Daily Deal: Striiv Fusion Activity And Sleep Tracker

Fitness trackers are becoming increasingly popular and are a handy way to get a snapshot of your movements throughout the day. The sleek new Striiv Fusion Activity and Sleep Tracker lets you track steps and distance covered, as well as receive text messages, phone calls or other notifications from your phone. It syncs with your phone via Bluetooth and is compatible with iOS 7, Android 4.3, and newer devices. You can wear it all day and night (the battery lasts from 3-5 days, so no need to charge it every night), it is water resistant, and it comes with three different colored bands so you can change it up when you want.

Note: We earn a portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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Elected Officials Grudgingly Admit Snowden Forced This Debate On Surveillance... As White House Insists He Belongs In Jail

No matter what you might think of the surveillance debate happening in DC this week, there's no honest way to deny that the debate would be very different (and likely wouldn't be happening at all) if Ed Snowden had leaked a bunch of documents to reporters almost exactly two years ago. Even those in the Senate who are the NSA's strongest supporters will now grudgingly admit that:

“Because of Edward Snowden, there’s a perception -- which is not true -- but there’s a perception that we’re invading people’s privacy,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), explained last month. “This would presumably take care of that,” he added, referring to the USA Freedom Act, which he voted against in 2014 but now supports as a better alternative to a complete lapse of the Patriot Act.

[....]

“It’s why we’re here,” Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee and a fierce NSA defender, said of the Snowden disclosures. “People began creating a myth around it. That did occur. The public discourse around it created a myth about what this program is and what it isn’t.”

Of course, both Nelson and Corker are wrong themselves in arguing that there's a "myth" or that perceptions are off. Yes, there are some who have an exaggerated picture of what's happening, but plenty who are fully aware of the details have found the program to be illegal, unconstitutional or both.

And that, at the very least, has to raise a question: how could it be illegal to blow the whistle on a program that has been found to be illegal or unconstitutional?

But, according to the White House, it still thinks Snowden belongs in jail for basically the rest of his life:

“The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. “The U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them.”

[...]

“We believe Mr. Snowden should return to the United States, where he will face due process and have the opportunity … to make that case in a court of law,” Earnest said.

"Very serious crimes"? That would be exposing a program that two separate courts, two separate White House review boards and countless others have noted to be illegal and/or unconstitutional? How do you figure? And, the whole "due process" claim is a load of crap from Earnest. As he well knows, under the Espionage Act (which is what Snowden has been charged under), he would not be allowed to explain the whistleblowing reasons for leaking the information. That's not due process and it's not allowing him to make his case.

The more the White House sticks with this wholly unbelievable line about "very serious crimes" at the very same time that Congress is debating reforms to surveillance programs only because of Snowden's actions, the more and more ridiculous the administration looks. I get that there must be some sort of ridiculous "political calculation" being made here about "looking strong" and "not encouraging" more leaks or something -- but all it really does is make the administration look foolish and unwilling to be honest.

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The Streisand Effect With Chinese Characteristics

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which culminated in what is variously called the "June Fourth Incident," or the "Tiananmen Square Massacre," remain some of the most politically-sensitive events in modern Chinese history. That makes an open letter on the subject by a group of Chinese students, initially circulated through email and on social media, extremely bold:

We are a group of Chinese students born in the 1980s and 1990s and now studying abroad. Twenty-six years ago on June 4th, young students, in life's prime with innocent love for their country just as we are today, died under the gun of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing’s streets. This part of history has since been so carefully edited and shielded away that many of us today know very little about it. Currently outside China, we have been able to access photos, videos and news, and listen to the accounts of survivors, unfettered. We feel the aftershocks of this tragedy across the span of a quarter century. The more we know, the more we feel we have a grave responsibility on our shoulders. We are writing you this open letter, fellow college students inside China, to share the truth with you and to expose crimes that have been perpetrated up to this day in connection with the Tian'anmen Massacre in 1989.

Even in China, people find ways to circumvent the country's famous Great Firewall that tries to block access to some external sites with material deemed politically dangerous. Interestingly, an editorial in the Chinese-government tabloid, the Global Times, written in response to the students' publication, recognizes that fact:

The open letter claimed that the post-1980s and post-1990s generations in the mainland have been fooled and they couldn't get to know the "truth" of the 1989 Tiananmen incident until they moved abroad to study, where they can get unlimited access to the Internet. However, it's well-known that Internet censorship cannot prevent people acquiring sensitive information from overseas websites.

Had the editorial left it at that, it would have made a good point in response to the students' arguments. But instead, it concluded:

Chinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident. Students born in the 1980s and 1990s have become the new targets of overseas hostile forces. When China is moving forward, some are trying to drag up history in an attempt to tear apart society. It's a meaningless attempt and is unlikely to be realized.

There, the editorialist moves back into standard propaganda mode: "everyone" agrees not to talk about what happened in Tiananmen Square 26 years ago, so anyone who does is clearly a dupe of "hostile forces." Perhaps realizing that these remarks only served to fan the flames of domestic debate yet further, the Chinese authorities later took down the original editorial, although the English translation is still available. But by then, it was too late: the heavy-handed attempt to stifle debate had done the exact opposite. As the letter's lead signatory, Gu Yi, told the Guardian:

The Global Times attacking our letter was the best advertisement.

That's a useful reminder that no matter how rich or powerful you are, in the age of the internet, no one is proof against the Streisand Effect.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Roca Labs' Lawyer Accused Of Intimidation After Threatening Expert Witness With *Criminal* Charges Over Billing Rates

The United State's leading purveyor of packed-in-garages stomach cement weight loss product can't be expected to let the merits of its offerings speak for themselves. I mean, it theoretically could allow this to happen, but it has already taken steps to ensure any positive reviews of its "gastric bypass alternatives" can only be viewed with skepticism.

Roca Labs will give purchasers a cut rate if they agree to proselytize on the company's behalf. Unhappy customers who tie themselves into this agreement are forced to display a public rictus or face additional withdrawals from their credit cards/bank accounts, as well as lawsuits for defamation and breach of contract. Those who pay the higher price initially are somewhat better off, although Roca Labs still seems intent on shutting down any negative portrayal of its products.

Given this background, it comes as no surprise that its courtroom tactics are just as surly and underhanded. A new motion for "case-terminating sanctions" has been filed in one of Roca's many, many lawsuits.

For the third time, Plaintiff and its attorney have engaged in unlawful witness intimidation. The prior times, this Court just told them not to do it again. They did not respect that warning. This time, Roca’s attorney is attempting to intimidate an expert witness from testifying by threatening criminal sanctions, and that threat has placed this witness in fear, requiring a rebuke from this Court sufficient to assuage his fears. A simple “don’t do it again” did not work last time. (Doc. # 17.) Defendants request a harsher rebuke from this Court, lest this continue.

This lawsuit, brought in Florida's middle district, features Roca suing PissedConsumer for negative reviews. Roca is suing everyone involved, from the reviewers themselves to the company owning the company owning the PissedConsumer brand. In its voluminous discovery demands, Roca is seeking pretty much every detail about every involved entity, including innocuous business dealings and, weirdly, the account holder info behind some negative tweets.

Several months and 100+ documents later, there's been some fighting over depositions and witnesses. That's where this gets uglier. Marc Randazza's filing notes that this isn't even the first time in this particular case that Roca's attempted to intimidate witnesses into withdrawing.

This action began with a request from Roca for this Court to impose an unconstitutional prior restraint on Defendants, in the form of their Motion for Entry of a Temporary Injunction. In Defendants’ Opposition to this Motion, filed September 18, 2014, Defendants contacted Roca’s former customers and attached declarations from them detailing their experience with Roca’s products. Very shortly after Defendants filed their Opposition, Plaintiff contacted these witnesses with threats of litigation for breach of an unenforceable contract. This timing was anything but coincidental, and so Defendants then brought a motion for a temporary restraining order against Plaintiff to cease this witness intimidation. While the Court denied Defendants’ motion on September 23, 2014, it “remind[ed] the parties that it will not hesitate to impose sanctions on any party that engages in witness tampering, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512.”

This stern talking to didn't work. Roca sued the witness, as well as Randazza himself. Now, it's attempting to do the same thing to another potential witness, only going further by claiming (baselessly) that the witness could be subject to criminal charges.

Fast forward to May 2015. The parties have been in the process of attempting to schedule depositions prior to the discovery cutoff, including the deposition of Defendants’ expert witness Thomas Parisi, MD. Defendants’ counsel retained Dr. Parisi as an expert witness, and the two worked together to determine a fair expert billing rate for all parties to this action. (See Declaration of Marc J. Randazza [“Randazza Decl.”], attached as Exhibit 3, ¶¶ 2-7.)

On May 22, 2015, Mr. Berger contacted Dr. Parisi by phone. (Declaration of Thomas Parisi [“Parisi Decl.”], attached as Exhibit 4, ¶ 8.) During this conversation, Mr. Berger asked Dr. Parisi about his expert witness billing rates, and Dr. Parisi informed him of them. (Parisi Decl. ¶ 9.) After being told of Dr. Parisi’s rates, Mr. Berger threatened him with criminal prosecution, stating that charging different rates for written testimony and trial testimony was “illegal” and that he would need to retain legal representation. (Parisi Decl. ¶ 10.) Berger went so far as to threaten Dr. Parisi with criminal prosecution. (Parisi Decl. ¶ 10.) Dr. Parisi felt intimidated and frightened by Mr. Berger’s threats, especially in light of Roca’s prior behavior. (Parisi Decl. ¶¶ 11-12, 15.) Dr. Parisi is hesitant to testify on Defendants’ behalf, specifically due to Mr. Berger’s threats. (Parisi Decl. ¶ XX.)

In defense of its actions, Roca Lab's lawyer, Paul Berger, claims Randazza somehow "fixed" the prices to make it, I don't know, prohibitively expensive? (Randazza has to pay the same amount for Parisi's testimony.) Berger's email is included in the exhibits, and it's filled with allegations that Parisi could do the work cheaper, and that Randazza drove the price up. Cited in support are the fact that Parisi closes his office at noon every Friday (Parisi's higher in-person rate cites having to close his office as justification for the increase), as well as the fact that the average Las Vegas vein surgeon makes $375,000 a year -- both of which seem mostly irrelevant to the issue at hand -- that issue being that expert witnesses are free to charge whatever they'd like for court appearances.

From Florida's laws on expert witness fees:

Any expert or skilled witness who shall have testified in any cause shall be allowed a witness fee including the cost of any exhibits used by such witness in an amount agreed to by the parties, and the same shall be taxed as costs. In instances where services are provided for the state, including for state-paid private court-appointed counsel, payment from state funds shall be in accordance with standards adopted by the Legislature.

Here's Parisi's statement:

As with the majority of expert witnesses, I charge a different billable rate for research and preparation of written reports than I do for in-person testimony.

Part of the reason I charge a higher rate for in-person testimony is that when I am doing research and drafting reports, I can do that in the comfort of my home, during down-time, when I would otherwise not be working or spending time with my family. Therefore, for reports, I only charge $300 per hour.

For in-person testimony, I charge a minimum of $3,000 for a half day. This is because I must take my practice offline for that much time, if I am going to report to a court or a court reporter’s office. In addition, it requires me to shut down my clinic for a large portion of a given day, as I am the only doctor working at my clinic. Further, I find in person testimony to be unpleasant and undesirable, and while I am willing to do it for the right pay, I can think of no other activity that would be as unpleasant as being deposed.

Parisi's statement also points out that it's not out of the realm of the imagination that Roca Labs would follow through with its threat to bring criminal charges against him (or, at least, attempt to, despite having no basis for doing so) considering it has already sued an opposing counsel for statements made in court.

Furthermore, Parisi offers his sworn statement that Berger's assertions in his email to Marc Randazza are wholly untrue:

It is my sworn testimony that Mr. Berger is lying in this email to Mr. Randazza, and that his statements regarding the contents of our phone conversation are not true. Mr. Berger’s statements are completely false, and seem calculated to try and create a rift between the defendants and myself.

Now, whether Roca's threats were prompted by a desire to keep Parisi from testifying or simply because its sludge slush fund for testimony reimbursement is running a little low because of its many litigations remains to be seen. But what it looks like is the standard Roca legal strategy: threaten, sue, threaten, sue, ad nauseum -- which apparently even extends to witnesses otherwise uninvolved (i.e., without "bypass alternative" currently or recently residing in their stomachs) with the lawsuits.

The allegations on either side are ugly. Roca is accused of baselessly threatening a witness with criminal charges. Randazza is accused of inflating the witness' testimony price (which would be odd, considering that's the price he also has to pay). The question before the court is: did Roca's lawyer's action rise to the level of sanctionable intimidation? A prior verbal warning by the court doesn't seem to have had any effect on Berger and Roca. If this sort of behavior continues, Roca may soon find itself being referred to as the "Prenda" of questionable weight loss products.

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Putin Has Shifted His Internet Propaganda Army Into Overdrive

While propaganda is certainly not the exclusive territory of Putin's Russia, it has become clear that Putin and friends -- when not busy arranging accidents for administration critics -- have taken internet propaganda specifically to an entirely new level. Back in April, reports started emerging detailing how Putin has built entire factories dedicated to soiling and seeding the internet with propaganda. Armies of paid sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation twenty-four hours a day.

It has been fascinating to watch whistleblowers at these factories coming forward in recent months, detailing how they're shocked by how effective such efforts are on shaping public discourse:

"The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realize that all this is having an effect,” the former worker said."

Interestingly, one of the workers at these factories was recently courageous enough to put her name in print. Journalist and single mother Lyuda Savchuk states she knew she was entering an "Orwellian universe" when she took the job, but found things notably worse than she ever imagined once inside:

"I knew it was something bad, but of course I never suspected that it was this horrible and this large-scale," she said in an interview in her apartment, which has colorful drawings on the walls for her two preschool-age children. She described how the trolls manage several social media accounts under different nicknames, such as koka-kola23, green--margo and Funornotfun. Those in her department had to bash out 160 blog posts during a 12-hour shift. Trolls in other departments flooded the Internet with doctored images and pro-Putin commentary on news stories that crop up on Russian and Western news portals."

While the AP report states Savchuk quit, other reports suggest that she was fired only after speaking to the media. Not only that, Savchuk is suing the government, focusing on the lack of paperwork outlining her responsibilities or the reason for her firing (apparently the Russian government isn't keen on a paper trail). She's also organizing an activist retaliation to the propaganda efforts:

"The ‘troll factory’ operates based on very weird schemes, but all those firms are connected to each other, even though they are separate legal entities,” Savchuk was quoted as saying. Since her dismissal, Savchuk has been organising a public movement against online trolling called Informatsionny Mir – a name that can be translated both as “Information World” and "Information Peace." "There are both opposition activists and supporters of the government among us, but we all believe that such methods of information war are unacceptable,” she said."

Several of the reports note that there has been a concerted effort to hire more English speaking trolls to try and influence thinking in the United States as well, as Russia gleefully annexes the Ukraine and tries to defend its atrocious positions on gay rights. Internet Research, the company that runs the operation and is owned by a friend of Putin, has also taken to hiring more Serbian trolls to try and pull Serbia off of its trajectory as a future EU member. As has long been the case, this propaganda operates hand in hand with the use of violence to silence opposition:

"When Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed in Moscow in late February, the Serbian trolls were quick to react. "Who is to gain from this assassination but America? It must have been CIA," was the dominant mantra that took hold in discussions on Serbian news sites. "Likes" went into the hundreds, while comments such as "Putin is responsible" received widespread ridicule."

Putin's problem? Propaganda usually only works well when it's not easily identifiable as propaganda. Putin and friends appear to believe they can overcome this problem by simply operating on a massive scale, using not only its troll factories but tens of thousands of Twitter bots to shout nonsense from every internet street corner. Of course you'd like to think the pillars of truth have their roots in firmer bedrock, and on most of these issues (like gay rights) Putin's simply throwing money at a thunderstorm. But on other issues (like eroding support for Serbian EU integration or fostering support for Russia's invasion of the Ukraine), Putin's army of disinformation jackasses have been worryingly effective.

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Judge Orders Newspaper To Delete Article, Newspaper Reminds Judge That It's In The US And The 1st Amendment Exists

This seems to happen all too often, but a local judge has forgotten about the whole 1st Amendment thing. Last week, Bergen County Superior Court Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca ordered the Bergen Dispatch to take down a news article. The article was about a specific family court case, involving custody of a child. It's not surprising that there might be some concern over privacy rights in such cases, but even so, that does not allow a judge to flat out order a newspaper to take down an article -- even moreso when the order came out of a closed hearing where no one from the newspaper was even present. In response, the Bergen Dispatch posted a fairly snarky article that reiterates some of the details from the case, and concludes with this wonderful paragraph:

While the Bergen Dispatch reviews its options we have confirmed that Bergen County does currently remain part of the State of New Jersey and that currently New Jersey is still part of the Union of states that is governed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As such, Bergen County citizens continue to enjoy the right to freedom of speech and the right to a free press.

Informed of this little tidbit of information, the judge has since vacated the original order, but it's still astounding that it had to go that far in the first place.

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