https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190928/11281943087/this-week-techdirt-history-september-22nd-28th.shtml

This week in 2014, Benjamin Wittes was attacking NSA critics with a big swing-and-a-miss, while Senator Saxby Chambliss was nonsensically invoking ISIS to defend the agency, and John Brennan was getting caught in a tangled web over the CIA spying on Senate staffers. Meanwhile, Apple and Google were moving to encrypt phones by default, leading to a law enforcement freakout with plenty of FUD from the feds, all the way up to James Comey slamming the companies for enacting basic security.

This week in 2009, the Techdirt/Lily Allen drama unfolded as the debate around Peter Mandelson's plan to kick UK file-sharers off the internet heated up. First, TorrentFreak discovered that Allen had reposted an entire Techdirt post on her blog without any link or credit, which we noted doesn't bother us but should make her rethink her views on piracy. As other artists like James Blunt and Elton John (in a massive flip-flop) joined Allen in supporting internet disconnection, she apologized for copying the post while entirely missing the point about the ease and innocence of casual copying. She attempted to answer some questions but didn't seem to address any of the really important ones being raised in her blog comments, and then things got sillier: it turned out her own official website was still distributing an early mixtape she made that was full of "pirated" songs. It was our honest hope that this would be a genuine teaching moment, but while Allen did appear to decide that kicking people offline might be too draconian, she mostly just seemed to miss the point some more, and delete her blog.