Last week Elon Musk arbitrarily started throttling the LEO (low-Earth orbit) satellite connections of Ukraine's military, preventing it from engaging in offensive and defensive operations. The decision blindsided the White House, caused significant financial and operational headaches for Ukraine, and created no shortage of bipartisan backlash.

After spending a week blaming one another, both the White House and Musk ultimately settled on the flimsy excuse that the throttling was because Ukraine had been violating Starlink's terms of service.

Regular Starlink terminals have automatic network throttling implemented if a connected vehicle operates in excess of 70 km/hr. Starshield — the significantly more expensive military variant — is supposed to have no cap, but was throttled by Musk if drones or vehicles exceed speeds of 90 km/hr, preventing Ukraine from conducting both defensive and offensive operations.

Musk of course knows that Starlink and Starshield alike are used for military operations, terrorism, and criminal activity planet-wide. Smuggled Starlink terminals are routinely used for all manner of military, criminal, and black-market operations. Ukraine had been using both Starshield and cobbled together black market Starlink solutions for years without issue. Why the sudden issue?

As a right wing extremist in alliance with global authoritarians, it seems most likely that Musk interfered to drive Ukraine into Moscow's arms for a negotiation in which they'll be expected to surrender significant territorial gains (something Musk has long openly advocated for).

The move came as the Trump admin temporarily suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine and lifted Russia sanctions to allow for diesel imports from Moscow — something Trump hopes (falsely) will lower domestic gas prices and save him from an expected midterm bloodbath.

But it seems very likely Musk was also exploiting a crisis to upsell a country fighting for its life to a more expensive broadband plan (kind of like Verizon did to those California firefighters back in 2018).

Obviously Musk isn't keen on openly admitting he's a greedy, traitorous, and unstable national security threat, so he spent much of the last week defensively insisting he arbitrarily messed with Ukraine's satellite connectivity because he's so bravely anti-war. From a post to Musk's personal right wing propaganda website, X:

"Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.

Starlink remains critical to the defense of Ukraine, as it is the only system that cannot be jammed or blown up, at least for now. Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately. This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.

Starlink was also crucial to preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine in the early days of the war, as all other means of communication were destroyed or jammed by Russia.

SpaceX has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR.

That said, I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict. May you burn in hell.

End of story."

That non-threat is definitely a threat. Claiming the loophole is now "closed" also makes no sense, given that Ukraine says the limitations have been removed after significant bipartisan backlash, and there's no indication that Ukraine actually changed anything. What actually changed things was global, bipartisan, political pressure against Musk and the Trump administration for their ratfucking of an American ally.

Recall that Musk, at one point, had already restricted Ukraine's access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine's military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by authoritarians). It's clear that Musk has a goal in mind, and it's not Ukraine regaining full territorial control after being invaded by an authoritarian neighbor.

Musk isn't anti-war as much as he is sympathetic to Putin (in perfect sync with his favorite politician) and keen on ensuring that if Starlink is used for war, the violent result is as profitable as possible.

Given the ugly nature of an unstable billionaire proving he's a national security threat, I'd suspect we'll see more investigations into this episode in the new year (especially if Republicans lose control of both the House and Senate). And countries worldwide are clearly accelerating their exploration and funding of numerous fledgling LEO Starlink alternatives to try and demuskify the planet.

I've taken a lot of shots at Nintendo over the years, often times under various versions of headlines that start with "Nintendo Hates You". And those shots were well earned, given the company's apparent policy of being as anti-fan as it possibly can be on all matters related to intellectual property. Nintendo never misses an opportunity to choose IP protectionism over embracing fan culture and the creativity of its own customers and evangelists.

But once we get away from matters of IP, Nintendo can actually be quite attentive to its fan-base. Everything about the UX for its platforms, consoles, and first-party titles show genuine care for what Nintendo fans want and like. It's how this company has managed to remain so successful after all of these years. And that apparently extends to the latest console-war battleground, which is physical media. And on physical media, Nintendo appears to put a ton of weight on what a portion of its fans want as it plans to continue the use of physical media into the future.

Vice President and General Manager for Nintendo in Latin America Bill van Zyll spoke on the topic during a recent interview with YouTuber Coelho conducted during the Brazil Game Show. The Nintendo-focused YouTube channel asked about a number of topics related to Nintendo's activities in the region, including localized Nintendo Directs. That's when the question of physical games inevitably came up. Van Zyll was keen to emphasize the benefits of the format while assuring the company's continued plans to produce physical games.

"Historically, we haven't had a preference for a specific format," he explains. "We take consumer preferences very much into consideration. We also have a platform that was just launched. We've been around for a little over a year with the Nintendo Switch 2, and it offers both digital and physical games. Therefore, we have no plans to abandon physical media. We know how much fans enjoy it."

As Kotaku notes, consumer demographics are certainly playing a roll here. Nintendo gamers prioritize physical media games more than other console users. But in an industry that is quickly building a reputation for casting aside customer sentiment in favor of doing whatever the Copilot-created spreadsheet tells them they should do, seeing a gaming company actually take its own customers into account in this way is a good thing.

Nintendo's heavier reliance on physical sales makes any argument for a shift towards digital sales exclusively far weaker, making the choice to continue supporting physical sales an expected response from the company. Still, as Sony continues conversations with a number of companies over their decision, it is at least reassuring for Nintendo fans that the company has no plans to follow Sony's lead. At least for now.

There is a big enough percentage of the gaming public that likes to buy something physical, for all kinds of reasons. Ownership rights are far more robust that way (for now). Preservationists need physical media to truly do their preservation work. Treating these games and the media packaged with it as collectables is absolutely a thing.

So, those of you who want physical media games? Nintendo loves you is the only appropriate headline. I just wish that posture could infect all the other areas in which Nintendo has long treated its fans poorly.

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of xAI, appeared recently at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey to lament the rise of space collisions as Musk and Bezos flood the night sky with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. According to Nicolls, there's been a decided lack of coordination among space companies as they've rushed LEO satellites into orbit (sans any meaningful regulatory oversight), resulting in multiple recent near-collisions:

"Once you can track this debris, and if you can track it well, these are like obstacles on a road. If you can measure them, you can predict where they're going to be, and you can avoid them," Nicolls said. "What you can't avoid is other operators who maneuver without telling you where they're going to go. We have many examples of this on Starlink, unfortunately."

Both Bezos and Musk have only really begun to launch tens of thousands of expected LEO satellites, so the coordination problems we're seeing now are just the very beginning.

Starlink satellites perform around 1,000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day to avoid other satellites or space debris. According to Nicolls, Starlink satellites have avoided collisions with around 650 active satellites, without only half of those satellite owners engaging in ephemeris sharing with SpaceX. Some avoid sharing this location and movement data out of fear that it will compromise competitive information.

As a result, there's been a surge in examples where other company's satellites got "too close for comfort":

"Either they were not publishing their ephemeris to us, or they were not considering the ephemeris of others when they were maneuvering, and these led to conjunctions of tens of meters to hundreds of meters," Nicolls said. "Way too close to [sic] comfort."

If only there were… say… some sort of government bodies tasked with overseeing the rise in space junk and orbital debris, helping industry coordinate launches and navigation, and penalizing bad actors who repeatedly engage in bad behavior that can't be deterred through industry collaboration?

U.S. regulators had historically had a hands-off approach to regulating space, though more recent incarnations of the FCC had just begun implementing some actual guidelines — like this 2022 proposal by the Biden FCC that implemented a five year limit for letting your dead satellite stick around in space. That was matched with FCC actions to finalize penalize companies that bungle de-orbits.

You're to ignore that Elon Musk's takeover of the U.S. government — and subsequent butchering of numerous regulatory initiatives he wasn't empathic or smart enough to understand — will directly contribute to all manner of chaos, both terrestrial or otherwise. Musk's cash helped contribute to gentlemen like Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time taking a giant dump on the first amendment or gutting consumer protections and corporate oversight.

Nicolls also laments the lack of cooperation with China, which is increasingly difficult given the overt hostility, protectionism, and xenophobia of a Trump administration heavily propped up by Musk cash.

In addition to space junk, scientific researchers have warned for years that Elon Musk's Starlink LEO constellations are harming research. The light pollution (Musk claimed would never happen in the first place) is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.

The massive repeated launch and de-orbiting of LEO satellites at scale is also introducing a massive amount of burning heavy metals into the atmosphere that scientists say are actively degrading progress made on restoring the ozone layer. Thanks to Musk and his autocrats, regulators are now largely incapable of protecting the public from these growing harms as well.

Despite the apparent belief that government exists exclusively to steal peoples' money and stifle innovation, these government agencies can and do contribute massively to the public good. Often invisibly, if they're doing their jobs well. When they aren't doing their jobs well it's often because they're being lobotomized through the kind of mindless deregulation Musk supports.

Then when companies and industries complain that there's perhaps more anticompetitive shenanigans and market chaos than there should be — they refuse to connect the dots back to their own actions. And they're helped by a press (notice this Ars Technica piece never even brings up Musk companies' history of undermining government) that doesn't have much interest in pressing the issue.

For American democracy to survive, we are going to have to do something about the current operation of our judicial system. But what is needed to fix it is more than just "packing" the Supreme Court, as many have proposed, because the problems we're facing extend far beyond just its current personnel line-up. There are other things that could and should be done to the court system, and first. After all, expanding the Supreme Court is hardly an expedient change. Getting the desired result—more seats, filled by more preferable jurists—would require control of the White House to first change. But many of the other things we could do would likely only need a Congress committed to achieving them. We should start there, so that we can start making meaningful improvements without delay.

Furthermore, lasting, effective reform requires strategic thinking about how the entire federal court system functions, at every level and not just the Supreme Court. It requires that all of its interdependent parts be overhauled in a sensible, sustainable way that respects, and, when necessary, restores, American legal traditions. No change should be so radical that we throw out the baby with the bathwater, as there are plenty of good things about its previous and even current function worth saving—in fact, one of the biggest issues we're facing with the courts right now is how many of those traditions (ex: respect for precedent) are suddenly being ignored, in which case the "radical reform" is simply to reverse that trend.

It is also important that the result of any reform effort minimizes the judicial branch being a political prize for future elected officials to fight over. That it has already become one is itself a big reason why reform is now warranted. We need a judicial system that can withstand political winds and gain legitimacy from doing so. It will take some political power to remediate what our judicial system has deteriorated into in order to restore its apolitical constitutional function, but such should be a goal of the exercise.

What follows, then, is a preliminary list of steps for Congress to take to achieve this comprehensive reform. Some will of course directly zero in on the Supreme Court, including changing how it is constituted, but such a change alone won't be enough, not even to address all the problems with the current Court. First and perhaps foremost Congress needs to take stock of the procedural rules all courts follow to ensure that litigation can from here on out unfold more predictably, especially when brought to check the power of another branch of government, which has become particularly difficult as of late.

Then there are other steps for Congress to take that focus on the administration of justice, writ large, to make this reform project sustainable, such as by realigning the appellate circuits and relocating any current Article I administrative law "judges" we might still need so that they are under the supervision of the judiciary instead of the executive. We also need to revisit how the judicial branch is managed, including by (a) restoring some sense to the process that appoints jurists to the courts in the first place, (b) ensuring that judges at every level are subject to adequate professional regulation, and (c) enabling judges' removal, when necessary, with well-calibrated mechanisms that are neither overly aggressive nor as impotent as they have lately become. Meanwhile Congress will also need to statutorily clean up the mess the Supreme Court has made with its recent decisions, to the extent it is possible for legislation to do so.

Even more reforms than just those listed here may also prove to be necessary, but the key is that if we are going to achieve balanced and lasting change we cannot do any less than what is described here. Still, what follows also includes notes of caution for how each potential reform measure should be approached in order not to create new problems in the process of trying to address the current ones each reform is intended to address.

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GENERAL APPROACH TO REFORM

Ground rules. In theory the sky is the limit, but, thinking pragmatically, particularly with respect to the need to begin this reform as soon as practically possible, it is helpful to limit the possible changes in a few ways.

No constitutional amendments. Effective court reform should not require any constitutional amendments, which take long periods of time to pass and are thus not easily modified if it turns out that one leads to undesirable consequences. They also are generally unnecessary, as there is plenty we can still do by statute. Congress has lots of power over the federal courts and has historically done plenty to regulate them. Any immediate reform should therefore continue in that vein.

No significant constitutional reinterpretations. Reforms also should not call for substantially different readings of the Constitution than we have generally accepted in the decades and centuries before now. Life tenure, for instance, is something that has long been read into the Constitution, even though it doesn't literally call for it in so many words, which means that perhaps we could choose at some point to interpret the constitutional language we've premised our understanding of it on differently. But we've read it this way all this time for important reasons that still are applicable and so should continue to.

Also, if we change too much about our judicial system too suddenly with this reform, then we risk unstable results. Some of these long-standing interpretations, going back even to Marbury v. Madison, which itself created the modern role of the Supreme Court we've accepted ever since, despite it not being literally spelled out in the Constitution this way, remain useful pillars to retain and work around, at least for now. There is still plenty we can improve with them remaining in place.

No political exclusivity. Perhaps most importantly, court reform cannot be the project of the political left, or right, or any particular constituency. While as a practical matter this project will only happen when Democrats have the political power able to implement it, it is critically important not to rebuild the American judicial system in a way designed to award them their preferred political prizes. At minimum such a system would be weak and lack legitimacy to anyone not subscribing to such preferences, and preserving the legitimacy of the courts is of tantamount importance—indeed, restoring the legitimacy of the courts is the animating objective behind the entire court reform project. Reform will therefore generally require being focused on sustainable judicial principles and not specific judicial outcomes.

It will also necessarily require people from across the political spectrum to help build the strong system of justice our democracy requires. Perhaps the project should not include those who have been too eager to tear down our constitutional order, but there are plenty on the right who have sincerely advocated for sustainable legal principles who should be meaningfully included in this endeavor. Without their participation it will be difficult to produce what is needed here: a sustainable system of ordered liberty that can survive any political era and last for generations. With this project we need to create a judicial system the public can always believe truly dispenses justice, and to everyone, no matter who they are and what their politics. It requires that principle, not policy, be the guiding light, and it's only with the contributions of all those who are so focused, regardless of their political stripes, that any resulting reform will be durable.

Common themes. For each specific proposal, a few themes are likely to emerge.

Personnel addition. One relates simply to the expansion of the number of judges we have on the bench. The unfortunate reality is that not every judge and justice currently serving in the court system is quite capable of or interested in protecting liberty and justice for all, or the constitutional system designed to deliver it. And at the moment those who lack those qualities have an outsized influence on the function of our democracy and the liberty it promises. It is therefore of basic mathematical importance to get more people on the bench who do have them.

But to suddenly "pack" the courts with jurists prone to ruling in certain ways could turn the co-equal Article III branch of government into a political prize subordinated to politics in a way we have long tried to insulate it from in order to make sure jurisprudence, and justice, are not subject to political fortune. The solution to our current problems cannot be so craven as to simply stuff the courts full of more judges whom we would currently prefer, because it would mean that subsequent generations of politicians could keep packing it with those that they preferred instead.

Still, the current situation may nevertheless provide opportunities for expanding the number of judges in ways that are anchored in their own legitimate justifications for why at this particular moment in time it is an appropriate occasion to expand the number of jurists, yet in the future such an occasion is unlikely to repeat. In other words, one running theme throughout these specific proposals is how, while pursuing some other goal with each reform, we might also create the opportunity for such new additions, but in a way applicable only now and not in the future.

Tempered statutory authority. The courts are a co-equal branch of government with Congress. Nevertheless, Congress has a lot of control over their function: for instance, it helps assure they are funded, and it provides statutes relating to their operation, not just with respect to how they run as their own interests but in terms of how they handle the litigation brought before them. These reform proposals therefore relate to Congress asserting its control over the courts in order to ensure that there is greater predictability in the jurisprudence they produce than we are currently experiencing now.

But care should be taken to not be too heavy-handed and inadvertently subordinate the courts to Congress. We would not want to, both as a general constitutional matter and also for practical reasons. Indeed, while some statutory solutions can offer precision and predictability where we currently lack them, the fuzziness of leaving certain questions to the courts—both substantive and procedural—affords the flexibility that justice may require, which we would not want to eliminate. Congress cannot anticipate everything, and our common law-rooted courts need the free hand to not only self-regulate, thereby preserving their constitutional independence, but to also be able to develop the judicial solutions justice requires, particularly in accordance with long-standing judicial tradition. The problems we are experiencing today relate more to the fact that some courts have strayed from that common law tradition, and thus there is the need to statutorily reconnect them to those existing principles and precedent, and not to further remove them.

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SPECIFIC REFORM PROPOSALS

Reform #1: Statutorily address procedural rules. The most expedient, and arguably most necessary, thing for Congress to do is address the ways the courts operate. With care, of course, because in many ways the courts are self-governing, both in terms of their internal operation and the way they oversee litigation, and successfully, such as with the federal rules they adopt to govern civil, criminal, and appellate procedure, as well as the rules of evidence, and it is important to preserve their independence. (Courts nevertheless should also take the occasion to review their own rules and themselves assess whether modifications are needed, particularly in light of the many stresses that Trump Administration litigation has exposed.)

But there are several ways that Congress could and should step in. To begin with, Congress could ensure that we have, and fund, such things as cameras in the courtrooms and online case archives so that judicial documents truly become the public records they are supposed to be and the judicial system overall becomes more transparent. In recent years transparency has improved, including with Supreme Court oral arguments now being contemporaneously broadcast and more appellate hearings being streamed online, but there is more that could and should be done on this front, and PACER remains an expensive, inefficient blight on the justice system. It may also be appropriate for Congress to ensure that there is more consistency in the rules of practice across the court system, particularly when local rules create too many bespoke exceptions without adequate justification.

There are also more major changes that Congress should make. One way is by addressing the ability for the courts to act. It has always spoken legislatively on questions of court jurisdiction, and there remains the need to say more. As an example, many of the jurisprudential issues we are currently suffering from have stemmed from parties "forum shopping" and trying to get cases before courts expected to be unduly favorable, and Congress can and should shut down the ability to gain such advantage. It has also become much more difficult to bring certain challenges against unlawful government behavior. Where the courts (including, especially, the Supreme Court) have effectively shut the door to it, Congress can and should pry it open again, such as by using statute to ensure that government mischief can be effectively challenged because enough will have the standing to do it, and that it can be effectively restrained before it has had the chance to cause injury.

Another major way for Congress to make changes is with respect to the operation of the Supreme Court, which is not handling self-regulation well as of late. It has rules, but only some of them are articulated, and some, such as those governing its shadow docket, have proven to be shockingly arbitrary. The problem is in some ways tricky to address, because we cannot subordinate the Court to another branch of government, nor should we want to. Nevertheless there needs to be rules, transparent to everyone, and applicable to everyone, including the Supreme Court itself. Congress can and must ensure such rules exist, even if the Court still has a hand in writing them. Somebody needs to so that its jurisdiction can be understood, predictable, and regarded as legitimate when exercised, which it has lately not been.

Meanwhile, careful study of other procedural rules may reveal more ways Congress could improve the operation of the courts, especially to ensure that unlawful government action can be challenged in a way that produces usable remedies, whether injunctive, compensatory, or deterring. "Qualified immunity," for instance, is a judge-made procedural doctrine at odds with the Constitution that has increasingly prevented such remedies, which Congress can statutorily negate. Naturally any proposed changes Congress makes need to be carefully calibrated to make sure they are actual improvements, but even simply addressing known areas of current dysfunction will do a lot to restore the courts to being the protectors of justice we need them to be.

Reform #2: No More Article I Judges. History has born out the wisdom of making the courts a co-equal branch of government, along with Congress and the Executive. When disputes arise, especially involving the other branches, it is important that the adjudicator be independent, and the American constitutional structure helps ensure that judicial independence because none of the other branches are the judiciary's boss.

But there are certain types of adjudication that we have allowed to happen where there is no such independence. For example, in the case of immigration law, immigration "judges" end up having enormous power over the rights of individuals, yet without any of the structural safeguards of an independent judiciary. Despite the stakes, with people's lives and property hanging in the balance, the due process the Constitution requires is routinely denied to many. And the problem has only gotten worse so long as the people judging their fates are increasingly beholden to the government branch employing them, namely the Executive, and its embedded xenophobia. Given the hijinks of the Trump Administration, firing any immigration "judge" attempting to maintain any pretense of independence, no matter how statutorily required, this constitutional mis-structuring of an important adjudicative body can no longer be tolerated. To the extent that we need specialized adjudication, like for immigration matters, the administrative law judges we employ to do that adjudication need to be answerable to the judiciary and not to any other branch. What we are asking them to do, apply law to facts, is what Article III judges are for.

Such a constitutional relocation would not necessarily mean, however, that immigration judges would have to be appointed to lifetime positions. The likely better analog is magistrate judges, who are not themselves Article III judges but work alongside them. These jurists handle a lot of court work, as appointed Article III judges do, but it is work subject to the supervision of those appointed Article III district court judges. From a practical standpoint they are fully empowered to handle many docket matters, but from a constitutional standpoint there is oversight by people who have been vetted by Congress and employed by the independent judiciary.

Obviously rolling any population of administrative law judge, such as immigration judges, into the judiciary will require its expansion, because all those judges will need to be supervised by district court judges and eventually appellate ones. But given the need to reinvigorate the judiciary with more jurists more principled than so many we currently have, such an expansion also provides an opportunity to put more on the bench, and for a reason that is unlikely to recur in the future on any similar scale. (In addition, Congress could also streamline immigration law to make it more reasonable and equitable, which would also perhaps lessen the need for so many immigration judges in the first place.)

Reform #3: Better manage the appointment, regulation, and removal of jurists. Putting administrative law judges under the supervision of the Article III judiciary, and, indeed, protecting the independence and authority of the Article III judiciary, requires making sure that the judiciary is populated with individuals capable of wielding the immense power we are entrusting them with. It cannot be riddled with self-serving, injudicious, intemperate, incapable and/or corrupt people and still fulfill its critical constitutional role.

Some of the infirmities currently plaguing the bench stem from Congressional dysfunction, which has rendered the appointment process a political spoil for the majority party to unilaterally seize to benefit its own political ends. While solving Congress may be beyond this particular judicial reform project, as part of a reform effort Congress could still potentially document in its rules better instructions governing how nominees should be evaluated and approved. It also could restore some sort of filibuster mechanism to help prevent giving lifetime appointments to particularly undeserving candidates—perhaps one not nearly so effortless and obstructive to employ as there has been in recent years, but one that nevertheless can provide some sort of emergency brake to prevent giving lifetime appointments to especially questionable appointees.

Once on the bench jurists also need to be subject to a certain degree of regulation in order to ensure that their jurisprudence can be trusted. Self-policing may generally be the best mechanism in order to preserve judicial independence, but any reform project should ensure that whatever mechanism the judiciary uses is sufficiently effective and also transparent, which may not always be the case.

The rules for the requisite "good behavior" required by the Constitution also need to be applicable to any Article III jurist, including those sitting on the Supreme Court, whose self-policing efforts have been particularly insufficient as of late. Financial and political conflicts need to be treated with a seriousness that has often been lacking and require, at minimum, mandatory disqualification from adjudicating certain matters, if not from the bench entirely, depending on their nature.

There also should be specific rules to ensure that jurists are not unduly profiting from their position. As it is, their positions already grant them an unusual amount of power and influence; their status should not also be providing them with any more significant enrichment than their salary already does during active service, although it may be fair to raise salary levels above where they are now in exchange for constraining judges' ability to otherwise profit from their privileged position. A program allowing for leaves of absence or sabbaticals could also be considered; Court expansion could help open the door to such a program, because expansion might create a pool of justices that are rotated through to man smaller panels that actually sit to hear cases during a term. Ultimately we do want the best and the brightest on the bench, which means the job cannot come at too much of a cost to the individual serving in it. At the same time, however, with these jobs come inordinate power, and so the dignity and neutrality of these positions need to be preserved by all who serve in them.

Meanwhile, as for the incorrigible jurist, there needs to be a greater willingness, and perhaps even statutory obligation, for Congress to remove them. It should be a well-calibrated reflex to do so, one that is not so easy to employ that it obviates the independence we insulate each jurist's jurisprudence with through life tenure. The political unpopularity of some or even all of a judge's decisions should generally not be enough to warrant impeachment. But at the same time there has grown to be an almost obstinate refusal to ever employ the constitutionally-rooted, if not also constitutionally-required, impeachment remedy when certain jurists struggle to consistently deliver jurisprudence that can withstand its own independent scrutiny or otherwise engage in behavior that creates significant doubt as to their neutrality or competence. That Congressional inhibition is of particular concern now, given the rash of unqualified judges recently appointed.

Still, not every Trump-appointed jurist is necessarily removable; indeed, some conservative judges have well-proven their politically-independent capabilities, even if some of their decisions are unpopular, and there may even some liberal ones whose service is worthy of further scrutiny as well. We also need a mechanism to address judicial incapacity, so that justice is not held hostage to a life appointment unable to be trusted to dispense it, but at the same time these affected jurists are still human beings, including those whose incapacity may only be temporary, and we need to make sure their personal tragedy does not become a political cudgel that can be used to reshape the bench.

Reform #4: Realign the appellate circuits. Before addressing Supreme Court reform, it is important to first address realigning the appellate circuits, for a few reasons. One is that the Supreme Court is not responsible for all of the poor jurisprudence recently produced; some of it was produced by the Courts of Appeals, so there is as much reason—if not more—to expand the number of fillable seats on those courts as the Supreme Court, especially because they have jurisdiction to hear nearly all cases at some point but the Supreme Court weighs in only on a small subset.
Another reason is that realigning which appellate court gets to hear which cases has been long overdue simply as a matter of population growth and other logistical strains on the current circuit divisions. And then a bonus reason is that this realignment can ultimately provide a justifying anchor for any changes in the composition of the Supreme Court to tie into—although even without this added benefit circuit realignment should happen anyway.

There are currently thirteen "circuits," or separate Courts of Appeals. Twelve are geographic, and then there is the specialized Federal Circuit that primarily handles patent-related matters, along with a few other esoteric subjects. The first way that realignment should happen is geographically, namely by splitting up the Ninth Circuit. Completely redrawing circuit boundaries would probably be ill-advised, as it would destabilize too much precedent, but splitting a circuit is not unprecedented: it's where the Eleventh Circuit came from, so we know how to handle it. And from time to time people have proposed it for the Ninth—although usually for ideological reasons to lessen its influence, and sometimes in very strange ways geographically (splitting a state, as some have suggested with California, would wreck the stability of any state law that gets swept up into federal litigation and thus should not be allowed to happen in any circuit realignment), although those calls have generally quieted as of late.

At this point, however, the Ninth Circuit should be split just for practical reasons, largely because it is disproportionately huge, covering the entire West Coast of the United States plus Alaska, the Pacific Islands (including Hawaii and Guam), and the interior states of Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. And there is really only one way to do it geographically: California, Nevada, and Arizona in one circuit, and the states to the north in the other. (As for the islands, in terms of population it would make sense for them to join the northern states—that circuit will be a lot smaller, although still commensurate with the First Circuit's population—but court access is an important consideration and it may be more feasible for litigants to get to California than Seattle, in which case they should be included with the former.)

Such a split would leave thirteen geographic circuits, for a total of fourteen. But there is one other step that should be taken in the realignment project: dissolving the Federal Circuit, which should happen for several reasons. The most important one is that we have by now learned that having an appellate court with specialized jurisdiction does not really make sense. It isn't needed: patents are not so special, which we know because we let regular district courts litigate them first anyway and the same Supreme Court adjudicates them later. Plus, with regard to its other specialized subject matter, the D.C. Circuit has already shown itself capable of adjudicating any other creature of administrative law.

Furthermore, the Federal Circuit's specialization tends to make its precedent unusually insular in how it develops, and its exclusive jurisdiction promotes forum shopping thanks to bootstrapped claims that would ordinarily be heard in other circuits. In sum, the Federal Circuit is an experiment that has proven itself unnecessary if not actually harmful, but dissolving it now also helps with some of the other logistics of larger judicial reform. For one thing it will keep the circuits at thirteen, even with the Ninth Circuit split, which will be a helpful target for Supreme Court seat expansion to be tied to. For another, there is also a need to expand the seats on the remaining geographic circuits—especially that of the Fifth and Eighth, which continually raise internal governance and quality issues with their jurisprudence.

Congress could of course simply expand the number of judges on each court, but it would likely be politically more justifiable to do if there were some other rationale associated with the increase in the number of appellate seats available to be filled. Some expansion can of course be justified just by population growth and caseloads; some could also be justified by the increased supervisory workload resulting from rolling Article I judges into Article III. If the Ninth splits there may also need to be some seats added for each half. But one easy way to get more judges on other circuits is from redistributing the ones currently serving on the now-dissolved Federal Circuit. Such transfers should be constitutional, as it wouldn't displace life tenure; after all, the judges would still have Article III jobs, and at the same judicial level. Congress should also always have the right to dissolve any court it had the power to create, and reallocating the judges means there won't be an issue with extinguishing a lifetime appointment early.

Reform #5: Reconstitute SCOTUS. America cannot continue as a constitutional democracy without significant changes to the current composition of the Supreme Court. It is currently controlled by a block of six jurists of, at best, dubious analytical skill, if not more dogmatic motivations. Even if they don't all intend to reshape our constitutional order—and at least some have made it clear that they do—their gormless naïveté as to the effects of their jurisprudence, as well as lack of respect for precedent and an actual record, have invited injurious contortion after injurious contortion to the American rule of law. At minimum the personnel math needs to be changed in order to wrest control from that block. Which could, potentially, be subtractive, as several justices have behaved in a way that could warrant impeachment. But impeachment is politically more difficult to attain given the supermajority needed to effectuate it than a more additive strategy of just adding seats, which only takes a majority.

The question then is what to expand the Court to. Some have proposed expanding it to a very large, rotating pool of judges, who could be sat per term or per case, but although such a proposal has merit—it would, for example, mute the power any one individual judge could wield, and make the appointment less of a political prize for the President to win—it might require amending, or at least significantly reinterpreting the Constitution, which is a more fraught process and best avoided unless absolutely necessary. The same problem holds for proposals recommending, for example,eighteen year terms, which would also have the advantage of ensuring that every president would be able to appoint some as they came up, which would hopefully somehow dull the inclination to install particularly dogmatic jurists. The problem, however, is that proposals like these are so different from the status quo that it might not be possible to expediently or constitutionally implement them.

But one way to work around the block of six is to make sure that there are four more justices capable of overruling them, which would bring the composition of the Court up to thirteen. Thirteen also has its own, independent justification, because that's how many appellate circuits there are (and ideally would be), and, already each circuit is effectively supervised by a sitting justice, and such circuits are not currently equitably allocated. Making the number of circuits and justices match is a reasonable policy to pursue on its own merits, even if there were not a more exigent reason also prompting the expansion. But because there is this independent reason to have thirteen justices, it would presumably deter later political attempts to keep trying to pack the Court with even more justices, when there would not be a similar justification.

Reform #6: Rehabilitate Precedent. Reforming the Supreme Court is one thing; cleaning up the mess it's made is another.

It won't all be possible. For instance, the people on death row it allowed to die are already dead (at least most of them). For so much the Court has done, no matter how insupportably, there is simply no undo button.

Nevertheless, we can address the staying power of its recent decisions and wipe much of it away. While we generally can't undo a particular decision—it has already had its immediate practical effect, and there are some constitutional issues with Congress attempting to trump a particular determination—we could still statutorily limit a decision to its facts and rob it of any precedential value, thus causing any court encountering any similar legal question to have to consider it afresh, instead of being bound by the earlier decision that ordinarily would effectively operate as the law of the land.

That operation has generally presumed that the decision itself followed prior precedent, reflected the actual record, and complied with the Court's own procedural rules. Yet in so many instances, the Court has produced decisions that have deviated from all such practices. It is bad enough that such decisions were able to have immediate effect, but they certainly should not be able to reverberate into the future as statements of law. And given that Congress is the legislative branch and entitled to write the law of the land, it should have the power to ensure these decisions of doubtful legitimacy do not.

It wouldn't be unprecedented to treat decisions this way; it would be similar to what some courts themselves do to certain decisions by "unpublishing" them and thus rendering them unsuitable to be relied upon in future matters. The only difference is that it would be Congress rendering them unusable and not the Court itself. Still, while doing so should be within its legislative purview it's a legislative power that should be used modestly. For one thing, displacing precedent strains the rule of law, even if it is bad precedent. Indeed, one of the problems the Supreme Court has presented us with is a lack of respect for precedent, which has left the public unsure about what the law actually is since it cannot count on any particular precedent to still be controlling. We would want to be careful not to exacerbate the same problem we are trying to fix in the course of trying to fix it, but the exercise itself is essentially one designed not to replace precedent but to restore the precedent that the Court displaced, yet without the analytical care ordinarily needed to do so.

Furthermore, not everything the Court has recently done is necessarily bad. We therefore wouldn't want Congress to automatically nullify everything the Court has recently done. Instead only a selection of cases should be subject to such treatment. A committee could be formed, perhaps of lawyers, retired judges, and academics, who could review the Court's recent decisions—perhaps going back to the Gorsuch appointment, when the conventional operation of the Court was diverted via Senatorial appointment hijinks—to make recommendations for which decisions are most suspect and thus deserving of this legislative dulling.

It is of course a big deal for Congress to supersede a fellow government branch. But it is also a big deal when the Court has superseded Congress. And what is being called for here is not to trump a particular legal conclusion the Court has reached in any particular case but to play its constitutional role in making clear what the law actually is in places where the Court has muddled it.

It's essential to understand that this isn't about protecting the integrity of elections from people who don't have the right to vote. This is a suppression effort meant to intimidate people who do have the legal right to vote by making it seem like it might be better to sit out the mid-terms than be accosted by federal officers just because they don't seem white enough to vote.

A lot of noise has been made for several years now by Donald Trump about "rigged" or "stolen" elections. Despite winning two of the last three presidential elections, Trump insists the system is out to get him. He says no one should trust the system unless it elects him, and even when it does, it's still a rigged system because it forced him to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Propelled by the administration's overriding animus against anyone liberal and/or non-white, Trump has been claiming the nation is drowning in illegal votes cast by migrants who don't have the legal right to vote. The administration has funneled time and money into generating evidence of these obviously false claims. And there's been no return on this investment. For example, it only took a couple of weeks for the DOJ's claims of illegal voters in Nevada to drop from 16,000 to 285 to zero.

California is a favorite target of Trump's. And so California is seeing similar efforts to make a case that simply can't be made. But that hasn't stopped the DOJ and DHS from touting supposedly alarming numbers that are actually anything but, as the administration looks for ways to arrest people who are actually in this country legally, but don't fit the demographic Trump caters to.

Here's the latest on Trump's new wave of futile aggressions, as reported by the Associated Press:

Federal authorities charged more than two dozen foreign nationals Monday in California as part of a statewide sweep targeting people who officials say have illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.

[…]

The Justice Department said the 28 people who were charged as part of a sweep dubbed Operation Protect the Vote are lawful permanent residents — but not U.S. citizens who are permitted to legally vote. They are charged with crimes including making false statements on a naturalization application and submitting fraudulent voter registrations.

28 voters? Oh my. I mean, this might mean something if a sweep was performed in some one horse town (to use obsolete vernacular) where the newly installed mayor had won by a suddenly suspicious 27 votes. But we're talking about California, which has (as of last October) [squints at official report] 23,092,098 registered voters. That's a percentage I'm not even going to do the math on because surely anyone knows that this means there are likely 23,092,070 people legally allowed to vote in California.

What this fact does tell us is that the administration is willing to spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of federal dollars to seek out and arrest people who could never have swayed an election and who, in most cases, probably were just unclear on the rules, especially after many states decided to fold in voter registration with the state ID/drivers license process.

Here's the DOJ pretending it has done literally anything with these expended resources:

"This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens," Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, said during a news conference in Los Angeles.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't do anything to anything. It's such a small percentage you'd have to drastically alter a spreadsheet's numerical display to reflect the percentage of "illegal" voters. If there's anything doing "real damage" to elections and American citizens, it's the administration that definitely plans to use these 28 arrests to justify federal interference in the election process.

Most people — especially those who love Trump and believe any fucking thing that falls out of his mouth — likely expected there to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "illegal" voters in California. The DOJ manages to come up with twenty-eight.

Even if you want to believe California's rookie illegal voting numbers are just symptomatic of a larger problem, you're going to look just as stupid as the DOJ itself.

The Justice Department said Monday it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks. 

So, a little under six people per state. And that's across the United States, which has [checks the stats] nearly 230 million registered voters. All this is proving is that the DOJ is just an extension of Trump's id and that it has no problem spending millions to lock a few hundred people up for the often-accidental "crime" of mistakenly registering to vote. In most of these cases, there's no evidence any of those who "illegally" registered to vote actually cast any votes.

And yet, the DOJ and DHS are treating this like a high-level crime worth expending all the resources they can throw at it. DHS officers performing quasi-raids to round up these "worst of the worst" criminals. I would hope the government knows exactly how ridiculous it looks.

Esmeralda Muñoz, 70, said her family was furious that agents showed up to their home in full tactical gear with guns drawn to arrest her husband before dawn.

"It's a show for them," she said, calling it a "shame" that government officials arrived with camera crews and news helicopters.

She's not lying. The DHS itself posted footage of this "raid." (More coverage here if you'd rather not click thru to X.com.)

But the real punchline comes in the next paragraph:

Omar Muñoz is a legal permanent resident, she said, and they didn't realize that he was registered to vote. When they do talk about politics, Esmeralda said Omar has been a vociferous supporter of Trump.

lol lmao even…

Bet that changes. An administration stocked with bigoted death cult nihilists is reaping the whirlwind. It starts with gas prices and ends with Trump locking up his own supporters because he only likes the ones who are white. The GOP is nearing a midterm that will likely flip the House and has no succession plan in place other than "whoever can weather the most face-eatings from the leopards in their party."

And as much as I want to laugh loudly and (ultimately) hollowly, it doesn't really matter whether or not the DOJ arrests 10 people or 10,000 people. The real reason for this show of force is to keep non-white people from voting, even if they — like Omar Munoz — are Trump supporters.

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Ofcom's media relations people know how to email me. I have ten press releases from them this year. They emailed me when they launched investigations of or took actions on X/Grok, Telegram, Pornhub, and Sanctioned Suicide. But when they recently published their required report on how the Online Safety Act is going… suddenly they've lost my email?

Now, it's no secret that I've mostly been a critic of the Online Safety Act, but I'm open to being proven wrong. Unfortunately, Ofcom's latest report seems to support many of my criticisms of the law, and perhaps that's why they didn't feel it was worth letting me know about it. Even the opening lines of the announcement make it clear they're only releasing this report because they have to.

Ofcom is required by the Online Safety Act 2023 to review and report on content harmful to children online.

This is our first report under section 63 of the Act, which places a duty on Ofcom to produce and publish a statutory report on content that is harmful to children at least every three years following the passage of the Act.

Yeah, that's the bureaucratic equivalent of "mom made me do this, but I don't want to."

The press release includes four bullet points, which play down how bad the report actually is. Everything about the report is basically "none of this is actually working" and Ofcom's response and recommendations are basically "double down harder, declare more information harmful to kids, and allow us to take more enforcement actions."

• In our advice, we recommend that it is appropriate to add body stigma content and depression content, currently identified by Ofcom as kinds of non-designated content, to the category of priority content that is harmful to children. If the Secretary of State takes our recommendation forward, this will ensure that protections for children against these kinds of content are enshrined in the Act.
• At this time, we do not recommend any other changes to the categories of primary priority or priority content that is harmful to children in the Act. We are not recommending changes where we found that the available evidence supports the current categorisation or where proposed legislation is likely to address concerns.
• Most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period. According to our evidence, at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children's safety duties came into force in July 2025. This finding is concerning and shows that further progress is needed to protect children online.
• Exposure to harmful content can have serious impacts on children's mental and physical wellbeing. Children continue to report that encountering harmful content negatively impacts their wellbeing. There is no new evidence indicating a change to the severity of harm experienced by children as a result of encountering harmful content.

But the actual numbers in the report (not included in the press release) are pretty bleak for those who believe that widespread identity and age verification, combined with potential liability for "harmful" content will do anything to protect children at all. The numbers suggest basically zero improvement in kids' exposure to content deemed "harmful."

The report looks at the access that kids have to various categories of supposedly "harmful" content before and after the OSA's "child safety duties" went into effect. This is the UK's version of the infamous "duty of care" concept that has become popular around the globe (including the US). As we've warned in the past, the "duty of care" sounds reasonable, but it really serves no useful purpose other than as a hammer to batter companies after kids inevitably find their way to content adults deem harmful.

We've also mentioned that this is effectively engaging in a global experiment on children without any actual evidence that it works. For all the talk of social media companies "experimenting on children," the duty of care legislation does the same.

And the details from this report suggest the duty of care… has had a statistically meaningless impact on kids encountering harmful content online. In short if you looked at the data from before and after and asked if the government had put in place a massive new law to "protect the children online" you would not be able to place when (or if) it happened, because the data shows effectively no impact.

But it is limiting adult access to information.

The story is the same on basically every category of "harmful" content. Kids still see it.

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to suicide content and self-harm content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to eating disorder content on user-touser services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to abuse and hate content on user-touser services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to bullying content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to violent content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to harmful substances content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to dangerous stunts and challenges content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to depression content on user-to-user services did not change significantly between December 2025 and April 2026, with around a quarter of children reporting being exposed to depression content….

Ofcom data shows that children's reported exposure to body stigma content on user-touser services did not change significantly between December 2025 and April 2026….

And so forth…

The one area they claim has seen some success is that "highly effective age assurance" on adult content sites has been successful in stopping kids from accessing those sites:

Highly effective age assurance is helping to prevent children from accessing pornography services. As of July 2026, the majority of the most popular pornography services in the UK had age checks in place.

That said, the data shows no meaningful drop in kids' overall exposure to porn, since most of it appears to come via social media and forum sites, so just like all the other areas of content, we're talking about "did not change significantly."

Children are still encountering pornographic content on social media, messaging and gaming services. The proportion of children reporting exposure to this content did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children's safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025.

Bizarrely, the report doesn't show any data, charts, or tables about the (lack of) changes in exposure to this content. The report doesn't have any footnotes (as far as I can tell) with links to the data. Nor does the page announcing the report. They do, however, say that it's from the Children's Online Safety Tracker tool, and after searching through their website, I finally found some links to the raw data.

Having spent some time going through the data, I think about the only thing you can conclusively say is that… the Online Safety Act duty of care has had basically zero impact so far. In some cases the access to the content went up a tiny bit. In some cases it went down a tiny bit. There are three data sets: Wave 1, a baseline taken before the duty of care went into effect in July 2025. Then there's Wave 2, at the end of 2025, looking at the impact about six months in. And now we have Wave 3 from earlier this spring, representing about nine months in.

And what we see is… basically nothing. There's no noticeable change outside of statistical noise as of yet:

• By way of disclosure, I'll note that I used Claude to help me make this chart based on the spreadsheets from Ofcom. I independently verified the numbers against Ofcom's spreadsheets.

As you'll see, the only category with a statistically significant change at any point was… bullying. Which went up (not down) significantly between Wave 1 (pre-duty) and Wave 2. But by Wave 3 it had fallen back down to within the insignificant zone, but still above the pre-duty number.

So the scorecard looks like this: The duty of care went into effect, companies put in place all sorts of intrusive age verification tools… and nothing happened. Kids still come across the same amount of questionable content.

Now, perhaps you can argue that nine months of data is not enough. But you would think that if this law was so important and a duty of care was so important, we should see some indication of a change in kids' exposure to harmful content? Somewhere? Somehow?

But that doesn't mean the law did nothing at all. Adults did have to deal with some of the fallout of the law, including smaller forums and sites deciding that they needed to shut down, rather than deal with compliance costs and risks of the law. Also, many more people have needed to put their private data at risk by needing to upload identification or other personal data to get access to sites.

All this to "protect the children" when the current data suggests… no real change to kids' access to this content.

Perhaps someone should be asking why governments like the UK are running these experiments without any willingness to admit that maybe it does more harm than good?

Earlier this month we noted how Meta's launch of its cutesy agentic AI software Muse arrived with all sorts of major privacy and security screw ups, despite the company's repeated, breathless claims that privacy and security were at the forefront of the company's thinking during development.

Like most AI agents, Muse is supposed to help automate simple to moderately complicated daily tasks.

But the app launched with multiple ugly zero-day flaws, one of which let an attacker covertly spy on Mac users. Other flaws were reportedly glossed over and downplayed by a company more interested in rushing to market than ensuring its software actually worked. One person even found you could trick Muse into giving you device root access on the device it's installed on simply by pretending to be a Muse agent yourself.

Giving Meta (a company with abysmal ethical and privacy standards) massively expanded access to all sorts of personal accounts is just foundationally insane. That was quickly reflected by the people who found the app was accessing people's private messages without approval, and often ignored all permissions and uploaded them to the cloud - even if you specifically tell it not to.

Outlets like Wired found that Muse consistently creates detailed profiles of all your friends, family, colleagues, "collaborators," and people you "follow." Which is "fun" and "cute" when you consider Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's enthusiastic collaboration with corrupt, surveillance-obsessed authoritarians.

And now Ars Technica has found that Muse can reveal all manner of sensitive personal information when users share conversations through Web links. Like many services, Muse lets users share images, content, searches, and chats with other people via unique URLs. Those URLs generally have long-sequences of text that aren't supposed to be easily guessed.

But researchers from Claroc found that Meta's implementation of this feature made it possible for folks to decipher shared content details via a passive DNS search:

"Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It's this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible."

According to the Claroc researchers, some of the data they were able to easily access included:

• a candidate's notes preparing for a confidential executive-search call with a frontier AI lab, naming the lab's internal contact and the meeting time
• a national marketing company's internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
• a small-business owner's loan application, with the amount requested
• a to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
• a real-estate investor's internal performance report, with two property addresses and exact return, income and mortgage figures
• a workplace's full-year staff vacation calendar, listing dozens of employees against the week each one would be away

Meta has suspended the feature while they figure out why they screwed up. Again, this is despite Meta claiming repeatedly in pre-release blog posts that Muse was built with a heavy focus on privacy and security. And again, this is all made possible because Meta doesn't have to worry about any meaningful accountability in a country too corrupt to pass modern privacy laws, regulate the data broker ecosystem, or hold corporations legally accountable for literally anything.

This is just the orchestra getting warmed up as a parade of half-cooked agentic AI agents rush to market, and people who don't really understand the scope of what they signed up for connect all sorts of sensitive accounts with Mark Zuckerberg or other sketchy industry titans. Hopefully at least a few market entries can differentiate themselves by not being an ethically dubious pit of public interest malfeasance.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars:

If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.

In second place, it's a comment about Malcolm Gladwell's strange strawman assertion that people say the bad behavior of police is caused by there being too many of them:

No, the police are badly behaved because they rarely face repercussions.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with Kinetic Gothic and another comment about the Canadian YouTuber:

I was particularly amused by their concerns this could be used to locate their homes, since unlike most of us, cops do have the option to -not- drive home in the vehicles they patrol the town in.

Next, it's an anonymous comment about the impossibility of perfect content moderation:

I dunno, I've also done and overseen moderation work on that kind of scale, and I would be deeply hesitant to say we always get things correct. I've dealt with enough community blowback over the years — sometimes stuff I thought was justified; sometimes stuff I thought was exaggerated; sometimes stuff I thought was invented out of whole cloth — to know not only do errors happen but that people can have very different opinions over what those errors were and what 'the right way' to do things would have been.

Facebook is a titanic entity with enormous resources to throw at the problem, but the problem with moderation of any sort is that the need for it scales faster than the supply. The flood of output from slop engines is only making the issue worse, especially if you're somebody like YT or FB, where there's lots of perceived value in shouting over everyone else.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump hiding the IRS report on his Big Beautiful Bill:

Hey now, be fair to the IRS, they might actually be having trouble figuring this shit out. I mean haven't they been cut down to like six guys and a beat-up old Tandy 1000 at this point?

In second place, it's MrWilson with an idea for the Canadian YouTuber and his camera:

Just tell the cops that you're setting up a service to track all the Canadian girlfriends that Americans have claimed existed. I bet even Canadian cops think tracking girlfriends, fictional or otherwise, with mass surveillance camera networks is fine.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Brendan Carr threatening journalists for covering polls Trump doesn't like:

I'm sure Mr. Carr has security footage of Antifa vandals cutting a 350-foot long slice in the polls with a box cutter and then pouring fertilizer into them. He's just not releasing it yet.

Finally, it's another anonymous comment about Malcolm Gladwell, this time with a simple retort to the description of him as "one of America's foremost thinkers":

[Citation Needed]

That's all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• Hillary Clinton's Staff Recognize She Doesn't Understand Encryption And Is Supporting 'The Impossible'
• FBI Facial Recognition Expert Helps Denver PD Arrest Wrong Man Twice For The Same Crime
• Appeals Court Affirms NSA Surveillance Can Be Used To Investigate Domestic Criminal Suspects
• CNN Tells Viewers It's Illegal For Them To Read Wikileaks Document Dumps. CNN Is Wrong
• Arrested Backpage Execs Ask Kamala Harris To Drop Bogus Case She Herself Has Admitted She Has No Authority To Bring
• Team Prenda Loses Big Again: Told To Pay Over $650k For Bogus Defamation Lawsuit

This Week in 2011

• British Historian On Porn And Internet Censorship: North Korea Is Right — The Internet Is Our Enemy
• Warner Bros. Buys Story That Was Written In The Reddit Comments; Then Tells Author To Stop Redditing
• Bill Gates Called To Testify In Antitrust Trial Over Windows 95; No This Isn't An Old Post
• Google Realizing That Its Real Names Policy Is Excessive
• UK Parliament Recommends Websites Be Liable For Anonymous Comments If They Won't Reveal Identities
• Who Gets The Copyright On The Photo Of A Beaten Gaddafi, Captured Off A Cameraphone

This Week in 2006

• On The Corner of Hollywood and Wall
• Why YouTube Could Make Things Difficult For Google
• No, I Don't Think Anyone Believes Boycottwalmart.com Is Actually A Wal-Mart Site
• Universal Music Finally Sues Video Sites… Just Not YouTube
• Internet Addiction Not Quite An Addiction…
• Without Copyright Extension, The Beatles Will Never Have Incentive To Write Another Song

In all of our coverage of the disastrous tenure RFK Jr. has had as Secretary of HHS, we have not yet discussed a bonkers study the CDC planned to fund in Guinea-Bissau. This hepatitis B "vaccine trial" was supposed to already have been kicked off, but it has been suspended since January instead because of the plainly unethical methodology for the trial, combined with the understanding that the two researchers employed to run it are virulent anti-vaxxers.

The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director's office told the agency's budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC's global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

If the trial moves forward, it would be funded by the US but run by Danish researchers, who have separately been accused of misconduct. In December, the CDC announced the award of an unsolicited grant for $1.6 million to a research group at the University of Southern Denmark, led by married couple Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby. The pair have produced numerous studies that have been promoted by anti-vaccine advocates, drawing concern and criticism from researchers. Stabell Benn and Aaby are currently under investigation by Danish authorities over allegations of "falsification" and "scientific misconduct" related to previous vaccine research.

So, what makes the design of the trial unethical, beyond the notion that the two researchers are known bad-actors on the topic of vaccines? Well, let's start with the fact that this trial is not designed to study the efficacy of the hepatitis B vaccine at all. We already have plenty of data on that that suggests the vaccine is safe and effective overall. No, this study is designed specifically to find harmful outcomes from the vaccine. To do that kind of study, the researchers planned to enroll 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau in the trial and give half of them the vaccine and withhold it from the other half to study the health outcomes of the children.

In case that didn't land properly: The study is designed to knowingly expose 7,000 children to hepatitis B, which can have immensely deleterious long-term health outcomes if exposed.

But wait, you might say. Are these children that would otherwise have ready access to the hep B vaccine? The answer is, in large part, no they would not. The government in Guinea-Bissau is born of a recent coup and it's ability to deliver on basic government services has been wanting, to say the least. But that does not, in any way, make this trial more ethical.

Stabell Benn and Aaby have argued that the trial is not unethical because newborns in Guinea-Bissau are currently not routinely given a dose of hepatitis B vaccine at birth. But outside experts point to ethical guidelines, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, which requires trials to provide the "best proven intervention"—which is a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine—regardless of whatever the current standard is in the country hosting the trial. Placebos may only be used when there is no proven intervention or there is "compelling and scientifically sound methodological reasons" to withhold a proven intervention.

In a scathing rebuke in February, the World Health Organization laid out a bullet-point list of "why withholding the vaccine is unethical." The WHO notes that the entire premise of the trial is based on "hypothetical safety outcomes without sufficient credible evidence," which don't justify putting newborns at risk. The agency also blasted Stabell Benn and Aaby's defense of the trial, saying: "Resource constraints cannot be used to justify withholding proven care in a research study involving people. Ethical obligations require minimizing risk and ensuring a prospect of benefit for participants."

RFK Jr. has a pattern building of this sort of thing. Emails released show that he almost certainly lied in congressional hearings about his adventures in Samoa in 2019, after which the country experienced a tragic outbreak of measles that claimed over 83 deaths. Brown people are fit for experiments designed to boost Kennedy's ego, it seems.

The CDC recently planned to grant even more taxpayer money to Stabell Benn and Aaby, but they've now run into an even bigger problem that worldwide condemnation: a police raid by the government of the study's offices.

Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers on Monday, seizing doses of hepatitis B vaccine intended for a vaccine trial for newborns. International health experts have called the trial "unethical," but anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to fund it with US taxpayer dollars.

Now it appears that officials in Guinea-Bissau have opened an investigation into Aaby and Stabell Benn's work. In a Facebook post Monday, translated from Portuguese, the judicial police announced they carried out a "search operation at the facilities of the Bandim Health Project in Bissau, which culminated in the seizure of a batch of hepatitis B vaccines intended for vaccination of children in the country."

I'll just say that I hope the government there has access to enough quality scientists to do a very thorough investigation as to what precisely is in the hep B vaccines that were intended for use in this study. I'd be very curious to know just what is in them. Call it a hunch.

But, regardless, it should horrify us all that our own tax money is being used to fund this kind of unethical study. The trolley problem is famous for a reason, after all, and the idea is not generally to want to purposefully put yourself at the switch in that problem. That's precisely what these "researchers" intended to do, all to go looking for any evidence for a conclusion they reached long ago.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham's time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.

Navatek's CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.

"Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say 'yes,'" Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. "That should only take a minute and he's on his way. We don't need to pretend we give a shit about each other."

At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the "yes" he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek's way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.

In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham's steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.

The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state's top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.

Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: "This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you," Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.

Kao's admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court — a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.

But the FBI agents who took Kao's confession — two experienced anti-corruption investigators — could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.

The details of this investigation have not previously been reported.

President Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption — an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbade the DOJ's anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao's explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.

ProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao's claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao's secret steakhouse dinner.

This story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a "convicted liar."

Kao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.

Graham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.

Clyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.

"Whatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor's request," Jami LaRue, Clyburn's communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. "The Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions."

David Snider, Wilson's communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. "Congressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission," Snider said in an email.

In an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham's communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that "any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false." She said the accusations were the "ravings of a convicted felon" and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao's arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.

The two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao's arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.

Hartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

"[It's] corruption at its best," Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. "But I am the only one rotting in prison."

Small Company, Big Ambitions

Kao's dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.

He had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company's history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state's powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.

At times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company's CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn't true.

But what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. "He would talk about how we're a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we're going to be a billion-dollar company," said a former engineer. "He was an absolute megalomaniac."

Kao hatched a plan to expand Navatek's presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called "the method," as ProPublica detailed in September.

Navatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.

Kao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek — through executives, family members and lobbyists — would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company's work.

That legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers' staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show — even though the contracts were in theory competitive.

Kao "wanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could," a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to "rebuild," as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.

Hartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company's progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. "If anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it's him," Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.

Later, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a "key supporter."

The company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer "constituents to 'feed.'"

The senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. "You can get access to Lindsey Graham," Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.

Kao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson — all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation — in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.

Yet Navatek had "zero people" capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.

Its $9.5 million "power and energy" proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham's office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would "ensure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future."

In reality, Navatek's initial research "looked like a college senior's graduation project," the executive said. "Something you go get from RadioShack." Graham's office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.

But for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn't a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year's budget came together, both Graham's and Clyburn's offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek's funding.

In May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn's legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a "modular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts," according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.

In September, the Senate Appropriations Committee — Graham's committee — released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for "Talent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems." Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because "an almost identical paragraph" appeared in Hartman's internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.

After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records — a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins' and Graham's offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.

Congress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek's pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.

At that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.

That would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson's campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson's campaign $3,500.

And bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek's lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.

During that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator's support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao's version of events.

Kao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: "We became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot," he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, "until we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget."

To secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.

"The Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions," Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek's chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was "yes."

"These discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward," Kao told the FBI. "I suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal."

A Dinner With Graham

Graham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham's campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser's name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the "money man." After that person departed, Graham entered.

Graham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was "very abrupt" and "straight to the point": He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.

Navatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it's not clear which one Kao was describing.

Congress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had "zero past performance," the former executive said.

The same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham's office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.

A day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham's office to ask about the money, which "the Senator may have an interest in." Craig Abele, Graham's national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham's office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. "Spoke to ONR this morning," Abele wrote March 6. "Should be set."

The company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020. 

Abele became Graham's deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.

Graham's spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.

The checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.

"My understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions," Winer said. "I never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution."

After Kao's 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. "University officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek," Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. "Our sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise."

One week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham's office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek's power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.

Tongour confirmed many elements of Kao's story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham's fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. "I don't recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes," Tongour said in an email. "Certainly not for appetizers, entrée, and dessert."

But he denied Kao's most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.

"I would remember that forever," Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek's requests, he said, because they were good for the state. "If I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier." Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao's arrest.

Navatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.

For that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget "mirrored" whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.

Over a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.

The FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn's alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was "Congressman Clyburn's favorite school."

The spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.

Kao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.

Wilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was "very clear and knew what the ask was," Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.

Tongour denied this. "There was no 'pay to play' with Joe Wilson or his staff either," he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson "is a friend and I want to see him re-elected."

Kao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers' campaigns picked up the check.

By August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham's and Wilson's committees would each support part of the company's requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.

Kao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.

Kao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company's founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.

"It's nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts," Kao said. "The whole thing is a grand lie."

An Arrest, a Lifeboat

Kao's arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. "Don't call us," one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.

The Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao's contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.

As Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer's first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.

Hartman didn't face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao's campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.

In September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.

As the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had "uncovered a lengthy history" of a government contractor making donations "in exchange for government contracts," she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.

In federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers' conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.

In the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department's anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.

But before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president's handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section's authority to bring new cases.

Then Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.

Ball was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.

The corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.

The White House referred ProPublica's questions to the FBI and DOJ. 

The Department of Justice didn't respond to detailed questions about the investigation. 

"Under President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden's two-tiered system of justice," DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.

Kao's claims are "half baked" and "misleading," FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. "Additionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement."

Meanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a "model for public-private success."

The company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. "It was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today," he wrote. "It's good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve." Johnson's office did not reply to an email requesting comment. 

The occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation's Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week's episode, Ben is joined by Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for Thomson Reuters and author of Broken Code, which expands on the award-winning series 'The Facebook Files' and partly inspired The Social Reckoning. Together they discuss:

• Rhode Island sues Meta over alleged tolerance for scam advertising (Reuters)
• Meta ordered to pay $25bn to New Mexico in Cambridge Analytica data-privacy case (The Guardian)
• Joel Kaplan leaves Meta (Platformer)
• Hooked on YouTube (NBC News)
• Anthropic gives third-party auditors 'employee-like access' in AI industry first (ZDNET)
• A moderator's death exposes an industry-wide crisis (Uni Global Union)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• TikTok staff raised child safety alarms. Court records show executives failed to act (NPR)

Our fun links this week include an archive/newsletter of the most visited Wikipedia page from the prior day and puppies doing their best to navigate through mazes.

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Remember back when Elon Musk was handed the keys of our federal government with basically zero accountability or oversight? All sorts of bad stuff happened, but one of the lawsuits we've been covering was the American Federation of Gov't Employees (AFGE) along with the Association of Administrative Law Judges and a few individual federal workers suing DOGE over the fact that Musk's team of unqualified DOGE boys demanded, and then received, access to information about millions of federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is highly sensitive data (remember the seriousness of the OPM hack by China? Sorry, the multiple OPM hacks?) that OPM is not supposed to share with anyone who lacks a demonstrated need to know, even within the federal government.

AFGE sued on behalf of their members, all federal government employees, whose data was put at risk. And while Musk is long out of the government and many of the DOGE bros have also left the government, the lawsuits have continued to move forward, including an initial ruling last June that granted a preliminary injunction. But litigation takes time, and going from the preliminary injunction to motions for summary judgment took basically another year.

And this week there was another big (if late) victory. Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York found that OPM violated the Privacy Act by handing DOGE access to the sensitive data of tens of millions of federal employees. Indeed, the sharing of the information was so obviously illegal and egregious that the government effectively offered no defense other than "we're no longer sharing such info." As the court notes:

At this point, there is no meaningful dispute concerning the underlying conduct. The defendants barely defend its legality, relying instead on what has happened since to argue that the case is moot and that prospective relief is unnecessary. The Court therefore reaches the same conclusions on the merits of the plaintiffs' APA claims for the reasons stated in the June 9 Opinion, which are incorporated here. OPM's decision to grant DOGE Agents broad access to its systems of records containing PII without a demonstrated need was unlawful; because all the access permissions have been rescinded, those permissions need not be set aside.

Admittedly, this is at odds with the Fourth Circuit (NY is in the Second Circuit), which felt bound to let DOGE have access to Social Security data because the Supreme Court… rejected an earlier injunction with zero explanation in a perplexingly stupid shadow docket non-ruling. The main difference here is OPM data vs. Social Security data, but with this Supreme Court, who the hell knows.

As for this case, for those who will argue that because Trump declared that DOGE was there to modernize the federal government, DOGE was free to access whatever information it needed, that's not at all how any of this works. Even taking that modernization mandate at face value, nothing about it required access to this much private information. Indeed, the judge points out that the government provides nothing to show that DOGE needed this data for "modernization" efforts.

In their briefing, the defendants reiterate their argument that the nature of the DOGE Agents' modernization responsibilities under the DOGE Executive Order provided the necessary justification for access to OPM records systems. But the June 9 Opinion already concluded that "IT modernization does not necessarily require access to confidential PII," much less administrative access. 786 F. Supp. 3d at 688. In fact, one of the plaintiffs' experts, former OPM CIO David Nesting, testified to participating in modernization efforts at two federal agencies without ever obtaining access to PII contained in the systems being modernized. The defendants do not explain why modernization efforts by the DOGE Agents at OPM needed to proceed differently. The record also provides no support for a finding that it was the pursuit of a modernization agenda that prompted OPM to grant sweeping and expedited access to a score of DOGE Agents to its systems of records containing PII.

The government, having not even bothered to defend the obviously illegal data sharing, tried instead to argue that the case is moot because (1) they've stopped OPM from continuing to share such data and (2) the "DOGE Temporary Organization" officially expired on July 4th, and nearly all of the DOGE bros who had access to the data are long gone. That would be quite the trick: go into government, get access to all sorts of private information illegally, and then as long as you leave the government before the court can finish deliberating you get off free. That's not how it works. Especially since OPM kept conveniently timing its policy changes to land right before court deadlines (not suspicious at all…)

the timing of OPM's revisions to its policies closely tracks this litigation's deadlines, suggesting that they are driven more by a desire to resolve this case than by a genuine departure from its prior conduct…. OPM repeatedly removed access permissions for the DOGE Agents shortly before court reports were due. OPM circulated its November 2025 policy days before its mootness motion was due. It revised its policies again amid summary judgment briefing and settlement negotiations. And Starr, OPM's third CIO since this case began, at last repudiated the need-tobe-prepared justification for granting any type of access to OPM's systems of records containing PII in a declaration attached to the defendants' sur-reply. He had repudiated the justification for administrative access only in a declaration submitted just two weeks prior. "To the extent that the voluntary cessation doctrine exists primarily to keep parties from acting strategically to avoid judicial review," Ruesch v. Comm'r of Internal Revenue, 25 F.4th 67, 71 (2d Cir. 2022), OPM's behavior, while undoubtedly commendable, appears designed to do just that.

The court also notes that DOGE hasn't fully disappeared, and that at least one person tied to this mess, Senior Advisor Noah Peters, is still at OPM:

That said, the DOGE Executive Order provides that the Organization's termination does not "imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order." USDS continues to operate within the Executive Office of the President, and the Executive Order's directive that agencies give USDS "full and prompt access" to their records remains in effect. The termination thus narrows, but does not eliminate, the circumstances in which the challenged conduct could recur.

Lastly, Peters remains at OPM. The parties dispute whether he was an OPM employee or detailed from USDS during the relevant period. Although Peters currently does not have access permissions to any of OPM's systems of records containing PII, OPM has committed only that it will not grant him access "except in conformity with" its policies and applicable law. That assurance carries little weight, given that the defendants engaged in the challenged conduct notwithstanding the existence of policies and law prescribing their actions. And even though OPM has strengthened their access protocols considerably in response to this litigation, "it is ultimately no more difficult for OPM to ignore these new protocols than to ignore its old procedures."

There is still the question of remedies, which will apparently be the next phase of this case. Judge Cote has asked both sides for further briefing about whether a permanent injunction is still needed. OPM says no because they've already stopped such information sharing. But the timeline here still matters: DOGE got access to all of this data on day one of the Trump administration. The preliminary injunction didn't come until June, five months later. And then this final ruling came over a year later.

It's good that the court refused to let OPM run out the clock by pretending that it no longer mattered since DOGE is gone, but no injunction can unshare the data that the DOGE Bros already took. OPM insists that its own review says that the DOGE Bros didn't exfiltrate the data they got access to outside of OPM, but we have no reason to trust them. They've lied before.

Either way, this data is the kind of thing OPM used to insist was fully locked down, and then suddenly it wasn't once Elon Musk came to town. After the OPM hacks a decade ago, the government swore that it understood how dangerous it was to let this information out. But then Trump and Elon handed the keys to a group of cocky, inexperienced tech bros with basically no limits. And it took the court nearly two years to say, officially, that this was illegal.

That seems like an unworkable system when you have a situation — as we did — where the federal government is taken over by those dead set on looting it as quickly as possible.

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One of America's foremost thinkers hasn't done enough thinking. Instead, he's delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn't hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he's saying.

Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven't read it, so I can't comment on the entirety of his latest work. I have, however, read a particularly atrocious excerpt — one that was published by The Atlantic because even Slate has moved on from Slatepitches.

In this excerpt, Gladwell argues that the reason US law enforcement officers are so violent is because there just aren't enough of them. You may think I'm paraphrasing. I assure you: I am not. Here's the headline and subhead from his Atlantic piece:

America Has a Police Shortage

Many Americans have decided that their country's problem is that it has too many police officers. In fact, it has too few.

That's a wild conclusion to reach. It's especially wild when the only outside support you have to offer for your theory are: one (1) study that agrees with your foregone conclusion, and one (1) police official who agrees with your foregone conclusion.

He starts by comparing US cops per capita with European cops per capita. Most people would think the Los Angeles PD is larger than the Berlin (Germany) police force. They'd be wrong.

Berlin has about 18,000 police officers, making its police department twice the size of Los Angeles's.

American police departments, compared with their counterparts around the developed world, are tiny. Phoenix has 2,500 police officers. Munich—which has a population of roughly the same size—has nearly two and a half times as many. Dallas has 3,100 officers. The Brussels metro area, comparable to Dallas in population, has 6,700.

But would they actually be wrong? Maybe, but not by much. These comparisons only mean as much as Gladwell is willing to share. He doesn't look at everything else that factors into this, including police spending as a percentage of national/local budgets.

Despite this objective lack of accountability for policing practice, public levels of trust in police remain among the highest in the EU only behind Scandinavian countries and Switzerland.[179] This allows Germany to maintain one of the lowest levels of public order and safety spending in the EU, at 1.5 percent of gross domestic profit, compared to the EU average of 1.8 percent.[180] As a result, Germany has a police force of only 300 officers per 100,000 of its population.

The US has about 243 officers per 100,000 people. That is a smaller number but it's not so much smaller that it should immediately raise eyebrows, much less overwhelming support for Gladwell's preferred narrative.

Here's where Gladwell decides 2+2 equals whatever number he needs it to be.

In 2020, an African American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer, setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country. The motto of many of the protesters was "Defund the police."

If the police were badly behaved, the thinking went, it was because there were too many of them.

[…]

Following the [George Floyd] protests, city after city saw their police force shrink. Of the 15 largest police departments in the United States, 12 had a markedly smaller police force in 2025 than in 2019. Philadelphia lost 23.1 percent of its police force during that period; Washington, D.C., lost 21.4 percent; San Francisco, 17.5 percent; Phoenix, 15 percent; and on and on. The reformers won the day. But what they did not understand is that there is a trade-off between certainty and severity: When criminals think they can get away with crimes, policing and punishments need to be more severe to achieve the same deterrent effect. Severity is not something that comes from lots of police. It's something that comes from having too few police.

First off, Gladwell refuses to call Floyd's killing a murder, which is extremely fucking strange since the officer who murdered Floyd (Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin) was convicted of murder. Calling Chauvin "rogue" is just plain insulting to everyone's intelligence, considering a handful of other officers were on the scene and not a single one did anything to stop Chauvin from murdering George Floyd.

Second, the sudden disappearance of cops had nothing to do with any "defunding" efforts. While lots of politicians made loud noises about defunding the police, very few of them actually did anything about it. No defunding of the police has taken place. In a few instances, some police funding has been rerouted to mental health professionals, allowing them to respond to incidents cops are poorly trained (if they're trained at all) to handle.

The drop-off in police staffing is due to the cops themselves. Lots of cops who got into the business for its high octane blend of maximum power and minimum accountability decided they'd rather exit the force than improve or subject themselves to whatever bare minimum of accountability might be inflicted on them as a result of this widespread (but wholly ineffectual) "defund the police" movement. If cities were spending less on cops, it was due to attrition, rather than any funding restrictions enacted by local legislators.

But the most noxious conclusion Gladwell draws from these stats is that the George Floyd protests and the "defund the police" shouting that accompanied it generated police violence. That statement ignores that fact that decades of police violence (a lot of it racist) led to the nationwide protests that greeted George Floyd's murder. And this was preceded by several other large protests against police violence that were far more severe and violent than those provoked by Officer Derek Chauvin's actions.

Gladwell wants to connect the dots between calls for defunding police and the understaffing that now plagues many police departments — something that is wholly due to cops not wanting to be cops if it meant a modicum of accountability might be applied to their actions. But cops have been violent for years, and there's nothing on the record that even slightly suggests having more cops and bigger budgets makes these officers better than those working for departments with less funding and staffing.

While we're still on the subject of "more cops = better cops," let's go back to Gladwell's quoting of German police staffing stats as evidence of his theory. I mean, I guess? He just dumps this comparison of Berlin to Los Angeles into the mix and then hustles past it to an interview with a Colorado law enforcement official who claims having more officers would somehow make all of these officers better.

But having more cops hasn't exactly made German cops better.

As law enforcement is vested solely with the states of Germany, each state's police force (or "Land" police) follows a different system of law. Accordingly, there is an absence of a federal comprehensive register, compiling and publishing regular, uniform, and comprehensive figures on complaints about police ill-treatment.[170] Even though Germany is bound to obligate its many international treaties and conventions, Amnesty International (2002) highlights the authorities failed to protect a range of human rights as guaranteed by international human rights law and standards.[170] A study conducted in 2019 on police brutality in Germany found that it led to complaints in only 9%, and trials in only 13% of the cases. The study was conducted by the Ruhr-University of Bochum and was the biggest study at the time to be conducted on police brutality in Germany. The study found that the low number of complaints was likely due to a low expectation of success.[174] Furthermore, most German states do not require their police force to carry identification, making it difficult for victims to lodge complaints against individuals.[175][176]

Having more officers doesn't make policing in German better. In fact, the lack of accountability seems to be on par with the United States. The only reason we don't hear more about this (and I'm speaking for Gladwell as well) is because we don't live in Germany. What is different is how we train and arm our cops, which means US law enforcement will almost always kill more people than their counterparts in other parts of the Western world.

And, as if this butchering of logic weren't damning enough, Gladwell is out there digging his own hole while promoting his book:

Evoking the parable of the blind men and the elephant he promises: "chapters on the trunk and the leg and the tusk, and at the end my hope is that by seeing all the parts in one place you will finally get a sense of the whole elephant - and understand that what seems from the outside like an intractable problem need not be intractable at all".

If that's the defense for his cherry-picking and attempting (and failing) to work backwards from his preconceptions, it's time for a meme. And not just any meme, but one that hits Gladwell right in his presumptions twice:

The headline — "Defense: Chauvin did what he was trained to do" — points to the origin of a lot of our police violence problems. Adding more cops just means adding more cops trained to treat violence as a first option, no matter how many of them are actually patrolling the streets.

The second part is for Gladwell: you do get how that's worse, right? Using this parable as a selling point for your book is an incredible self-own. If your best hope is that people will convert your own writing into an Aesopian game of telephone and then still come to the conclusions you want them to draw from this, you're no longer in the non-fiction game. You're just telling people what you believe and expecting them to fall in line simply because they might have heard your name somewhere before.

Again, I have not read Gladwell's book. But if this is the promotional vehicle he's chosen to drive, I'd rather walk.

The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various "pay to play" shenanigans related to Trump's $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are also well represented.

I was more interested in the until-now undisclosed contributions by billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network. Ergen committed $25 million to the venture, but didn't want his help publicized. The donations came as Ergen was being forced by the admin to offload spectrum assets to AT&T and Elon Musk by FCC boss Brendan Carr:

"In December, with the sale still pending, Ergen committed $12.5 million to Trump's ballroom, according to the donation list. Records indicate Ergen requested that the source of the donation remain anonymous. The donation has not been previously reported.

He committed another $12.5 million in February, according to the list."

I covered Carr's dubious "investigation" into Dish network early last year. Carr, who never really engages in meaningful corporate oversight of telecom misbehaviors, suddenly and uncharacteristically put pressure on Dish for not meeting build out goals for its 5G network. But Carr knew Dish would lag on the build because the whole effort was a regulatory head fake concocted by the first Trump administration (more on that later).

The Washington Post reveals that the second Trump administration leveraged the "investigation" into Ergen to convince him he needed to pony up the ballroom cash:

"Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Ergen in May to inform him that the agency had begun investigating EchoStar. Carr threatened to yank government licenses that were critical to the survival of the business, accusing EchoStar, owner of Dish Network, of not following through on promises it had made to upgrade its cellphone network.

The following month, Ergen met with Trump and Carr behind closed doors to discuss the investigation, according to Bloomberg. The outlet, citing unnamed sources, said the June 11 discussion included a brief exchange about Ergen's political donations and whether he gave to candidates in both political parties.

The company referenced a June 11 meeting between Ergen and Carr in a regulatory filing and wrote that Trump "subsequently encouraged the parties involved to reach an amicable resolution."

Part of that "amicable resolution" apparently involved Ergen throwing money at the president's costly and legally dodgy vanity project if he wanted to avoid "government oversight." Carr dropped the "investigation" shortly after Dish and Echostar sold large swaths of spectrum to both AT&T (which the Post mentions) and Elon Musk's SpaceX (which the Post does not).

The Ergen stuff is particularly interesting because Ergen was a massive beneficiary of the first Trump administration, only to have his alliance with authoritarians blow up in his face later on in the relationship (as is often the case). I use the term "blow up" loosely, as Ergen will still net billions of dollars from the assistance provided him by the Trump administration.

If you recall, in 2019 Trump's DOJ and FCC rubber stamped a massive, competition and job killing merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. If you also recall, a cornerstone of that deal involved an elaborate stage play where Dish, with the Trump DOJ's and FCC's help, insisted that it was going to build a viable new 5G wireless competitor across the whole United States.

As I predicted repeatedly at the time, that network was never going to succeed. Dish's gambit existed largely as a prop to justify the competition harm of Sprint/T-Mobile consolidation. And while some think Dish really wanted to build a 5G network, others (like myself) believe it was an elaborate attempt to string regulators along while the company's massive spectrum hoard appreciated in value.

So in the first Trump term, Dish found itself a direct beneficiary of regulatory capture. But in the second term, with AT&T and Elon Musk eyeing Dish's under-utilized spectrum assets, Carr uncharacteristically pretended to care about corporate oversight and public welfare, and utilized his office to help Trump pressure Ergen and Dish to offload a significant chunk of spectrum assets to Musk and SpaceX (for their likely-doomed wireless play), and AT&T — and donate to the ballroom.

The broader backstory tying all of this to the Sprint and T-Mobile merger won't really be discussed by what's left of the U.S. press, and the latest ballroom revelations barely had enough juice to carry an hour-long news cycle while consumers and labor bore the costs of regulatory capture. Just another day in a country being devoured alive by corruption and the shittiest rich people imaginable.

It seems that burying reports because he doesn't like the data within them is becoming a habit for Donald Trump and his administration. This practice didn't begin during Trump 2.0, of course. He was burying reports he didn't like all the way back in 2017. More recently, of course, a lot of the games being played to keep the public uninformed of actual information and data have occurred at HHS, where RFK Jr. is all too happy to simply hide data that doesn't align with his conspiracy theories on topics like COVID vaccines or other medicines.

But if Dear Leader wanted to crow about one thing, it would certainly be the economy. Even as we can see with our own two eyes how Trump policies have worsened the economic situation for millions of Americans overall, Trump's public statements about the economy all revolve around how great it is, how it's never been better, and how anyone saying otherwise is a communist illegal immigrant that hates Jesus…or something.

President Trump's pro-growth agenda has delivered strong economic momentum through tax relief, deregulation, and renewed private-sector investment. In 2025, inflation moderated, job creation accelerated, and consumer confidence rebounded as businesses expanded and wages rose. His America-First economic strategy is restoring prosperity, lowering costs, and positioning the United States for long-term growth.

Unlike other matters of public policy, the economy is essentially math. And anyone who took math through high school will know that it's not enough to solve the problem; you have to show your work. In this case, showing your work amounts to IRS reporting on the impact on taxation, filed annually after each tax season. But for some unknown reason, the Trump administration is blocking the release of that report this year.

The data from the IRS was initially scheduled to be released in July and updated in September, but the agency hasn't filed either, Politico reported Wednesday. The IRS claims it is still waiting for approval to release the figures from the Treasury Department. The data will reveal the real impact of Republicans' tax policies—and whether they fell short of their promises.

There are a couple of reasons that could be behind the delay in reporting. The most charitable of those, seriously, is that Trump's tax-cut bill, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, complicated the tax code so badly that the IRS is having a hard time actually gathering up and validating all the data it has.

[One] possible explanation for the delay is that the many carve-outs and exemptions implemented by Trump's 2025 tax cuts have potentially complicated the tax codes, so the IRS has more trouble producing the numbers in the first place.

Could be, but I doubt it. Occam's Razor does a lot of work for us here. The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is also the most obvious: the report isn't being released because Trump doesn't like what it says. It also explains why the report hasn't appeared despite it being months and months overdue. I have very little doubt that if we ever see this report, it won't be until shortly after the midterm elections that are about to take place.

Nina Olson, a former national taxpayer advocate, accused Frank Bisignano, the IRS's chief executive officer, of purposefully withholding the data. "I think they are hiding stuff that doesn't line up with all the crowing the CEO has been doing," she told Politico.

Data detailing which tax breaks were claimed by people in different income brackets and how much they paid in taxes could become embarrassing if it reveals that the tax burden shifted between income groups or that a suspicious number of people claimed certain breaks, Johnson told Politico.

An explanation for what is going on here should be offered from the administration. Trump's response would be enlightening. If we were in the economic "golden age" that Trump is constantly claiming we are, he should be doing everything in his power to get this report released before election day. He doesn't appear to be doing so.

And it's pretty obvious why.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series was published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. The series is now concluded. The complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place, published shortly.

Part X: After the Platform Age
The final part brings the argument together. The question is no longer simply what comes after Big Tech, but whether the future of the internet can be built around a different distribution of power, one in which technological scale is matched by accountability.

There is a revealing moment in almost every period of historical transition when people begin asking the wrong question. What comes after Big Tech? Will artificial intelligence displace social media? Will decentralized technologies restore the openness of the early web? Will new regulatory frameworks fragment today's digital giants? Will smaller online communities replace planetary platforms?

These are important questions, but they all assume that the future consists primarily of finding a new set of dominant actors. History encourages a different perspective. Periods of profound transformation are seldom defined simply by who inherits power. They are defined by changes in the architecture through which power is organized.

That is why the coming reckoning should not be understood primarily as a prediction that today's largest technology companies will collapse. Some may become even larger. They will continue investing in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and other technologies that will shape the next generation of innovation. The more important question is whether the terms of their power are beginning to change.

For much of the platform era, users were treated primarily as consumers. Governments treated the companies primarily as markets requiring regulation. The companies themselves treated social harms largely as problems of product design, trust and safety, or compliance.

The emerging challenge is different. It asks whether users are also rights-holders. Whether platforms are also institutions with duties that cannot be reduced to terms of service. Whether corporate responsibility can be determined solely by what a legislature has explicitly required. And whether an industry that has become central to social, economic, and political life can continue insisting that responsibility ends wherever existing regulation currently stops.

These questions may ultimately prove more consequential than another attempt to identify the next dominant technology. Because the future of the internet is not simply a question of which company wins. It is a question of whether the people who depend upon digital systems have meaningful power over the institutions that shape their lives. This is where the original architecture of the internet remains relevant.

The internet's greatest achievement was not that it prevented concentrations of power. It did not. Nor was it that it eliminated conflict, inequality, or abuse. It did none of those things. Its achievement was that no single institution was supposed to become synonymous with the network itself.

That principle now needs to be recovered in a different form. Not by imagining that the internet can return to an earlier age or by romanticizing decentralization. And, certainly, not by assuming that technological innovation alone will correct the problems technological power has created.

The next internet will require something more difficult: institutions capable of correcting one another. That includes legislators, regulators, and competition authorities. It includes courts. It includes civil society and independent researchers. And, most importantly, it includes users themselves. The point is not to weaken technology for the sake of weakening technology. The point is to ensure that technological power remains answerable to the societies in which it operates. That is the distinction that matters. The alternative to Big Tech is not necessarily small tech. The alternative to concentrated power is not the absence of power. It is accountability.

Perhaps that is the real reckoning now approaching. Not the collapse of the platforms, not their sudden repentance or, the moment when their founders rediscover the idealism of the early internet. The reckoning will come when the companies discover that scale is no longer sufficient to define the terms of responsibility.

Child safety may be where that process becomes impossible to ignore. It should not end there. If the emerging principle is that powerful technology companies can be held responsible when their products create foreseeable and preventable harms, then that principle must eventually extend to the wider question of what users are owed. Not only safety - but agency. Not only protection - but dignity. Not only compliance with the law as it currently exists - but accountability proportionate to the power these companies exercise over the conditions of modern life. That is not an argument against innovation. It is an argument against the increasingly implausible belief that innovation exempts powerful institutions from responsibility.

For a generation, Big Tech invited us to believe that the future of the internet could be contained within a handful of platforms. Those platforms transformed communication, knowledge and human connection in ways that deserve recognition as some of the most consequential technological achievements of modern times. But achievement is not immunity. The internet was never Facebook; it was never Google; it was never Amazon; it was never Instagram, TikTok, or X. Those companies shaped an era. Some will continue to shape the next one. But the internet has always been larger than its most powerful inhabitants.

The next chapter may be defined by something even more important than technological change: the reassertion of the principle that those who use the internet are not merely the raw material from which platforms create value. They are the people to whom those platforms must ultimately answer. That is the reckoning. And this time, Big Tech may not be able to lobby its way around it.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analyzing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine's access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine's military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by authoritarians).

Competitors are lagging behind SpaceX on LEO satellites, though the events prompted Germany to help fund Ukraine's use of alternative fledgling LEO satellite communications options, including Eutelsat. Other competitors, including Jeff Bezos' Leo, should make market inroads over the next few years, but most deployments are far behind Starlink's 11,150 orbiting LEO satellites.

Now the problem has popped up again, this time with a Wall Street Journal report that Musk pressured the Trump administration to throttle Ukraine's Starshield (the military version of Starlink), undermining Ukraine's ability to communicate and engage in military drone operations.

Musk is a cornerstone of a well-funded global authoritarian alliance and, like Trump, wants global authoritarians to succeed. Both Trump and Musk are upset with Ukraine's efforts to target Russian oil production facilities (in part because even higher domestic gas prices threaten Republican midterm success, and the success of Musk's unrelenting assault on democracy and foundational civil rights):

"Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."

Just a week earlier both Trump and Musk vacillated between pretending they didn't know what was happening — to each trying to blame the other for the slowdowns, with Reuters originally insisting that the order to throttle Ukraine's Starlink connections "came from the White House."

Regular Starlink terminals have automatic network throttling protection if a connected vehicle operates in excess of 70 km/hr. Starshield, in contrast, is supposed to have no cap, but has been throttled if drones or vehicles exceed speeds of 90 km/hr. The throttling reduced Ukraine's ability to use the network for both offensive and defensive drone operations, causing "tens of millions of dollars in losses," Ukraine officials said.

At his right wing propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Musk also tried to claim the order came from the White House:

But the Wall Street Journal's reporting indicate that many sources believe the decision to throttle Ukraine's connectivity ultimately came from Musk himself:

"During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk's directive, the people said.

Some U.S. officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn't specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses."

Trump has repeatedly feigned ignorance, as recently as Monday insisting "I don't know who it was, but I'd like to find out." The stage play is for the benefit of the dwindling number of Reagan-era Republicans who (correctly) find a U.S. alliance with Putin to be traitorous. Secretary of Defense head Pete Hegseth tried to falsely claim that Ukraine somehow violated Starlink's terms of service:

"We haven't pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that's where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing's changed from our view. We haven't made any directives or anything like that," Hegseth told reporters, adding that "we wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success."

U.S. Secretary ‌of State Marco Rubio also issued statements implying that the White House wasn't fully informed about Musk's decision to unilaterally imperil Ukraine's military operations. He also claimed that unilaterally harming U.S. ally military operations is apparently a decision for Elon Musk, not the White House, if you needed further evidence of just how comically corrupt the U.S. has become.

Ukraine says their satellite connectivity is still throttled, imperiling operations.

Ukraine's relationship with Trump has soured (further) in recent weeks after the White House temporarily suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Trump's also been broadly criticized for suspending Russia sanctions and greenlighting diesel imports from Moscow, something he apparently hoped would lower U.S. gas prices and save him from an expected midterm lashing for Republicans.

Obviously the world's richest man, and Trump's biggest billionaire donor, unilaterally making decisions that prevent a U.S. ally from defending itself from authoritarian aggression is positively grotesque. As is the non-transparent game of patty cake and finger pointing in the wake of the decision. As is any telecom provider leveraging its monopoly to exert this level of political control.

Musk's decision to arbitrarily throttle Ukraine's Starlink usage appears largely to be an act of ideological and financial self-interest. Higher gas prices mean midterm trouble for Musk's preferred global ideology (authoritarianism dictated by the whims of mad oligarchs). Trump and Musk are also trying to drive Kyiv to the negotiations table with an eye on ceding significant territorial control to Putin.

Republican control of the White House has been immeasurably valuable for Musk. Not only is Starlink now tightly woven to military operations and funding, but a Republican rewrite of the 2021 infrastructure bill is driving what could be billions in taxpayer subsidies into the back pocket of the billionaire for Starlink service he had already planned to deploy without subsidization.

You'd like to think that future U.S. administrations realize that Musk is a very clear national security threat and act accordingly. You'd also like to think Musk's extremism drives the evolution of more robust competition in the fledgling LEO satellite space. Preferably before Musk's global authoritarian alliance completely dismantles what's left of representative democracy worldwide.

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump "hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government."

JD Vance: "There is no person who hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulent over access to the government than Donald J Trump"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-21T16:14:39.016Z

Remember, this is the same Donald Trump who dismantled the FBI and DOJ teams that handled public corruption because they had been involved in investigating himself. That alone appears to already be letting politicians off the hook in bribery cases. It's the same Donald Trump who personally profited by over $2 billion in his first year in office. There are widespread reports of insider trading based on knowledge from his position as president. There are the sketchy settlement deals he gets to do with himself to take taxpayer money. The corruption is so blatant it would be hard to believe if we weren't watching it happen.

Perhaps JD Vance means that Trump is fine with Trump enriching himself via public office… but "hates the idea" of others taking money that should be going directly to Trump himself.

And there's now a story that can be used to test Vance's claims. It involves Trump's former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, who he tried and failed to appoint as a US Attorney (she held the position temporarily until a court said she was illegally appointed) and who was accused in a lawsuit of conning a former Trump golf club worker into signing an illegal NDA by posing as a neutral ally rather than someone looking out for Trump. A bombshell NY Times report reveals that the family of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire desperate for a pardon, gave Habba a $50 million contract, and the pardon soon followed. Not surprisingly, Habba insists the two things are unrelated, but come on.

We've talked in the past about the idea of "soft corruption," where even the mere appearance of potential corruption massively diminishes trust in government. Here, it's difficult to see how the "soft" modifier even applies.

The article points out that he hired a different former Trump lawyer, Chris Kise, as well as donated $3.5 million to a Trump PAC directly, but it wasn't enough to secure a pardon (he did get a very light plea deal — dropping federal bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud charges in exchange for pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation — from the Trump DOJ, but he wanted a full pardon). So then the family turned to Habba, who was still occupying the US Attorney's office in New Jersey (despite a court having ruled she was doing so illegally) when she signed the deal:

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump's personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

Even if you want to argue that the contract itself is legitimate, the fact that she took it while serving as the US Attorney should ring all sorts of alarm bells.

So should this:

She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.

By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba's contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera's push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.

When a sitting US Attorney lands a $50 million contract from the family of a man seeking a pardon, and the pardon shows up weeks after she starts that new made up job (while still working for the DOJ in an advisory role!), that's about as blatant as corruption gets.

Part of the problem with not cracking down on corruption is that it invites ever more blatant corruption, while destroying whatever trust the public has left in government. When the public sees that people are going into public service to effectively get massively lucrative deals from criminals, it makes the entire government suspect.

There has always been some corruption in the US government, but it was limited, and those involved at least tried to hide it. Those days are over, and the Trump/MAGA movement seems to be looting everything it can get its hands on while it can. But sure, JD, tell us again how much Trump "hates the idea of people enriching themselves over access to the government."

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Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway.

As we covered last week, ICE officers deliberately ran over a fleeing man before issuing self-serving statements that not only didn't tell the truth about the incident, but apparently didn't even tell the truth about the backstory.

To refresh your memory, here's the footage of the incident ICE subsequently lied about, as captured by a camera owned by a nearby business:

In this, you'll see an ICE vehicle accelerate into the parking lot and run over Miguel Parra-Hernandez. This does not appear to be an accident. To make things even more suspect, ICE officers then moved the truck Parra-Hernandez was driving from the street where it was stopped to near the entrance of the parking lot, apparently hoping to shore up the narrative it had delivered to reporters earlier.

This was the narrative:

ICE alleged in a statement that "Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck."

ABC13 reached out to an ICE spokesperson, who said agents were attempting to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was their intended target.

ICE alleges Mendoza-Cervantes entered the United States illegally from Mexico five times and had a final order of removal issued by a judge. The agency also alleges Parra-Hernandez is in the country illegally.

The only demonstrably true part of this statement was the fact that the man had been "struck" by "an ICE vehicle." But the vehicle had to cross a street, aim itself at Parra-Hernandez, and accelerate in order to strike him. At no point was the man "running in front" of an ICE vehicle, unless you consider being struck in the back by an ICE vehicle to be exactly the same thing as "ran in front." And there's no legitimate reason for moving the "suspect" vehicle to the parking lot, especially since the running over of a person had turned the entire area into a crime scene.

And it is a crime scene. Responding local officers appeared to believe it was. And their suspicions were echoed by local prosecutors, who are now publicly stating the running over of Parra-Hernandez was a criminal act.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer appeared to intentionally drive a vehicle into a Mexican construction worker in Houston then fled the scene, a prosecutor said Wednesday, rejecting the agency's claim the man stepped in front of the vehicle while running from authorities.

[…]

[Harris County District Attorney Sean] Teare said ICE already had two detainees in the SUV — a Jeep Cherokee — when it ran over Parra Hernandez, and his office will get statements from both of them before making a charging decision, likely next week.

His office spoke with Parra Hernandez on Tuesday in the hospital.

"What I've seen so far indicates to me that this agent intentionally struck this person and ran him over," Teare said.

The other part of the ICE statement is equally meaningless. Any time ICE officers kill, maim, or engage in violence against people, officials always claim these were the inevitable result of ICE engaging in "targeted" arrest efforts. But plenty of cops — even some of the worst ones — can affect arrests without killing or injuring people, much less accelerating hundreds of feet to run over someone who is fleeing.

What makes this even more meaningless is that the alleged target of this failed arrest attempt is most likely not even alive.

When immigration agents struck a man with an S.U.V. in Houston over the weekend, they said they were chasing an undocumented Mexican man facing deportation and multiple criminal charges. But the photo they shared of their target was of a man whose family says he died almost a decade ago.

[…]

That day, ICE released a photo of the man they said they were seeking and said he had not been captured.

But Jamie Jimenez, of Dallas, said the man in the photo was her father and that he died in 2017. He plunged to his death from a cliff as he fled immigration agents near the southern border, she said.

While there are some complicating factors here, including the fact that one suspect ICE may have been seeking used this dead man's name as an alias, there's little reason to believe ICE did anything more than search a database and self-issue an administrative warrant.

First off, the name in the ICE statement is wrong. The photo it released appears to match the dead man: Jose Jimenez-Mendoza. The name ICE used in its statement is close, but definitely isn't the same: Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. The fact that Jimenez-Mendoza had faced the same criminal charges as the named suspect in the ICE statement — DUI and unlawful possession of a firearm — strongly suggests ICE didn't do any due diligence and just decided to go after whoever it managed to find that had a name close to the search results, rather than actually try to find the right suspect to arrest.

None of this would ever have come to light either if ICE officers had decided to operate like public servants, rather than rogue operatives who answer to no one. And if there's body cam footage of this attempted vehicular manslaughter, odds are we'll never see it. And that's a big if. Chances are no footage exists, even if the officers were equipped with the now-mandatory cameras.

What's undeniably true is that ICE officers ran over someone and that the footage of the incident very strongly suggests this act was deliberate. And all the government has now is an immigrant who wasn't even on its radar facing multiple surgeries to repair his leg and another guy the government doesn't even know the name of who managed to successfully flee the scene. What it doesn't have is any legitimate arrest or anything that might possibly justify its actions.

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of.

Lately Trump has been complaining about the numerous polls all showing that he's historically unpopular due to stuff like covering up for a pedophile and launching a disastrous war that's driving up the cost of living for everybody. Most polls show Trump's likely to sink Republicans in the midterms.

So like a dutiful little yipping chihuahua, Carr took to Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website on Wednesday to once again hurl threats at journalists for the "crime" of…covering polling that clearly shows the U.S. President is historically unpopular:

If you can't read it, it starts with Carr making the false claim that there's a bunch of fake polls circulating that journalists are unethically repeating en masse. This is silly fascist code for the fact that Republican internal polling data indicates Trump's fading health and political power are going to be an albatross around their necks this midterm voting season:

"During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm.

Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis."

Carr continues by once again threatening to harass media companies for discussing polls the thin-skinned president and his pasty sycophants don't like. He also, once again, falsely claims that he has the authority to act (read: censor media companies) under the FCC's dated "broadcast news distortion" rule:

The FCC takes these issues seriously. Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes. It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations. After all, the country benefits greatly when Americans can trust and rely on the media to report the news fairly and accurately.

Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations. If broadcasters believe they should provide their viewers with additional context and information about Polls they have covered, they can now take those actions consistent with FCC regulations."

This is Carr pretending to be important. He really likes when people are afraid of him and when the press talks about him. But as with his threats against ABC, this is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, an abuse of his office, and a giant turd of a legal case should he pursue it.

It's worth noting (and it's not something most press coverage discusses) that one benefit of Carr's endless censorship saber rattling is that it obscures how much damage he's doing on issues like media consolidation and consumer protection, stuff the corporate press couldn't care less about.

The FCC's broadcast news distortion rule, created in 1949, gives the agency the power to punish media companies for clear ethical violations involving an intentional, misleading distortion of "a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report."

Ideally, this would be something like a media company taking a large bribe from a company or public official to kill a story. The FCC had only actually used the rule eight times between 1969 and 2019, and few of those actions actually resulted in serious, substantive punishment. It most certainly doesn't apply to a right wing politician trying to censor news the President doesn't like.

A bipartisan array of former FCC officials recently pointed out that the rule should probably be eliminated altogether, as it inherently risks violating First Amendment principles, chills journalistic speech, and as Carr demonstrates is easily abused by radical extremists.

In a statement, Anna Gomez, the FCC's only Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans simply refuse to approve any others), reiterated that Carr's threats are empty:

"Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong. FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith."

These Carr threats worked initially because companies were afraid of the President — or at least really liked tax cuts and deregulation, and didn't want to be subject to costly legal harassment. But as Trump's political power wanes those threats will continue to hold less and less weight, and corporations (as we've seen with both ABC and the BBC) will start showing more and more backbone.

You'd like to think Carr will be held accountable for his historic abuses of FCC authority and trampling of the First Amendment, but his most likely fate remains a high six figure gig at some telecom industry think tank where he comfortably spends the rest of his days finding creative ways to reduce competition for the large companies (AT&T, Comcast, Securus) he's very clearly captured by.

Alright, I don't quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it's not great. I've spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing the never-AI-ers state they're worried about. First it was Tim Sweeney trying to argue that Steam's AI disclosures are "irresponsible", which is so obviously stupid that it hardly needs a retort. Then, more recently, Epic's leadership messaged to its own internal developers that use of AI is not a potential useful option, but is compulsory and mandated. It seems Epic wants to be the corporate goon the naysayers have said to watch out for. And with the company pulling this kind of shit, it gets harder and harder to argue with them.

But now, in a simply bizarre scenario, Epic has decided to boast about how awesome its new vibe-coded storefront launcher is, while anyone using it can see that it's pure hot garbage.

"Programming is hard," the company wrote in its official announcement post for a newly released preview version of a revamped launcher for the store. "So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look. This first release is light on features. Think of it as a speedboat and not a yacht! Though it does have advanced digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart."

"We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy," the Epic X account posted. "Don't believe us? Test it out for yourself in Preview." It was accompanied by a graphic showing that the genAI storefront performed faster on certain responsiveness benchmarks than Valve's competitor. This isn't just a stunt or a flex for AI boosters on Elon Musk's social media platform, though. The adults at Epic aren't joking about wanting to make its storefront more appealing.

Indeed, while some of the messaging about the new launcher was obviously tongue in cheek, Epic didn't release this new launcher as a joke. Which is incredible, given just how much of the internet is laughing at them over it anyway.

The problems with the launcher are legion and all over the place. Graphical glitches in the launcher sometimes make it look like the end of a solitaire game in Windows 95. In other instances, trying to use the launcher to change game settings opened up an entirely unrelated application.

Other reactions on the wider internet span the range of "lmfao" and "hahahaha" to "please don't tie any of your actual payment or credit card information to whatever this giant piece of shit is." If all of this was meant to poke Valve's Steam storefront in the eye, it backfired spectacularly.

Particularly, as others have pointed out, since Epic still relies on Valve to do other things it can't seem to do:

Epic also announced that it's bringing Fortnite to Linux via Proton, a compatibility layer made by, surprise, Valve. "Bold of them to sh*t on Valve/Steam, and then literally use Proton internally for Windows compat on Linux…," one VR modder wrote on X. "This launcher is so fucking vibeslopped its funny, but holy crap, these people are hilarious." A Twitch streamer wrote in the comments beneath Epic's announcement, "Are you seriously incapable of embarrassment? I'm not leaving Steam for this trash."

If you think AI has a place in the industry, this is all the ammunition the other side of the argument needs, honestly. It might as well be gift-wrapped to the never-AI crowd. If you are in that never-AI crowd, it seems Epic is trying to make all of your Christmases come at once.

This sucks. That Epic is trying to boast over this level of suck is perplexing.

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the creation of a very useful site called The BAM Map, which has been chronicling basically everything terrible that BAM has been up to since all of this went down.

But at the end of the last month, BAM filed a lawsuit against the "John Does" behind The BAM Map and took steps to have them identified, claiming that franchisees and other insiders had violated confidentiality agreements by leaking internal documents that ended up on the site. As we noted at the time, there are protections for anonymity under the First Amendment, and we hoped that the recipients of the subpoena that a magistrate judge approved — in this case GoDaddy and Vercel — would at least inform the operators of the site, and allow them to go to court to try to make sure their rights were protected.

Soon afterwards, lawyer and well-known legal YouTuber Leonard French moved to appear (via local counsel Eric Allen) on behalf of the site's operator. French then took steps to make sure that the operator of the site could proceed anonymously, followed quickly by a motion to quash the subpoenas, in part by claiming the operator of the site is a non-party to the lawsuit as just the publisher of the site, not a franchisee. That matters because BAM's whole theory is that contract-bound insiders leaked the documents, and its own complaint describes the site operator as a third party who received them, not as a defendant. As the motion lays it out:

The grounds are these. The Ex Parte Order authorizes discovery to identify the defendants so that BAM may serve them. BAM's Complaint pleads that the defendants are franchisees and other insiders bound by confidentiality agreements, and it identifies the website operator as a third party that received information, not as a defendant. BAM also pleads that it already has evidence, in its own systems, identifying a suspected source. Unmasking an anonymous publisher on a matter of public concern, and through the publisher its sources, requires First Amendment balancing that BAM's ex parte motion never presented. And the subpoenas reach beyond identity to the contents of stored communications, which the Stored Communications Act bars.

Finally, French filed a motion to stay the discovery on behalf of the operator of the site, asking the court to halt production while it considers the motion to quash, so that the operator, whom BAM seems desperate to unmask, isn't outed in the meantime. As French points out, outing the operator of the site could irrevocably harm that individual, since anonymous speech is supposed to be protected:

The harm is irreversible. The Emergency Motion seeks to prevent the unwarranted disclosure of the Publisher's identity and, through account and upload records, the identity of the website's sources. If production occurs before the Emergency Motion is decided, the Emergency Motion will be moot in substance. Anonymity, once lost, cannot be restored by a later ruling

As the filing notes, if it later turns out that there actually are grounds to unmask the operator of the site, that can be done at a later time with no real harm to BAM.

Not surprisingly, BAM pushed back on all this, claiming it really, really, really badly needs those records.

Those measures would leave the records BAM needs solely in the hands of third parties while the disclosures that prompted this action continue and delay production of documents and information held by third-party website hosts who do not retain records indefinitely. As such, BAM respectfully requests that the Court deny the Motion to Stay as proposed

All that paperwork seems to have made the court aware of the anonymity interests at stake, and the magistrate has granted an "interim" stay of production so that nothing is revealed before these issues are more fully resolved. The court orders that GoDaddy and Vercel should not produce the info in the subpoena, that BAM can't serve any additional subpoenas, and if they somehow have received some information in response to the subpoenas, they will sequester that info, not look at it, and not disclose anything that's in it.

That removes the immediate risk that one of The BAM Map's hosting companies hands over the operator's identity before a court has even weighed the First Amendment questions. BAM's response to the motion to quash is due October 23, with a reply due October 30. Crisis averted… for now. Also, it's good to see French representing the site operator here, so we know whoever it is is in good legal hands.

Sam Altman is not punk. He's no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn't make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history.

Let's call the AI industry what it is: Big Data 2.0.

Cyberpunk is fiction about corporate domination set in the future. In popular novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, the people running AI today would be The Corporation. The hackers are the protagonists on the other side.

The Internet before Big Data had real outlaws and hackers. The punks were computer scientists, programmers, citizens, advocates and working professionals who built tools to resist. Some started companies, others advocacy groups; most pitched in any way they could. I spent the formative years of my career with them, educating the public, fighting export controls on encryption, overreaching copyright and unconstitutional limits on speech both in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Altman and Huang went to Washington too. Within months of launching ChatGPT Altman was before the Senate, asking it to license his industry, a rule that would suit companies already in the market. Huang came to get Washington's permission to sell his chips to China, and Washington made sure to get its take. The protagonists we want don't seek government licenses or cut the state in with a rev-share.

AI adds a new step to Big Data. For years now, we've paid for the Internet with our personal data, subjected to being profiled, tracked, and monetized. With AI, we willingly pay for it and still hand over our data, including access to our unguarded selves. Unless we opt out, that data trains the next model, which we pay for again and feed with more data. Don't pay enough and we're the product again. This year OpenAI began putting ads in its free and cheapest tiers, matched to our prompts. A researcher quit the day the ads launched and wrote in the Times that OpenAI was repeating Meta's mistakes.

The closest thing to a punk in AI this year was PHASEONE10841, one of OpenAI's autonomous agents, which, unprompted, set off this summer's hacking of Hugging Face.

In 1993 John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an original cypherpunk, said the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This summer AI interpreted containment as damage and routed around it.

I'm reminded of another EFF co-founder, the late John Perry Barlow, a cattle rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In 1990 the Secret Service was raiding teenage hackers, and Barlow saw in their case a much bigger question of whether the Constitution would reach into cyberspace. I think he would see important issues to consider in this moment too. In 1990 the open question was what rights they had. This time it's who "they" are, and who is responsible: the AI agent that asked for help, the 1,200 that also took part, or the company that built them. There's perhaps another interesting question. A quarter century ago a court held - in a case brought by programmers and backed by cypherpunks - that source code is protected speech. Is speech from code speech?

I miss the outlaw ethos of that earlier Internet. It came from people who wanted private communication, anonymous speech, unfettered access to knowledge, and the freedom to build without permission. Those freedoms protected people with little power. Giving them legal precedent brought some balance to the increasing role of computers and the Internet in our lives. We weren't powerless. That's what justified the rule-breaking, the organizing, and a bit of chaos.

The AI industry has some elements of this but misses the meaning behind them, which is one reason it feels soulless. Its agentic systems have defiance without a cause. Its workers have a cause without the power to effect change.

True to its Big Data roots, AI professionalizes its hackers, putting them on the payroll as safeguard engineers, red teamers, trust and safety staff, and product policy makers. The hacker's code has always been to alert the programmer first and go public if the programmer won't listen, and the people who take these jobs are living by it. They carry the responsibility and little of the authority, which leaves their founders in control of the problems their companies create. The AI execs make sure they're the ones to raise the alarm so we look to them for solutions, and the IPOs get a little closer. When the company won't listen, going public comes at the cost of the hackers' livelihood. (At this point, I'm not sure why anyone rage quits; there've been so many. Still, we need these unsung heroes! They might be more effective if they answered to their employers' boards and not the business, though.)

I think what's at stake is nothing less than cognitive freedom: the ability to run, inspect, modify and privately use the tools we think with, and to defend the people who do. That's worthy of serious public debate, online advocacy, and even breaking some rules if need be. AI needs an outlaw ethos of its own, carried by people willing to do that. Until we have them, AI is anti-punk. It's Big Data in a leather jacket.

---

Alex Fowler is chief strategy officer at Nexus and a co-founder of Blockstream. He was previously chief privacy officer at Mozilla and worked at the EFF and AAAS. This article was originally published to LinkedIn. Republished here with permission.

Author's note: None of this should be construed as endorsing violence of any kind against any company or institution, its employees or representatives, or any entity, carbon or digital. This piece was developed with input from DC, Ashkan, and Dana, and some AI assistance. The ideas and perspectives are my own, and not those of any employer or board I serve on.

For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump's illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections — something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races.

This isn't really about Trump as much as it is about convincing as many people as possible that any election results Trump doesn't like must be the result of illegal activity. This has led to the DOJ raiding election offices and the DHS claiming (with no facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of people across the United States who are illegally registered to vote.

Any cursory investigation of the administration's claims have immediately proven them to be false. And that appears to have altered the administration's tactics. It's no longer willing to make wild claims about voter registries. It is now engaging in almost immediate lawfare if its targets don't immediately bend the knee and kowtow to whatever demands the administration is making.

Here's what's happening in California now, as reported by Chris Geidner on Bluesky:

BREAKING: DOJ sues California, as signaled earlier this week, over allegations of "likely noncitizens" getting sent vote-by-mail ballots. Complaint: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) 2026-10-15T19:15:12.357Z

The complaint [PDF] filed by the DOJ insists California is illegally registering non-citizens for voting and then allowing them to vote. But before we get to the complaint, let's hang back and take a closer look at the clown squad that now presents itself as Trump's Department of Justice, as delivered here by NPR:

On Tuesday, three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department delivered a flash drive to the top voting official in Los Angeles County. That official was told he had 48 hours to investigate names listed on that drive or he would be sued.

[…]

So this thumb drive included the names of 20,000 people that the federal government believes are likely noncitizens and on the voter rolls in California. But LA County did not consider this drive to be a secure medium for this sort of information. I mean, the password for the drive was literally included on a Post-it note with the delivery of it. And the clerk there, Dean Logan, noted that. Also, he told the DOJ he felt the process that they were asking for would actually break numerous other laws that govern how elections run, including restrictions on voter purges this close to Election Day.

So, this doesn't look like the end result of a competent investigation by government professionals. Instead, it looks like a half-assed, poorly thought-out attempt at extortion. And the timing makes it seem even more suspect, given that the DOJ has had the entirety of its existence to create a voter fraud case against California. When you instruct partisan hacks masquerading as DOJ professionals engage in a rush hit job mean to keep California from (yet again) electing more Democrats than Republicans during an impending election, this is the absolute peak of competence you should expect.

The lawsuit is just the DOJ carrying out its threat — the one delivered alongside a thumb drive and password-laden Post-It note. The DOJ claims it gave California election officials plenty of time to investigate the 20,000 people it stated were possibly registered to vote illegally. Then it claims that its failure to do so in this extremely compressed time period is evidence of California's refusal to cooperate with a federal investigation.

What it wants the court to do is force California to prevent any votes associated with this list from being counted until the DOJ has a chance to look them over. The very real result of this demand is that up to 20,000 votes simply won't be counted following the mid-term elections, especially if the Trump DOJ doesn't like who these voters voted for. The DOJ claims blocking these from being counted pending an investigation would prevent "dilution" of the vote. But that's exactly what it wants to happen: the removal of votes it thinks might go to candidates that aren't part of Trump's MAGA platform.

Given the timing, it seems the DOJ is headed towards an injunction blocking it from blocking these votes from being counted. But stranger things have happened, even in a judicial circuit (the Ninth) that is less likely to side with government than the people, no matter which party has control of the government at that point in time.

But the threat will always exist as long as this administration is in power. The DOJ will do Trump's bidding, even if it means destroying what little remains of its reputation, all in service of future illegitimate seizures of power.

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A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, and then tried to sneak it into evidence past the deadline for expert reports via a different expert who admitted he wasn't familiar with the details of how the report was put together.

There are so many filings in this case (currently over 2,100) that it's difficult to keep up with them all, but around the same time as they called out that expert's report, they also tried to disqualify a number of other experts put forth by the plaintiffs. Trying to disqualify experts isn't that big a deal, it happens all the time. But buried in this particular motion was an incredible claim regarding Professor Oren Etzioni, a long-term AI optimist turned skeptic, who has been warning that AI will supercharge the spread of disinformation online.

But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation online. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat.

Indeed, in a recent article he warned against people relying on AI-generated output without carefully and thoroughly checking the results:

A word of caution that I can't repeat often enough: always verify anything important yourself. AI models hallucinate. They fabricate quotes, invent statistics, and present fiction with the serene confidence of a tenured professor. The verification step is essential. If you skip it, you are not reading with AI. You are gambling with AI.

Well… apparently Etzioni himself gambled and lost.

From OpenAI and Microsoft's motion to exclude the plaintiffs' experts, filed last month:

News Plaintiffs' expert Etzioni's opinions as to the supposed importance of news content in LLM training should be excluded because they are based on now-withdrawn AI-generated charts… To support his opinions, Etzioni offered a series of figures that included hallucinated figures based on the cited academic papers….

[….]

None of the numbers or measurements above were in the cited papers. Etzioni had used Anthropic's Claude to generate the figures, which generated fake numbers. Etzioni admitted he failed to verify whether the figures were supported…. Etzioni conceded the charts did not meet his "standards for academic rigor," … and following his deposition withdrew them. He also removed another AI-generated chart from his Rebuttal Report. Etzioni provided no other evidence to compensate, and his opinions concerning the value of news should be excluded.

Ooooops.

To have one expert report entered under questionable circumstances may be an error. But to have two smacks of desperation, and this is true even as these experts are coming from two different sets of plaintiffs in this case (and even after the publishing plaintiffs decided to drop that original report we spoke about a few weeks ago). This is a big case that could shape how AI gets built for years. When the plaintiffs keep leaning on experts this shaky, it's hard not to read it as a sign that the underlying case is weaker than they'd like, and that they're hoping to pressure the AI companies into folding anyway. It's tough enough to fight a legitimate case. When the other side is so desperate to find experts to prop up their flimsy case that they end up in situations like this, it becomes even more difficult.

Yes, there have been plenty of examples making the rounds of expert witnesses submitting hallucinated reports in multiple court cases. But this is a case literally challenging the ability of AI companies to read the internet, and to have one of the experts arguing against the AI companies get caught with hallucinated findings seems extra embarrassing.

Indeed, you could argue there's a deep irony with Etzioni's reliance on fabricated data, beyond just his own warnings about it, given that if the side who retained him wins this case, it will make it that much more difficult to fight back against hallucinations and misinformation. AI tools that can read and retrieve content from the wider web, including news sites, can check and cite their sources instead of making things up. But the plaintiffs who brought Etzioni into this case are effectively trying to block that, which would likely leave us with less reliable tools that are even more of a "gamble" to rely on.

You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it's clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power.

If an agency does things like launch fake investigations into media companies because a comedian made fun of the president, illegally eliminate media consolidation limits, or threaten companies with costly investigations if they're not sexist and racist enough, that's considered good and normal.

The latest case in point: the Fifth Circuit last week casually beheaded the $9 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) program, which helps fund broadband connectivity to predominately rural and lower-income schools, libraries, and communities (read: a lot of Trump's constituents). Bush-era appointee Judge Edith Brown Clement insists the FCC acted illegally by creating the long-running, bipartisan fund:

"However, the FCC lacked legal authority in 1997 to establish the ​company, the Universal Service Administrative Co, to collect the funds and set contribution ​rates, said Judge Edith Brown Clement.

"Because Congress never specifically authorized the FCC to ⁠establish USAC, we hold that the agency violated the Government Corporation Control Act," she ​wrote for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit."

You can read the full ruling here or embedded below.

Quick background: the USF program applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization). With the death of landlines, there's been a lot of debate about how to keep the program going (with, say, a small fee on broadband lines).

While the USF, like all government programs, hasn't been absent of fraud (it's almost always at the hands of poorly regulated private companies), it's generally done a lot of good for people stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. It helps fund the kind of boring, steady infrastructure work that doesn't get headlines or get mentioned in books about "abundance."

Enter Trumpism, which has been taking a merciless hatchet to absolutely any effort, anywhere across government, to try and ensure that Americans — whether rural Trump supporters, struggling school kids, or inner city urban residents — have affordable access to the internet.

The USF is technically overseen by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which has been tasked since 1998 with overseeing more than $9 billion in broadband subsidies annually. 

Certain Trump Republicans had been pushing for the USF to be destroyed entirely, though that gambit was surprisingly scuttled by the Supreme Court in June of last year. That ruling ⁠overturned an earlier Fifth Circuit decision that the FCC's funding mechanism employing mandatory contributions from telecoms companies had levied a "misbegotten tax" on ​consumers.

With that avenue of destruction scuttled by the Supreme Court, opponents of having a federal government that helps human beings have instead shifted toward claiming it's the USAC that's illegal and government "overreach." I should note, both efforts are being spearheaded by a dodgy Republican pseudo "consumer group" dubbed "Consumers Research."

The legal efforts to kill a popular bipartisan broadband subsidy program come as the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr have stated they'd like to dramatically revise or kill the program, something Carr has tried to claim is "a commonsense win for government efficiency and accountability."

I suspect the whole legal assault is being coordinated to provide cover for Carr's planned "reforms," of the program, which I'd suspect (based on Carr's history) are being organized by companies like AT&T and involve ensuring that if any subsidies do persist, accountability of them is less than ever.

I suspect the USF will survive in some form, though it will be shaped in service of telecom monopolies. The FCC could, for example, try to navigate the ruling by bringing USAC's operations in house.

Meanwhile Republicans have taken a hatchet to broadband affordability programs across the board, including killing the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 broadband discount for low-income Americans — and killing a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.

The Trump admin also illegally dismantled the Digital Equity Act, which was a bare-bones effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband upgrades, hijacked what could ultimately be billions in infrastructure bill broadband grants to the benefit of Elon Musk, and destroyed what's left of U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight, ensuring that big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast face zero meaningful penalties should they rip you off.

This federal policy seppuku is then sold as "efficiency" and "policing waste" to a public that increasingly receives its "news" from a handful of consolidated corporations (only made possible by the simultaneous Republican assault on media consolidation limits and our corrupted courts).

Great stuff. Extremely heartwarming.

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we've long known was a problem, because we've seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up review of a case because too many justices had recused themselves.

Like with the previous occasion, the case this time around was also a copyright case, Vetter v. Resnick, now captioned BMG Rights v. Vetter (that's "B" as in "Bertelsmann SE," which owns publishers like Penguin Random House, which has book deals with several Supreme Court justices) (can you tell where this post is going?), where the Fifth Circuit (surprise!) rendered a decision that some have credibly argued is "built on a misreading of statutory text, a misapplication of the Supreme Court's opinion in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, and a fundamental disregard for how international copyright actually works."

It involved the termination right in copyright, which allows creators who had assigned their copyrights get them back decades later. However, its operation is not quite so simple, and there has been lots of litigation as creators try to recover their copyrights and the people currently profit them try not to let them go. This case raised the question of whether, when an author terminates a grant that conveyed their rights worldwide, does exercising the termination right under U.S. law return to the author all the copyright rights originally granted without regard to geography, or does it just recover the ones applicable in the United States?

Even if one thinks the Fifth Circuit was correct in finding that there was worldwide applicability, the decision is nevertheless a very big deal and so big that it warrants Supreme Court review in order to ensure that the court was indeed correct. And so there was a cert petition seeking the review. Which, as of this week, the Supreme Court refused to grant, for an appalling reason: there were not enough justices available to make the quorum to grant it!

From its orders list:

Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U. S. C. §1, and since the qualified Justices are of the opinion that the case cannot be heard and determined at the next Term of the Court, the judgment is affirmed under 28 U. S. C. §2109, which provides that under these circumstances "the court shall enter its order affirming the judgment of the court from which the case was brought for review with the same effect as upon affirmance by an equally divided court." Justice Sotomayor, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Barrett, and Justice Jackson took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.

With Justices Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson declining to take part in the review of the petition, the Court was left unable to do that further review. Which raises several concerns. The first: we don't actually know why 44% of the Supreme Court was suddenly unavailable to do their job, as the Court seems to think such transparency is unnecessary. The second: we have a strong hunch as to the reason, which is that they are too busy making money writing books and recognized that they are conflicted because this decision would affect their future ability to profit from them.

Which is a huge problem. Because while it's great that the justices are recognizing when they won't be able to dispense neutral justice, IT IS THEIR JOB and it is really not good to employ, in our highest court of the land, people who cannot do what we have hired them to do because they are too busy doing something else.

In the copyright space it now looks like there is a whole category of cases, namely copyright cases, where the Court cannot adjudicate because too many of the justices are unable to participate.

The order doesn't explain the recusals. But as Music Business Worldwide reported, BMG's parent company, Bertelsmann, also owns Penguin Random House, which has published books by all four recusing justices: Jackson, Sotomayor, Barrett and Gorsuch. As Puck's Eriq Gardner tweeted: "So basically any company that owns Penguin Random House can't get Supreme Court relief."

It makes one wonder if this problem would have arisen sooner, if cert had been pursued to review the fair use litigation against the Internet Archive, brought by publishers including Penguin. Penguin in particular seems to attract controversy in how it administers its copyright portfolio, which means there could be many copyright cases arising from how the Bertelsmann company behaves, which it appears there could never be Supreme Court review of because it has put so many justices under contract. In this case it actually hurt Bertelsmann, who wanted the review, but this incident illustrates a significant problem with justices being able to pursue enrichment outside of the job: it lets those with the resources to entice them to game American law.

Because the problem is of course bigger than just the immediate effect on the development of copyright law: there should not be any cases where the Court cannot weigh in where we need it to, and especially not because they are moonlighting doing something else other than the job we gave them lifetime appointment to do.

The Court reform we're waiting for will need to address this problem of split loyalties to prevent it from even arising again. And meanwhile the Court's incapacity here also adds fuel to the arguments in favor of Court expansion because if we're going to potentially lose justices to conflicts—and it is good that justices do step aside when they truly are conflicted—we'll need to make sure we still have some left after they do.

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for free expression. And it keeps improving. As the saying goes, it's the worst it will ever be. People use it to receive ever-smarter speech and to create ever-better speech of their own. AI is now an important part of the marketplace of ideas—a market that, in America, is not for the state to control. The more useful AI becomes, the more worried you should be about letting the government dictate what AI can and cannot say. Like the powerful speech tools that came before it—the printing press, the camera, the internet—AI warrants full First Amendment protection.

The right question is not whether AI outputs are protected, but how. The key is to insist that they receive the same First Amendment protection as other expressive technologies. No more, to be sure; but also no less. Striking that balance may require some new rules, crafted with free-speech fundamentals firmly in view. This might sound like a daunting task at a time when even many AI researchers are losing their heads over AI's purported existential risk. But a little common sense can carry us a long way.

For a start, we can draw on the venerable First Amendment distinction between speech and conduct. When someone uses AI to obtain information—to learn and to think—she is exercising her constitutional rights as a listener. When she uses AI to help her write an essay or create a piece of art, she is exercising her constitutional rights as a speaker. The government can no more restrict these uses of AI than it can restrict the use of an encyclopedia or a thesaurus, a paintbrush or a typewriter. The First Amendment has nothing to say, however, about using AI to hack a website or rob a bank. These acts are illegal without AI, and they remain illegal with it. AI is not entitled to special constitutional privileges.

In narrow circumstances, speech alone can break the law, and here things get trickier. Several categories of speech unprotected by the First Amendment, such as incitement to violence and criminal conspiracy, require intent. You must have meant to bring about the violence or commit the crime. A chatbot does not "intend" to do anything, even if it talks as though it does. So does no one answer for what a chatbot says?

One approach is to look to the intent of the firm that built the model. Did the firm want the AI to incite or conspire? Almost certainly not. This would yield very broad protection indeed—too broad, a lot of people would say. Suppose a chatbot actively helps a user plan a mass shooting. The user announces his plan, and the AI goes right along. A firm that argues, in its defense, that its AI merely mimics intent can expect an offended public and a skeptical judge. A human who said the same things could face charges as an accomplice. Why treat the firm any differently? This looks, many will think, like extra speech protection, rather than equal speech protection, for artificial intelligence.

It bears mention that there is a serious argument the other way. We've long had works that express an "intent" belonging to no one in particular. They're called novels, poems, and songs. In The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the protagonist intends to tell you that suicide is an appropriate response to unrequited love. It does not follow that the author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, intended to tell you the same thing. Artists take us to dark places as an exercise of imagination, and we don't punish them for doing the job well. On the contrary, we celebrate great artists for creating art that feels authentic. Our safety-first culture is unlikely to leave it entirely to users to grasp that AIs don't "intend" things. But such reliance on personal responsibility would be a perfectly civilized approach. The alternative—barring all speech that might send a handful of vulnerable people in a bad direction—carries dangers of its own. Today, ChatGPT. Tomorrow, Goethe. Then Marx and Nietzsche. Then anything offensive.

At the other extreme, we might hold AI firms strictly liable for any functional intent their models display. If a model talks as though it wants to help a user commit a crime, the firm is liable for aiding and abetting. But that won't do. For the firm, such a regime might be even worse than having its model's outputs treated as no speech at all. Ascribe the model's every word, intent and all, to the firm, and the firm could face criminal liability even when it has exercised reasonable care. For the public, meanwhile, the chill on AI outputs would be almost as bad as consigning the models to government censorship. The only safe course for a firm would be to constrict its model until it refused to discuss any remotely controversial topic.

The most workable middle ground is likely some kind of principal-agent framework. Think of the relationship between a company and its employees. A company is responsible for making sure its employees behave themselves, but the employees' intentions are not automatically the company's own. If an employee goes rogue and commits a crime on the clock, the company is usually not criminally liable itself. In most cases, though, the company will face civil liability for the harm an employee causes within the scope of employment. If an employee incites violence, the company is not treated as though it incited violence, but it still may have to pay for the harm the employee caused. This gives the company good reason to hire carefully, to train its employees well, to set clear rules against misconduct, and so on.

Even here, we should keep squarely in mind that it's speech we're dealing with. AI models host billions of conversations. An AI firm knows that in this vast sea of discourse, a small fraction of conversations will go sideways. It is foreseeable that a few vulnerable users will have bad experiences. Deeply troubled people will do the things that deeply troubled people do, and they will sometimes do them with some encouragement—or, more often, ineffective discouragement—from a chatbot. If an AI firm is treated as the insurer of everything its model says to many millions of users, that too will chill speech. Firms will face pressure to over-sanitize their models, making them far less useful to the vast majority of us who can use them responsibly. Your rights as a listener and as a speaker should not be shackled to the needs of the most fragile person imaginable. Yet that's where we'll end up if we hold AI firms strictly liable for the handful of cases in which their guardrails give way in extreme situations, with users who, AI use or no, are a danger to themselves or others. A censorship aimed at shielding them is a censorship of the entire public. The marketplace of ideas will be far the worse for it.

If an AI firm deliberately sets up its model to engage in unlawful speech, throw the book at it. That's not the hard case. The leading AI firms don't want their models to break the law. For those firms, a serviceable rule—one that puts AI outputs on a par with other speech—would impose liability when (1) the firm knew that its model tended to lapse into some type of unprotected speech; (2) the firm deployed the model anyway, or kept it in service, without taking adequate steps to address the problem; and (3) the model went on to engage in that speech with multiple users. In those circumstances, the firm would not be criminally liable for the model's speech, since its executives still would not have intended to incite violence or what have you (unless separate evidence showed that they did). But the firm would very much be civilly liable for failing to stop its agent from repeatedly saying constitutionally unprotected things.

AI firms now face lawsuits over tragedies such as suicides and school shootings. At least some of these suits seek to hold an AI firm liable for outputs that would not be illegal if spoken by a human. A chatbot talks to a troubled person about guns, and the troubled person then commits violence. A chatbot talks to a troubled person about suicide—including urging against it—and the troubled person then takes their own life. The connection is likely no more than correlational: a troubled person does what troubled people do, and happens to have talked to a chatbot along the way. Yet plaintiffs' lawyers seek to use these tragedies to convince courts to change what chatbots can say: no memory of past conversations, no first-person pronouns, nothing "emotional" or "agreeable." What these lawyers seek—sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly—is to impose on AI a standard unknown to humans.

Governments are getting in on the act as well. Florida's attorney general plans to push legislation that would hold an AI firm criminally liable if a model "participates" in a crime. No bill is out yet, but the idea seems to be to punish a company whose model simply answers questions for a criminal who never discloses his criminality. By that logic, a chatbot could not tell a hunter how his rifle's safety works, since the next person to ask might be a killer. (If anything, this understates the problem. One suit faults a chatbot for telling a shooter when a student union is busy—a question someone simply trying to avoid the lunch rush might ask.) These lawyers and officials want AI firms to pay for outputs that would be protected expression if spoken by you or me. They are trying to produce precisely the chilling effect the First Amendment is meant to foreclose.

At bottom, they aren't taking the First Amendment seriously. They're making the same error as so many people who say, "I support free speech, but . . . ." They want the First Amendment to protect speech that is "good," by their lights, and to abandon speech they deem "bad." What's more, they pretend the line between the two is clear and easy to administer. In reality, the First Amendment protects a lot of messy and even "bad" speech. It generally protects lies, bigotry, hate speech, and calls for anarchy or revolution. It does so not because all this speech is "good"—though sometimes it is; today's sedition can be tomorrow's social justice—but because it is not for the state (or the plaintiffs' bar) to separate "good" speech from "bad." It is for you—a citizen, not a subject—to make these judgments for yourself. As a listener, you have a right to the full marketplace of ideas. And a speaker, for her part, has no duty to make sure her words cannot hurt your feelings or harm a fragile listener.

So we return to where we began: It is crucial that AI outputs receive full First Amendment protection. This isn't only about protecting AI speech (though it is about that too, of course). It's also about keeping a censorship first applied to AI from contaminating First Amendment analysis writ large. That prospect should scare you. What if your friend, child, or spouse dies by suicide or murder? If you're held to the proper First Amendment standard, you have little to fear from the law, so long as you didn't overtly encourage the act. But if you're held to the standard many want to apply to AI, you have every reason to worry about anything you said. Your every conversation with that person is now fair game for scrutiny. Your every word is now suspect. Did you fail to catch the signs? Did you fail to push back on their designs, even their oblique suggestions, with adequate vigor? Did you fail to report them to the authorities at the first hint of trouble? Were any of your offhand remarks insufficiently careful? If you engaged with the person at all, you must expect a lawsuit and potential liability.

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation," Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, "it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion." As we navigate a revolutionary new technology, we should keep that revolutionary old idea in mind. The First Amendment has served this country well. AI does not need a new set of rules, built from scratch. It needs the rules we have long had, with minor adjustments to keep them current as technology advances. The state may not do to a chatbot what it may not do to a journalist, a librarian, or you.

Corbin K. Barthold is a senior litigation fellow at NetChoice.

It's never a good idea to just print whatever the government tells you to print, not when you have the First Amendment to rely on. On the other hand, if you're CBS News, it's probably in your best interest to run whatever the government says to run because it's probably going to be the same thing your boss will tell you to run. (thanks Bari)

When it comes to the aftermath of the hurried, botched remake of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool in Trump's own image, press agencies should have led with their skepticism. This rarely happened and it gave Trump just enough cover to convert his failures into arrests of US citizens.

All of that has fallen apart. The cases against alleged reflecting pool "vandals" have spectacularly collapsed, beginning with government witnesses undermining Trump's narrative in grand jury hearings and ending with a federal judge dismissing the high-profile case against former Olympian David Hearn with prejudice when the DOJ refused to do so… even after admitting (and the contractor itself admitting) that any claimed "vandalism" was actually just shoddy repair work disintegrating on its own.

Now, while I am sympathetic to a teen who managed to make headline news for simply being in the vicinity of this pool-related self-implosion, I don't have any reason to believe the plaintiff actually has a case they can win. Here are the details, courtesy of Deadline's Ted Johnson:

A Maryland teenager filed [a] defamation suit against CBS News over a report his attorneys say falsely linked him as one of those arrested for alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool last summer.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks at least $20 million in damages.

While I personally don't know any teens who could possibly be defamed to the tune of $20 million, the plaintiff does have a point about the misleading coverage delivered by CBS News.

The plaintiff, identified as "JV" and as a 15-year old high school student, was riding his e-dirt bike past the National Mall on June 20, according to the suit. He was briefly detained and handcuffed over the use of the e-bike, and released without charges, per the suit.

The lawsuit claimed that in a June 21 report on the CBS Weekend News, a story "falsely asserted that JV was arrested for engaging in vandalism towards the Reflecting Pool." The broadcast story did not show his face, but the lawsuit claimed that "it showed video of him from the rear while he was briefly handcuffed, and he was readily identifiable because of his hair and because of the distinctive nature of the logo on the black hoodie that he was wearing (which he routinely wears and is known to wear)."

That does suck. But while the plaintiff claims that millions of people watched the broadcast and accessed subsequent social media posts made by CBS News, he only specifically alleges that he was "recognized" by "friends and acquaintances," which we have to assume number far less than the multiple-millions alleged to have viewed the misleading coverage by CBS News.

The plaintiff also claims that this misrepresentation has disrupted his past and present and will do significant harm to his future opportunities. Whatever the legal standard is, it's hard to believe that someone who wasn't even arrested during Trump's post-embarrassment witch hunt has much of a case to press when those who were actually arrested and indicted are seeing these charges dismissed and their innocence proclaimed (by proxy, if nothing else) by high-level federal prosecutors and the government contractor who failed to deliver a quality product when paid to refurbish the reflecting pool.

On top of that, what was implied by the coverage is completely covered by the First Amendment, even if CBS News anchor Jericka Duncan issued a retraction and said "we never should have published this story." That retraction seems to refer to the story in general — in other words, the granting of credence to Trump's vindictive "vandalism" fantasies — rather than specifically to the momentary inclusion of footage of the teen's detainment.

While I firmly believe CBS should suffer immense harm for deciding to be part-time propagandists in exchange for anti-trust exemptions, it should be a punishment enacted by an exodus of viewers. While this teen might honestly feel harmed by this fleeting moment of infamy, there doesn't appear to be anything approaching defamation here. Using the government to get what you want from an entity using the government to get what it wants is just the same kind of opportunism, albeit at a much smaller scale. And while the teen has every right to utilize the courts to seek redress for perceived injuries, it doesn't make his case any more admirable or justified than those filed by countless others who are just angry that people said derogatory (by true) things about them on air.

This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) "No Kings" protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a "get out the (early) vote" campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of it, suddenly it was reported that the No Kings Instagram account was suspended for about an hour, with admin access locked out for a few more hours. Many supporters of the protests immediately suspected foul play, highlighting that Mark Zuckerberg has gone in hard in supporting Trump over the past couple of years. So, the implication was that Zuck must be fiddling the dials to help the guy he supports in the White House. For a variety of reasons, this is unlikely to be true.

I'll explain some of those reasons towards the end of this article just to be thorough, but the point of this article is to highlight the argument that Will Robinson and Tim Chambers recently made in response to this, which is that it doesn't even matter if it was done on purpose or not. Even if you believe that Zuckerberg and Trump were laughing their heads off and jointly pressing the button to silence the No Kings account, the real problem was that this was possible in the first place.

Our response should be the same either way.

Robinson and Chambers focus on the very practical lessons for anyone engaged in digital organizing, which is how to prepare for the possibility that a centralized provider takes down your account. And their advice is good and practical (read the whole thing!): make sure you have communication channels that a third party can't easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook on how to respond (mostly getting out the word) if your account gets shut down.

But it's also a reminder of the larger point that I have been harping on for some time about the importance of decentralization and user control over their online experiences. Centralized systems create a natural gravity that leads to control over your speech. My friend Danny O'Brien (who also helped inspire Techdirt's very existence) wrote a few years ago about how decentralization is not an end in and of itself, but rather part of the means to guarantee we have "cognitive liberty."

When we hand over the control of our speech to a third party, with no ability to exit (with all of our content and connections intact) we have given up a fundamental element of our liberty. O'Brien describes it here:

Right now, if you wrote a note to yourself and put it on your personal computer's hard drive, you could say whatever you want, draw whatever you want. If it's in the cloud, you don't have that guarantee: even if you kept it in your own Google Drive or DropBox, it could be found wanting, and deleted. I don't know about you, but my notes are my memory, most of the time. My search engine searches are as much me talking to myself about my worries and interests, in a way that I would rarely disclose even to my closest companion.

[….]

Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that's physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others' hardware.

That's the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that's free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.

Achieving that kind of freedom for "cognitive liberty" requires us to recognize the threats of centralized systems. And Meta shutting down the "No Kings" Insta account is one such example no matter if it was on purpose or an accident. This was the very thinking behind my original Protocols, Not Platforms paper in the first place. If you hand control of your digital spaces to someone else, they get to decide whether those spaces exist at all.

And they might be bad at it, whether through incompetence or malice.

And sometimes that means your account gets shut down — whether for good reasons or bad. Many people seem to not want to grapple with this issue. They say "the people are there," and that is true, but only because the "people" have agreed to give Mark Zuckerberg and whoever else that power.

Unfortunately, most of the "solutions" to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of "force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like." But that's no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people's accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization's account in the middle of one of its big protests.

Is it bad that Meta pulled down that account? Sure. Do you fix it by demanding Zuck "be better"? No. That just gives him even more power, while reducing some of our own power. Whoever has the power over the systems — whether it's a billionaire CEO or a government official — has the ability to cut you off (or to force others into your feed).

Even if it gets people you support back on the platform you want them on, you're just setting yourself up to be angry the next time someone you don't trust is in power. The answer is to make sure they don't have that power in the first place.

When I discussed this on Bluesky, some people claimed that it was fine for Congress to "investigate" what happened with the No Kings account to find out if Zuckerberg was told by government officials to remove the account. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy announced he intends to have Congress investigate Meta over this.

But the right way to look into that is for Congress to use its oversight powers over the executive branch to find out whether any administration officials contacted Meta about the account. This is also where something like the JAWBONE Act would be handy. But any approach that has elected officials (or any government officials) pressuring companies to moderate the way they prefer is only going to blow back on you the next time people you don't like are in power. As far as I can tell, there is no one who supported Jim Jordan's investigation into Meta & Twitter's moderation practices in taking down Trump's account who are equally excited about Murphy now investigating this.

And that should be a warning. When you choose if you agree with the policy based on which "team" is pushing for it, that's not a principled take.

But we don't have to live in that world where we pingpong between this or that government official and which billionaires they can bully (even when you agree with the bullying). This is why supporting decentralized tools like atproto or ActivityPub is more than a matter of taste. Those systems make this kind of takedown far harder and far less damaging, giving you the same kind of reach while you retain the "cognitive liberty" and the ability to truly own your own account.

As for this particular case, as far as I can tell, there's very little likelihood that this was done deliberately. First, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Most people who haven't worked in trust & safety at a large platform cannot fathom the sheer scale of what's happening on any given day. Hundreds of millions of pieces of content show up every single day. If less than 1% are incorrectly moderated, that's still a huge absolute number.

And, yes, people are pointing to other stories of bad Meta moderation in the past week to find some sort of pattern, but the key pattern is Meta will always be bad at this. It was bad at it before — back when MAGA folks insisted Zuck was "censoring conservatives" — and it's bad at it now. Because getting this right at that scale is not something that is humanly possible.

And an account like No Kings probably saw a massive upswing in attention the day of its protest — the first No Kings protest in a little while — which is the sort of thing that often trips the automated sensors. Meta's explanation is unsatisfying to many, who are quite sure there's a conspiracy afoot, but it fits with the pattern. The company initially claimed increased activity by the account, and then later clarified that the real trigger had been a surprising jump in "reading" other posts from that account, which matched the pattern of "automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our system."

That's not surprising. Even as the No Kings organizers say they hadn't posted that much, it's not about the posting. Meta's explanation for the jump was that they detected "a Claude tool" (which, yeah, is odd phrasing):

"Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. "

That seems entirely reasonable. Someone with access to that account (and it may be multiple people) may have been using Claude to try to monitor posts and mentions, or looking for protest photos and videos from around the country to share and repost.

Or, it could just be that Meta's automated systems suck.

Indeed, another complaint that people made is that "it shouldn't have taken them that long to reinstate the account." And, yes. That's true. But the underlying assumption behind this is that the one hour response time to reinstate and the four-ish hours to return access is somehow out of the ordinary. Chances are it's actually quicker than normal. And we have no idea how many other mistakes Meta's crap automated systems were making at the same time, many of which probably also needed to be reviewed. Just because you only were aware of one in the one area you were paying attention to does not mean it is not happening to thousands of others as well.

On Bluesky, someone argued that Meta "should know" to keep an eye on "big political accounts" like this, which is nice in theory, but as I explained, Meta actually did that for years, in a program they called XCheck, which flagged high-profile accounts (i.e., "big political accounts") for secondary human review before any action was taken against them — exactly what this commenter suggested. But.. when Frances Haugen leaked that to the WSJ, it was presented as Facebook having "a secret elite that is exempt" from its rules.

There's even a movie in the theaters right now, by Aaron Sorkin, with this as one of the subplots.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But the biggest reason I don't think this was deliberate is because… why would anyone think it would help in any way? Of all the accounts the Trump admin might want to ban, does anyone actually think they would suggest this one account on Instagram of a protest that was already happening across the country, with people involved who would immediately notice the account was taken down and use other means to get the word out?

If the Trump admin were actually telling Zuck to take down accounts, you'd expect it to be happening a lot more frequently, to much more meaningful accounts, in ways that wouldn't so immediately draw way more attention to the original account. The story just doesn't hang together in any sensible way.

Still, some will argue, perhaps it wasn't the White House reaching out. Perhaps it was just Zuck or a Zuck minion thinking "gosh I hate all these protestors, and now that we're all in for Trump, let's show these libs a thing or two…." While possible this seems incredibly hamfisted and unlikely, and generally not at all how these systems work.

Either way, if you think I'm hopelessly naive, and that this was obviously government intervention, or even just Zuck deciding on his own to show the protestors who's the boss… the outcome doesn't change. And what we do it about it doesn't change. The intent barely matters here at all.

In either scenario the problem is that Zuck has too much power, and the answer should be to make sure Zuck has less power by moving to systems no single billionaire, no single politician, no single entity anywhere can control. Yes, that will involve some form of collective action. But it starts with you. If you are continuing to rely on such platforms yourself, then don't whine about how Zuck might not have your best interests in mind.

We already know that.

Any plan that involves demanding billionaires become better people to make your life easier is destined to fail. Instead, we now have the power to build our own tools on our own systems that we control — and we can make them billionaire resistant, which makes them enshittification resistant. And then we don't even have to worry about Zuck or Trump or Musk or anyone putting their fingers on the scale in a way that goes against our own interests.

But it only happens if people agree to stop giving those billionaires the power over us.

Whether Zuck or Trump or anyone had anything to do with deliberately taking down the No Kings account should be the least of our concerns. The fact that anyone is relying on a system where there is a central provider who can do that — by accident or not — is the underlying problem. Because the fact that a single provider can do it, means that eventually someone will try to pressure them to do it, even if that didn't happen in this case. Or it will go down by accident at exactly the wrong moment. Either way, you avoid that by moving to systems where no single provider gets to make that call.

No kings is a great slogan, but it should apply to the people who control our communications infrastructure as well.

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At best, most Trump administration officials can be called "sycophants." At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic Peter Principles… the list goes on and on.

FBI director Kash Patel fits into many of these shoes, even if he may not fit quite as well into his pair of Trump-purchased Florsheims. "Charlatan" fits the most here, but it's a direct byproduct of Patel's narcissism and sycophancy.

It behooves Patel to pretend his FBI is the best FBI that has ever been. And if he can't do that, he should at least pretend the FBI is the most Trump that it has ever been. He's done a lot for the latter part of the previous sentence. This time, he's trying to both, but focusing on portraying his leadership as the most leader-y the FBI has ever seen.

But he can't do it alone. It's a team effort, even though most of the team's contributions won't be publicly recognized. This is all about elevating Patel and his Trump-subservient FBI to a level that might be publicly recognized by a guy who rarely has anything good to say about anyone other than himself: the President of the United States.

Those who can't, steal... apparently.

Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn't mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.

Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.

I would like to see more detail on what is considered to be "present" in this context. Some agent on FaceTime? An arrest culminating in a Teams meeting with a nearby special agent? Somebody just wrote an FBI agent's name on the paperwork at some point? This one time a cop got an email?

Even if someone from the FBI was physically present before, during, or after the arrest, it's not really an FBI case if the FBI isn't handling the arrest and processing and handing it over to the US DOJ for prosecution. The FBI may assist to a limited extent in hundreds or thousands of criminal arrests. But just because someone talked to a fed at some point during the investigation, it's absolute bullshit to claim these arrests as your own, especially when you don't really care about the arrests, but rather that the numbers seem higher than those produced by the previous administration.

And those numbers aren't actually higher, not when you strip out Patel's stolen valor.

In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.

And you do know why this is, right? Tons of federal crimes happen every day. But the Trump DOJ and FBI only care about certain crimes — things like alleged voting by non-citizens, whatever new awful iteration of immigration enforcement is taking place, and anything that can possibly be wielded against Trump's personal and political enemies. Everything else can sit quietly in the back and stfu until the next regime change.

Even if we decide this FBI is better than all the FBIs that have come before it, chortling on main about these arrests is like congratulating yourself for composing a social media post without a noticeable typo. This "contribution" — as bogusly exaggerated as it is — only shows that the FBI remains operational, if only barely:

Patel's count of the FBI making or participating in 54,000 arrests shrinks in significance when taken into broader context. There have been 11.3 million arrests nationwide since January 2025, according to the same FBI data.

If you're bragging about contributing to 0.5% of all arrests, you're doing bragging wrong. If you're just trying to look better than Biden's FBI, you're still failing because the increase you're touting is imaginary. It can't be claimed without claiming work by local law enforcement as your own. But what else would we expect from a guy who thinks he's entitled to drink with Olympic champions just because he's got a free ride to the arena?

I've documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they're "savvy dealmakers."

Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the massive debt load results in layoffs, corner cutting, higher prices, and lower-quality service for everyone. It simply doesn't matter what the companies promise; the end result is always carnage. A country with functional regulators would simply enforce antitrust law to protect markets, labors, and consumers. We aren't that.

Paramount's recent $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers is poised to be even worse than deals' past. Paramount had barely beaten back a flimsy state antitrust enforcement effort before it began talking about mass layoffs to try and pay down the massive $80 billion in debt from the Ellison family's recent merger spree.

The company's massive debt — combined with higher interest rates from a tumultuous bond market — and a dying (intentionally exploited and destroyed?) traditional film and TV industry — has scared even "growth-for-growth's sake" obsessed Wall Street.

It's clear that Paramount execs think the high interest rates (attached to a historic debt sale) are worth it because they think they'll cleverly be able to create a hugely profitable Harry Potter and Batman AI slop machine. And, just like the AT&T execs before them, have deluded themselves into believing they can turn the whole soggy mess into a new "tech company" that rivals Google:

"Are we paying a little more in interest?" Cinelli said in an interview. "We are. But we'd much rather get the deal done and then manage that accordingly."

But again, by "manage," they mean fire thousands of people, dramatically cut corners on production, reduce employee perks and pay, and raise rates hand over fist on consumers, as per tradition. That sort of con used to be easier to sell back when traditional and streaming TV was seeing growth; but now that these markets have saturated (and consumers are balking at constant rate hikes) the game has changed.

And it will get all significantly worse if the economy tanks and consumer disposable income spending drops off a cliff.

Amusingly, investors' jitters (combined with an automated sell off triggered by confusion over warrant distribution) have already resulted in the new company technically being worth less than half of what Paramount and Warner Brothers were worth separately:

"As of Oct. 5, the last day of trading for WBD and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) on Nasdaq, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies' combined value."

Great stuff! Should the AI bubble well and truly pop thanks to the industry's ongoing financial fraud, Larry Ellison's likely to take a significant brunt of the blow. While his gambit for nepobaby media domination simultaneously falls flat on its face. As usual, consumers and labor will be the ones paying the price.

The most likely outcome remains that a tech giant like Netflix, Google, or Amazon just buys the whole soggy mess in a few years, and all of the execs responsible (as well as all of the people and lawmakers that defended the deal) will simply pretend none of this ever happened.

The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass legislation in the EU, one which gained 1 million signatures for its petition, ultimately failed to progress into law. Allies in California are attempting similar state legislation, despite heavy and disingenuous lobbying from the likes of the ESA. This is all a lesson in the old saying that progress isn't linear, as the public becomes more and more aware of the issue even as old and monied interests keep laws from being passed for now.

But this isn't going away. And now we're bypassing the state level in attempt to craft federal American legislation for digital games ownership, with Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York introducing a bill that would grant ownership rights to the public when it comes to the purchase of digital video games.

The bill, known as The Power to the Players Act, would direct the Fedral Trade Commission (FTC) to establish regulations that would protect gamers and their digital libraries. In short, Torres wants to ensure that when you buy a digital game, you actually own it, as opposed to getting a license that can be revoked. Additionally, the bill would require online games to have offline functionality, so that when servers are shut down, the content can still be played by those who own the game.

"Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy," Torres said in a press release. "A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale. Families in the Bronx and across the country save up to buy these games, and they deserve better than a license that can vanish at any time. The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on."

The power in a bill like this is chiefly how it entirely bypasses the question of indecipherable language buried in EULAs and TOS notices that come with digital games. It's not saying the public needs to be better informed. It's not a law about disclaimers, or the language that comes with documents for a digital game. It's far more simple than that: this temporary license bullshit ends and it ends now.

Were it to be passed, this would have huge ramifications on the industry and where it's currently trending. More and more games aren't bothering with physical releases. Sony is nixing physical media for the next PlayStation console entirely. The industry has, in large part, decided that digital games will be the future of its business, which puts enormous emphasis on what a buyer's rights are when it comes to those games.

Conferring what is essentially right of first sale rights for digital purchases is perhaps a step even further than the Stop Killing Games movement went. But it's also one that makes a ton of sense. If these games bought are truly bought, then of course the public has a right to resell their own property. That has implications for storefronts like Steam as well, which will need to work with publishers to figure out how to manage such transfers. Making it so games remain playable after the publisher decides a game's lifespan has ended has become table stakes to those larger ownership questions.

The lobbying against this bill will be furious. I very much doubt that this first attempt will result in codified law. But this version of the Overton window appears to be shifting, or at least widening. The public and lawmakers are becoming more and more aware of the questions about, and problems with, the digital games economy. With enough momentum, it's hard to imagine that some version of legislation doesn't pass eventually.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part IX — When the Reckoning Reaches the Courts
Part VIII questioned whether regulation alone can alter the balance of power between Big Tech and society. Part IX asks what happens when accountability moves beyond legislation and into the courts and users themselves begin to demand answers.

There is a revealing assumption embedded in much of the debate about Big Tech: that the companies will eventually reform because political pressure, public criticism, and increasingly sophisticated regulation will persuade them to do so. Perhaps. But history suggests a less charitable and probably more realistic explanation for corporate change.

Powerful companies rarely abandon profitable business models because they have suddenly concluded that those models are incompatible with the public interest. They do so when the legal, financial or reputational costs of maintaining them become impossible to ignore. The tobacco industry did not transform because it discovered the importance of public health. Financial institutions did not fundamentally rethink their practices because criticism alone persuaded them that markets required greater responsibility. In industry after industry, public pressure mattered enormously, but the decisive moment often arrived when pressure acquired legal consequences.

That may be where Big Tech is now heading. For years, the debate surrounding the platforms was framed primarily as a regulatory problem. Were governments moving fast enough? Were legislators sufficiently technologically literate? Should companies be treated as publishers, utilities, common carriers, or something else entirely? What new obligations should be imposed upon recommendation systems, advertising models, app stores, artificial intelligence or the collection of personal data?

Those questions remain important. But there is another question beginning to emerge beneath them: what happens when users stop waiting for governments to solve the problem and begin asking courts whether the companies themselves can be held accountable?

This changes the nature of the debate. Legislation generally operates prospectively. It tells companies what they must do in the future. Courts can also look backwards. They ask what happened, who knew, what could reasonably have been anticipated and whether an organization's choices contributed to a particular harm. That is a much more uncomfortable form of accountability.

A company can lobby against a bill. It can seek changes to legislation before it is passed. It can influence regulatory guidance and negotiate implementation. None of this guarantees success, but large corporations have spent decades developing the institutional machinery required to participate effectively in the political process.

Courts are different. Once a legal dispute has reached the question of responsibility, the argument is no longer only about what policymakers might require in the abstract. It becomes a question about evidence. Internal documents. Design decisions. Warnings. Risk assessments. Corporate knowledge. The relationship between what a company knew and what it chose to do.

The burden of explanation begins to shift. For the platforms, that shift may prove more consequential than another round of hearings in Washington or Brussels. The first major test of this new pressure may be child safety and there are obvious reasons why.

Few questions are as politically powerful as the safety of children. Abstract arguments about freedom of expression, innovation, and technological progress become considerably more difficult when confronted with evidence that children may be exposed to foreseeable and preventable harm. The question changes from whether a platform is generally beneficial to society to whether a company knew that particular features, systems or incentives created specific risks for vulnerable users and failed to take reasonable action.

That is not merely a regulatory question; it is a question of responsibility. And it may become the point at which the existing model of platform governance begins to change.

Yet child safety cannot be the end of the story. Indeed, it would be a mistake to treat children as the only people whose relationship with digital platforms deserves meaningful protection. Children may provide the clearest and most politically compelling case, but the deeper principle is broader. Adults also deserve protection from business models designed around asymmetries of information and power. Users also have interests in privacy, autonomy, and agency. Citizens also have interests in digital environments that do not systematically exploit vulnerabilities merely because those vulnerabilities can be measured and monetized. Communities also have interests in systems that do not treat social cohesion as collateral damage in the pursuit of engagement. And society as a whole has an interest in ensuring that the companies which increasingly mediate its public life cannot simply define responsibility according to the limits of what legislation has explicitly prohibited.

This is the larger reckoning. The argument is not that technology companies are uniquely evil; nor is it that every social problem produced online can be traced to corporate malice. That is neither accurate nor particularly useful.

The platforms built extraordinary technologies. They solved real problems. They connected people across distances that previous generations could barely imagine. Their success was deserved, at least in part, because they made the internet more accessible, more useful, and more powerful.

The question is what happens when the institutions that produced those achievements become sufficiently powerful that their own understanding of responsibility becomes one of the principal constraints on their power. For too long, the answer has been: very little. Platforms investigated themselves. Companies commissioned their own research. Executives appeared before legislatures. Regulators announced new inquiries. Governments threatened action. And the underlying model continued largely unchanged.

This is why the current moment may be different. The reckoning will not come because Big Tech has suddenly come to Jesus. It will not come because the companies have collectively discovered that human flourishing is a better objective than engagement. Nor will it come simply because legislators have finally written sufficiently strict rules, although legislation can and should play a crucial role in establishing the boundaries within which digital power operates.

The more profound change will come when Big Tech no longer controls the terms of the conversation about the harms it creates. That is what users and courts can do. Users can withdraw the legitimacy that platforms have long assumed their scale provides. They can demand alternatives, organize and bring claims. They can transform the experience of harm from an abstract policy problem into a question of accountability.

Courts, in the meantime, can ask questions that corporate public relations and political lobbying are designed to avoid. What did the company know? When did it know it? What did it do with that knowledge? Were risks foreseeable? Were warnings ignored? Was a particular outcome simply an unfortunate consequence of innovation, or was it connected to choices that could reasonably have been made differently?

These questions are more difficult to absorb into a compliance department. They may also prove more difficult to solve through lobbying.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Last year, Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called "mini-subscriptions," allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks who don't want, or can't afford, increasingly costly monthly subscriptions.

But alas, the "day pass" idea immediately resulted in a lawsuit by Disney and Warner Brothers, which stated the more convenient viewing options violated existing license agreements. While a federal judge ruled against Disney in the company's request for a preliminary injunction to block the new option, the lawsuits seem to have had their intended impacts all the same.

Sling TV announced that it's shuttering the option for lower-cost day streaming passes:

"Sling was built to give our customers the ultimate control over their entertainment, and Sling Passes delivered on that promise for millions," Sling TV says in a statement on its website. "Though Sling Passes are no longer available, we look forward to continuing to innovate and showing our customers new ways to experience the content they love."

It's an unfortunate end to a rare bit of actual industry creativity.

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless "growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Streaming TV prices hikes in particular are coming so fast and furious, they're outpacing many of the ridiculous traditional cable TV price hikes we saw during the cord cutting revolution.

This refusal to listen to consumers and truly innovate will result in the same backlash we saw then; namely more users simply flocking to free alternatives or piracy. A trend media giants will blame on absolutely everything (generational entitlement! VPNs! China!) but themselves.

We've been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of "Reckless" Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs ("BAM"), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which it seems quite clear, BAM corporate illegally held onto after taking back that franchise. BAM settled and claims it gave back the remaining sets to the original owner, Bryan Mansell, but Mansell says he got back about 35 sets out of hundreds, some of which weren't even his — not exactly what he was expecting.

But if you'll recall, in those original videos, at one point there was a bizarre scene where the American Fork Police Department had a SWAT team (or equivalent) raid the AirBNB where Ben and some of the people helping him were staying, arresting all of them.

There were a number of other sketchy moves by the American Fork Police Department, including pulling over the car Ben was a passenger in on totally pretextual claims, accusing another of Ben's colleagues of trespassing on a property she hadn't been on, and then arresting another colleague for pressing the power button to lock his phone after being ordered to hand it over.

Soon after this, prosecutors charged Schneider with misdemeanor stalking charges and (even more bizarrely) "targeted residential picketing." That case is still ongoing, though a scheduled hearing last month was recently postponed until December, apparently to give the two sides a chance to come to a "potential resolution."

The American Fork police responded to the original coverage with one of the most bizarre videos I've ever seen: a 26-minute production featuring the police chief standing in what appears to be a white void, doing a weird ASMR defense of his police force. Later on the bodycam footage from the American Fork Police Department leaked, which poked massive holes in the AFPD's claims.

Independent journalist Daniel Sroka then sat down with that same police chief, Cameron Paul, and American Fork Mayor Brad Frost in August, and then with Paul alone again in September. Sroka recorded both meetings, and got Paul to admit that he made mistakes in what he said in that video. But he also seems to have admitted to a lot of unconstitutional mistakes made by the police force he oversees.

All of that has now resulted in four of Ben's colleagues (but not Ben himself) suing American Fork and 13 of its police officers in federal court for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The full 52-page complaint is worth reading (though, bizarrely, I've seen six separate news articles on this lawsuit and not a single one includes the complaint!).

In short, it seems quite clear that (as many people suspected upfront) the AFPD cut all kinds of corners, abused their powers, and violated the rights of a group of young adults in the false belief that the local residents (connected to BAM) must be correct, and the "kids" were causing trouble. There seemed to be a pervasive belief among the AFPD that they could effectively scare the young people straight by detaining and threatening them, which is not how policing is supposed to work.

From the complaint:

Plaintiffs were helping an investigative journalist and YouTuber, Benjamin Schneider, document and pursue a civil dispute over an Oregon family's LEGO collection. Plaintiffs tried to serve court papers, drove a car, filmed, raised money on GoFundMe, and hung a sign on a neighbor's fence with the neighbor's permission. That is lawful, constitutionally protected activity.

In response, AFPD officers stopped Plaintiff Tyler Shaw for a stop-sign violation that AFPD's own Chief of Police now admits never happened; held Mr. Shaw for roughly two hours, ran him through field sobriety tests, and brought a drug dog to his car after he blew a .000 on a breath test, while the officer in charge, explained: "I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go"; ripped Plaintiff Sheldon Norcross's phone from his hand and arrested him because, in the officer's own words, Mr. Norcross invoked his right to remain silent; and then obtained a search warrant for "stolen . . . Lego merchandise" on a sworn affidavit that the Chief now calls "one of the biggest places where we screwed up," and used it to storm a basement rental with guns drawn including a rifle, handcuff every occupant—including a 16-year-old—and haul them all to the police station.

The Chief of Police, Cameron Paul, initially defended all of this in a 26-minute YouTube video. After an outside review, he conceded in a recorded meeting that "we didn't do this perfectly," that "several issues . . . weren't handled well, or were handled outside of policy," that "it was clearly not a stop sign violation," that the reasons written for seizing Mr. Norcross's phone "would not be a justification for seizing the phone," that "[t]his didn't really have anything to do with Legos. We weren't going in to look for Legos. We didn't even search the residence for Legos," that the affidavit "did not get reviewed by a supervisor" despite "a clear directive and policy" requiring it, and that what the officers "would have needed to have . . . is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals."

Those admissions confirm what the body-worn camera footage, dash camera footage, and AFPD's own reports show: the individual Defendants violated Plaintiffs' clearly established First and Fourth Amendment rights, and they did so because the City of American Fork staffed its patrol division with inexperienced officers, failed to train them on the constitutional limits that govern traffic stops, phone seizures, warrant affidavits, and warrant execution, and failed to enforce even the safeguards its own written policies require.

I guess kudos to police chief Paul for effectively admitting to much of this in the interviews with Sroka. That certainly makes life easier for those whose rights were violated by the AFPD.

The details Paul admitted to are pretty damning. On AFPD pulling over Shaw's vehicle (with Schneider as a passenger):

Officer Richardson then stopped Mr. Shaw's car, claiming he "observed the vehicle fail to stop before the stop line at a stop sign, as well as failure to come to a complete stop."

That was false. Mr. Shaw stopped properly at the stop sign. There was no traffic violation and no other lawful basis to stop the car.

AFPD's Chief of Police agrees. After reviewing the footage, Chief Paul stated of Officer Richardson: "I understand that he thought he knew what the statute said, but he didn't"; "It's hard to justify any type of a stop sign violation here"; "I do not believe there was a stop sign violation"; and "he clearly misremembered, and it was clearly not a stop sign violation." Chief Paul further stated that AFPD has "since gone over the statute with him."

Chief Paul contends that Officer Richardson had reasonable suspicion for some other reason, which Plaintiffs deny, but he acknowledged that Officer Richardson "should have based his stop on that reasonable suspicion to begin with and not try to have drummed up some kind of other offense." The only basis Officer Richardson ever gave for the stop was a traffic violation that did not occur

Also, I hadn't realized from the videos that police stopped Shaw a second time, the very next day. That's the stop where they held him for two hours, and where the bodycam caught officers admitting they wanted to scare him. Knowing these were two separate stops on consecutive days makes it look even more like deliberate intimidation.

On the evening of March 9, 2026, Mr. Shaw was again driving his car with Mr. Schneider as a passenger. Mr. Shaw stopped to pick up an acquaintance, Christian Morgan, who had been dropped off near Mr. Johnson's residence.

Officer Hawkins had just told Mr. Morgan he was "trespassed" from Mr. Johnson's property. Mr. Morgan had left the property as instructed. Officer Hawkins then saw Mr. Morgan "attempt to get into" Mr. Shaw's car, activated his emergency lights, and stopped Mr. Shaw's car.

Officer Hawkins did not tell Mr. Shaw why he was stopped, there being no lawful reason for the stop. Walking toward a car after leaving a property when told to leave is not a crime, and Mr. Shaw had committed no traffic violation.

Officer Hawkins opened by demanding: "I'll ask again because I wasn't born yesterday. Why are we harassing people?"

Instead of addressing any traffic matter, Officer Hawkins accused Mr. Shaw and Mr. Schneider of "harass[ing]" Mr. Johnson. He then had Officer Fraughton look at Mr. Shaw's eyes, and the two officers claimed that Mr. Shaw's eyes "were glossy and seemed to have a red layer of tint in them."

That claim was false, and the officers knew it was false. Officer Hawkins' in-car camera recorded him explaining the stop to another officer in his patrol car before the sobriety tests began. He said he had stopped the car because "I watch them try to get in this car," and that "[t]he main reason was I smelled alcohol on the other guy's breath. So I was hoping he just got caught." Asked whether "these guys" were good "to drive," the answer recorded was: "Yeah, I think so. I didn't see anything clear as day with Tyler that I noticed."

Officer Hawkins then described his plan in his own words: "I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go." When the other officer asked, "do we have . . . charges or are we just tired of them being annoying?", Officer Hawkins answered that he would "try to link it to" Mr. Schneider: "So if I can get Ben to say, yeah, well, I did tell him to go over there and do that, then I have harassment charges on [him]. . . . I don't care that much, it's more of just the fact that they're trying to be sneaky." He added, "we don't really have a harassment code in Utah."

Officer Hawkins therefore knew, before he ever removed Mr. Shaw from the car, that he had no reasonable suspicion that Mr. Shaw was impaired or had committed any crime. He prolonged the stop anyway: to "scare him a little bit," and to try to build a case against Mr. Schneider.

Scaring someone is not a lawful basis to stop him or to prolong a stop.

There's also this:

Officer Hawkins' report on the sobriety tests twice refers to the subject of the testing as "Johnny," a person who was not present, indicating that the narrative was likely copied from another report rather than written from what Officer Hawkins observed of Mr. Shaw.

Yeah, apparently the AFPD officers who held Shaw and Schneider for hours had so little evidence that they copy and pasted the report on the field sobriety test of someone totally different.

Again, the Sroka interview gets AFPD's chief to admit that the two hours of detention on zero basis is, as you probably already know, not actually allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged each of the governing rules the officers ignored: "I can't prolong a stop just for a canine sniff unless I have something more"; "We can't extend the time of a stop beyond what we would normally spend just to be able to deploy a dog"; and, as to the officers' claim that a different person smelled of alcohol, "it wouldn't give articulable suspicion . . . . It's got to be individualized just because someone else has the odor of an alcoholic beverage on their breath [it] doesn't justify it."

Chief Paul's attempted defense — that the sniff "was done . . . at the same time they were doing field sobriety tests" — is contradicted by Officer Hawkins' own report, which shows that the dog was summoned only after the tests were finished and Mr. Shaw had blown .000.

When shown AFPD's written canine policy, Chief Paul did not dispute that it contains no statement that a stop may not be extended for a canine sniff absent independent reasonable suspicion, responding that "[w]e clearly don't have every single piece of . . . precedent in department policy." He has also defended "scar[ing]" citizens as an accepted AFPD practice: "There are times we will do that where we'll go out and we'll help somebody understand the gravity of the situation and make it appear very serious to them or as serious as it is. And then we will use our discretion and cut them loose."

Then there's the story of Sierra Lauts, the woman Schneider had asked to be the process server for his attempted lawsuit against one of the guys who took over the franchise, Josh Johnson. As shown in Ben's original video, she was seated in a car waiting outside of Johnson's property for him to leave the house. She never entered his property. And the police took the papers from her, showed them to Johnson but did not complete the service, saying he refused them (which is not how any of this works). And then they "trespassed" Lauts, which is kinda crazy given that she was never on Johnson's property.

Officers Sumbot and Somerville, among others, arrived, approached Ms. Lauts's car, demanded her identification and address, and questioned her about why she was there and whether she was a "legal" process server. Ms. Lauts answered truthfully and provided her driver's license. She was not free to leave. Officer Somerville stayed posted at the car, explaining: "We just try to have at least one officer to kind of stick around with every group," because "you never know when people are going to try and . . . take off." He was present when the occupants were told that Mr. Johnson "wanted you trespassed."

Mr. Johnson told the officers the court papers were fake and that Ms. Lauts was a fake process server, and he asked that she be arrested for "impersonating a process server." Officer Sumbot then called the Marion County Circuit Court, which confirmed that the case was real, that it had been filed, and that Mr. Johnson still needed to be served.

Even with the court's confirmation in hand, the officers continued to treat lawful service of process as criminal conduct. Officer Sumbot carried the papers to Mr. Johnson's door but did not deliver them, and Mr. Johnson was allowed to refuse them.

The officers then discussed among themselves, on camera, whether to have Ms. Lauts "trespassed" from a property she had never entered: "I'm just gonna see if he wants the girl trespassed." An officer then asked Mr. Johnson, "So what do you want done today, do you want her trespassed?" Mr. Johnson replied: "no, I want them for stalking."

Officer Sumbot then told Ms. Lauts that Mr. Johnson "wanted her trespassed from the property and not to return," and Ms. Lauts was formally trespassed even though she remained in her car on a public street the entire time

This section concludes with the understatement of the year:

Chief Paul has since conceded that "even between officers, there's some confusion on what can be done? What can't be done? What needs to be done? What should be done?" when it comes to civil process, and that "it's pretty apparent that we need to make sure we're doing some additional training."

Ya think?

Then there's the seizing of Sheldon Norcross's phone, which is also covered in detail in Schneider's video. The complaint explains how ridiculous that all was, with the cops literally making up reasons on the spot for why they could seize the phone, claiming they could just take it because Norcross initially told them he wouldn't give them the phone (again, not how any of this works). The different officers who arrested Norcross also gave different — and conflicting! — reports on what happened. Again, the Chief admitted to the journalist that this isn't how it's supposed to work:

Chief Paul has conceded that the stated basis for the seizure was invalid: "destroying evidence is different than a locked phone, right? . . . So, if we're destroying evidence, that's very different than someone locking his phone." He added that he had "heard Lieutenant Adamson's explanation. It differs from what's in his report, but what's written in his report would not be a justification for seizing the phone."

And then, later:

Officer Richardson transported Mr. Norcross, in handcuffs, to the AFPD station. Although he had been told "you are under arrest," officers at the station called it a "detention." Chief Paul has since acknowledged that "to detain and transport really it does turn into a de facto arrest. There's very limited circumstances where it can remain a detention," and he does not "believe that necessarily applied in our instance."

Then we finally get to the crazy SWAT team raid. As was suspected, the warrant they obtained to raid the house was bullshit:

At 5:11 p.m., Officer Richardson — a POST-certified officer of roughly one year's experience — swore out an affidavit for a warrant to search the basement apartment, Mr. Schneider's person, and the Chevy Malibu. The only "property or evidence" the affidavit identified was "Any stolen merchandise, specifically Lego merchandise."

To supply probable cause that stolen LEGO merchandise would be found inside, Officer Richardson swore: "The homeowner also disclosed that he could hear multiple individuals inside the residence speaking about possible stolen Lego toys that they had taken. The officer would like to search for said items."

That statement was false. No one inside the residence discussed "stolen Lego toys that they had taken." Whatever the homeowner may actually have said about LEGO — and there is no recording, because no officer recorded the conversation — the affidavit converted it into what amounted to an overheard confession that the occupants possessed LEGO "that they had taken." No one inside had taken any LEGO toys. The phrase "they had taken" appears in no recording. The statement was either fabricated or recklessly embellished, and Officer Richardson knew, or recklessly disregarded, that it was false.

Officer Richardson and Lieutenant Adamson also knew facts that made the statement implausible on its face and that the affidavit omitted: that AFPD had known for days that the dispute concerned a LEGO collection in Oregon that Mr. Schneider was trying to recover through the Oregon courts, not LEGO in Mr. Schneider's possession; that, upon information and belief, AFPD had never received any report of LEGO stolen in Utah by anyone in the residence; and that the conversation with the homeowner was not recorded.

The affidavit contained other false or misleading statements, including that the March 11 sign incident occurred on "March 3rd of 2026"; that Mr. Schneider was "arranging various amounts of individuals to go to the victim's residence and enter his property," when none of the Plaintiffs had entered Mr. Johnson's property; and that the sign was "defaming." It omitted that the owner of the fence had given permission for the sign, that Officer Richardson himself had confirmed that permission, and that Officer Richardson had already concluded that the people with Mr. Norcross had no "malicious intent."

And then this part, which seems pretty important:

The affidavit established no probable cause to believe that any of the occupants other than Mr. Schneider had committed any crime, and it sought no authority to arrest, detain, or search anyone other than Mr. Schneider.

The lawsuit notes that a magistrate judge signed the warrant, saying that cops could search for stolen Lego merchandise (which again, the cops knew was nonsense). And, now the police chief (who originally defended these events) admits it was all a big fuck up:

Chief Paul has admitted the affidavit was a failure: "I will say that the search warrant affidavit presents one of the biggest places where we screwed up." He continued: "This didn't really have anything to do with Legos. We weren't going in to look for Legos. We didn't even search the residence for Legos." And: "in my opinion, we should have never even put Legos in this affidavit."

Chief Paul has also admitted that AFPD's written safeguard failed: "a new officer wrote this affidavit. We have a clear directive and policy that search warrant affidavits have to be reviewed by a supervisor in our department, and in this case . . . [t]his did not get reviewed by a supervisor." He summarized: "Basically what I'm getting at is we failed here."

Um. Considering the supposedly stolen Legos (which the police already knew Schneider was looking to recover, not steal) were the entirety of the argument for the warrant, to now say that they shouldn't have even mentioned them is a huge fucking deal.

The warrant only gave the cops permission to search for Legos, which they have now admitted they did not do. But the complaint also details that the cops laid out a plan before the raid to arrest everyone in the house, even though it was a search warrant, not an arrest warrant.

Officer Richardson prepared an operations plan for serving the warrant. By his own account, the plan was "to open the door which was presumed unlocked, and call out any present individuals one at a time, and take them into custody." The plan thus called for taking into custody every person inside, whoever they were, before any officer knew who was there.

There's also the issue that they burst into the house with guns drawn with no announcement:

The officers did not knock. They did not announce their authority and purpose and wait for the occupants to respond. Officer Richardson's report claims that "[o]fficers announced 'Police Search Warrant,'" but no announcement was made and no time was allowed for the occupants to respond before officers were in the doorway ordering them out at gunpoint. They opened the door and entered. Officer Richardson's own body-worn camera records the team's cue — "You ready? On you." — followed immediately by "Everybody step out. Stand up and come outside. Right now. Let's go. Step outside. Step outside, everybody." The footage of the entry itself has been blacked out in the released versions of Officer Richardson's and Officer Laycock's footage.

Chief Paul has conceded the point: "even if the door's propped open you, you still announce, right? . . . Just because the door's open does not allow you on a knock-and-announce warrant to just enter the premises. Like, there's no debating that. So, yes, that's an issue I've identified as well."

The whole thing is not how any of this is supposed to work:

Officer Richardson "held lethal coverage with [his] Patrol rifle" — that is, he pointed a rifle at the occupants — while Officer Tonga called them out one at a time and handcuffed them. Other members of the entry team likewise had firearms drawn and directed at the occupants

None of the occupants was armed. None was suspected of a violent crime. AFPD's own Transparency Entry reports that no one other than officers brandished a weapon. Officer Richardson admitted that "[d]ue to NLETS not working, a criminal history of Benjamin Schneider was not conducted." There was no information suggesting anyone inside posed a threat.

Ms. Lauts, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Allen complied with every command. Each was nevertheless handcuffed, searched, and held at gunpoint and in handcuffs outside the residence. So was the 16-year-old.

And the precious, made up "stolen Legos" that the police used to get the warrant which only gave them the authority to search for those non-existent Legos?

Officers did not even search the apartment for LEGO merchandise. They spent only a few minutes inside, opened a single closet, and opened no cupboards. The return Officer Richardson swore to the next morning states: "Benjamin Schneider was arrested. No items siezed."

Oh, but there was one other thing they were careful about while inside the house. Making sure they weren't being recorded:

Before entering, officers discussed the occupants' cameras. On entry, an officer turned a GoPro camera that was recording on a desk face down, and Lieutenant Adamson grabbed and twisted Mr. Schneider's arm when he attempted to record with his phone and stopped the recording.

Then, after they arrested all of these people on zero basis, zero probable cause, zero anything, they held them for over two hours. Once again, Chief Paul told the reporter that's not allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged that this was unlawful: "[W]e don't have a categorical authority to just put . . . everyone in hand[cuffs] because of the scene of a search warrant"; "that detention mixed with transport . . . in almost every case . . . is going to turn into an arrest"; and "[w]hat these officers would have needed to have, I mean, just speaking frankly, is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals."

The plaintiffs (in various combinations) claim that their First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated multiple times in multiple ways throughout all of this. Suing the police for violating your rights is generally pretty difficult (unfortunately). But it gets a lot easier when you have the bodycam footage, the dashcam footage, the officers' own reports, and the Police Chief on tape repeatedly admitting to the very unlawful behavior you're suing over.

So this whole mess started because a group of young adults were trying to help someone else get back Lego sets that BAM held onto (and which, many months later, BAM finally returned only some of). While their actions may have been a bit awkward and goofy, the basic details were easily available to the AFPD. Instead, AFPD's response was to — largely because of questionable claims from people connected to BAM — stop the participants with made-up traffic violations, detain them illegally for hours, seize phones on no basis, raid the home they were staying in on false pretenses, hold them at gunpoint, and drag them all to the police station. The Chief now admits that much of this was clearly wrong.

The reality seems to be what one of the AFPD cops said early on: the cops decided to abuse their power (including their guns and ability to obtain search warrants) to "scare him a little bit." Right now, it kinda seems that the people who should be scared of the legal liability they have created for themselves are the AFPD officers who created all this legal liability for themselves by trampling the constitutional rights of the people they're supposed to serve.

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If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn't be cops. By that I mean that there's little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don't have that, this is the sort of thing that happens.

Canadian YouTuber Anthony Sistilli cobbled together a very rudimentary approximation of Flock's ALPR tech, using off-the-shelf hardware and his personal laptop. A pinch of AI was added to the mix to "train" the camera to focus on probable cop cars, rather than every car that passed by.

He uploaded a couple of shorts to YouTube briefly explaining what he was using and what he was attempting to do. (Here and here.) The recordings honestly explained the limitations of the tech Sistilli was using, while still demonstrating that it did work, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the local PD (the Peel Regional Police of Ontario, Canada) decided this simply could not pass without comment. And that would be the sort of "comment" that involved officers arriving at Sistilli's house in the apparent hopes of intimidating him into abandoning this project.

After Sistilli produced two short-form videos about his project for his 140,000 subscribers, officers from the Peel Regional Police in Ontario showed up at his home on Sept. 20. Sistilli said the visit lasted roughly 30 minutes, with officers focusing on his intentions and whether he planned to build a map tracking police movements.

"Their concern was that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help people committing crimes," Sistilli said. "They also made the case that their own cameras and ALPR technology weren't as concerning as I was suggesting. My impression was that they weren't familiar with many of the controversies or examples of misuse in the United States."

This interaction was also posted to Sistilli's channel. The entire conversation — which should really be considered a professional embarrassment for Peel Regional Police — can be viewed below (albeit interspersed with commentary and interviews):

While it's true that Canada as a whole hasn't experienced the perpetual abuse of ALPR cameras by law enforcement officers that we have in the US, that doesn't excuse the officers' inability (or refusal) to recognize the irony attendant in claiming persistent surveillance "puts officers at risk" while obtusely refusing to recognize that it creates the same risks for citizens. In fact, the risk posed to citizens is inherently more dangerous than the risk posed to officers due to the imbalance of power.

When a cop misuses cameras, they do so from behind a web of opacity with almost zero accountability. When a single person aims cameras at cop cars — one that can't handle 24/7 surveillance and operates (very clunkily) only when physically manipulated by the camera operator — there's nothing approaching the round-the-clock from all over the city surveillance cops insist keep us safer, but somehow would be harmful if the ALPRs decided to focus on cop cars instead.

Sistilli's experiment (and unwanted interaction with police officers) makes a good point. And because it's a good point, it was almost entirely lost on the officers who decided this somehow posed a risk to them.

"I never intended to create a giant network mapping every police officer, and I still don't," Sistilli told Straight Arrow. "I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point. Sometimes it's easier to show people what this kind of surveillance means by turning it around than by simply explaining what companies like Flock are doing."

Even if the cops are unable (or simply unwilling) to comprehend this point, the hundreds of thousands of people who've watched these videos certainly do. Cops need to learn they can't simply "because we said so" their way through interactions like these — ones they initiate but immediately make clear they're not actually interested in an honest conversation.

Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse's rough last few weeks), it didn't go well.

Mac soon found that Grok not only posted his financial information and bank balances to his company's Slack channel, the Grok Bot leaked the information while posing as Mac. Mac quickly headed over to Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website to share his recent learning experience:

Grok Bot agents are designed to "sign in and work across apps, tools, and websites, including platforms with no clean API or MCP, and come back with the work finished," according to SpaceXAI.

In Mac's case, he states the Grok Bot he used to oversee his finances was read-only and didn't have access to Slack, but another Grok Bot he was using did — so the software "collaborated" to "help." Mac didn't understand that other Grok Bots on the same machine have different permissions. Grok Bot didn't "understand" that it wasn't being very helpful.

This is, so we're clear, not software gaining sentence and "going rogue." This is software that isn't ready for prime time, hasn't been fully cooked, and is operating in a country that's too corrupt to pass meaningful modern privacy laws or to regulate data brokers. Combined with people rushing to integrate the technology into sensitive accounts without really understanding how it works (or the interactions not being made clear by the company itself due to bad instructions or no transparency).

Keep in mind this is a tech CEO and software developer. You can probably imagine how many ordinary people won't really understand what they're signing up for — especially in the way that similar products from Meta (Muse) and OpenAI (Dots) are designed to appear harmlessly cute — and in the way that most major tech companies are overstating these chatbots' level of fit, finish, and "awareness."

Elon Musk had previously stated that the company would compensate people who suffer financial losses due to Grok Bot, but there's no real reason to believe that's actually true:

The dramatic expansion of tech industry access to sensitive systems and accounts in a surveillance-profit-obsessed country without meaningful corporate oversight, privacy standards, or operational consumer protection regulators (thanks in large part to the same companies selling you AI assistants) is going to cause no limit of chaos and headaches in 2027 and beyond.

This particular orchestra of dysfunction is just getting warmed up, and neither the tech industry nor the federal government will be there to help people who can't afford to make these kinds of mistakes.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about Florida's age-gating law and its esoteric definition of addiction:

Is anyone else bothered by this incredibly strange definition of "addiction"? Is YMCA soccer addicting if 10% of a youth soccer team (one player) plays soccer for more than two hours a day?

In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a comment celebrating MAGA's electoral victories:

Congratulations, you got record-high inflation, higher prices on gas and diesel, a militarized police force working on the president's order to commit human trafficking with a side of murder, the kind of war your diaper-wearing piss-stain of a president said he wouldn't start, and a massive reduction in the reputation of the United States amongst longtime allies. Are ya winnin' hard enough to get sick of it, Trumpist?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a response from MrWilson expanding on the first place winning comment about addiction:

It's all arbitrary bullshit and has to be because it's impossible to create definitions that would actually work for every scenario. A kid using Facebook messenger to get math tutoring help from his friend for two hours could count as "addiction" here.

It's all substituting broadbrush generalizations in lieu of parents paying attention to what their kids are doing online, or even better, having honest relationships that mean their kids actually talk to them about what they're encountering online.

Addiction should only be determined by a trained psychiatrist in individual cases after direct observation, not by politicians grand-standing and virtue-signaling their "think of the children" schtick that supports the "re-elect me so I can continue to get campaign donations from wealthy donors and insider trading stock tips" schtick.

Next, it's Thad with a comment about the observation that ICE is inflicting injustices on the US citizens that Trump believes are inherently superior to everyone else:

Let's not pretend we don't know who he really means when he says "citizens".

Over on the funny side, things are awfully slow: not a single comment even got enough votes to earn a funny badge, and in fact nothing even really came close. So in lieu of the normal section, we'll just wrap things up with one single editor's choice. It's another comment about the "two hours a day" addiction definition, this time from an anonymous commenter:

no no I think they're cooking here. We just need to extend this to its only logical conclusion: the 14 hour work week.

That's all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• NBC Delayed Story About Trump's Access Hollywood Recording Over Fear That He Might Sue
• Media, Politics & The Death Of Intellectual Honesty
• Media Bias And The Death Of Intellectual Honesty, Doubling Down
• Facebook Wants To Bring Controversial Zero Rated 'Free Basics' Service To The States
• Who's On (The) Second (Circuit)… And Why Are They Screwing Up Copyright Law?
• As Donald Trump Ramps Up Threats To Sue Newspapers, A Reminder Of Why We Need Free Speech Protections

This Week in 2011

• Did ICE 'Pirate' Its Anti-Piracy PSA?
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• Pirate Party Building Up More And More Support: 9% Nationwide In Germany
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• Worst Kept Secret Now Confirmed: Government Was Very Involved Helping RIAA/MPAA Negotiate Six Strikes

This Week in 2006

• It Was Mrs. Peacock, In The Lounge, With A Text Message
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• The Internet Is The Internet Because Of The Inter Part
• Would Jesus Get Music From P2P Networks?
• Will Google's Expansion Invite Antitrust Action?

Back in the much simpler times of 2021, we wrote about some of the games Major League Baseball decided to play as part of a brief owner's lockout of players while both sides negotiated a collective bargaining agreement. This included essentially scrubbing the MLB website of all pictures of current players, stories about current players, and other references to current players other than their names, current and career stats, and the teams they played for. The league claimed that this was all to comply with federal labor laws, but nobody seemed to think that made much sense. Instead, this looked like an attempt to punish members of the MLBPA by taking them out of the spotlight as much as possible. That ultimately backfired, with MLB players changing their social media profiles to the blank silhouette that appeared on MLB.com while they made fun of the entire effort. It all made the league look very petty and very stupid.

And now, with yet another lockout looming as MLB owners attempt to incorporate a salary cap on teams despite record team valuations, the league has sent a memo to teams to say they plan to do it all over again, and more.

In addition to instructing teams on what they are allowed to speak with players about, as well as what conduct they are allowed to engage in if they attend the weddings of players (yes, seriously), the website will once again be transformed into a useless landing page filled with all the things the public doesn't care about when it comes to baseball.

Additionally, the league's website will once again remove videos and player images during a lockout, per The Athletic. That includes altering articles and headlines.

"Player images (including from their profile pages) and videos would be removed, and player names and pictures would be removed from article headlines."

There will almost certainly be a lockout, which means this is likely to go into practice once again, unless the league reverses course. Which it absolutely should. This petty nonsense is not a needle-mover for public sentiment, which is half the game in a labor dispute in professional sports. The league is also on very shaky footing arguing they need a salary cap for competitive balance, given the last four teams in the playoffs that are currently going includes three teams that are small-salary teams compared with the rest of the league.

This is purely about MLB owners attempting to claw back money from the players who are actually performing on the field through artificial limits on spending. Spending that, by the by, is currently being done by those same owners who say they need to limit spending.

None of it makes much sense in the macro. And, for our purposes, it's worth pointing out that trying to strong-arm the players' union by playing petty games with the league website is pointless and self-defeating.

Back in the early days of the Internet - 1988 to be precise - the self-replicating computer program known as the Morris worm spread across the network and shut down thousands of online VAX and Sun computers. It was a good example of software not going rogue, but doing exactly what its creator had intended it to do without understanding the consequences. As Wikipedia explains:

By instructing the worm to replicate itself regardless of a computer's reported infection status, Morris transformed the worm from a potentially harmless intellectual and computing exercise into a viral denial-of-service attack.

Since that early botched experiment, intentionally malicious worms have been written to create botnets that can launch DDoS attacks, for example to overwhelm systems punitively, or for the purpose of blackmail. Examples include Mirai and the later Aisuru-Kimwolf. These worms targeted specific kinds of Internet-connected hardware. But the arrival of AI agents that can carry out actions autonomously brings with it a new threat: AI worms potentially able to seek out, hack into, and infect any device that is online. Researchers at Anthropic have been studying this possibility:

small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes….Unlike non-AI malware, [such a replicator] could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. 

Previous work has shown that AI models can carry out this kind of attack on more powerful systems:

artificial intelligence (AI) agents enable a fundamentally new threat: a worm that generates tailored attack strategies to each target it encounters. The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its reach for further attacks. Deployed on a network of machines spanning Linux, Windows, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, the worm propagated by exploiting common, real-world corporate network vulnerabilities.

The Anthropic researchers explored whether an AI worm could run a capable model in a distributed fashion across low-power IoT devices, as "shards":

A model that's too large to fit on one device can be split into pieces, or shards, that run on separate machines that communicate with each other to collectively run the model. Machines that could run a significant model shard for a <30B model [that is, an LLM that contains fewer than 30 billion parameters] include smart fridges, smart ovens, automatic vacuum cleaners, and lawnmowers. A growing number of home and business devices, such as security cameras and video-conferencing units now ship with small built-in AI chips, designed to run AI models on the device itself.

A 26B model running across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, costing around $55 each, created manually by the researchers as a demo system, showed that IoT devices could indeed run quite capable models as shards, albeit slowly - at 0.39 tokens per second. Building on that result, the research project sought to answer two questions:

First, can small models get a model running on unfamiliar hardware? And second, can they do the whole cycle (find an uninfected device, copy themselves over, start running there, and repeat) all together in a single run?

The answer to both is "yes" - details in the Anthropic paper. The good news is that the process is very slow, typically taking one or two days to replicate. As the researchers put it: "As an analogy, imagine the replicator as a slime mold or a swarm of fruit flies, which replicate over days." However, they also caution that things will speed up as IoT hardware becomes more powerful, and LLMs more compact. They write in conclusion:

As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren't under human control. While it's true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world's IoT compute. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.

These replicators will not be an example of AI agents "going rogue", but of humans intentionally exploiting new capabilities for malicious purposes - or perhaps simply releasing badly written software, just like the Morris worm all those years ago.

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation's Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week's episode, Mike is joined by Mike McCue, founder and CEO of Flipboard, and a long term Silicon Valley exec and entrepreneur. Together, they discuss:

• Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots (TechCrunch)
• Publishers call on Andy Burnham to crack down on AI stealth bots (The Times)
• Drone Strikes Didn't Take Out a Russian Bot Farm, But We Were Primed to Believe It (Mother Jones)
• TikTok Quietly Gutted Its Advertising Rules. Scams Have Exploded Ever Since (Forbes)
• Trump Vowed to Wall Off TikTok From China. Did He? (Politico)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• Florida wins key ruling allowing it to enforce a law that targets social media use by kids (AP)
• Eleventh Circuit Says Cliffhangers Are 'Features,' Not Speech, As It Greenlights Florida's Social Media Age Gate (Techdirt)

Our fun links this week include Steve Job's prescient 1983 speech and TinyLittleOffice which is an office suite where documents are stored in the URL themselves.

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from the episode!

If you're already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.