#Federal District Court

[recreation-law]

Defendant found criminal guilty for failing to have a federal permit to operate on a lake owned by United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)

If you are on Federal land or Federal water making money you have to have a Federal Permit United States v. Warman, 23-MJ-02-EBA, Violation 1062808 (E.D. Ky. Mar 15, 2023) State: Kentucky; United States District Court, E.D. Kentucky, Northern Division Plaintiff: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Defendant: HEATHER WARMAN Plaintiff Claims: Defendant Defenses: She did not own the business and she was out…

[reportwire]

John Roberts’s Long Game

John Roberts’s Long Game

The Supreme Court delivered appalling decisions in June—on abortion, guns, and environmental regulation—but the conservative supermajority is poised to strike an even greater blow against American democracy. The justices now have the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in their sights. On October 4, the second day of the new term, they will hear Alabama’s challenge to a federal district court’s finding…

[mapsontheweb]

A visualization of the 94 Federal District Courts of the United States.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

New citizens taking the oath of allegiance, Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn, 1924.

Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images/Fine Art America

[nationallawreview]

Opposing Decisions – Does the FTC Have the Authority to Ban Non-Compete Clauses?

In April, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) promulgated a new rule banning non-competes (the Rule); the FTC adopted the Rule to prohibit employers from entering into or enforcing non-compete clauses with workers and senior executives. Several lawsuits were quickly filed challenging the rules. Separate parties filed in Texas (in which cases were consolidated), and ATS Tree Services, LLC, filed an…

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider overturning a nearly 40-year precedent by taking up a challenge to a regulation affecting fishing vessels in a case that is the latest conservative-led attack on federal bureaucracy.

The court will weigh whether to overturn a much-cited 1984 ruling, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which said courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting the law when the language of a statute is ambiguous.

Attempts to overturn the ruling, which the court has rarely invoked in recent years, is just one avenue of attack by conservative groups and business interests as part of what has been dubbed “the war on the administrative state.”

"The Supreme Court has an opportunity to correct one of the most consequential judicial errors in a generation," said Ryan Mulvey, a lawyer at the Cause of Action Institute, a conservative group that represents the challengers. The Chevron ruling "has proven corrosive to the American system of checks and balances and directly contributed to an unaccountable executive branch."

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is skeptical of broad assertions of federal agency power.

The case itself is a challenge to a government regulation that requires fishing vessels to help fund the collection of scientific data to assist with fishery conservation and management. The court could still rule in favor of the challengers by limiting the scope of the Chevron decision without overturning it entirely.

The court took up an appeal brought by Loper Bright Enterprises and several other operators of fishing vessels that are active in the herring fishery off the Atlantic coast, which challenged the 2020 rule applying to New England fisheries.

The challengers say the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal body that oversees ocean resources, did not have authority to issue the regulation under the relevant law, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

The rule implements a monitoring program that vessel operators are required to fund. As the challengers put it, operators have to pay up to $710 a day at certain times for independent observers to board their vessels and monitor their operations. The cost is a significant burden on small owner-operators, the challengers say.

The case, backed by conservative groups, is the latest attempt to undermine the power of federal agencies. Lawyers for the fishing vessel operators say a lower court that upheld the rule gave too much deference to the federal agency in interpreting the 1976 law.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the vessel operators' claims in a decision in August, upholding a similar ruling a federal district judge issued the previous year.

The brief Supreme Court order noted that liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not participating in the case. She was originally part of the appeals court panel that decided the case before President Joe Biden appointed her to the high court. She heard oral arguments but was not involved in the ruling itself.

[sw5w]

Our Only Other Choice Would Be to Submit a Plea to the Courts

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:23:52

[186-3]

even if you're resigned that trump is going to win, 1/3 of the country lives in states with competitive senate elections. if democrats win the senate, there is very little that trump can do (can't even appoint supreme court nominees)

the following states all have competitive senate elections:

arizona

florida

maryland

michigan

montana

nevada

ohio

pennsylvania

texas

wisconsin

even if you don't think your state is competitive at all, THESE SENATE RACES STILL ARE, SO IF YOU LIVE IN ONE OF THESE STATES, MAKE SURE TO VOTE

and even if you don't live in one of those states, you could live in a competitive house seat. if democrats win the house, then trump can't pass any bills

and even if you don't live in a competitive state or district, your local elections matter even more than federal ones because they have a much more direct impact on your life

so VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE

[wausaupilot]

Wausau man previously convicted in cockfighting scheme faces federal drug charges

Bee Her has multiple prior convictions and was on probation at the time of his most recent arrest - which led to federal charges.

Wausau Pilot & Review A federal judge on Thursday signed a warrant for the arrest of a 45-year-old Wausau man accused in a major drug trafficking scheme, the same day he was indicted by a grand jury. Bee Her will face charges of distributing more than 50 grams of methamphetamine in the U.S. Western District Court of Wisconsin. A news release from the U.S. Dept. of Justice alleges Her…

[cannabisbusinessexecutive]

Court dismisses lawsuit challenging federal marijuana laws

The U.S. District Court of Massachusetts dismissed a case challenging marijuana’s federal illegality on Monday, rejecting arguments made by cannabis companies against prohibition. U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni, an Obama appointee, ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue, but in dismissing the lawsuit his order applied the same analysis that the Supreme Court did when it last…

[criminaljusticemark]

United States Federal Court Structure

“Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.”- Earl Warren, 14th Chief Justice of the United States The United States court system is a dual system (USC, 2023). The dual court system refers to the separate federal judicial and state judicial court systems (USC, 2023). The two court systems…

[pnwnativeplants]

"A federal district court recently ruled that a large portion of Electron Dam must be removed from the Puyallup River in Washington because the dam harms fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Electron Dam has been harming Chinook salmon, steelhead, and trout for nearly 100 years. In 2020, the company that operates the dam tried to replace a spillway and botched the job, creating more hazards for the fish. Earthjustice went to court to press for the new segment’s removal on behalf of the Puyallup Tribe. Salmon and other native fish play a critical role in the Tribe’s culture and economy. With this part of the dam gone, the river will flow naturally for the first time in almost a century."

[soon-palestine]

𝗨.𝗦. 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗧 𝗖𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗦 𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗛 𝗚𝗜𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗦 𝗢𝗙 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗢 𝗔𝗕𝗨𝗦𝗘𝗦

Not guilty.

That's the verdict of a US federal appeals court in a case involving five tech companies accused of benefitting from child labour in Congolese mines. On 5th March, 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia made a 3-0 decision in favour of (Google’s parent company) Alphabet, Microsoft, Dell, Tesla and Apple Inc. in a case filed by 16 former Congolese child miners and their guardians.

The plaintiffs accused the companies of "deliberately obscuring" their dependence on child labour, in effect abetting the exploitation of many children to ensure steady supplies of cobalt. Some of the complainants were the guardians of children who’d been killed in cobalt-mining operations.

The court ruled that buying cobalt in the global supply chain did not amount to "participation in a venture," and there was no proof that the tech giants had anything more than a buyer-seller relationship with suppliers or had the power to stop the use of child labour.

Cobalt is in high demand as competition for market leadership in Electric Vehicle sales kicks into high gear. Nearly two-thirds of the world's cobalt is mined in DR Congo. The country has 2-million artisanal miners working under horrible conditions, according to DelveDatabase, an online database. Four critical minerals - copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium - will generate $16 trillion in the next 25 years, according to the IMF.

DR Congo's vast wealth is the key reason for the country's long history of exploitation and conflict - from Belgian King Leopold II running the country as his private estate to Western tech firms churning out high-end goods using Congolese minerals.

Help raise awareness of the exploitation of Congolese children by sharing this video widely.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #30

August 2-9 2024

The Department of Interior announced the largest investment since 1979 in outdoor recreation and conservation projects. The $325 million will go to support State, territorial, DC, and tribal governments in buying new land for parks and outdoor recreation sites. It also supports expansion and refurbishment of existing sites.

The EPA announced that Birmingham Alabama will get $171 million to update and replace its water system. The city of Birmingham is 70% black and like many black majority cities as struggled with aging water systems and lead pipes causing dangerous drinking water conditions. This investment is part of the Biden-Harris administrations plan to replace all of the nation's lead pipes.

The Department of Energy announced $2.2 billion in investments in the national power grid to help boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather. The projects will add 13 gigawatts of capacity, support 5,000 new jobs and upgrade 1,000 miles of transmission. Major projects will cut power outages in the west, drive down energy prices in New England, add off shore wind, and enable the development of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s wind resources.

The Justice Department won its massive anti-trust case against Google. A federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. The DOJ has an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Facebook and Amazon for their monopolist practices

The US Government announced $3.9 billion in direct aid to Ukraine. The money will help the Government of Ukraine make up for massive budget short falls caused by the war with Russia. It'll help pay the salaries of teachers, emergency workers, and other public employees, as well helping displaced persons, low-income families and people with disabilities.

The Department of Energy announced $190 million to improve air quality and energy upgrades in K-12 schools. The grants to 320 schools across 25 states will impact 123,000 students, 94% of these schools service student bodies where over half the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the face of climate change more schools have been forced to close for extreme heat. These grants will help schools with everything from air filtration, to AC, to more robust energy systems, to replacing lighting.

USAID announced $424 million in additional humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict and food insecurity, 25 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian aid. This year alone the US has sent close to a billion dollars in aid to the DRC, making it the single largest donor to the crisis.

The Senate approved President Biden's appointment of Stacey Neumann of Maine, Meredith Vacca of New York, and Joseph Saporito Jr. of Pennsylvania to life time federal Judgeships. This brings the total of judges appointed by President Biden to 205. President Biden is the first President who's judicial nominations have not been majority white men, Judge Vacca is the first Asian American to serve in her district court. President Biden has also focused on former public defenders, like Judge Saporito, and former labor lawyers like Judge Neumann, as well as civil rights lawyers.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[nationallawreview]

US District Court Sets Aside the FTC’s Noncompete Ban on a Nationwide Basis

On August 20, the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas held that the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) final rule banning noncompetes is unlawful and “set aside” the rule. “The Rule shall not be enforced or otherwise take effect on its effective date of September 4, 2024, or thereafter.” The district court’s decision has a nationwide effect. The FTC is very likely to appeal to the…