It doesn’t matter how you look at this situation. This is an abuse of power. No matter how much benefit of a doubt you give the protagonists — even if you cut the Peoria, IL police so much slack you’re both falling over backwards (to borrow a Sparks lyric) — this situation looks like the end result of an overly-close relationship between city politicians and local law enforcement. How else would you explain the following?

Illinois police seized computers and mobile phones while raiding a house whose owner was suspected of parodying the town mayor on Twitter.

In all, five people following the Tuesday evening raid were taken to the Peoria Police Department station for questioning, local media report.

The Twitter account, which had all of 50 followers, and had been already shut down by Twitter “weeks ago,” became the flash point for a police raid that involved seven plainclothes officers and the detainment of five people – two of whom were cuffed at their place of employment.

If the mayor felt there was something wrong with this “impersonation,” he had plenty of other options available that wouldn’t have resulted in this egregious show of force. For one, he could have contacted Twitter and asked for the account to be suspended. (And, for all we know, he did. [UPDATE: see below.] The account hadn’t been active for “weeks” by the time the raid took place.) Second, he could have pursued this through civil action (if he felt the account was defamatory, etc.). There was no reason to involve the police in this — unless, of course, this was the sort of thing the Peoria Police enjoy doing.

Justin Glawe at Vice has a followup on this story which highlights the Peoria Police Department’s shady misconduct record.

Peoria is a town of 116,000 people. It has some problems with crime and also some problems with the police, which you can get a sense of if you follow my work or the work of Matt Buedel, the Journal Star crime reporter who broke a several stories last year detailing misconduct within the police department, including an attempt to catch a city councilman in a prostitution sting. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office ruled that an internal report regarding some of those acts of alleged misconduct should be released, but the city and the police department refused. (That report was apparently “lost” by Settingsgaard, and somehow ended up in the hands of a panhandler who, coincidentally, I used to work at a gas station with and know to be a pretty serious drug addict.)

The prostitution sting involved 12 task force officers staking out a Red Roof Inn overnight in hopes of catching Dan Irving, a city council candidate, with a prostitute. This sting ran the day after a close primary election. (Irving went on to lose the general election.) The overnight stakeout was ultimately fruitless as Irving never arrived at the motel with or without a prostitute.

Evidence exists that the Peoria Police Department is willing to be politically motivated. These officers trashed rooms and grabbed every device with an internet connection (including some Xboxes), proclaiming they were linked to an “internet crime.” Although no one’s been charged yet (other than an unrelated marijuana possession charge — hooray for the fortuitous results of a bogus police search), the chief of the Peoria Police has dug deep enough into Illinois law to find something to use against the person running the long-suspended, inside joke of an account.

Peoria Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard said the department was investigating misdemeanor charges of impersonating a public official, which carries a maximum one-year jail term and $2,500 fine. The chief, according to the Southern Illinoisan, said it “appears that someone went to great lengths to make it appear it was actually from the mayor.”

Really? “Great lengths?” How many Twitter users would have believed the following was issued by the Mayor or his office?

Beyond that, the account bio was changed on March 10th to indicate the account was a parody. A couple of weeks later, it was suspended. Three weeks after that, Peoria police corral five people and their electronics in order to stop something that was already dead and never popular.

Now, news of this has spread nationwide, and as Justin Glawes points out, it has led to the generation of several more fake Peoria Mayor accounts. The colossally stupid effort has done little more than given the nation a reason to dig into the misdeeds of the Peoria Police and an indication of just how thin Mayor Ardis’ skin is.

UPDATE: Confirmed: Mayor Ardis was behind the raid. The search warrant obtained by Peoria’s Journal Star notes that Ardis approached the police department and told officials there he wanted to find out who was behind the Twitter account. He also told the PD he wished to pursue criminal charges. Warrants were also served to Comcast and Twitter in order to obtain additional information. [h/t to Jim Romenesko]

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Following reports from last week about how cereal company General Mills had changed its privacy policy to preclude people from going to court if they so much as “liked” Cheerios on Twitter, the company has backtracked, changed its policy and admitted that consumers “didn’t like” the new policy, though they insist it was all a misunderstanding:

As has been widely reported, General Mills recently posted a revised set of Legal Terms on our websites. Those terms – and our intentions – were widely misread, causing concern among consumers.

So we’ve listened – and we’re changing them back to what they were before.

We rarely have disputes with consumers – and arbitration would have simply streamlined how complaints are handled. Many companies do the same, and we felt it would be helpful.

But consumers didn’t like it.

After throwing in some legalese (and admitting their lawyers made them do that), General Mills’ director of external communications Kirstie Foster explained:

We’ll just add that we never imagined this reaction. Similar terms are common in all sorts of consumer contracts, and arbitration clauses don’t cause anyone to waive a valid legal claim. They only specify a cost-effective means of resolving such matters. At no time was anyone ever precluded from suing us by purchasing one of our products at a store or liking one of our Facebook pages. That was either a mischaracterization – or just very misunderstood.

Not that any of that matters now.

On behalf of our company and our brands, we would also like to apologize. We’re sorry we even started down this path. And we do hope you’ll accept our apology. We also hope that you’ll continue to download product coupons, talk to us on social media, or look for recipes on our websites.

That first paragraph is not entirely accurate. While similar claims do exist in all sorts of consumer contracts (and, contrary to the statement, they often do cause people to effectively waive valid legal claims), they tend to exist in actual contracts. That is, not in a website privacy policy or terms of use — which is what made General Mills’ effort so notable.

Again, there is a simple solution to all of this. It should be clear that simply throwing up a “terms of use” page has no direct legal impact, especially if there’s no evidence that anyone has actually read it.

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When a Pennsylvania student recorded an incident of bullying and brought it to his school’s administration, it kicked off a darkly farcical series of escalations, with the school calling the cops, the cops calling the attorney general, and nobody calling perspective or common sense. An anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by summing it all up in a sentence:

Kid gets bullied, goes to bigger bullies who then refer him to even bigger bullies.

In last week’s comments post, I had mentioned how infuriating it is that the rightsholder’s word is so often taken as law when it comes to DMCA takedowns. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, and Loki won second place for insightful by delving below the surface:

My issue with this is that in a lot of cases these claims aren’t from actual rightsholder’s and that these people can potentially violate MY rights whenever they feel like it without facing any of the penalties they insist I should face for doing the same.

On top of that, even when they are the legal rightsholders, they like to ignore or pretend other rights I have, like fair use, simply don’t exist (when they aren’t trying to pay or cajole governments into actually voiding those rights) and then get upset when other people do the same to their rights.

All from an industry that moved thousands of miles away so as to avoid what they felt was a totally unfair and restrictive patent system, so they could turn around and impose an equally unfair and restrictive copyright system.

That sort of hubris, hyprocrisy, and arrogance is not even close to deserving of respect, but merely both of my middle fingers raised high in salute.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we head to our post about the RIAA trying to have its pre-1972 recording cake and eat it too. There were two comments on that post expanding on key related issues and exposing the broken thinking behind so much of copyright law. First up, PaulT on the fact that retroactive copyright changes make no sense:

It’s my opinion that copyright changes should never be applied retroactively. If the argument is that copyright encourages or even enables work to be created in the first place, then clearly the copyright terms in force at the time of creation were sufficient. The work wouldn’t exist to argue over in the first place if the artist required today’s copyright laws to create it.perhaps decades after his death – is just wrong.

This is, of course, not the RIAA’s argument, but they can’t just come out and admit that they want to be able to collect huge sums of money for decades after an artist’s death no matter when the recording took place. They have to play word games to pretend they have the moral high ground.

As ever, “fairness” means “letting corporations make as much as possible” rather than anything that actually benefits a living human being not on the RIAA’s board.

Next, it’s Ninja making the related point that paying people for decades-old work at all doesn’t make much sense to begin with:

So we are talking about songs that are at least 45 years old, right?

Funny they talk about fairness. I don’t see old engineers being paid continuously because structures were made based on their projects. In fact, I have yet to see a dead engineer whose estate still receives money for his/her work. You can replace engineer with any profession.

Professionals usually earn money because they put their work, effort, sweat into it. Constantly.

There’s no reason for a 45+ yr-old song not to be in the Public Domain.

Over on the funny side, we start out with our challenge to “find the fib” in some NSA statements. DannyB won first place for funny with a highly appropriate reaction to this scavenger hunt:

That’s like searching for a needle in a needlestack. Therefore, we need to collect all metadata.

Meanwhile, the internet was abuzz this week after a bizarre discovery about Kate Mulgrew aka Captain Janeway aka that terrifying prison cook (just one more thing — aka Mrs. Columbo). She had (accidentally) lent her voice to a trailer for a documentary promoting geocentrism aka stupidity, leading G Thompson to question how such a thing was possible for anyone with a little fame:

What celebrity would ever accept this stupid theory? Of course they all know that THEY are the absolute center of the universe.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start with Digger, who responded to General Mills’ attempts to rope customers into bizarre legal agreements just for buying their product by drafting his own license agreement:

CELA

Cereal
Eaters
License
Agreement

States the following, and I tape it to every box of cereal that I eat.

By allowing my CELA to stick to your box, you, the cereal provider, agree to the following terms.

My agreement supersedes any and all previous agreements. My agreement can never be superseded, ever, even if forced to sign a new contract while someone holds a nuke over my head, my agreement will still be valid and enforceable over yours.
My agreement allows me to sue you for over 1 quadrillion dollars if I so much as bite my cheek while chewing on your cereal, or burn my tongue if I overheat my coffee that I drink while eating your cereal.
My agreement holds your corporate officers and board members fiscally and legally responsible for any and all effects of using your cereal and any activities taken while eating said cereal, no limitations apply.
My agreement says that you owe me $1000.00 per bite of your cereal that I eat just to suffer through the crap you put in it.

END OF AGREEMENT. THANKS FOR PLAYING.

And finally, we’ve got a simple answer to a simple question. We asked if you’d trust the NSA’s advice on fixing Heartbleed; an anonymous commenter replied:

Short answer: No
Long answer : Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Indeed. That’s all for this week foooooooolks!

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Here we are again with another look back in Techdirt history. Five Years Ago: As we’ve noted, sometimes these look backs show that nothing ever changes. For example, one of our big stories five years ago was… the NSA abusing its surveillance powers… Continue reading →

As some folks know, I’m a pretty big believer in standing while you work rather than sitting. It takes a little while to get used to, but these days I greatly prefer standing. While the first few weeks are a bit difficult on your legs and (especially) … Continue reading →

We’ve written a few times in the past about research done by Paul Heald on copyright and its impact on the availability of certain content. He’s recently published an interesting new study on how the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown regime facilitates making… Continue reading →

When we talk about the stupidity that are school-affiliated zero-tolerance policies, those stories usually revolve around an administration’s inability to marry common sense with their reactions to non-issues. This can produce somewhat varied results, from really dumb stories about children being children and ending up in serious trouble, to a far more angering practice of victim-blaming. What it all boils down to, though, is an overreaction to certain tragic situations that results in bureaucratic lunacy on a level I never would have thought possible. School shootings and violence are the impetus in these cases, but we see this elsewhere as well. 9/11 resulted in the s#!*-show we know as airport security and NSA surveillance. The Boston Marathon bombing has resulted in the kind of militarized protection and media-blitzkrieg that would likely have other world nations that deal with far more terrorism shaking their heads. And, in each of these cases, we learn a simple truth that we should have seen coming all along: reactionary policies breed stupidity, corruption, and trouble.

So let’s get back to zero-tolerance policies in schools and witness the logical conclusion they offer: a college professor who had recently been at odds with his school’s administration was just suspended for posting a picture of his child wearing a Game Of Thrones t-shirt.

A popular community college professor was suspended after posting a photo of his daughter wearing an oversized T-shirt bearing a tagline from this season of Game of Thrones—Daenerys Targaryen’s “I will take what is mine with fire and blood.” Francis Schmidt, who teaches art and animation at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, shared the photo on Google+, where it was seen by several of his work contacts. One of them, a dean, decided the shirt was a veiled threat of some kind.

In case you can’t see the image, it’s of Schmidt’s daughter doing a handstand while wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt that includes the tagline: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” In case you think it’s reasonable that such a picture being shared on social media could be interpreted as a threat to commit violence at a local community college, stop thinking that because that’s a stupid thought. I imagine Schmidt said as much when he was called in to meet with the administration to explain why he’d sent a “threatening email”, despite the fact that no email had been sent.

At the meeting, Schmidt explained the shirt in the context of Game of Thrones and showed Miller that the “fire and blood” tagline has 4 million results on Google. The professor asked why his photo had caused such a reaction, and was told that “fire” could be a metaphor for “AK-47s.” Schmidt was placed on administrative leave without pay later that week, and told he would have to pass a psychiatric evaluation before he could return.

Now, like me, you should be even more confused. There’s no way you could somehow interpret “fire” to mean “AK-47” any more than you could interpret “fire” to mean “Easter ham.” They aren’t related. And if you’re thinking that there’s so little sense being made here that there must be something more to this story, there sure as hell is. The head of the school’s administration had just been delivered a vote of no confidence by the staff, including Schmidt, who had also filed a grievance recently for being denied a request for a sabbatical. You don’t need to read between the lines much to understand that this is probably a trumped-up charge serving to punish a member of the teacher’s union.

Which brings us nicely back to my original point: it isn’t just the stupid you have to worry about when it comes to zero-tolerance policies, it’s also the corrupt. When we overreact to admittedly tragic occurrences, we almost invariably open up the possibility for abuse through that overreaction.

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South Fayette School in Pennsylvania, along with a complicit criminal justice system, recently made headlines with its groundbreaking anti-bullying program, which apparently deters bullying by punishing bullied students.

Here’s a short recap:

A bullied student used an iPad to make an audio recording of other students abusing him. He brought this to school administration who a) called in a police officer (after being advised by its legal team that this might be a violation of the state’s wiretapping law) and b) deleted the recording.

The police officer, unable to actually bring a felony charge against the minor, settled for disorderly conduct. This charge brought him before a judge, who first stated her firm belief in the school’s inability to do wrong before finding him guilty.

Throughout the entire debacle, not a single person involved even considered the possibility that the student had committed no crime or the fact that he had followed all of the school’s prescribed steps for reporting bullying incidents. Instead, the desire to punish someone was obliged every step of the way.

Finally, someone within the justice system has chosen to act like an adult, rather than a bunch of clique-y, vindictive children.

Stanfield (the student) had announced that he and his attorney would file an appeal to that ruling but his fight may already be coming to an end. Today, Benswann.com has been told by Stanfield’s attorney that the District Attorney will allow the appeal to go forward but will no longer pursue this case.

More specifically, both the wiretapping charge (which was apparently still brought despite the involved officer’s statement otherwise) and the disorderly conduct charge (which the judge found the student guilty of) were dropped.

A wiretapping charge against a South Fayette High School student who recorded two classmates bullying him has been dropped by the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office.

Mike Manko, a spokesman for District Attorney Stephen Zappala, said Judge Robert Gallo signed an order Thursday to withdraw the citation against 15-year-old Christian Stanfield.

“No one in our office who is authorized to give advice on wiretap issues or school conduct issues was ever contacted in this matter. We have made multiple attempts to contact the officer who wrote the citation and (the) results have been unsuccessful,” Manko said in a written statement. “We do not believe this behavior rises to the level of a citation.”

Odd that a police officer wouldn’t talk to a district attorney. Unless, of course, a little bit of hindsight made him realize his every move fell between vindictive and buffoonish. Lt. Murka, who apparently considered both wiretapping and disorderly conduct to be appropriate “remedies” for a bullied student recording his tormentors, seems to have recused himself from the public eye. Manko, speaking for the DA, hits the heart of the issue — one simple sentence that any of those involved could have deployed to call an end to this ridiculous situation before it ended up in front of a judge: “We do not believe this behavior rises to the level of a citation.”

The school has now gone on record to declare it’s everyone else who’s wrong:

The South Fayette Township School District wishes to address recent reports in the local and national media concerning a student of the South Fayette Township School District. It is to be noted that certain information being disseminated by the media is inaccurate and/or incomplete.

Rather than clear up what exactly was “inaccurate and/or incomplete” about the reporting, it instead has chosen to hide behind “confidentiality.”

The School District is legally precluded from commenting specifically in regard to these reports as the issue involves a confidential student matter.

Considering the story has been all over the news, it seems a bit weak to claim the matter is still “confidential.” It would seem it could comment on any of the specifics already in the public domain. The story has gone nationwide, so it’s disingenuous to pretend it’s still a “confidential” matter.

While it’s nice that the DA has dropped the charges and allowed the student to proceed through school without criminal charges hanging over his head, one wonders if this same outcome would have forthcoming without the attendant public outcry. Any adult can start acting like one with enough public shaming. But the application of a little common sense would have averted this incident completely.

A bit more troubling is one of the suggestions that escaped the lips of a local politician who showed up to the teen’s “not a criminal” celebration.

State lawmaker Jesse White joined the rally, telling Stanfield he wants to name a law after him. He said it would close the loophole in the wiretapping law and allow victims of bullying to record it as proof for police and school officials.

His opportunistic heart’s in the right place, but naming laws after people often indicates the new law is a bad one. This isn’t an issue where a new law will fix things. This is an issue where no one in this chain of events showing the courage (and common sense) to stand up and ask why they were punishing a bullied kid for recording bullies.

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