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Sarah Jeong Is Still Trying to Change Her Facebook Name to 'A Literal Psyduck'

The year ahead in copyright, patents and internet law, according to contributing editor Sarah Jeong.

This year, rather than writing our own predictions, we decided to have Motherboard interview each other. In this installment, Canada editor Matthew Braga grilled contributing editor Sarah Jeong on the year ahead for intellectual property law, encryption and her ongoing quest to successfully change her Facebook name to that of a, uh, fictional animated duck.

Matthew: What's the latest on your attempt to change your Facebook name to that of a Pokemon? Is 2016 the year you'll finally be able to subvert Facebook's controversial real names policy and use Facebook with your perfectly legal and given name, "A Literal Psyduck?"

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Sarah: Well, I have at least one form of identification that would be acceptable to Facebook [for verification], but I need to corroborate it with a second form of ID: a photo or date of birth corresponding with my Facebook photo or Facebook date of birth. My Facebook profile pic is that of a Psyduck, and as for my date of birth… in 2011, I read an article about how social security numbers can be predicted with ease if you know someone's place of birth and birthday. So I changed my birthday to something false on Facebook. So now, technically speaking, I can never be reinstated on Facebook under any name.

a duckOctober 1, 2015

I'm completely certain that Facebook would let me go back to being Sarah Jeong just because it's a "plausible" name, but we can't end this magical journey with something so anticlimactic.

Last year you conducted a very hilarious interview with a PETA lawyer about whether a macaque can be the legal copyright owner of a photo (seriously). What's in store for that case in 2016, and will the resulting decision set any precedents?

There's a motion hearing on January 6th that I am VERY EXCITED to attend. My guess is that this case will be thrown out ASAP by the judge, if only because no judge wants to be The Judge Who Let That Monkey Copyright Case Go Any Further. But it'll be fun while it lasts.

One of the monkey selfies taken with David Slater's camera. Photo: David Slater (or Naruto?)/Wikimedia Commons

Are there any other copyright-related cases you're looking forward to this year, as much as one can look forward to the ever-raging tire fire that is Internet law?

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Oracle v. Google is ramping up again in the district court. There's a pre-1972 recordings case in the court of appeals this year (Capitol v. Vimeo), and Blurred Lines is also on appeal. I guess Blurred Lines isn't really an internet case, even if Robin Thicke looks like keyboard cat. Compare:

I'm no Robin Thicke fan but I kind of want a poster of his courtroom sketch on my wall Parker HigginsMarch 12, 2015

Andy BaioMarch 12, 2015

Please put those side by side in the body.

Oh my god. Absolutely. Okay, what about patents? Is this the year we finally abolish all patents? Or barring that, what patent-related absurdity can we expect in the months ahead?

We might see a revival of the political movement around patent reform as we lead up to the election. That would be interesting. The activism around that has been fairly demoralized since patent reform was killed in Congress, but people haven't stopped hating patents.

It seems likely that the bigger issue for Congress this year could be that of encryption, which has increasingly drawn the ire of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Is the simmering encryption debate about to boil over?

I think it has boiled over already! I don't see the debate expanding beyond law enforcement, intelligence, and a sizeable but still fairly constrained circle of technically savvy elites. The debate has always been acrimonious—starting in the 1990s!—but it has really escalated.

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But I don't see big tech companies like Apple or Google stepping back from the stand they've taken. I think that Silicon Valley suffered a huge blow when the Snowden revelations implicated many major companies in NSA spying, and this is how they're making up for their injured pride. Being pro-strong-encryption is an ideologically pure stance that is backed by technological and pragmatic considerations, as well as consumer protection interests. If there's a good hill to die on, this one's it.

Plus, the average person doesn't understand the encryption debate. It's just hard to fan populist outrage against Apple. The ordinary people who follow the encryption debate most closely are going to be pro-encryption.

Is it weird that, rather than concerns about eroding personal privacy, it might take the war with ISIS—and reports that ISIS is using and creating its own encryption—to stoke wider interest in encryption outside of those relatively small, elite circles?

ISIS is a great talking point to push any government agenda. Reports of terrorist use of encryption are wildly over-exaggerated—sometimes merely misleading, sometimes outright lies. That is of great concern and should absolutely be addressed in the ongoing debate. Meanwhile, I'm not sure ordinary people sustain enough interest in the matter to want to follow an argument that goes from ISIS to "ergo your iPhone should be backdoored." What's a backdoor anyways? And what does my iPhone have to do with terrorism? If a beloved American company like Apple thinks that's a bad idea, there's probably something to that, right?

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I'm talking about Americans, of course. I think the encryption debate takes a different flavor abroad. Different countries have different civil liberties traditions, and other societies also view American tech companies in a different light!

Especially considering the encryption debate really only applies to smartphone owners, and smartphone penetration is highest in—surprise!—the countries that are probably least at risk of having their devices illegally searched, seized, intercepted, etc.

It's interesting because it's not actually that difficult to procure the kind of information you need to solve crimes—government requests for information from third party tech companies, etc.

And Marcy Wheeler has pointed out that information like contacts lists on your iPhone might now be encrypted, but the actual calls you make (to whom and at what time) are recorded by service providers, and service providers have long been very cozy with the government.

The psychology behind the encryption debate is so fascinating to me. I don't think backdoors would actually help law enforcement that much, it's just that people are always drawn to mysteries and to breaking down locks. I mean, hell, you and I have been obsessed with a password-protected file from that Satoshi hoax, and we're 99 percent sure it's full of bullshit.

Right! If anything, the encryption debate is probably a convenient bit of sleight of hand, distracting people from the fact that, shhhh, there's actually a ton of information we can already get, and will continue to get, irrespective of this debate. Which you and I already know, but it's the principle of the matter.

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Yep! I'm not sure that it's purposefully engineered that way, but it certainly has that effect. As long as civil liberties advocates are engaged with fighting the encryption debate, their attention is drawn away from strengthening the 4th Amendment on other fronts. Not saying they shouldn't be fighting this fight, just that it's a bummer.

For example, the third party doctrine has been disastrous in the Internet age. Your 4th Amendment rights are practically nonexistent now that most of your digital life is being held by third parties in the cloud. If you voluntarily give information to a third party, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. So for example, the government doesn't need a warrant to look up your financial information, because your bank is a third party.

More worryingly, if you give your information over to a third party platform, and that platform hands your information over to the government, that's not a search under the Fourth Amendment.

If they'd come into your house and grabbed a letter from your desk drawer, that would be a search. If they turned on your laptop and read an email, that would be a search. But if they asked Gmail to give it to them, and Gmail just forked it over, it wouldn't be a search. Of course, Gmail doesn't just fork it over—but that's because they don't want to, not because the Constitution won't let them.

Encryption is a proxy fight, because people use encryption to try and safeguard their privacy in the age of third party platforms. But also encryption is necessary as a form of consumer protection from scammers, thieves, stalkers, and abusers. So now this civil liberties fight is also a consumer protection fight.