eSports has been a thing for some time now. While competitive video gaming was once relegated to some minor tournaments incorporating a few games held in a couple of countries in Asia, eSports has evolved into a wider industry. You can track the progress of it all by its reaching certain checkpoints: viewership numbers that look like those of real-life sporting events, the introduction of college scholarships for eAthletes, and eSports coverage appearing on national broadcasts from the likes of ESPN. The trend line for this has only moved in one direction. And now that appears to be continuing with professional sports leagues getting in on the action.

The latest in this is the National Basketball Association's announcement that it will be partnering with Take-Two Interactive to start its own eSports basketball league.

Today, the National Basketball Association announced plans to partner with publisher Take-Two Interactive for an official NBA 2K esports league, which led NBA commissioner Adam Silver to deliver this fantastic quote to the Wall Street Journal: “Think of eBulls against the eKnicks.”

The way this will work should be exactly as I imagined it would when I began playing the single player versions of sports games half a decade ago. And I'm sure many others considered how this might happen as well. Individual gamers would control individual custom players within an official league. It's like playing the MyPlayer version of the NBA2K series, except that you're playing in a league consisting of nothing but MyPlayers and competing online for teams, which might have their own owners, pay structures, etc.

The league, Silver explained, will operate just like the NBA: It’ll have a regular season, a playoff bracket, and a finals matchup. Teams of five players, each with his (or her?) own custom NBA 2K characters, will compete in a five-month season that starts in 2018. There’ll even be a draft, Silver said, although he also noted to the Wall Street Journal that none of the 30 NBA teams have fully committed to this esports league yet. (He expects around half of them to participate in the first year.)

It's not hard to imagine how this could balloon from this starting point. Owners of eSports NBA franchises might in the future fill a 12-man roster with gamers in this manner. They might hire coaches, fill out budgets for general managers that will be responsible for drafting and signing eAthletes, etc. It would be an eSports league that would mirror the real life sports league in most ways. The concept sounds really fun, though it remains to be seen how many NBA teams want to get on board.

What is clear, though, is that eSports isn't some fad ready to flame out quickly.

Earlier in the year, the public learned ISPs in the UK were partnering with the entertainment industries to send out "educational notices" to internet users suspected of copyright infringement. Having seen this type of "education" take many forms in the past, from silly to threatening, we have since waited to see what form this iteration would take. Well, TorrentFreak got in touch with someone who was notified through the system, and it appears this version is relatively benign.

The redacted sections are those that would identify the individual to whom it was sent, but you get an idea of the actual content in the notice. The links included in the notice are to the subscriber's ISP account, as well as one that takes you to the 'Get it Right Information Portal." It's at that portal that a subscriber will get more information on the suspected act of copyright infringement. While that information is fairly detailed, including such things as file sizes and types, the times and dates of the infringement, and the application used in the alleged infringement... the whole thing still relies on the faulty evidence of an IP address. That's problematic for reasons we've discussed to death here at Techdirt, but given the lack of any threatening language in any of this, it's still all fairly benign.

Which is why the individual TorrentFreak spoke with, who admits to committing the act in question, doesn't think the public will be all that impressed with this unsolicited "education."

“I don’t think [the warnings] will work, at least not on a big scale. Maybe they will educate some people who did it by mistake or did it just once but for someone like me there is no hope. But at least the campaign is not aggressive.”

The only thing in all of this that raised some eyebrows was that this notice came from Sky, the same ISP that has suggested that receivers of these notices will be forced to remove filesharing software to keep service from being interrupted.

“Your broadband service won’t be affected as a result of receiving this email alert,” Sky assures its subscribers, but it doesn’t stop there. “However, if you continue to share content illegally using your broadband connection, Sky will request that you take immediate steps to remove or disable any file sharing software that is being used to share copyrighted content illegally,” Sky writes.

So, putting all of this together makes this a little more troubling. ISPs will monitor your connection at the behest of private industry, will notify you that they're doing so, and only promise to serve you as their customer if you agree to remove software with all kinds of legitimate uses... and all of this is still based on the concept that an IP address is useful as an identifier for an infringer. When taken in total context, it's easy to see how this foot-in-the door, benign "education" could transition to ISPs mandating control of the public's software rollouts to get service. And that's not benign at all.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, I am closely following the "airport cases" around the country. In order to keep abreast of the latest developments in one of the fastest-moving cases, Washington v. Trump, I built a Twitter bot that scrapes the public docket mirror hosted by the Ninth Circuit and tweets about new documents and links as soon as they're added.

This case leads a legal push that has attracted incredible amounts of public attention. There have been tens of thousands of protestors, dozens of organizations and companies that submitted amicus briefs (including Techdirt's think-tank arm, the Copia Institute), and over 135,000 people who tuned into the audio-only livestream of the Ninth Circuit oral arguments (which was also broadcast live on multiple news channels).

Those numbers reveal a public demand to be informed and to participate in the law. But they also show the limitations on the kind of transparency that can satisfy that demand. Most notably, any attempts to make court proceedings more accessible to the public has to contend with the expense and overhead of dealing with PACER. My bot is only possible because the Ninth Circuit provides a public docket mirror for individual "cases of interest," essentially duplicating the existing system outside the paywall. Those mirrors are manually updated, which means they are labor-intensive, error-prone, and not always up to date.

By contrast, look at the @big_cases bot run by USA Today reporter Brad Heath. It monitors a set of district court cases, selected by hand, and posts new documents as they get filed. These district court cases don't have public docket mirrors, so @big_cases accesses PACER directly -- and for that, it needs user credentials and ultimately to pay for the documents it downloads. For a journalist whose job is reporting on legal developments, paying these costs makes sense -- and sharing the documents further is a valuable public service. Without institutional backing, though, it's hard to justify the PACER expenses.

The costs go beyond the financial. These bots represent an experiment in meeting members of the public where they are, and those efforts are less likely if they come with a pricetag. Worse, it means these experiments will be limited to cases of widespread general interest. To pick a trivial example: Techdirt readers might be interested in a bot that tweets updates from privacy or copyright dockets. If those public documents were freely accessible, anybody could build a tool like that without worrying about subsidizing the ongoing PACER costs.

At a time when the president and his press secretary are calling into question the legitimacy of factual news reporting, an informed public requires more than ever access to primary sources. Moreover, they need to be confident in the integrity of those sources. Journalists reporting on court proceedings increasingly post the original source documents. Without a free and public government source file, though, most readers can't see the context of the case, and they have to trust that they're getting the full and unmodified documents in question.

The procedural stance of Washington v. Trump is unclear. A Ninth Circuit judge has made a request that both sides brief whether a larger panel should re-hear the question. The White House has issued conflicting reports about whether or not it will appeal Thursday's order to the Supreme Court. And the District Court has indicated that a new briefing schedule might be appropriate. These paths offer various levels of transparency, and it's frustrating to know my bot may not be able to keep up with, say, district court proceedings simply because of the antiquated PACER system.

Meanwhile, the issue continues to attract attention from lawmakers. The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Judicial Transparency and Ethics on Tuesday, February 14, and is expected to include testimony on PACER. Hopefully, the Committee uses this to recognize that a truly transparent judiciary requires rethinking how PACER functions.

PayPal is ubiquitous. And that's unfortunate. Over the years, the payment platform has earned a reputation for acting in a way that can charitably be described as "hellishly inconsistent." For little to no reason, users have found their accounts shut down or suspended. And, thanks to US laws meant to prevent the PayPal-ing of material support to foreign terrorists, PayPal has been suspending accounts for innocuous payments containing certain trigger words in the descriptions.

The latest victim of PayPal's inscrutable policies and unapproachable customer service is a small Canadian newspaper. As the CBC reports, the small paper's attempt to enter a few of its stories for consideration for national newspaper awards resulted in the bricking of both the sender's and the receiver's accounts.

A community newspaper's payment to enter a feel-good story about a family of Syrian refugees in an awards competition prompted PayPal to freeze the account of a national media organization after flagging the suspicious transaction, The Canadian Press has learned.

[...]

The weekly Flin Flon Reminder entered the article — titled "Syrian family adapts to new life" — last month as part of its submissions to the annual Canadian Community Newspaper Awards. The feature story from July 2016 outlines the challenges and triumphs as the family settled in the Manitoban town of 5,100 and the community's willingness to make them feel welcome.

The word "Syrian" set off PayPal's auto-monitor, which blocked the Flin Flon Reminder's $240 in entry fees. (To be considered for the awards, submitters must pay $60 per article submitted -- and it would appear Flin Flon submitted four of them.)

It would be one thing if the payment was flagged and then reviewed. But nothing in the story suggests PayPal took a second look at this until a larger media outfit -- the CBC -- started asking questions.

PayPal didn't limit itself to killing the sender's account. It suspended the receiver's account as well.

This week, Durnin called News Media Canada — formerly Newspaper Canada — to find out what had happened. They realized PayPal had frozen the News Media Canada account, said Nicole Bunt, who processes the awards entries.

PayPal supposedly reviews flagged payments within 72 hours. No one involved heard anything from PayPal until after the CBC's inquiries. The belated response from PayPal: "Um... US law mumble mumble mumble."

"You may be buying or selling goods or services that are regulated or prohibited by the U.S. government," PayPal said in an email to News Media Canada.

Oh, really? This is some spectacular review work by PayPal, considering both the sender and the receiver are located entirely in Canada. While US law may govern US transactions processed by the company, they should have little to no effect on completely extraterritorial transactions.

And the sole reason for PayPal's dual account nuking? The word "Syrian" being in the submission to the newspaper awards.

The note also requested a "complete and detailed explanation of the transaction" and the purpose of the payment, which identified with the story's headline.

That's the problem with keyword flagging. All it's ever going to do is produce false positives and inconvenience hundreds of non-terrorists. The algorithms deployed by PayPal are looking for terms no terrorist is going to use when transferring funds to allies. It works on the stupidest of assumptions: that memo lines are going to filled with suspicious keywords when actual nefarious transactions are taking place.

If you're going to build a US law-compliant service that relies on tragically flawed logic, the least you can do is actually review flagged transactions in a timely manner and provide actual people customers can talk to, to sort out these issues.

Instead, PayPal appears to have left this payment-vetting process to the machines and made it all but impossible to speak to someone who might be able to derive something from context. And it makes it worse by subjecting other countries to US law, whether or not the flagged transaction violates laws in the country where the funds are changing hands.

Then there's this kicker at the end of the CBC article.

PayPal did not immediately explain its process.

Yeah. Or EVER. That's the other problem. Go ahead and CYA by flagging keywords and keeping your Terms of Use vaguely-written and open to often-baffling interpretations. But do your customers a favor and at least answer questions about the specifics of their flagged transactions. At the very least, it would show some human has eyes on the process. If you can't be proactive, at least be usefully reactive.

Despite the rising competitive threat of T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless has spent the last few years simply refusing to seriously compete on price. That stubbornness has extended to the company's refusal to match T-Mobile's unlimited data plans, eliminated by Verizon back in 2011. In a truly competitive market, you're supposed to listen to your customers and try to provide whatever they're clamoring for. But Verizon's tack has been the exact opposite; the company spending the last few years trying to tell consumers they don't really want simpler, unlimited data options -- and that these plans are unnecessary and unviable.

For most of this time, Verizon Wireless' excuse du jour was that it didn't have to compete on price or service because its network was just that phenomenal. But a report last week by Open Signal found that T-Mobile, once considered an under-cooked upstart, was finally fielding a network that nearly matches Verizon in terms of both speed and overall coverage:

"Our testers were able to find a Verizon LTE signal 88.2% of the time, cementing Big Red's place at the top of our 4G rankings. But T-Mobile has been systematically closing the gap. In the fourth quarter its 4G availability was less than two percentage points below Verizon's, the closest we've seen that difference."

Initially Verizon tried to downplay the results, insisting that because Open Signal uses crowdsourced data, that the results souldn't be taken seriously. That didn't go over particularly well over at T-Mobile:

But Verizon then did a 180, announcing late last week that the company would finally be offering unlimited data again, and without throttling video, music or games as a result (which is now standard practice at both T-Mobile and Sprint). Of course the industry's definition of "unlimited" remains as murky as it has always been, with Verizon quick to note that by "unlimited," they actually mean somewhere around 22 gigabytes per month, after which your connection will likely be throttled:

"On all Verizon Unlimited plans you get our fast LTE speeds. To ensure a quality experience for all customers, after 22 GB of data usage on a line during any billing cycle we may prioritize usage behind other customers in the event of network congestion. While we don’t expect to do that very often, network management is a crucial tool that benefits all Verizon customers."

Still, a good move is a good move. And Verizon's decision will likely push AT&T (which currently only sells you unlimited data if you bundle your wireless connection a with DirecTV service) to follow suit. Granted competition in telecom is fickle and inconsistent, and non-price competition -- where theatrics trump actual value -- is generally the rule of thumb. And should rumors of a new Sprint, T-Mobile merger be accurate, we could very quickly be facing three large carriers with, once again, little to no incentive to actually give consumers what they want.

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Part of the reason asset forfeiture is such a problem is the lack of transparency. The funds obtained through this process are frequently hidden from the public and used to purchase everything from margarita makers to Stingray devices. The procedure through which the government takes control of citizens' assets is also shrouded in secrecy. Cases are filed against property, not the persons formerly in possession of them. The process for retrieval is purposely impenetrable, designed to make it almost impossible for petitioners to reclaim their assets.

Law enforcement officials claim that all parts of this opaque process are there to prevent drug dealing and/or terrorism, hence their reluctance to divulge the inner details of this particular mean/method. Legislators in New Jersey were hoping to end this unofficial tradition with a bill that would have demanded far more transparency from agencies involved in asset forfeiture.

S2267 passed with unanimous support in both houses of the State legislature and would have instituted the following information be submitted to the state Attorney General's office every year.

[I]nformation on the seizure of the property, including a description of the seized property; the date of seizure ; the market value of the seized property; the alleged criminal offense associated with the seizure; a description of the location at which the property was seized, including whether the property was seized from a private residence or business or during a traffic stop; if the property was seized during a traffic stop, the name of the highway, street, or road on which the property was seized and whether the vehicle was traveling northbound, southbound, eastbound or westbound;

   (2)   the disposition of any criminal action related to the seizure;

   (3)   information on forfeiture of the seized property, including:

   (a)   whether the forfeiture involved prima facie contraband or was enforced by civil action pursuant to N.J.S.2C:64-1 et seq., the forfeiture was a result of racketeering activity pursuant to N.J.S.2C:41-1 et seq., or the forfeited funds or property were obtained from an action involving financial facilitation of a crime pursuant to P.L.1994, c.121 (C.2C:21-23 et seq.); and

   (b)   whether a person with a property interest in the seized property was represented by counsel at the forfeiture proceeding, if applicable;

   (4)   information on the final disposition of the seized property, including whether the property was returned to the owner, destroyed, sold after forfeiture, or retained after forfeiture; and the date of disposition;

   (5)   information on the value of 1the1 forfeited property, including the gross amount received from 1the1 forfeiture, the total expenses deducted as part of the forfeiture action, and the net amount received from the forfeiture;

   (6)   whether the forfeiture resulted from an adoptive seizure; and

   (7)   any other information the Attorney General requires.

This information would have provided the public with valuable insight into state law enforcement's use of asset forfeiture. And there are several reasons law enforcement wouldn't want to have to turn over these details. The dirty secret of asset forfeiture is that it's not being used to take down the biggest and baddest criminals. It's far more frequently used to nickle-and-dime average citizens, with a majority of an agency's take being made up of seizures valued at well below $10,000. Vehicles are seized from grandmothers because their grandchildren drove drunk. Any cash on anyone who smells like marijuana to a police officer usually ends up being forfeited even if the person is free to go.

These details would have made the state's asset forfeiture programs looks exactly as bad as they are. New Jersey holds a D rating from the Institute for Justice, which performs annual reviews of states' forfeiture programs, rating them for damage done to citizens' rights and property. One of the aspects of forfeiture that aided in the state's D rating is the lack of transparency and almost-nonexistent reporting requirements.

County prosecutors across the state collected $72 million in forfeiture proceeds from 2009 to 2013, including more than $57 million in cash and vehicles worth $9 million, according to the report.

In addition, the report found county agencies received an average of $7 million a year from federal "equitable sharing" programs that give state and local agencies a cut when they serve on federal task forces.

But the millions tallied by the institute "are a vast undercount for what's going on in New Jersey," according to Dick Carpenter, the group's director of strategic research and one of the authors of the report.

Carpenter said it's difficult to get the whole picture in New Jersey because while the state does collect some data, it was not able to provide the group with comprehensive figures for local and state law enforcement agencies.

"The transparency in New Jersey is pretty poor," he said. "The ability for average folks -- or even elected officials -- to know what's going on in their state or municipality just isn't there."

None of this matters now, at least not for the foreseeable future. Governor Chris Christie has decided the public isn't on the "need to know" list as far as asset forfeiture is concerned.

Gov. Chris Christie on Monday vetoed a bill that would have required county and state prosecutors to publish information about how they use civil courts to seize property from criminal investigations.

In order to fend off any attempts at a veto override, Christie has proposed his own law enforcement-friendly "fixes" to the rejected legislation.

Christie instead recommended a quarterly report in which prosecutors identify seized assets and detail the legal proceedings by which they were seized.

Under Christie's proposal, prosecutors also would not have to disclose why they seized an asset or for what purpose it would be used.

Christie's "compromise" does nothing. Quarterly reports are already filed with the attorney general, but they're withheld from the public. The details included are minimal and provide no useful insight into law enforcement's forfeiture activities. And it's not as though the AG's office goes after agencies for incomplete or nonexistent reporting. There appears to be no consequences for agencies that fail to comply with these minimal reporting requirements.

Of course, Christie's "compromise" is predicated on a ridiculous pretense.

The governor said his proposed changes would "strike a balance between government transparency and protecting law enforcement operations and personnel."

Protect law enforcement from what exactly? Transparency? Accountability? Criticism? There's nothing in the information the bill demanded that would make it anything more dangerous for law enforcement. It might inform the public where law enforcement likes to go diving for dollars, but the only negative thing likely to happen to law enforcement is an increase in informed criticism.

In Christie's mouth, the words "government transparency" are meaningless -- as meaningless in his buzzword jumbling, bootlicking excuse for kicking the legislature's unanimously-supported bill to the curb.

As was widely expected, back in October, Oracle announced its appeal of Google's big fair use win, concerning its reuse of certain Java API components in Android. If you've been following this (long, long, long) case, you'll recall that Google has won twice at the district court level. The first time, Judge William Alsup correctly noted that APIs were not subject to copyright, because copyright law clearly states that copyright protection does not apply to "any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery," and an API is a process, system or method of operation. However, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), who only had jurisdiction over the case because it initially involved a patent issue, seemed unable to understand that an API is different from software and overturned the lower court's sensible ruling.

That resulted in the second case which was weird, because everyone had to tiptoe around the fact that basically everyone had assumed that APIs were not covered by copyright, in order to instead make a fair use argument, which ultimately succeeded. Oracle then tried to play some games to get that ruling overturned, but that failed miserably, when the judge pointed out that Oracle's argument was almost entirely based on a failure to read what Google had actually given them (Oracle had claimed that Google failed to disclose something important, when the reality was that Oracle's lawyers failed to read the material that Google had given them).

Anyway, now that things are back at CAFC, we have to hope and pray that the court doesn't muck things up any worse than it already has (and, trust me, it's mucked things up badly to the point that it's impacting a bunch of other cases). On Friday, Oracle filed its 155-page opening brief. Feel free to dig in, if you must, but the arguments are (mostly) basically what we expected. Oracle argues that Google's use is not fair use (basically saying the jury got it wrong). It further argues that the case should be sent back to the district court because it was prevented from presenting key evidence that would have undermined the fair use claim. And then, somewhat incredibly, at the end, Oracle continues to try to argue that Google concealed its plans to expand Android into PCs -- the very issue that Judge Alsup smacked Oracle down for when it was revealed that Google had shared that info, and Oracle just hadn't read it. In the filing, Oracle whines that Judge Alsup "blamed the victim" for not having read what Google actually gave them, saying that it was impossible to have read everything Google gave them because there was just too much stuff and this was a "needle in the haystack." That... seems pretty weak. Amusingly, at the same time that Oracle is complaining that Google gave Oracle too much in discovery, it also complains that Google clearly withheld more info. Throw any argument at the wall and see what sticks, I guess.

Frankly, this opening brief seems to really lean in to CAFC's notorious ignorance of how software works, and the fact that last time around it couldn't tell the difference between an API and software. It just keeps focusing on the agreed upon point that Google copied some of Java's APIs, but keeps calling it "copyrighted code." It's impossible to predict how CAFC will rule, because CAFC is frequently hilariously confused when it comes to how technology (and software in particular) actually work. But hopefully someone over there will take the time to figure it out. After all, there have been a few, somewhat shocking signs of enlightenment in the past few months at CAFC. Hopefully that continues.

The state of Ohio has had its problems with speed cameras. Back in 2010, the city of New Garfield refunded $100,000 in fines collected in violation of its speed camera policy. The city told the public that drivers would only be ticketed for driving more than eleven mph over the speed limit [... which makes one question the purpose of its speed limits]. Plenty of drivers got dinged for exceeding the speed limit by less than the arbitrary cutoff, resulting in the mass refund.

Not that this will necessarily keep anyone from being ticketed, speeding or not. In the same year, an Ohio court ruled that an officer's guesstimate of someone's speed is just as reliable as radar or speed cameras when it comes to testimony. Given how many speed cameras have ticketed parked cars and brick walls, this is somewhat of a "close case" when it comes to testimonial accuracy.

The Newspaper -- which stays on top of every speed/traffic cam-related development [note: they really HATE traffic cams in France…] -- reports that New Miami, Ohio, is being forced to hand back every cent of its speed camera take as the result of a court decision.

New Miami, Ohio broke the law, it was caught, and now it will have to repay $3,066,523 worth of tickets. That was the judgment rendered Wednesday by Butler County Court of Common Pleas Judge Michael A. Oster Jr.

"If the government has created an unconstitutional law/ordinance that has taken people's money without affording them the necessary due process protections, should not justice demand, and the law require, restitution of that money to the people?" Oster asked at the opening of his ruling. "Once the complexities of the law are analyzed, the answer is simple: Yes."

As the court sees it, the system set up by the town eliminates a crucial Constitutional right. It's very likely the town knew its actions were unconstitutional, but it probably never assumed it would have to refund $3 million in ill-gotten revenue.

New Miami, Ohio, is more speed trap than town, as the court order [PDF] explains:

The Village of New Miami is in St. Clair Township located just north of the city of Hamilton. New Miami is less than one square mile in size (.95 square miles) and has a population of 2,249 people based on the 2010 United States Census Bureau. US. 127, a major north-south highway, runs through the Village and is the primary location where the speed cameras were located.

Despite its blink-and-you'll-miss-it size, the village still issued an incredible amount of tickets, thanks in part to its freebie contract with camera provider Blue Line Solutions (BLS). The contract it signed required the cameras (of which there were at least two) to be in operation for a minimum of 100 hours a month. This isn't unmanned time, as the camera system requires an officer to pull a trigger and capture an image of the speeding driver to send to the processing company that issues the tickets.

BLS gave the town the cameras for free, under the assumption the investment would pay off with operating times of 100 hours per month minimum per camera.

After review by a Village of New Miami police supervisor, the ticket is mailed to the registered owner and a fine of $95 is included.

The village and Blue Line Solutions, LLC split each $95 fine with one another. The village keeps 65 percent of the $95 fine while the private camera company keeps 35 percent.

The speed cameras as free for the village, provided to the village by the private contractor under the five year deal.

To ensure the revenue flow wasn't disrupted by angry drivers and/or insurance companies, the town rewrote its statutes to cut both the criminal justice system and insurance companies out of the equation.

Village of New Miami records show the small Butler County village created its own speeding law in 1991, allowing the village to charge speeding violations under a civil ordinance instead of under the state’s uniform traffic statute.

Under the village ordinance, drivers caught speeding in New Miami would not be subjected to the state’s point system, which would suspend a driver who accrued 12 point violations in a two year period. As a result, insurance companies would not know the conduct of the drivers they cover.

None of that matters now that the court has found the village's system unconstitutional and the town responsible for paying back members of this class action lawsuit. And this $3 million will all be coming from New Miami. The camera manufacturer has no liability if the cameras are deployed unlawfully. That's all on the municipality, which will probably have to screw its own residents to issue refunds on the hundreds of bogus tickets as the money it's unlawfully collected over the years hasn't just been sitting around collecting interest.

The Christian Science Monitor has posted an interesting article detailing some (but certainly not all) of the ways the US Secret Service can obtain data from locked phones. In all the cases discussed in the article, the data itself wasn't encrypted, but was otherwise inaccessible without the password.

In addition to using third-party forensic software and hardware (like that of recently-hacked Cellebrite), the Secret Service also engages in a lot of manual labor to recover phone data. In one instance, the Secret Service was able to pull out the phone's flash memory and grab data from it -- although this process took it nearly a week.

A Huawei phone obtained by the agency called for a very unique brute force approach.

In another case, involving a password-locked Huawei H883G phone, agents bought multiple copies of the same model and practiced carefully polishing off material from the back of the device with an automated sander.

Often, agents can apply heat to phones to open them up. But Huawei built this particular model in a way that applying too much heat could damage its memory. So, agents sanded off material from the back of the Huawei H883G device to excise sexually explicit images for a case involving a different New Hampshire man.

What's not contained in the article are complaints about encryption. Either the Secret Service doesn't encounter that much of it, or it just doesn't find it to be that much of an obstacle when it does. Dave Aitel, a former NSA research scientist, is the only person quoted in the article who says anything about encryption -- and even he believes the Secret Service's combination of hardware and software is a better approach than giving government agencies encryption backdoors.

Watering down encryption on phones is "not a good path," says Dave Aitel, a former National Security Agency research scientist who currently runs the cybersecurity firm Immunity. "The path of hacking is much nicer – from a policy perspective."

[...]

"If a device is using encryption at rest ... that could be problematic, especially if the implementation of the encryption is good,” he said.

It could be problematic, but encryption keeps bad guys out the same way it keeps the good guys out. And there's nothing covered here that suggests the Secret Service is as opposed to encryption as FBI Director James Comey is. Granted, the Secret Service probably runs into fewer encrypted phones than the FBI does, but even in its more-limited selection, it seems to be making the progress it needs without suggesting the government force companies to give them all-access backdoor keys.

One other somewhat surprising revelation contained in the piece is the fact that small phone manufacturers might (inadvertently) be making more secure phones than the Apples and Samsungs of the world. Why? Because the limited market draws less interest from government contractors who develop cell phone-cracking tools. If there are fewer government buyers interested in cracking Brand X, no company is going to expend research resources trying to find a way around the phone's built-in protections.

"A cheaper phone that might be less popular, it seems like it'd be easier for the vendors to get into it," says [James] Darnell of the Secret Service phone lab. "But it's actually quite the opposite."

What's covered here indicates James Comey's "sky is falling darkening" proclamations are pretty much his alone. Law enforcement at large isn't demanding encryption backdoors. It's just the same handful of holdouts, albeit ones with inordinately-large soapboxes.