which much hay had been made was actually a pretty generic pamphlet for journalists and activists.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wrote about why voting for COICA was voting for censorship, and why adopting ACTA would increase copyright infringement (not that this stopped the EU Parliament from rubber stamping their approval). Backlash was mounting against the TSA, with the San Diego airport team arresting a man for refusing to be groped and claiming that recording the TSA security process is an arrestable offense too. Agents decided to demonstrate the process for Congress to show that it was no big deal, which completely backfired, while the agency was refusing to say if it had ever caught a terrorist on the basis that this was a state secret, and we wrote about how all this TSA nonsense was based on the myth of “perfect security”.

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