The original song appeared on 2019’s "Hot Pink."

One of the key points we've been making concerning Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ's eager support for the terrible EARN-IT Act, is that much of it really seems to be to cover up the DOJ's own failings in fighting child porn and child exploitation. The premise behind the EARN IT Act is that there's a lot of child exploitation/child abuse material found on social media... and that social media companies should do more to block that content. Of course, if you step back and think about it, you'd quickly realize that this is a form of sweeping the problem under the rug. Rather than actually tracking down and arresting those exploiting and abusing children, it's demanding private companies just hide the evidence of those horrific acts.

And why might the DOJ and others be so supportive of sweeping evidence under the rug and hiding it? Perhaps because the DOJ and Congress have literally failed to live up to their mandates under existing laws to actually fight child exploitation. Barr's DOJ has been required under law to produce reports showing data about internet crimes against children, and come up with goals to fight those crimes. It has produced only two out of the six reports that were mandated over a decade ago. At the same time, Congress has only allocated a very small budget to state and local law enforcement for fighting internet child abuse. While the laws Congress passed say that Congress should give $60 million to local law enforcement, it has actually allocated only about half of that. Oh, and Homeland Security took nearly half of its "cybercrimes" budget and diverted it to immigration enforcement, rather than fighting internet crimes such as child exploitation.

So... maybe we should recognize that the problem isn't social media platforms, but the fact that Congress and law enforcement -- from local and state up to the DOJ -- have literally failed to do their job.

At least some elected officials have decided to call the DOJ's bluff on why we need the EARN IT Act. Led by Senator Ron Wyden (of course), Senators Kirsten Gillbrand, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown and Rep. Anna Eshoo have introduced a new bill to actually fight child sex abuse online. Called the Invest in Child Safety Act, it would basically make law enforcement do its job regarding this stuff.

The Invest in Child Safety Act would direct $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target the pedophiles and abusers who create and share child sexual abuse material online. And it would create a new White House office to coordinate efforts across federal agencies, after DOJ refused to comply with a 2008 law requiring coordination and reporting of those efforts. It also directs substantial new funding for community-based efforts to prevent children from becoming victims in the first place.

Basically, the bill would do a bunch of things to make sure that law enforcement is actually dealing with the very real problem of child exploitation, rather than demanding that internet companies (1) sweep evidence under the rug, and (2) break encryption:

• Quadruple the number of prosecutors and agents in DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 30 FTEs to 120 FTEs;
• Add 100 new agents and investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Innocent Images National Initiative, Crimes Against Children Unit, Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Teams, and Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Forces;
• Fund 65 new NCMEC analysts, engineers, and mental health counselors, as well as a major upgrade to NCMEC’s technology platform to enable the organization to more effectively evaluate and process CSAM reports from tech companies;
• Double funding for the state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces;
• Double funding for the National Criminal Justice Training Center, to administer crucial Internet Crimes Against Children and Missing and Exploited Children training programs;
• Increase funding for evidence-based programs, local governments and non-federal entities to detect, prevent and support victims of child sexual abuse, including school-based mental health services and prevention programs like the Children’s Advocacy Centers and the HHS’ Street Outreach Program;
• Require tech companies to increase the time that they hold evidence of CSAM, in a secure database, to enable law enforcement agencies to prosecute older cases;
• Establish an Office to Enforce and Protect Against Child Sexual Exploitation, within the Executive Office of the President, to direct and streamline the federal government’s efforts to prevent, investigate and prosecute the scourge of child exploitation;
• Require the Office to develop an enforcement and protection strategy, in coordination with HHS and GAO; and
• Require the Office to submit annual monitoring reports, subject to mandatory Congressional testimony to ensure timely execution.

The government loves its secrets. It loves them so much it does stupid things to, say, "secure the nation..." or "protect the integrity of deliberative processes" or whatever the fuck. We should not trust the government's reasoning when it chooses to redact information from documents it releases to FOIA requesters. These assertions should always be challenged because the government's track record on redactions is objectively awful.

Here's the latest case-in-point: Emma Best -- someone the government feels is a "vexatious" FOIA filer -- just received a completely stupid set of redactions from the Secret Service. Best requested documents mentioning darknet market Hansa, which was shut down (along with Alpha Bay) following an investigation by US and Dutch law enforcement agencies.

The documents returned to Best contained redactions. This is unsurprising given the nature of the investigation. What's surprising is what the Secret Service decided to redact. As Best pointed out on Twitter, the Secret Service decided public press releases by the DOJ were too sensitive to be released to the general public.

Here's one of the redactions [PDF] the Secret Service applied to a press release that can be found unaltered and unedited at the Justice Department's publicly-accessible website:

And here's what the Secret Service excised, under the bullshit theory that a publicly-released press statement is somehow an "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letter which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency."

“This is likely one of the most important criminal investigations of the year – taking down the largest dark net marketplace in history,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Make no mistake, the forces of law and justice face a new challenge from the criminals and transnational criminal organizations who think they can commit their crimes with impunity using the dark net. The dark net is not a place to hide. The Department will continue to find, arrest, prosecute, convict, and incarcerate criminals, drug traffickers and their enablers wherever they are. We will use every tool we have to stop criminals from exploiting vulnerable people and sending so many Americans to an early grave. I believe that because of this operation, the American people are safer – safer from the threat of identity fraud and malware, and safer from deadly drugs.”

Um. Is Jeff Sessions being Yezhoved by the Secret Service? Does the agency consider him to be enough of a persona non grata after his firing by Trump to be excised from the Secret Services' official recollection of this dark web takedown? This insane conspiracy theory I just made up makes as much sense as anything the Secret Service could offer in explanation for this redaction. The redaction removed nothing but the sort of swaggering statement Attorney Generals always make after a huge bust.

Needless to say, Emma Best is challenging the Secret Service's redactions. Pithily.

I am appealing the integrity of the redactions, as you withheld public press releases under b5, which is grossly inappropriate.

Yeah. That's an understatement. The Secret Service has no business redacting publicly-available info. Even if this was a clerical error, it's so bad it's insulting. And that's why you can't trust the government on things like this: when it's not being malicious, it's being stupid.

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U.S. President Donald Trump described his former national security adviser Michael Flynn as an 'innocent man' after learning that the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly sought to drop the criminal charges against Flynn.

U.S. President Donald Trump described his former national security adviser Michael Flynn as an 'innocent man' after learning that the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly sought to drop the criminal charges against Flynn.

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly asked a judge to drop criminal charges against President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn following mounting pressure from Trump and his political allies on the right. This report produced by Jillian Kitchener.

U.S. President Donald Trump described his former national security adviser Michael Flynn as an 'innocent man' after learning that the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly sought to drop the criminal charges against Flynn.

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly asked a judge to drop criminal charges against President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn following mounting pressure from Trump and his political allies on the right. This report produced by Jillian Kitchener.

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Online Resource

Panel Dylan Schiemann (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:57 - Dylan Schiemann Introduction The Dojo Toolkit CEO of SitePen 01:14 - Dojo TD Ameritrade The Wall Street Journal JPMorgan Chase & Co TD Bank voro.com Esri 04:40 - Why is Dojo relevant today? Peter Higgins: #dadt (Dojo already did that) 07:00 - AMD and RequireJS Performance Benefits CommonJS 10:34 - Dijit Form Controls Layout Widgets Other Widgets (i.e. grids, rich text editor controls, trees, etc.) Polymer 15:32 - Browser Support The Awesome Bar Removing Code Aspect-oriented Programming 20:01 - Dojo 2 Dojo Mobile Responsive Dijits Local Storage Better Grid Widgets Cleaner APIs 32:52 - Marketing Dojo Dojo Tutorials Good APIs Demos Target Environments 27:55 - Graded Support Graded Browser Support - YUI Library 30:56 - Maintaining the old version while moving ahead with the new version 33:01 - Strict Mode dojo.declare 34:15 - Dojo and Node.js dojo/request 36:20 - The Dojo Foundation lodash The Intern 40:21 - Testing D.O.H.: Dojo Objective Harness Sauce Labs Chai 42:56 - Charting and Graphing & Vector Graphics DojoX voro.com GFX D3 Raphaël 46:41 - The History of Dojo and Prototype Picks Sexism in Video Games - This Female Gamer is Fed Up / from a woman's view / woman / Rape is in Grand Theft Auto Game (AJ) My Fair Lady (AJ) Moon (Jamison) Dr. Dog (Jamison) Warhammer Quest (Joe) Knights of the Old Republic (Joe) Ruins by Orson Scott Card (Joe) AngularJS Fundamentals (Joe’s Pluralsight Course) (Joe) Commit (Chuck) Authority | Nathan Barry (Chuck) The Intern (Dylan) FrozenJS (Dylan) hammer throw: 1986 Youri Sedykh's World Record Series (Dylan) Kundalini Yoga (Dylan) Arcosanti (Dylan) Ubud, Bali (Dylan) Insadong, Seoul, South Korea (Dylan) Next Week Burnout Transcript JAMISON:  This is my voice. CHUCK:  You keep it with you at all times, don’t you? JAMISON:  I do. Unless I go to a rock concert or something. Then I leave it there. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.]  [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.]  CHUCK:  Hey everybody, and welcome to Episode 62 of the JavaScript Jabber Show. This week on our panel, we have Jamison Dance. JAMISON:  Hi, guys. CHUCK:  Joe Eames. JOE:  Hey there. CHUCK:  AJ O’Neal. AJ:  Not coming at you live. Not at all. CHUCK:  I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv and we have a special guest this week. That’s Dylan Schiemann. So, do you want to introduce yourself real quick, Dylan? DYLAN:  Sure. Thanks Charles. I’m Dylan. I’m one of the founders of an open source project called the Dojo Toolkit. I’m also the CEO at SitePen, a company that builds web apps and provides JavaScript training and support. CHUCK:  Awesome. Dojo’s been around for a long time, hasn’t it? DYLAN:  Nine years. CHUCK:  Nine years. DYLAN:  Oh, yeah. Three lifetimes in the Internet age, I guess. CHUCK:  Does that make it older than jQuery? DYLAN:  It does, yes. JQuery, I think, started about seven years ago, maybe. Six or seven years ago. CHUCK:  I remember seeing a couple of websites built in Dojo way back in the day. I don’t remember exactly which ones they were. For some reason, I got the impression that it was a framework, but it’s more of a toolkit. It’s much more like jQuery than it is like, say, Backbone or Ember or any of those. DYLAN:  It’s kind of everything. You can use it as a simple toolkit like jQuery. You have DOM manipulation,