Blog

‘This Is Atrocious’: Congress Crams Language to Criminalize Online Streaming, Meme-Sharing Into 5,500-Page Omnibus Bill

Lawmakers in Congress are under fire from digital rights campaigners for embedding three controversial changes to online copyright and trademark laws into the must-pass $2.3 trillion legislative package—which includes a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill and a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill—that could receive floor votes in the House and Senate as early as Monday evening.

The punitive provisions crammed into the enormous bill (pdf), warned Evan Greer of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, “threaten ordinary Internet users with up to $30,000 in fines for engaging in everyday activity such as downloading an image and re-uploading it… [or] sharing memes.”

While the citizenry had almost no time to process the actual contents of the 5,593 page legislative text, Greer said Monday afternoon that the CASE Act, Felony Streaming Act, and Trademark Modernization Act “are in fact included in the must-pass omnibus spending bill.”

As Mike Masnick explained in a piece at TechDirt on Monday:

The CASE Act will supercharge copyright trolling exactly at a time when we need to fix the law to have less trolling. And the felony streaming bill (which was only just revealed last week with no debate or discussion) includes provisions that are so confusing and vague no one is sure if it makes sites like Twitch into felons.

“The fact that these are getting added to the must-pass government funding bill is just bad government,” Masnick added. “And congressional leadership should hear about this.”

Keep reading

Coronavirus Package Allows Feds to Import More Foreign Workers as 17.8M Americans are Jobless

A spending bill, labeled as a relief package for Americans during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, will allow federal bureaucrats to import more foreign workers to take blue-collar jobs in the United States – even as 17.8 million Americans remain jobless.

A provision slipped into the more than 5,590-page spending bill allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Labor Department to import more foreign labor competition against Americans at their discretion.

Specifically, the bill gives DHS the ability to “increase the total number” of H-2B foreign visa workers who can be brought into the U.S. to take blue-collar, nonagricultural jobs that would otherwise go to working class Americans.

DHS Secretaries over the last four years have repeatedly allowed businesses to import more H-2B foreign visa workers above the annual cap of 66,000. Continuation of the policy would come as 24.5 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. About 17.8 million of those are jobless.

keep reading

Asymptomatic transmission of covid-19

The relations between viral load, viral shedding, infection, infectiousness, and duration of infectiousness are not well understood. In a recent systematic review, no study was able to culture live virus from symptomatic participants after the ninth day of illness, despite persistently high viral loads in quantitative PCR diagnostic tests. However, cycle threshold (Ct) values from PCR tests are not direct measures of viral load and are subject to error.10

While viral load seems to be similar in people with and without symptoms, the presence of RNA does not necessarily represent transmissible live virus. The duration of viral RNA shedding (interval between first and last positive PCR result for any sample) is shorter in people who remain asymptomatic, so they are probably less infectious than people who develop symptoms.11

Viral culture studies suggest that people with SARS-CoV-2 can become infectious one to two days before the onset of symptoms and continue to be infectious up to seven days thereafter; viable virus is relatively short lived.7 Symptomatic and presymptomatic transmission have a greater role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 than truly asymptomatic transmission.121213

Keep reading

Johns Hopkins newspaper removes study examining COVID death rate

Johns Hopkins University’s student newspaper, the News-Letter, reported on a university presentation stating that COVID-19 “had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people” and that the virus “has also not increased the total number of deaths” in comparison to historical data. However, the paper later removed the article, stating that it had been used to support “dangerous inaccuracies” on social media.

Assistant Director for the university’s Applied Economics program Genevieve Briand critically analyzed the net effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the United States based on historical data. Using information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Briand identified the percentages of total deaths per age category both before and after the pandemic began. 

Keep reading

COVID-19 RELIEF BILL DOUBLES HEALTH CARE BUDGET — FOR CONGRESS

IN A FLURRY of last-minute legislating over coronavirus relief, congressional leaders abandoned hazard pay for essential workers and emergency funding for local governments that may be on the brink of municipal bankruptcy.

But lawmakers did find funding to dramatically increase the budget for the exclusive government-run health clinic that serves Congress. 

The Office of Attending Physician, which provides medical services to lawmakers, received a special boost of $5 million, more than doubling its annual budget, which is currently around $4.27 million. 

Keep reading