Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Racism is not getting worse. It's getting filmed," Will Smith said in 2016. And this week the Washington Post noted a parallel pattern emerging: videos of violent police encounters which "contrast sharply with accounts by the departments or their unions." The Post provides four examples of police officials providing "inaccurate or outright misleading descriptions of what has occurred... Taken together, the incidents show how instant verification of police accounts have altered the landscape of accountability."

The Post even spoke to the executive director of one of America's national police officer labor unions, who conceded their profession has been "diminished by events that have been witnessed on video over the course of the last couple of weeks."

Here's one of the Post's examples:

Evan Gorski, 21, a protester in Philadelphia, was arrested on an allegation he pushed an officer off a bike on Monday, authorities told his attorney. But video circulated on social media painted a much different picture of how Gorski, a Temple University student, tangled with police. In the moment captured by others, Gorski reached between another demonstrator and an officer to separate them.

A moment later, Philadelphia Police officer Joseph Bologna Jr. struck Gorski with a baton, chased him down and straddled him as another officer pressed his face on the asphalt. Other officers swung their batons at others gathered around. Gorski's attorney, R. Emmett Madden, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that prosecutors dropped charges and released him Wednesday after reviewing video from the scene. "The police were lying," Madden said. "We had a protest police brutality, and then police brutalize my client and try to frame him for a crime he didn't commit."
Officer Bologna is now facing charges of aggravated assault.

Meanwhile CNN report that in the last week at least 8 instances of police using excessive force. were caught on camera, while Vox argue that videos going viral "have been crucial in keeping the police accountable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to "conduct covert surveillance" and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News. Floyd's death "has spawned widespread protests across the nation, which, in some instances, have included violence and looting," said the DEA memo. "Police agencies in certain areas of the country have struggled to maintain and/or restore order." The memo requests the extraordinary powers on a temporary basis, and on Sunday afternoon a senior Justice Department official signed off.

The DEA is limited by statute to enforcing drug related federal crimes. But on Sunday, Timothy Shea, a former US Attorney and close confidant of Barr who was named acting administrator of the DEA last month, received approval from Associate Deputy Attorney General G. Bradley Weinsheimer to go beyond the agency's mandate "to perform other law enforcement duties" that Barr may "deem appropriate." In addition to "covert surveillance," the memo indicates that DEA agents would be authorized to share intelligence with local and state law enforcement authorities, to "intervene" to "protect both participants and spectators in the protests," and to conduct interviews and searches, and arrest protesters who are alleged to have violated federal law. Here's why Shea says the agency should be granted extraordinary latitude: "In order for DEA to assist to the maximum extent possible in the federal law enforcement response to protests which devolve into violations of federal law, DEA requests that it be designated to enforce any federal crime committed as a result of protests over the death of George Floyd," Shea wrote in the memo. "DEA requests this authority on a nationwide basis for a period of fourteen days."

Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou has lost a key aspect of the trial on her extradition to the United States, a Canadian court announced on Wednesday. From a report: Meng, a Chinese citizen, was arrested in December 2018 on a warrant issued by U.S. authorities, who accuse her of bank fraud and misleading HSBC about a Huawei-owned company's dealings with Iran, thereby breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran. Meng's lawyers argued that the case should be thrown out because the alleged offences were not a crime in Canada. But British Columbia's Superior Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes disagreed, ruling the legal standard of double criminality had been met. "Ms. Meng's approach ... would seriously limit Canada's ability to fulfill its international obligations in the extradition context for fraud and other economic crimes," Holmes said.

"The man behind the world's first major computer virus outbreak has admitted his guilt, 20 years after his software infected millions of machines worldwide," reports the BBC: Filipino Onel de Guzman, now 44, says he unleashed the Love Bug computer worm to steal passwords so he could access the internet without paying. He claims he never intended it to spread globally.

And he says he regrets the damage his code caused. "I didn't expect it would get to the US and Europe. I was surprised," he said in an interview for Crime Dot Com, a forthcoming book on cyber-crime.

The Love Bug pandemic began on 4 May, 2000. Victims received an email attachment entitled LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU. It contained malicious code that would overwrite files, steal passwords, and automatically send copies of itself to all contacts in the victim's Microsoft Outlook address book. Within 24 hours, it was causing major problems across the globe, reportedly infecting 45 million machines...

He claims he initially sent the virus only to Philippine victims, with whom he communicated in chat rooms, because he only wanted to steal internet access passwords that worked in his local area. However, in spring 2000 he tweaked the code, adding an auto-spreading feature that would send copies of the virus to victims' Outlook contacts using a flaw in Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system.
"It's not really a virus," wrote CmdrTaco back on May 4, 2000. "It's a trojan that proclaims its love for the recipient and requests that you open its attachment. On a first date even! It then loves you so much that it sends copies of itself to everyone in your address book and starts destroying files on your drive...

"Pine/Elm/Mutt users as always laugh maniacally as the trojan shuffles countless wasted packets over saturated backbones filling overworked SMTP servers everywhere. Sysadmins are seen weeping in the alleys."

WhatsApp has alleged in new court filings that an Israeli spyware company used US-based servers and was "deeply involved" in carrying out mobile phone hacks of 1,400 WhatsApp users, including senior government officials, journalists, and human rights activists. The Guardian reports: The new claims about NSO Group allege that the Israeli company bears responsibility in serious human rights violations, including the hacking of more than a dozen Indian journalists and Rwandan dissidents. For years, NSO Group has said that its spyware is purchased by government clients for the purpose of tracking down terrorists and other criminals and that it had no independent knowledge of how those clients -- which in the past have reportedly included Saudi Arabia and Mexico -- use its hacking software.

But a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp against NSO Group last year -- the first of its kind by a major technology company -- is revealing more technical details about how the hacking software, Pegasus, is allegedly deployed against targets. In the court filings last week, WhatsApp said its own investigation into how Pegasus was used against 1,400 users last year showed that servers controlled by NSO Group -- not its government clients -- were an integral part of how the hacks were executed. WhatsApp has said victims of the hack received phone calls using its messaging app, and were infected with Pegasus. Then, it said: "NSO used a network of computers to monitor and update Pegasus after it was implanted on users' devices. These NSO-controlled computers served as the nerve centre through which NSO controlled its customers' operation and use of Pegasus."

NSO has said in legal filings that it has no insight into how government clients use its hacking tools, and therefore does not know who governments are targeting. But one expert, John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, who has worked with WhatsApp on the case, said NSO's control of the servers involved in the hack suggests the company would have had logs, including IP addresses, identifying the users who were being targeted. "Our products are used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives. NSO Group does not operate the Pegasus software for its clients," the company said in a statement. "Our past statements about our business, and the extent of our interaction with our government intelligence and law enforcement agency customers, are accurate."

Matt Stroud, reporting for OneZero: In magazine profiles and on conference stages, Damien Patton, the 47-year-old co-founder and CEO of the surveillance startup Banjo, often recounts a colorful autobiography. He describes how he ran away from a broken home near Los Angeles around age 15 and joined the U.S. Navy before working as a NASCAR mechanic. He says he became a self-taught crime scene investigator and then learned to code. Eventually, Patton helped build the digital infrastructure of what would become Banjo, a company that, in the past decade, has raised nearly $223 million, according to the investment data-sharing platform SharesPost, from prominent venture capital firms such as SoftBank. Patton has been the subject of profiles in dozens of publications; Inc. featured him in its April 2015 issue, and versions of his story have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Fortune, Fast Company, and the New York Times. He has told a version of his story to an online entrepreneurial program at Stanford.

With his long red beard, flat-brimmed baseball cap, and a penchant for motorcycles and off-road vehicles, Patton strikes a hardened, gritty profile among the hoodied techies of Silicon Valley. Patton's story and public persona are compelling. They are also incomplete. Documents available to the public and reviewed by OneZero -- including transcripts of courtroom testimony, sworn statements, and more than 1,000 pages of records produced from a federal hate crime prosecution -- reveal that Patton actively participated in white supremacist groups in his youth and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue. In an interview with OneZero, one of the people involved in that shooting confirmed Patton's participation. Patton has not previously acknowledged this chapter of his life in public.

XXongo writes: Monitoring parolees released from prison by an app on their smartphone sounds like a good idea, right? The phone has facial recognition and biometric ID, and a GPS system that knows where it is. But what if the app doesn't work? In a story on Gizmodo, the [Telmate Guardian] app's coding is "sloppy" and "irresponsible" and its default privacy settings are wildly invasive, asking for "excessive permissions" to access device data. And the app isn't even accurate on recognizing parolees, nor on knowing location, with one parolee noting that the app set off the high-pitched warning alarm and sent a notification to her parole officers telling him that she was not at home multiple times in the middle of the night, when she was in fact at home and in bed. The device also serves as a covert surveillance bug, with built-in potential to covertly record ambient audio from the phone, even in standby mode -- a feature which is not even legal in many states. "But there's nothing you can do," according to one parolee. "If you don't accept it, then you go back to prison. You're considered their property. That's how they see it."

"Australia's coronavirus tracing app, dubbed COVIDSafe, has been released as the nation seeks to contain the spread of the deadly pandemic," reports ABC.net.au: People who download the app will be asked to supply a name, which can be a pseudonym, their age range, a mobile number and post code. Those who download the software will be notified if they have contact with another user who tests positive for coronavirus... Using Bluetooth technology, the app "pings" or exchanges a "digital handshake" with another user when they come within 1.5 metres of each other, and then logs this contact and encrypts it.

The data remains encrypted on a user's phone for 21 days, after which it is deleted if they have not been in contact with a confirmed case. The application will have two stages of consent that people will have to agree to: initially when they download the app so data can be collected, and secondly to release that data on their phone if they are diagnosed with the virus. If a person with the app tested positive to COVID-19, and provided they consent to sharing the information, it will be sent to a central server. From here, state and territory health authorities can access it and start contacting other people who might have contracted coronavirus...

The app is voluntary and it will be illegal to force anyone to download it.
In addition, Australia "will make it illegal for non-health officials to access data collected on smartphone software to trace the spread of the coronavirus," reports Reuters, citing comments Friday by Prime Minister Scott Morrison "amid privacy concerns raised by the measure." Australia has so far avoided the high death toll of other countries, with only 78 deaths, largely as a result of tough restrictions on movement that have brought public life to a standstill. The federal government has said existing "social distancing" measures will remain until at least mid-May, and that its willingness to relax them will depend on whether people download the smartphone "app" to identify who a person with the illness has had contact with...

Morrison also confirmed a local media report which said the data would be stored on servers managed by AWS, a unit of U.S. internet giant Amazon.com Inc, but added that "it's a nationally encrypted data store".
"The spec for it is very privacy-positive," writes Slashdot reader Bleve97, adding "It will be interesting to see what it looks like once it's been disassembled in a sandbox and played with!"

And Slashdot reader betsuin has already installed it (adding that the app "does not require GPS... I've installed, GPS is off on my rooted device."

America's Supreme Court "is finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet," according to the Washington Post's cybersecurity writer: The justices agreed to hear a case this fall that argues law enforcement and prosecutors have routinely applied the law too broadly and used it to criminalize not just hacking into websites but also far more innocuous behavior — such as lying about your name or location while signing up on a website or otherwise violating the site's terms of service...

[C]urrent interpretations of the 1986 law, known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse act (CFAA), have made researchers wary of revealing bugs they find because they fear getting in trouble with police or with companies, which can also sue under the law in civil courts. "Computer researchers are constantly afraid that a security test they run is going to run them afoul of the law," Tor Ekeland, an attorney who specializes in defending people accused of violating the CFAA, told me. "This law makes the Internet less safe because it chills legitimate information security research and it's bad for the economy because it chills innovation...."

"This is about whether a statute should be drafted so broadly that everyone is committing crimes all the time and the government gets to choose who to prosecute," Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me... The Justice Department even charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the law — his crime was allegedly giving advice to one of the site's main leakers Chelsea Manning about how to crack a Defense Department password to gather more information...

One of the best-known CFAA prosecutions was of the Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber argued in a recent court filing that former employee Anthony Levandowski committed fraud, an action that frees the company from any obligation to pay his legal bills, including a judgment ordering the star engineer to pay Google $179 million. Uber's fraud claim was part of its response to Levandowski's motion to compel the ride-hailing company into arbitration in the hopes that his former employee will have to shoulder the cost of the $179 million judgment against him. The motion to compel arbitration, and now Uber's response, is part of Levandowski's bankruptcy proceedings. It's the latest chapter in a legal saga that has entangled Uber and Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet.

In this latest court filing, Uber has agreed to arbitration. However, Uber also pushed back against Levandowski's primary aim to force the company to stand by an indemnity agreement. Uber signed an indemnity agreement in 2016 when it acquired Levandowski's self-driving truck startup Otto. Under the agreement, Uber said it would indemnify -- or compensate -- Levandowski against claims brought by his former employer, Google. Uber said it rescinded the indemnification agreement several months prior to the inception of Levandowski's bankruptcy case "because it was procured by his fraud," according to the court filing. Uber revoked the indemnification agreement after Levandowski was indicted by a federal grand jury with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets while working at Google, where he was an engineer and one of the founding members of the group that worked on Google's self-driving car project.

This week U.S. president Donald Trump suspended America's $900 million annual contribution to the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, called Trump's move a "crime against humanity...."

The Hill reports: "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity," he added...

The American Medical Association (AMA) late Tuesday called Trump's decision a "dangerous step in the wrong direction" and urged him to reconsider. "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," the AMA said in a statement. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, said Wednesday that there was "no reason justifying" Trump's move...

And Bill Gates said in a tweet that halting funding to the WHO amid a world health crisis "is as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist added. "The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
Agreeing with Bill Gates was 95-year-old former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Newsweek quotes Carter's newly-released statement calling the WHO "the only international organization capable of leading the effort to control this virus."

The head of the United Nations also called the WHO "absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

While criticizing the WHO, this week an article in the Atlantic called president Trump's moves "a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic." The Democrats speaker of the House added that Trump's decision "is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged."

But the science magazine Nature still published an editorial harshly criticizing Trump's attempt to defund the WHO. "[E]ven talk of doing so in the middle of a global health and economic crisis cannot be condemned strongly enough." They argue that withholding America's funds "will place more lives at risk and ensure that the world takes longer to emerge from this crisis... It is right that researchers, funders and governments have been protesting against Trump's decision, and they must continue to do so in the strongest terms."

And Newsweek also published the comments of the WHO's Director-General, who had this message for its critics. "[O]ur focus, my focus, is on stopping this virus and saving lives... This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy.

"When we're divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

Self-driving startup Zoox has admitted that four of its employees took confidential documents from their previous employer Tesla, according to a statement issued after the company settled a lawsuit this week over the matter. The Verge reports: "Zoox acknowledges that certain of its new hires from Tesla were in possession of Tesla documents pertaining to shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures when they joined Zoox's logistics team," the startup said in a statement to Reuters. Zoox says it will pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of money and will perform an audit to "ensure that no Zoox employees have retained or are using Tesla confidential information." Zoox says it "regrets the actions of those employees," and says it will also "conduct enhanced confidentiality training to ensure that all Zoox employees are aware of and respect their confidentiality obligations."

Last August, Slashdot reader bobstreo tipped us off to an interesting story where an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may have been the first allegation of a crime committed in space. We have now learned that the spouse has been indicted on charges of lying to federal authorities. USA Today reports: Summer Worden, 44, made false statements to NASA's Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Trade Commission, according a statement from U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick. A federal jury in Houston returned the two-count indictment in late February, but it was unsealed Monday. Worden married Anne McClain, a decorated astronaut who was once set to be part of NASA's first all-female spacewalk, in 2014 and filed for divorce in 2018. In 2019, Worden filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming McClain had stolen her identity while on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station, although she saw no signs anyone had moved or used funds in the account, The New York Times reported. Worden's parents brought a separate complaint to NASA's Office of the Inspector General that described a "highly calculated and manipulative campaign" designed to win custody of the couple's child.

Through her lawyer, Rusty Hardin, McClain told The Times she had accessed the account but said she did so to ensure that the family's finances were in order and that there was enough money in the account to care for their child, who was born a year before they met. She said she was never told to stop using the account and continued to use the same password she had throughout the relationship. The indictment says Worden maintained multiple accounts at USAA Federal Savings Bank and she shared access to those accounts "with a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army on detail to NASA's Johnson Space Center." She lied about when she opened the account that had allegedly been improperly accessed and when she reset her login credentials in a complaint filed with the FTC in March 19, 2019, according to the indictment. Worden also allegedly made another false statement in an interview with NASA's Office of the Inspector General in July. If Worden is convicted, she could face up to five years in prison on each count and a maximum fine of $250,000. She is expected to make an initial court appearance April 13.

"Zoomboming," where someone successfully invades a public or private meeting over the videoconferencing platform to broadcast shock videos, pornography, or other disruptive content, could result in fines and possible imprisonment, according to federal prosecutors. The Verge reports: The warning was posted as a press release to the Department of Justice's website under the U.S. Attorney's office for the state's Eastern district with support from the state attorney general and the FBI. Now, prosecutors say they'll pursue charges for Zoombombing, including "disrupting a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud, or transmitting threatening communications." Some of the charges include fines and possible imprisonment. The press release says that if you or anyone you know becomes a victim of teleconference hacking, they can report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. "Do not make the meetings or classroom public. In Zoom, there are two options to make a meeting private: require a meeting password or use the waiting room feature and control the admittance of guest," the guidance reads. "Do not share a link to a teleconference or classroom on an unrestricted publicly available social media post. Provide the link directly to specific people."

The Verge adds: "The guidance also advises against allowing anyone but the host to screenshare and asks that users of Zoom and other apps install the latest updates."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.

The self-proclaimed hacker added that she wanted $100 million for the source code and threatened to "leak everything" if there was no buyer. She reportedly found the GPU data in a "hacked computer" in November, although AMD said it hadn't been approached until December. AMD doesn't appear to be bowing under pressure. It believed the stolen code was "not core to the competitiveness or security" of its products, and said there was an "ongoing criminal investigation."

Anthony Levandowski, former Google engineer and a pioneer of self-driving car tech, agreed to plead guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets from the internet giant. CNET reports: Levandowski left Google in 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, which was quickly acquired by Uber for $680 million. These actions set off a chain of events that led to Google's autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, suing Uber over alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. That lawsuit settled in February 2018 with Uber agreeing to pay Waymo $245 million. The prosecutors indicted Levandowski in August in a suit that involves 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. The activities allegedly took place as he prepared to leave the search giant to build out Uber's self-driving car operation.

Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft in an agreement in which federal prosecutors agree to drop the remaining charges, according to a filing with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. The plea carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. "I downloaded these files with the intent to use them for my own personal benefit, and I understand that I was not authorized to take the files for this purpose," Levandowski said in the filing. No sentencing date has yet been scheduled.

Malware distributors "have started disseminating real-time, accurate information about global infection rates tied to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in a bid to infect computers with malicious software," reports security researcher Brian Krebs: In one scheme, an interactive dashboard of Coronavirus infections and deaths produced by Johns Hopkins University is being used in malicious Web sites (and possibly spam emails) to spread password-stealing malware. Late last month, a member of several Russian language cybercrime forums began selling a digital Coronavirus infection kit that uses the Hopkins interactive map as part of a Java-based malware deployment scheme.

The kit costs $200 if the buyer already has a Java code signing certificate, and $700 if the buyer wishes to just use the seller's certificate. "It loads [a] fully working online map of Corona Virus infected areas and other data," the seller explains. "Map is resizable, interactive, and has real time data from World Health Organization and other sources. Users will think that PreLoader is actually a map, so they will open it and will spread it to their friends and it goes viral...!" The sales thread claims the customer's payload can be bundled with the Java-based map into a filename that most Webmail providers allow in sent messages... The seller says the user/victim has to have Java installed for the map and exploit to work, but that it will work even on fully patched versions of Java...

It's unclear how many takers this seller has had, but earlier this week security experts began warning of new malicious Web sites being stood up that used interactive versions of the same map to distract visitors while the sites tried to foist the password-stealing AZORult malware.

"The United States Department of Justice has charged two New Jersey men with using drones to sneak drugs and other contraband into a federal prison..." reports CNN: The two men, Nicolo Denichilo, 38, and Adrian Goolcharran, 35, smuggled items including marijuana, steroids, cell phones, SIM cards, and syringes into the prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, according to the US Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey. The prison, known as FCI Fort Dix, is a "low security federal correctional institution" that houses more than 3,000 inmates, according to its website...

The Fort Dix prison officials also discovered an inmate near the drone drop site in possession of more than 30 cell phones and 50 SIM cards, among other phone equipment, the statement said...

[A]uthorities said they obtained evidence of at least seven drone deliveries since July 2018 at the prison.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat quotes CNN: Robert Ross was sitting in his San Francisco home office in October 2018 when he noticed the bars on his phone had disappeared and he had no cell coverage. A few hours later, he had lost $1 millionâ¦

"I was at home at my desk and I noticed a notification on my iPhone for a withdrawal request from one of my financial institutions, and I thought, 'That's weird. I didn't make a withdrawal request,'" Ross recalled. "Then I looked back at my phone and I saw that I had no service...."

Ross was the victim of a SIM hack, an attack that occurs when hackers take over a victim's phone number by transferring it to a SIM card they control. By taking over his cellphone number, a hacker was able to gain access to his email address and ultimately his life-savings, Ross said in an interview with CNN Business...

An arrest was made in Ross' case, and the suspect has pleaded not guilty... He is suing AT&T for what he alleges was a failure by the company to protect his "sensitive and confidential account data" that resulted in "massive violations" of his privacy and "the theft of more than $1 million," according to the lawsuit.

The Verge takes a 5,000-word look at a Kickstarter campaign "that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers."

"The difference in this story, however, is that for only the second time, the Federal Trade Commission is coming for the creator." The agency claims Doug Monahan took his backpack funds and spent them on "personal expenses," including bitcoin purchases, ATM withdrawals, and credit card debt. The agency says he threatened backers who pursued him for their bags. The state of Texas is suing him, too. A lot of people want a piece of Monahan, but he's not going down without a fight. He's serving as his own lawyer to dispute the claims in court, and he invited me down to Texas to clear his name and reputation...

He sold iBackpack as a high-tech wonder that would "revolutionize" backpacks and improve people's lives, whether they're eight or 80. On Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016, Monahan advertised the backpack as the bag of people's dreams: it'd feature more than 50 pockets, include multiple external battery packs, RFID-blocking pouches, a precipitation hood, a USB hub, charging cables, a Bluetooth speaker, and a mobile hotspot for a portable Wi-Fi connection. That's a lot of stuff in one bag that you could seemingly be talked into believing is useful...

He got addicted to pain pills, too. At the same time, the batteries that were supposed to go in the bag represented a liability. The iBackpack drama occurred around the same time that Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, and he didn't feel comfortable shipping lithium-ion batteries. Someone could have died, he says.... Monahan says they just don't understand him or crowdfunding, in general. He's not a bad guy, he says. It's just that businesses fail sometimes, which is what he invited me to Texas to prove.

Poking at Monahan's past, however, suggests this isn't a man with a one-time flub, but rather someone with a trail of failures. Is he a con-artist? An irresponsible businessman? Does the difference even matter?
The Verge also investigates a claim that the whole backpack idea was stolen from another company -- and talks to a former employee who says their manager at Monahan's company was a 14-year-old.

And at one point, Monahan "essentially crank calls the FTC's lawyers with me in the room."