In the last few years, the Supreme Court has been paying a lot more attention to the internet than it ever has before, and the cases keep on coming. This is already having a big impact on how the internet functions, and it doesn't look likely to stop any time soon. Given all that, this week our own Cathy Gellis joins the podcast for a discussion all about the past, present, and future of SCOTUS and the internet.

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We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something—and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those who insist that it's all bad and there is nothing of value in it. And there are those who think it's all powerful, the greatest thing ever, and will replace basically every job with AI bots who can work better and faster.

I think both are wrong, but it's important to understand why.

So let me lay out how I actually think about it. When it's used properly, as a tool to assist a human being in accomplishing a goal, it can be incredibly powerful and valuable. When it's used in a way where the human's input and thinking are replaced, it tends to do very badly.

And that difference matters.

I think back to a post from Cory Doctorow a couple months ago where he tried to make the same point using a different kind of analogy: centaurs and reverse-centaurs.

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Obviously, it's nice to be a centaur, and it's horrible to be a reverse centaur.

As Doctorow notes in his piece, some of the companies embracing AI tech are doing so with the goal of building reverse-centaurs. Those are the ones that people are, quite understandably, uncomfortable with and should be mocked. But the reality is, also, it seems quite likely those efforts will fail.

And they'll fail not just because they're dehumanizing—though they are—but because the output is garbage. Hallucinations, slop, confidently wrong answers: that's what happens when nobody with actual knowledge is checking whether any of it makes sense. When AI works well, it's because a human is providing the knowledge and the creativity.

The reverse-centaur doesn't just burn out the human. It produces worse work, because it assumes that the AI can provide the knowledge or the creativity. It can't. That requires a human. The power of AI tools is in enabling a human to take their own knowledge, and their own creativity and enhance it, to do more with it, based on what the person actually wants.

To me it's a simple question of "what's the tool?" Is it the AI, used thoughtfully by a human to do more than they otherwise could have? If so, that's a good and potentially positive use of AI. It's the centaur in Doctorow's analogy.

Or is the human the tool? Is it a "reverse centaur"? I think nearly all of those are destined to fail.

This is why I tend not to get particularly worked up by those who claim that AI is going to destroy jobs and wipe out the workforce, who will be replaced by bots. It just… doesn't work that way.

At the same time, I find it ridiculous to see people still claiming that the technology itself is no good and does nothing of value. That's just empirically false. Plenty of people—including myself—get tremendous use out of the technology. I am using it regularly in all different ways. It's been two years since I wrote about how I used it to help as a first pass editor.

The tech has gotten dramatically better since then, but the key insight to me is what it takes to make it useful: context is everything. My AI editor doesn't just get my draft writeup and give me advice based on that and its training—it also has a sampling of the best Techdirt articles, a custom style guide with details about how I write, a deeply customized system prompt (the part of AI tools that are often hidden from public view) and a deeply customized starting prompt. It also often includes the source articles I'm writing about. With all that context, it's an astoundingly good editor. Sometimes it points out weak arguments I missed entirely. Sometimes it has nothing to say.

(As an aside, in this article, it suggested I went on way too long explaining all the context I give it to give me better suggestions, and thus I shortened it to just the paragraph above this one).

It's not always right. Its suggestions are not always good. But that's okay, because I'm not outsourcing my brain to it. It's a tool. And way more often than not, it pushes me to be a better writer.

This is why I get frustrated every time people point out a single AI fail or hallucination without context.

The problem only comes in when people outsource their brains. When they become reverse centaurs. When they are the tool instead of using AI as the tool. That's when hallucinations or bad info matter.

But if the human is in control, if they're using their own brain, if they're evaluating what the tool is suggesting or recommending and making the final decision, then it can be used wisely and can be incredibly helpful.

And this gets at something most people miss entirely: when they think about AI, they're still imagining a chatbot. They think every AI tool is ChatGPT. A thing you talk to. A thing that generates text or images for you to copy-paste somewhere else.

That's increasingly not where the action is. The more powerful shift is toward agentic AI—tools that don't just generate content, but actually do things. They write code and run it. They browse the web and synthesize what they find. They execute multi-step tasks with minimal hand-holding. This is a fundamentally different model than "ask a chatbot a question and get an answer."

I've been using Claude Code recently, and this distinction matters. It's an agent that can plan, execute, and iterate on actual software projects, rather than just a tool talking to me about what to do. But, again, that doesn't mean I just outsource my brain to it.

I often put Claude Code into plan mode, where it tries to work out a plan, but then I spend quite a lot of time exploring why it was making certain decisions, and asking it to explore the pros and cons of those decisions, and even to provide me with alternative sources to understand the trade-offs of some of the decisions it is recommending. That back and forth has been both educational for me, but also makes me have a better understanding and be comfortable with the eventual projects I use Claude Code to build.

I am using it as a tool, and part of that is making sure I understand what it's doing. I am not outsourcing my brain to it. I am using it, carefully, to do things that I simply could not have done before.

And that's powerful and valuable.

Yes, there are so many bad uses of AI tools. And yes, there is a concerted, industrial-scale effort, to convince the public they need to use AI in ways that they probably shouldn't, or in ways that is actively harmful. And yes, there are real questions about what it costs to train and run the foundation models. And we should discuss those and call those out for what they are.

But the people who insist the tools are useless and provide nothing of value, that's just wrong. Similarly, anyone who thinks the tech is going to go away are entirely wrong. There likely is a funding bubble. And some companies will absolutely suffer as it deflates. But it won't make the tech go away.

When used properly, it's just too useful.

As Cory notes in his centaur piece, AI can absolutely help you do your job, but the industry's entire focus is on convincing people it can replace your job. That's the con. The tech doesn't replace people. But it can make them dramatically more capable—if they stay in the driver's seat.

The key to understanding the good and the bad of the AI hype is understanding that distinction. Cory explains this in reference to AI coding:

Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI, and almost without exception, they are senior, experienced coders, who get to decide how they will use these tools. For example, you might ask the AI to generate a set of CSS files to faithfully render a web-page across multiple versions of multiple browsers. This is a notoriously fiddly thing to do, and it's pretty easy to verify if the code works - just eyeball it in a bunch of browsers. Or maybe the coder has a single data file they need to import and they don't want to write a whole utility to convert it.

Tasks like these can genuinely make coders more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it's clear they're not looking to make some centaurs.

They want to fire a lot of tech workers - they've fired 500,000 over the past three years - and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AIs' code.

Criticize the hype. Mock the replace-your-workforce promises. Call out the slop factories and the gray goo doomsaying. But don't mistake the bad uses for the technology itself. When a human stays in control—thinking, evaluating, deciding—it's a genuinely powerful tool. The important question is just whether you're using it, or it's using you.

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I don't understand sycophancy. Never have. I don't know what it gets you in the long run other than a reputation for subservience. That's worth nearly nothing in the open market. The only people who will hire you are people most people would never want to work for.

And yet, that is pretty much the entirety of the GOP under Trump: a massive collection of doormats the current president won't even remember stepping on moments later. Sucking up to a goldfish brain like Trump makes you a fool, rather than the savvy pol you imagine yourself to be.

Welcome to the dom side of the sub/dom equation, Senator Marsha Blackburn. While she's most famous here for trying to turn the internet into whatever the current iteration of the GOP wishes it to be (at least here at Techdirt), she's stepped out of her comfort zone recently to publicly complain about a Supreme Court justice who attended an awards show where multiple people publicly criticized Trump's anti-migrant actions.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) called for an investigation Thursday into Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for attending the Grammy Awards, where various artists criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

[…]

"Americans deserve a Supreme Court that is impartial and above political influence," Blackburn wrote on social platform X. "When a Justice participates in such a highly politicized event, it raises ethical questions. We need an investigation into Justice Jackson's ability to remain impartial."

First things fucking last, Justice Jackson was not a presenter, nor was she a "participant" in any of the ICE criticism delivered by Grammy-nominated artists like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Justin Vernon. She was also not involved in any way with the production of the Grammy Awards ceremony, further removing her from anything that might be deemed "impartial."

But beyond any of that is the fact that Justice Jackson had a perfectly legitimate, non-political reason to be there:

Jackson was nominated in the Best Audio Book, Narration and Storytelling Recording category for her memoir "Lovely One." 

Jackson didn't win (she lost to the Dalai Lama which, if you're going to lose, is probably a loss you'll never complain about publicly) but she was nominated. That alone gave her a reason to be there. The anti-ICE content may have been personally enjoyable, but she wasn't there to soak up the stuff being said by others.

Not that it matters to the performative doormats currently employed as GOP politicians. Sen. Blackburn immediately started banging away on her keyboard and decided to take her disgruntled Grammy Awards forum comments to the next level by sending them off to Chief Justice John Roberts:

I write today regarding recent reporting about Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's attendance at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California, on Sunday, February 1, and the ethical questions raised by her attendance at such a highly politicized event. For the following
reasons, I urge you to conduct a thorough investigation into Justice Jackson's attendance at this event and whether her presence at such an event complies with the obligation that a Supreme Court justice "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary."

While it is by no means unheard of or unusual for a Supreme Court justice to attend a public function, very rarely—if ever—have justices of our nation's highest Court been present at an event at which attendees have amplified such far-left rhetoric. Many of the attendees wore lapel pins that read "ICE OUT," an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) adage. One Grammy winner that evening opened his acceptance speech by stating, "Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say 'ICE out,'" which was received with thunderous applause by the crowd. Another award recipient that evening noted in her acceptance speech that "No one is illegal on stolen land," going on to say that "we need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting . . . And f*** ICE, that's all I'm gonna say." These statements were just two of many polarized, highly charged anti-law enforcement sentiments from that evening. It is important to note that Justice Jackson was present in the audience throughout the event.

Wow. Harsh words from someone who couldn't be bothered to speak up while Justice Clarence Thomas received millions of dollars' worth of gifts from right-wing benefactors over the past two decades. She was oddly quiet when it was revealed Justice Thomas's wife was pushing election conspiracy theories. Truly an unexpected amount of yelling from someone who had nothing to say when Justice Alito's wife was flying pro-Trump flags at Alito's home.

Oh. Wait. Blackburn has something to say about both of those things in this letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

Unlike these meritless claims against Justice Alito and Justice Thomas, there are serious questions regarding Justice Jackson's participation in such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event and her ability to remain an impartial member of the Supreme Court.

It was a Grammy Awards ceremony, not an anti-ICE protest. That people had negative things to say about ICE is completely expected, given how many people are opposed to how this administration is handling immigration enforcement. Blackburn absolutely knows she's comparing apples to precision-machined aftermarket car parts. But like everyone else in this despicable political party, she doesn't care and she knows it's going to cause at least a small percentage of the converted to pretend to be offended on her behalf.

I assume John Roberts knows this as well. Let's hope he'll just roll his eyes and go back to binge-watching the kind of television I assume he enjoys: the no-one-asked-for-this 2023 reboot of Night Court.

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales from Texas went on Face the Nation on Sunday and said a lot of silly things, doing his best as a loyal Trump foot soldier to defend the indefensible, to make sense of the nonsensical, and to lie about all the rest.

However, I wanted to focus on one bit of the clip that I've watched over a dozen times, and still can't figure out what Rep. Gonzales meant. And I'm writing this in hopes that some DC or Texas reporter asks Gonzales to explain. Here's the clip:

Gonzales on Liam Ramos and his family: "They're not gonna qualify for asylum. So what do you do with all the people that go through the process and do not qualify for asylum? You deport them. I understand that 5-year-old and it breaks my heart. I also think, what about that 5-year-old US citizen?"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-08T16:09:49.039Z

And here's the transcript from CBS. I'm including a bit more than is in the clip just to get the full context of what he's saying:

MARGARET BRENNAN: You have this facility, though, in your district, Dilley, and that is for family detentions. That's where little five-year-old Liam Ramos from Minnesota was held before a judge, that's the picture of him there, ordered him released. He was ordered released because his family has a pending asylum claim, a legal process. He had entered with U.S. government permission through a process that the Biden administration had deemed legal. The current administration does not. The CBPOne app. Liam's father gave an interview to Telemundo and you read the transcript, he's talking about this five-year-old. He's not okay. He's waking up at night crying. He's worried he's going to be taken again. It's psychological trauma, according to the father. And the administration is still trying to deport him. Do you understand why they are so focused on this five-year-old and his dad if they did come in through the front door with U.S. government permission? 

REP. GONZALES: Well, the front door was via an app that Biden knew exactly what he was doing, and he created this huge mess, and now President Trump is there to clean up.

MARGARET BRENNAN: -but he came in the front door, he wasn't-

REP. GONZALES: -through an app-

MARGARET BRENNAN: -across the border-

REP. GONZALES: -through an app that wasn't vetted. And bottom line is, he's likely- they're not going to qualify for asylum. So what do you do with all the people that go through the process and do not qualify for asylum? You deport them. I understand the five-year-old and it, you know, it breaks my heart. I have a five year old at home. I also think, what about that five-year-old U.S. citizen-

MARGARET BRENNAN: -You feel comfortable defending that? 

REP. GONZALES: I feel comfortable- we have to have a nation of laws. If we don't have a nation of laws-

MARGARET BRENNAN: -They were following the- the law that is- that is that's the rub, is that a new administration deemed the last administration's regulation not to be legal.

Again, there's a lot of nonsense in there, including Gonzales trying to pretend that Liam Ramos and his father had not entered the right way and following the laws of the US for those seeking to come here just because it was "through an app." That app was the legal process. They followed the law. They did it the right way. To magically make that out to be violating the law because the next administration no longer wants to support that path doesn't change the underlying fact that they were doing things the legal way.

But, again, let's leave that aside. I simply want to focus in on the question of what the fuck Gonzales meant when he said:

I understand the five-year-old and it, you know, it breaks my heart. I have a five year old at home. I also think, what about that five-year-old U.S. citizen-

What about them? Under what scenario, process, or idea is that hypothetical five-year-old US citizen harmed? I've been unable to think or a single possible scenario in which the US citizen five-year-old could be harmed by allowing Liam Ramos to go through the asylum process.

Perhaps Rep. Gonzales can enlighten us by completing his thought and explaining.

Seriously: what is the scenario here? Is pre-kindergarten a zero-sum game now? Does Liam Ramos's presence in a classroom somehow harm the US citizen in the next seat?

Brennan cut him off before he could finish the thought, and nobody followed up. So we don't know. But I'd really like someone in the DC or Texas press corps to ask him to complete that sentence. Because I can think of one very obvious way that five-year-old US citizens are being harmed right now—and it's not by Liam Ramos.

It's by watching their government kidnap their classmates.

Nicholas Grossman talked about how his own child is distraught because some of his classmates can no longer come to school for fear their parents may be kidnapped by ICE:

My first grader (a US citizen) came home from school crying because a friend from class (also a US citizen) hasn't been coming to school because his parents (one of whom is not a citizen) are afraid of ICE.Little kids don't have concepts of racism and xenophobia. That has to be taught. Or imposed.

— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T17:11:41.156Z

Indeed, the NY Times went and actually spoke with Liam Ramos' classmates, and they seem legitimately distraught that government agents kidnapped their friend and sent him halfway across the country to a dangerous concentration camp. The video on that page is absolutely heartbreaking. I don't see how anyone with a soul could possibly support or justify what is being done to Ramos. And to claim it's in the name of his US citizen classmates is even more obnoxious. Just a couple of the quotes from five year olds:

"You are scaring schools, people, and the world. You should be kind, helpful, and caring like normal police. Not dangerous, scary, and stealing people. I think you should make friends with the world."

"You, right now, you're making people really sad because you're just taking them away without them doing anything."

So, please, Rep. Gonazales, tell us what you were thinking. What about those five-year-olds? What about kidnapping their classmate makes them better off? What about any of this makes sense? They're not criminals. They followed the official legal process. They came in through "the front door" following the official process of the government at the time.

At no point have they done anything wrong.

So please, Rep. Gonzales: finish the thought. What about that five-year-old US citizen?

Because those five-year-old US citizens have already given their answer. They're not being harmed by Liam Ramos. They're being harmed by a government that just taught them their friends can disappear without warning.

That's "what about" them.

FCC boss Brendan Carr is back with yet another fake "investigation" of media outlets he deems insufficiently deferential to radical (and increasingly unpopular) right wing ideology. This time it involves Carr launching a phony non-investigation of ABC's The View. The crime? They apparently didn't kiss MAGA Republican ass with enough zeal:

"The Federal Communications Commission is opening an investigation into whether ABC's "The View" daytime talk show violated equal time rules for interviews with political candidates after an appearance by a Democratic Texas Senate candidate this week, a source told Reuters on Saturday."

This, to be clear, isn't a real investigation. Carr's office is likely the Reuters source. And he previously hinted this was coming. As we mentioned then,  Carr is threatening to leverage the "equal time" rule embedded in Section 315 of the Communications Act to take action against talk shows that don't provide "equal" time to Republican ideology.

The rule is a dated relic that would be largely impossible for the Trump FCC to actually enforce. Republicans like Carr historically despised the equal time rule — an offshoot of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine, a problematic effort to ensure media fairness (specifically on broadcast TV) they long complained was unconstitutional. Until they found a "President leader" with no ethical or moral center.

The rule was originally created to apply specifically to political candidate appearances on broadcast television, since back then, a TV appearance on one of the big three networks could make or break and politician attempting to run for office. In the years since, the rule has seen numerous exemptions and, with the evisceration of the regulatory state by the right wing, isn't seriously enforceable.

That's not stopping weird Trump zealots like Carr, who is keen to abuse FCC authority he doesn't really have to harass media companies that don't adequately bend the knee to kakistocracy. Anna Gomez, the FCC's lone Democrat Commissioner, has done a good job with messaging pointing out that Carr is a dangerous, but highly performative, hack:

"Like many other so-called 'investigations' before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action," she said. "This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation."

As Gomez notes, most of this stuff goes nowhere. On one hand, it's decorative cack Carr leaks to gullible media outlets to make it appear like he's doing important things. On the other hand, it's still designed to stifle journalistic freedom and the First Amendment by warning media companies that they'll face protracted and costly legal headaches if they refuse to kiss Republican ass.

Keep in mind that ABC and Disney executives have already repeatedly tripped over themselves to curry favor with our embarrassing government, including paying Trump a $15 million bribe to settle a baseless lawsuit they were likely to win. They're doing this because they like lower taxes, mindless deregulation, and rubber-stamped media consolidation. They couldn't care less about journalism or viewpoint diversity.

These are cases that not only are winnable, many excellent lawyers would be willing to help fight them. And yet our media giants are still pathetic and feckless. It's another good lesson about how even if you think kissing up to autocrats is a financial win, it doesn't pay great returns over the longer haul. There is never a point where you will be deemed dutifully obedient, and akin to Vader's management of Bespin's Cloud City, the arrangement can and will always get worse.

Our increasingly broken corporate press struggles (or simply refuses) to communicate that Carr's goal isn't equality; it's the disproportionate coddling and normalization of an extremist U.S. right wing political movement that's increasingly despised by the actual public.

It was this steady media deterioration at the hands of the right wing and corporate power that opened the door to Trump's buffoonery in the first place. And, without a serious progressive media reform movement (which needs to include publicly funded media, serious media consolidation limits, ownership diversity rules, and creative new funding models for real journalism), it's only going to get worse.

The obvious end point, if people of conscience can't galvanize useful policy reform, will be the sort of state media control we seen in countries like Russia and Hungary. At which point, all of the problems we're seeing now at the hands of our violent, dim autocrats will only get worse.

Way back in 2018, a series of events in Samoa brought about the country's worst measles outbreak in years. It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, it turns out that the vaccine didn't kill the children at all. Instead, medical professionals had accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxer solution instead of sterilized water like they were supposed to. Despite that fact, the anti-vaxxers sowed all kinds of fear and disinformation throughout the country, whipping up negativity around measles vaccines. As a result of that, the government put a 10 months ban in place on the vaccine.

In June of 2019, RFK Jr. visited Samoa. He met with anti-vaxxer crusaders and government officials. Despite that, he has said publicly and in testimony before Congress that his trip there had nothing to do with vaccines and was instead about a medical records and tracking system the country was interested in. You can see an example of that claim in his own confirmation hearing.

Lots of people questioned that claim. And rightly so. The people he was meeting with, the timing in conjunction with the vaccination ban, it all lined up to yet another anti-vaxxer visiting the country to push their anti-vaxxer message.

Two months later, Samoa experienced a massive measles outbreak.

An outbreak began in October 2019 and continued for four months. Before seeking proper medical treatment, some parents first took their children to 'traditional healers' who used machines purchased that claimed to produce "immune-protective" water.

As of 22 December, there were 79 deaths. This was 0.4 deaths per 1,000 people, based on a population of 200,874, an infection fatality rate of 1.43%. There were 5,520 cases, representing 2.75% of the population.61 of the first 70 deaths were aged four and under. All but seven of the deaths were from people aged under 15.

At least 20% of babies aged six to 11 months contracted measles. One in 150 babies died.

This past week, documents and emails obtained by The Guardian and The AP show that everyone on the Samoan government's side of the house understood Kennedy's visit to be explicitly about vaccines, contrary to his statements, including statements before Congress. He was sworn in for that confirmation hearing, to be clear.

Documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, an inside look at how Kennedy's trip came about and include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit.

The documents have prompted concerns from at least one U.S. senator that the lawyer and activist now leading America's health policy lied to Congress over the visit. Samoan officials later said Kennedy's trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak, which sickened thousands of people and killed 83, mostly children under age 5.

The AP post has a ton of details further down the article, but here is an example of the content.

Embassy staffers got a tip about Harding's involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yett, then the representative for Pacific island countries at UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.

"We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine," Yett wrote in a May 22, 2019, email to an embassy staffer based in New Zealand. "The staff member in question seems to have had a role in facilitating this."

Two days later, a top embassy staff member in Apia wrote to Scott Brown, then the Republican U.S. president's ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, alerting him to Kennedy's trip and Harding's involvement.

"The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view)," the embassy official, Antone Greubel, wrote. "It turns out our very own Benjamin Harding played some role in a personal capacity to bring him here." Greubel wrote that he told Harding to "cease and desist from any further involvement with this travel," though the rest of the sentence is redacted.

Now, I have zero problem believing that Kennedy is lying about all of this. Lying is just what he does. And regularly. I also put the blood of all those dead children, and any long term health issues in the thousands of others, partially on Kennedy's ledger. This is all simply common sense.

But the real travesty is something quite similar is happening right here, right now. The measles outbreak in America is speeding up, not slowing down. Kennedy, as with Samoa, is taking zero responsibility for it. If he's taking any real concrete actions to combat it, I don't know what those would be, nor would I understand why they've been hidden so completely from public visibility. Kennedy once opined that maybe it would be better if everyone just got measles.

If that is his real goal, it appears we're on our way. But somebody besides a couple of press outlets should be investigating Kennedy for lying to Congress, at a minimum. And perhaps having a hand in the deaths of children, as well.

Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that's simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that's almost entirely the result of immigration, which is why courts have routinely held that non-citizens have the same rights as citizens while on US soil.

That's still the case, for the most part. The Fifth Circuit — fulfilling its role as the preferred US Supreme Court understudy — has chosen to ignore literally hundreds of rulings in favor of due process rights for immigrants to decide those no longer exist in the states most migrants detained by the government get sent to before being removed from the country.

Last November, the Trump administration's efforts to eliminate due process rights had been rejected by more than 100 judges in more than 200 cases. A few months later — and with a full-press surge happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the number of rejections has spiked:

A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.

While most of the mass deportation action is currently happening far north of the Fifth Circuit (which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), arrested immigrants are often sent almost immediately to detention facilities closer to the southern US border. Texas is, by far, the most popular destination for ICE detainee flights.

The Fifth Circuit waited around until late Friday night to release this decision [PDF], presumably in hopes of seeing the backlash subside a bit before the judges were due back at the office. Steve Vladeck covers all the angles in his post on this abhorrent ruling, starting with how this is an insane conclusion to reach given that 3,000 cases around the country have upheld the same rights the Fifth Circuit has chosen to deny to any migrant with the misfortune of finding themselves in its jurisdiction.

Well, late Friday night, in a ruling handed down just two days after oral argument, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—holding that, yes, the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety. The Fifth Circuit's opinion was written by Judge Edith Jones and joined in full by Judge Kyle Duncan—two of the most reactionary, right-wing federal appellate judges in the country…

The obvious upshot of this decision is that ICE et al will be rushing detainees to Texas ASAFP to take advantage of this ruling.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council noted last night, the Fifth Circuit's decision will "fuel ICE's push to transfer people to Texas immediately," and it will put "even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond." All of that can be traced to another procedural technicality—the principle that a district court gains jurisdiction over a habeas petition if, but only if, it is filed while the petitioner is physically in that court's jurisdiction. In other words, to avoid being subject to the Fifth Circuit's decision (while it remains on the books), detainees arrested elsewhere would have to have someone file on their behalf before they're physically transferred into the Fifth Circuit.

There's still a chance that people arrested in, say, Minneapolis, Minnesota might be able to avoid the Fifth Circuit's refusal to recognize their due process rights. But the denial of due process rights begins immediately in most cases, with ICE officers refusing to allow detainees to contact family members, much less seek legal representation. If ICE can get them on a plane headed south before anything is filed in local courts, the Fifth Circuit's ruling will override whatever rights migrants might have still had access to in the states they were removed from.

An appeal of this decision is already in process. And while it's concerning that this particular iteration of the Supreme Court will be handling it, it's not a foregone conclusion that it will convert the Fifth's ruling into nationwide precedent. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court has rejected a handful of Fifth Circuit rulings that cross the line into an open embrace of violent fascism. On the other hand, this version of the Supreme Court is far more prone to deliver wordless rubber stamps of appellate decisions it likes, so some caution is warranted.

This decision requires the most MAGA-coded judges in the Fifth to buy everything the Trump administration is selling. And what it's selling is a brand new interpretation of the phrase "seeking admission." Rather than limiting it to people crossing the border illegally, it applies this definition to any migrant who doesn't have the proper paperwork, even if they arrived in this country decades ago.

The dissent, written by Judge Dana Douglas, makes it clear that this administration will do anything and everything that serves its racist desire to eject non-whites from the United States.

The Congress that passed IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act [1996]) would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people. For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so, and nothing in the congressional record or the history of the statute's enforcement suggests that it did. Nonetheless, the government today asserts the authority and mandate to detain millions of noncitizens in the interior, some of them present here for decades, on the same terms as if they were apprehended at the border.

Do you want to be this shitty, Judge Douglas asks the judges who pretended this sort of thing is OK as long as it's Trump doing it.

The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that "seeking admission" is like being an "applicant for admission," in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens. Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. I dissent.

Hopefully this ruling will be reset by the Supreme Court or an en banc rehearing. But for now, the law of the land in three states that are willing to house ICE detainees says due process rights are only available in the 47 states the Fifth Circuit doesn't control.

If you watched NBC's prime time broadcast of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, you saw Vice President JD Vance in the stands at San Siro Stadium in Milan with his wife, Usha. The commentary team said "JD Vance" and moved on. Pleasant enough.

But if you were watching literally any other country's broadcast—or were actually in the stadium—you heard something else: the crowd booing. Loudly. Jeering. Whistling. CBC's commentator captured the moment awkwardly:

There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha - oops, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.

Multiple journalists on the ground reported the same thing. The Guardian's Sean Ingle noted the boos. USA Today's Christine Brennan noted the boos. The boos were, by all accounts, quite audible to anyone actually present in the stadium.

Timothy Burke put together clips of many other countries broadcasts, many of which called out the boos or discussed criticism of the Trump admin:

JD Vance getting booed, as called around the world (auto transcribed & translated, mostly):

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog.xyz) 2026-02-08T06:33:29.885Z

Mexico's broadcast went on at length, including discussing how the US had to change the name of their Olympic village from "ice house" to "winter house" knowing how it would be perceived.

I didn't forget Mexico, BTW, it's just that I had to make Mexico as its own separate video because they were talking about Vance and ICE through the entire U.S. arrival at each of the locations and WELL INTO FRANCETWO AND A HALF MINUTES

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog.xyz) 2026-02-08T17:17:53.411Z

But if you were watching NBC's broadcast in the United States? Crickets. As the Guardian reported:

However, on the NBC broadcast the boos were not heard or remarked upon when Vance appeared on screen, with the commentary team simply saying "JD Vance". That didn't stop footage of the boos being circulated and shared on social media in the US. The White House posted a clip of Vance applauding on NBC's broadcast without any boos.

For what it's worth, NBC denies that it "edited" the crowd booing the Vances. But the analysis on that page by the folks at Awful Announcing show pretty clearly that NBC (which ran a live feed of the opening ceremony as well as a prime time version) turned up the sound of music at the moment the Vances were shown on the screen.

Now, look. As a technical and legal matter, NBC has every right to make that editorial choice. Broadcasters exercise editorial discretion over their coverage all the time. They choose camera angles, they choose what to amplify and what to downplay, they shape narratives. That's not illegal. It's not even unusual. It's called being a media company. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion—including editorial discretion that results in coverage that makes politicians look better than reality would suggest.

Of course, that principle cuts both ways. Or at least it should.

We've now spent months watching Donald Trump file lawsuit after lawsuit against news organizations for what he claims is "unfair" editing. The theory in these cases is that editing footage in ways that make Trump or his allies look bad is somehow actionable defamation or election interference. It's a theory that, if accepted, would basically mean the president gets veto power over how he's portrayed in any news coverage.

Remember, Trump sued CBS over a "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that the way the interview was edited amounted to "election and voter interference." That lawsuit was, to put it charitably, legally incoherent nonsense. We covered it at the time, noting that Trump's supposed smoking gun was that CBS edited an answer for time—you know, the thing every television program in history does, including cutting out the bits that make Trump look bad.

Then there was the $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over a documentary that didn't even air in the United States. Trump's legal team actually cited VPN download statistics as evidence of damages, apparently believing that Americans who went out of their way to circumvent geographic restrictions to watch a documentary they weren't supposed to see somehow constitutes harm to Trump.

Of course, as you already know, CBS, facing the Trump lawsuit while also trying to get FCC approval for the Paramount merger, decided to just… pay up. We called it what it was at the time: a $16 million bribe. Not because CBS thought Trump had a valid legal claim—the lawsuit was obviously baseless—but because CBS was terrified that an angry Trump administration would tank its merger if it didn't make the lawsuit go away.

And that's the point. The lawsuits aren't really about winning in court. They're about establishing a new norm: favorable coverage or else.

So now we have NBC, which happens to have a rather large interest in staying on the good side of this administration (what with the LA Olympics coming up in 2028 and all the broadcast rights that entails, and you already have Trump and FCC boss Brendan Carr threatening NBC's late-night comedy hosts), making an editorial choice to mute crowd boos directed at the vice president. And I will bet you every meager dollar I have that no one in Trump's orbit will say a single word about NBC's "unfair" editing. No tweets from Trump about "fake news NBC" cutting audio to misrepresent crowd reactions. No lawsuits alleging that NBC's editorial choices constitute fraud on the American public.

Because the "unfair editing" complaints were never actually about editing. They were about whether the editing made Trump look good or bad. Editing that cuts out boos? That's just good production values. Editing that makes Harris's answer seem more coherent? That's election interference worthy of billions in damages.

This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It's not a single dramatic moment. It's a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn't "be accurate" or "be fair." The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.

And NBC appears to have learned the lesson well.

This past weekend Section 230 turned 30 years old. In those 30 years it has proven to be a marvelous yet misunderstood law, often gravely, as too many, including in Congress and the courts, mistakenly blame it for all the world's ills, or at least those that happen in some connection with the Internet. When in reality, Section 230 is not why bad things happen online, but it is why good things can happen. And it's why repealing it, or even "just" "reforming" it, will not stop the bad, but it will stop the good.

Unfortunately, even 30 years in, these ignorant efforts to diminish or even outright delete the law continue, despite the harm that would result if they succeeded. Which is why this anniversary seems like a good time to review why many of the reasons why the hostility towards Section 230 is so misplaced. Here at Techdirt we've collectively all spilled a lot of digital ink over the years about why Section 230's critics are wrong to condemn it, and not just a little bit but completely and utterly, as well as counter-productively. But on this celebratory occasion I thought it would be fun to look back on what I personally have written about Section 230—at least since its 20th birthday celebration and the piece I wrote then—and collect some of these "greatest hits" in a post to help get anyone new to thinking about Section 230, who may be unsure why those pushing to repeal it is so misguided, caught up on why Section 230 is not a law we should be messing with.

What Section 230 does. One reason that people get Section 230 wrong is that there are a lot of myths about it and what it does or does not do. A good place to start is with an overview of how it generally works, and if you like watching videos you can watch this presentation from a few years ago where I gave a crash course in its operation.

In short, though, Section 230 immunizes platform providers from liability in two key ways: for liability in what their users use their services for, and for liability that could possibly result in how they moderate their users' use of their services. Section 230 aligns platforms providers with Congress and makes it possible for them to work towards what Congress wants—the most good material online, and the least bad—by making it legally possible for the providers to do the best they can to achieve it on both fronts. If it is legally safe for them to allow user expression, because they won't have to fear being liable for it, they will allow the most good expression, and if it is legally safe for them to remove user expression, because they won't have to fear being liable for their moderation, then, as this post explains, they will be able to remove the most that is bad.

But Section 230 is not some sort of special favor for Big Tech, as some have suggested. It's not even one for startups, as others have alleged. In fact, it applies to regular people as much as it applies to anyone. Rather than it being any sort of subsidy, it instead operates more like a rule of civil procedure to make sure that platforms cannot be drained of resources having to defend themselves for whatever wrong a user's conduct is accused. Which is also why "reforming" Section 230 effectively means repealing it, because nearly all the proposed reforms would make the statutory protection more conditional, but if platforms are unsure about whether they are protected or not and in jeopardy of having to litigate the question, then for all intents and purposes they are effectively unprotected, and they will act accordingly to defensively either deny more beneficial content, or leave up too much that is harmful (or both).

When Section 230 applies. One of the common myths about Section 230 is that it prevents anyone from ever being held responsible for how the Internet has been used. Not so; Section 230 does nothing to prevent anyone from being accountable for their own behavior. What it does not allow, however, is someone else being held accountable, namely the provider of the platform service they used, because, as discussed above, if the platform could have to answer for how any of their users used their services, they would never be able to offer their services, and if they couldn't offer their services then there would be no Internet for anyone to use even for any of the good, useful, or important things we use it for.

Section 230 also doesn't immunize platforms for their own actions, only those of their users. The issue sometimes is in telling the two apart, but as this post argues, it's not actually as hard to figure out as some people would insist. First, the idea that there is some publisher/platform distinction is a fiction; the only thing that matters is whether the immune provider is providing an interactive computer service of some sort and someone else has provided the content, or if the platform has provided the content itself. And in the event we get confused about who the content provider is, we can look to see who imbued the offending expression with its allegedly wrongful quality, which more often than not is the user and not the platform. As we've understood since the Roommates.com case, that a platform has simply welcomed the expression isn't enough to put the platform on the hook for it.

Furthermore, the type of content a platform might be immune for intermediating can be myriad, including online advertising, which is expression provided by others and then intermediated by a platform (despite what certain state governments think), online dating sites, or online marketplaces—although there have been some issues getting the courts to consistently recognize how Section 230 should apply in that context, even though the statutory history supports it. Although sometimes they still do.

Why Section 230 is important. Regulators can be tempted to take swings at Section 230 because it can be tempting to try to control what can be said on the Internet, and Section 230 gets in the way of those efforts. While the First Amendment also protects platforms' ability to choose what user expression to facilitate, Section 230 makes that protection meaningful by making those choices practically possible. When they cannot be freely made, then the user expression they facilitate takes a hit.

Which is why efforts to change Section 230 are a problem, because of all the collateral damage they will cause to online expression.  But for some regulators, that censorship is the goal and why they have Section 230 in their sights. They want to prevent online expression, because too often it is online expression they don't like. And, indeed, sometimes the speech is unfortunate, potentially even actionable.

But eliminating Section 230 is no solution at all. If we take away platforms' ability to be platforms, then we take away everyone's ability to use them to speak, no matter how important what they have to say is. It's why we need to defend Section 230, even when it's hard. There are always things that need to be said online, especially when we need to speak truth about power. Section 230 means we can. And we'd miss it if we couldn't.

Here's what's strange about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that made the open internet possible: Both sides of the traditional political spectrum hate it. But for opposite reasons. That, alone, should highlight that something is wrong in their analysis.

Republicans hate it because they say it lets websites censor conservative speech. Democrats hate it because they say it lets websites host dangerous disinformation.

Read those two sentences again.

One side is furious that platforms can moderate. The other side is furious that platforms don't have to moderate. Both sides are attacking the same 26-word provision of a 30-year-old law—and if you understand why their complaints are contradictory, you understand what Section 230 actually does.

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which contained the mostly unconstitutional Communications Decency Act, which inexplicably contained Section 230. (If you want the full history, I hosted a podcast series about it last year.) And after three decades, there's now a concerted, bipartisan effort to kill it—by people who either don't understand what the law does, or understand perfectly well and see its destruction as a path to controlling the flow of information online.

Years back I wrote a piece debunking many of the myths about 230. The myths have only multiplied since.

Both critiques, stripped of their partisan framing, are about the same thing: who gets to control what speech appears where. And Section 230's answer to both sides is the same: pound sand.

That's what the law actually does. It doesn't mandate or prohibit "censorship." It doesn't require neutrality (that's a myth that won't die). It simply says: if you have a problem with content online, take it up with the person who created it, not the service hosting it. Platforms can moderate however they see fit—aggressively, lightly, inconsistently, politically—and they won't face ruinous liability for those choices. They also won't face liability for what they don't remove.

This is what makes an open internet possible. Without that protection, no service would risk hosting user content at all. Or if they did, every moderation decision would require a lawyer's sign-off, optimizing for liability reduction rather than healthy communities. The people who actually understand how to build good online spaces—trust and safety professionals, community managers—would be overruled by legal departments playing defense.

Almost all criticism of Section 230 is not actually about Section 230. It's about one of two things: (1) not liking something in society that manifests online, and incorrectly believing that changing the law will somehow fix it, or (2) wanting control over what content platforms host.

So what happens if critics get their way? There's a lobbying campaign right now claiming that reforming or repealing 230 will lead to "greater responsibility from tech companies."

This is exactly backwards.

Without 230's protections, smaller platforms—the ones that might actually compete with the giants—get destroyed first. They can't afford the vexatious lawsuits. They can't afford buildings full of lawyers. The big players survive, and their market position gets locked in even harder.

And those surviving giants won't become more responsible. They'll become less. Any competent legal team will tell them: the less you know, the less liability you have. Don't proactively look for harmful content. Don't research how your platform causes harm—those findings would be exhibit A in every lawsuit. Just stick your head in the sand and let the lawyers handle the subpoenas.

This is how liability regimes work, and America's exceptionally litigious legal culture makes these incentives even stronger. The critics either don't understand this or don't care, because their actual goal was never "responsibility." It was control. That they've duped some tech critics into thinking it's about "responsibility" or "safety" doesn't change that. Because it won't improve responsibility or safety. But it will give politicians tremendous power over online speech.

Thirty years ago, a 26-word provision buried in a mostly unconstitutional law kicked off the open internet. It let anyone build a platform, host a community, create something new—without needing permission from lawyers or regulators first. That era is now under direct attack by people who misrepresent what Section 230 does and misrepresent what killing it would mean.

The open web turned 30 this weekend. The bipartisan campaign to kill it was never about responsibility or safety, it was always about control. Whether the open web sees age 31 comes down to 26 words that tell both sides to pound sand.

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The Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law thirty years ago today, on February 8, 1996. Buried in a corner of that sprawling law was Section 230, a law that says websites aren't liable for third-party content.

Section 230 didn't receive much attention when it was passed, but it has since emerged as one of Congress' most important media laws ever. Section 230 helped trigger the Web 2.0 era-where people principally talk with each other online, rather than just having content broadcast at them one-way. By enabling that discourse and other new categories of human interaction, Section 230 has thus reshaped the Internet and, by extension, our economy, our government, and our society.

To commemorate Section 230's 30th anniversary, this post considers Section 230's past, present, and future.

* * *

Section 230's Past

"Big Tech" Didn't Lobby for Section 230. Google and Facebook didn't exist in 1996; they emerged in the wake of Section 230's passage. In 1996, the Internet industry was small, especially as compared to other media industries like cable or telephony. However, AOL played a key role in Section 230's passage, as evidenced by the fact Section 230 uses statutory terms like "interactive computer service" and "information content provider" (a really terrible phrase) that mirror AOL's idiosyncratic jargon.

The Internet Industry Didn't Initially Celebrate Section 230's Passage. I'm not aware of any fetes in 1996 that celebrated Section 230's passage. That's because Section 230 was overshadowed by another part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Communications Decency Act (CDA). The CDA imposed an unmanageable risk of criminal liability on Internet companies for user-generated content, so Internet executives were panicked that they might go to jail for the ordinary operation of their services. There was no time to get excited about Section 230's long-term implications in the face of the immediate threat of criminal prosecution.

A week after the act's passage, a district court enjoined the CDA, and the industry panic slightly abated. The industry relaxed a little more when the Supreme Court struck down the CDA as unconstitutional in 1997 (the Reno v. ACLU decision). However, that relief was short-lived because Congress quickly passed another law to criminalize user-generated content (the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, ultimately declared unconstitutional). So for years after Section 230's passage, the industry was preoccupied by Congress' UGC criminalization efforts.

Section 230's Impact Wasn't Immediately Clear. Section 230 includes some unusual and non-intuitive statutory language. As a result, the Internet industry wasn't initially sure exactly what it said. Section 230's potential scope only started to emerge after the district court ruling in Zeran v. AOL in March 1997. Then, after the Zeran v. AOL Fourth Circuit opinion in November 1997, it became clearer that Section 230 had reshaped the law of user-generated content. For more on the Zeran case, see this ebook.

Section 230 Left Open a Problematic "Copyright Hole." Section 230 expressly excludes intellectual property claims based on third-party content. As a result, even after Section 230 passed, Internet services still faced potential secondary copyright liability with no statutory protection from Congress.

In particular, vicarious copyright infringement turns on a service's "right and ability to control" the content on its servers, and plaintiffs can cite a service's content moderation efforts-including those otherwise immunized by Section 230-as inculpatory evidence. In other words, Section 230 didn't immediately legalize content moderation, because default copyright law still made those practices legally risky.

Two-plus years later, Congress partially plugged Section 230's copyright hole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In contrast to Section 230's unconditional immunity for UGC, the DMCA created a notice-and-takedown liability scheme for user-caused copyright infringement. However, it took years for court cases to confirm that standard content moderation efforts didn't increase services' copyright liability for user-generated content.

Due to its unusual drafting and the legal context surrounding it, Section 230 didn't definitively resolve the legitimacy of user-generated content and content moderation efforts when it passed in 1996. That implication took several more years to emerge.

For more on Section 230's past, see Prof. Jeff Kosseff's book, The 26 Words That Created the Internet. See also the 15-year retrospective event we held at SCU in 2011.

* * *

Section 230's Present

Section 230 Offers Critical Procedural Benefits. Critics, politicians, and the media often focus their fire on Section 230's substantive scope, such as how it compares to the First Amendment and whether it strikes the right policy balances. However, much of Section 230's "magic" is procedural, not substantive. Section 230 provides courts with a helpful way of quickly dismissing unmeritorious cases. This, in turn, reduces defendants' costs and increases their confidence of winning in court; and this further emboldens services to optimize their editorial policies for their audiences, engage in content moderation to effectuate those policies, and legally defend individual items of user-generated content. Even if the First Amendment dictated all of the same substantive outcomes as Section 230 (it doesn't), Section 230 provides greater procedural predictability to the parties and thus achieves superior outcomes.

Section 230 Affects a Lot of Court Cases. According to the Shepard's citation service, Section 230 has been cited in over 1,700 cases. As this figure indicates, citations keep going up:

Section 230 Discourages Many Lawsuits From Ever Being Filed. Section 230 has largely extinguished the genre of lawsuits against Internet services for their individual content moderation decisions. Without Section 230, every content moderation decision might prompt a lawsuit, manufacturing millions of potential lawsuits every day.

Section 230's Drafters Future-Proofed the Law. Section 230 critics often highlight its adoption during the Internet's infancy, as if that's proof the law is not appropriate for the modern mid-2020s Internet. In 2020, Sen. Wyden and former Rep. Christopher Cox, the authors of Section 230, responded:

[Critics] assert that Section 230 was conceived as a way to protect an infant industry, and that it was written with the antiquated internet of the 1990s in mind - not the robust, ubiquitous internet we know today. As authors of the statute, we particularly wish to put this urban legend to rest…our legislative aim was to recognize the sheer implausibility of requiring each website to monitor all of the user-created content that crossed its portal each day…

The march of technology and the profusion of e-commerce business models over the last two decades represent precisely the kind of progress that Congress in 1996 hoped would follow from Section 230's protections for speech on the internet and for the websites that host it. The increase in user-created content in the years since then is both a desired result of the certainty the law provides, and further reason that the law is needed more than ever in today's environment.

* * *

Section 230's Future

[TL;DR:

My biggest complaints with AI tend to be with the human beings who are rushing language learning models into mass adoption without doing their basic due diligence. Like AI toy maker Bondu, the creator of "AI" enabled stuffed animals, which recently left the stored chat logs children have with their polyester-filled automated friends openly available online to anybody with a Gmail account:

"[security researcher Joel Margolis] made a startling discovery: Bondu's web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children's conversations and for Bondu's staff to monitor the products' use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu's child users have ever had with the toy."

At this point there's just no excuse for this sort of thing. We've been writing for more than a decade about how most "smart," internet-connected toys were being rushed to market without adequate privacy and security safeguards, creating OpSec risks for kids before they've even been adequately potty trained.

Now, as we've done in sectors like health insurance and journalism, we've slathered half-cooked language learning models all over existing dysfunction we refused to address, called it innovation, and then ignored the fact we've introduced entirely new problems.

In this case, the included exposed data included kids' names, birth dates, family member names, and even the detailed summaries and transcripts of every previous chat between the child and their Bondu stuffed animals.

On the plus side, once alerted, the company quickly fixed the issue in a matter of minutes. And when asked by journalists about it, didn't try to lie about the problem (a low bar, but still):

"When WIRED reached out to the company, Bondu CEO Fateen Anam Rafid wrote in a statement that security fixes for the problem "were completed within hours, followed by a broader security review and the implementation of additional preventative measures for all users." He added that Bondu "found no evidence of access beyond the researchers involved."

If hackers are clever they don't leave many footprints, so that last bit might not be worth much.

One recent survey found that 84 percent of Americans want tougher privacy laws. But corruption has ensured that the country still lacks even baseline internet-era privacy protections. The powers that be have decided, repeatedly, to prioritize mass commercialized surveillance over public safety, and it's only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost in ways we can't even begin to consider.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about ICE and CBP stealing money from citizens at the Minneapolis airport:

Dear Democrats in leadership positions:

There is no reforming or retraining this level of institutional rot. Your centrist asses need to start demanding the abolishment of ICE (and DHS), and you need to start doing it now.

Sincerely, a concerned US citizen

In second place, it's Strawb with an answer to the question of why the CIA deleted its famous World Factbook resource:

Well, the easy answer is "Because a corrupt government's worst enemy is a well-informed population".

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with Bloof offering another even broader answer to that question:

If something is useful and a product of government, that's all the reason republicans need to destroy it.

Next, it's dfbomb bringing more updates from Minneapolis:

They leave cars running from their victims in the road. We have to find tows and clear it.

They deploy tear gas taking people from parks. We have to clean up and help those hurt.

They harass and stalk schools, taking kids with impunity. They approach our school patrols pretending to be locals to get info.

They kill and are protected.

They do not care if the people they take are actually what they're told to look for, they just take brown people and those that piss them off.

They took Native-Americans and have not returned them.

This is ethnic cleansing and it is done at the behest of a white supremacist administration hunting brown people.

This has not stopped. There is no draw down.

Please stop arguing over the KIND of fascism this is and start rattling cages in DC to abolish this bullshit.

This is not a fucking drill.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is terribly tired with a comment about a line in one of the federal rulings calling out the administration's immigration bullshit:

Holy old fuck, she pounds X is a wild-ass sentence to be reading in the real god damn world.

Couldn't have made it sound more like an addictive substance if I tried.

In second place, it's dfbomb again, this time with a comment on our post about news websites bringing back comment sections:

Is there irony in the urge for me to shitpost in the comments on this one?

Things are still pretty slow on the funny side (for reasons that continue to be obvious), so we'll stick to just one editor's choice — a very simple answer to the question of why the CIA shut down the Factbook, this time from an anonymous commenter:

Oh, that's easy. They shut it down because it has facts in it.

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, the attacks on Section 230 were coming fast, with a Columbia law professor spewing blatantly false information in the Wall Street Journal and Joe Lieberman calling for its repeal, followed by the Democrats introducing the dumpster fire that was the SAFE TECH Act, which we dug into in depth. We also wrote about how attempts to tie 230 to a horrific story of online stalking were just plain wrong. Meanwhile, a federal court tossed out a constitutional challenge to FOSTA, 14 states were considering right to repair laws, and the RIAA launched a brand new front group pretending to represent independent artists.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, a DHS official was calling for an end to anonymity online, French politicians were trying to ban linking to any website without permission, and India was getting ready to ban zero rating after the failure of Facebook's misleading lobbying. We wrote about how lobbyists turned an education reform bill into a copyright propaganda push, Take Two Software was sued over tattoo copyrights, Hasbro was sued for font piracy on My Little Pony merchandise, and a ridiculous copyright fight was still keeping the only video of the first Super Bowl locked up.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, there was a lot of coverage of the recent uprising in Egypt and the government's response. We looked at just how the government shut down the internet in an attempt to quell the protests, then at how they turned it back on for the same reasons. Al Jazeera offered up its Egypt coverage under a Creative Commons license, while China was trying to prevent people from talking about it online. Meanwhile, Homeland Security embarked on a new round of domain seizures that raised serious questions and strongly suggested the agency was twisting the law, especially with the now-infamous seizure of Spanish streaming site Rojadirecta.

It's been several years since we last did this, but I'd like to remind you all that the National Football League plays a lot of make believe when it comes to what its trademarks for the "Super Bowl" do and do not allow it to do in terms of enforcement. Thanks largely to media outlets that repeat the false narrative the NFL puts out there, far too many people think that businesses, or even members of the public, simply cannot use the phrase "Super Bowl" in any capacity whatsoever if there is any commercial component to it.

TV companies advertising their goods and telling you to "be prepared for the Super Bowl"? Can't do it. A church holding a party for the game with invitations to the Super Bowl and a 5$ cover charge? Verboten. And this way of thinking is perpetuated by posts like this one from TVLine.

The term "Super Bowl" is an NFL trademark, and licensing that trademark is very, very expensive. After all, the NFL makes a lot of money from "Super Bowl" commercials - 30-second slots for this year's game have cost upward of $10 million.

Of course, there are ways around not being able to mention the Super Bowl in commercials. Brands that aren't willing or able to license the name will refer to it as "the big game" or something along those lines instead. What's more, the brands that pay to license the name still have to work within strict parameters. According to L.A. Tech & Media Law, parties that purchase Super Bowl ad spots can only mention the name of the event for a limited period of time.

In the past, the league has sent cease-and-desists to bars and even churches that host Super Bowl parties and charge an admission fee. In short, if an entity of any kind uses the term for commercial gain, they can expect a letter from the NFL's lawyers.

Yes, they can, but that shouldn't be the entirety of the post. The NFL can send whatever letters they like. What matters is whether they are asserting rights they actually have or not. Otherwise, posts like this leave the public with an, at best, incomplete idea of what rights the NFL has and what rights it doesn't.

The NFL certainly has a trademark on "Super Bowl." That does not automagically mean it can fully control all uses of that mark, even where there is money involved. Fair use defenses still apply, of course, as does the general standard that the use had to either confuse the public as to the source of the product or service, or falsely imply an association between the company and the NFL. Not all uses, even commercial, will do that.

Stop giving the NFL power it doesn't actually have. A restaurant putting out a sidewalk sign that says it will have the Super Bowl on its TVs is not trademark infringement by any sane reading of the law. An advertisement merely acknowledging the existence of the Super Bowl does not in and of itself make it infringing.

Yes, the NFL pulls overly protectionist crap with this trademark all the time. Yes, it would take coordinated pushback from more than one corporate entity with deep pockets to fight it. But it's a fight worth fighting and, at the very least, none of us have to pretend that the NFL has rights it doesn't have.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo - acquired via a whistleblower - asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge's warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted "a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches."

Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Conversation's Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.

Okay, I'm going to read the Fourth Amendment - and then you're going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Can you help us understand what that means?

Since the beginning of the republic, it has been uncontested that in order to invade someone's home, you need to have a warrant that was considered, and signed off on, by a judicial officer. This mandate is right within the Fourth Amendment; it is a core protection.

In addition to that, through jurisprudence that has evolved since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it is settled law that it applies to everyone. That would include noncitizens as well.

What I see in this directive that ICE put out, apparently quite some time ago and somewhat secretly, is something that, to my mind, turns the Fourth Amendment on its head.

What does the Fourth Amendment aim to protect someone from?

In the context of the ICE search, it means that a person's home, as they say, really is their castle. Historically, it was meant to remedy something that was true in England, where the colonists came from, which was that the king or those empowered by the king could invade people's homes at will. The Fourth Amendment was meant to establish a sort of zone of privacy for people, so that their papers, their property, their persons would be safe from intrusion without cause.

So it's essentially a protection against abuse of the government's power.

That's precisely what it is.

Has the accepted interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed over the centuries?

It hasn't. But Fourth Amendment law has evolved because the framers, for example, didn't envision that there would be cellphones. They couldn't understand or anticipate that there would be things like cellphones and electronic surveillance. All those modalities have come into the sphere of Fourth Amendment protection. The law has evolved in a way that actually has made Fourth Amendment protections greater and more wide-ranging, simply because of technology and other developments such as the use of automobiles and other means of transportation. So there are greater protected zones of privacy than just a person's home.

ICE says it only needs an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, to enter a home and arrest someone. Can you briefly describe the difference and what it means in this situation?

It's absolutely central to the question here. In this context, an administrative warrant is nothing more than the folks at ICE headquarters writing something up and directing their agents to go arrest somebody. That's all. It's a piece of paper that says 'We want you arrested because we said so.' At bottom that's what an administrative warrant is, and of course it hasn't been approved by a judge.

This authorized use of administrative warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment flies in the face of their limited use prior to the ICE directive.

A judicially approved warrant, on the other hand, has by definition been reviewed by a judge. In this case, it would be either a U.S. magistrate judge or U.S. district judge. That means that it would have to be supported by probable cause to enter someone's residence to arrest them.

So the key distinction is that there's a neutral arbiter. In this case, a federal judge who evaluates whether or not there's sufficient cause to - as is stated clearly in the Fourth Amendment - be empowered to enter someone's home. An administrative warrant has no such protection. It is not much more than a piece of paper generated in a self-serving way by ICE, free of review to substantiate what is stated in it.

Have there been other kinds of situations, historically, where the government has successfully proposed working around the Fourth Amendment?

There are a few, such as consent searches and exigent circumstances where someone is in danger or evidence is about to be destroyed. But generally it's really the opposite and cases point to greater protections. For example, in the 1960s the Supreme Court had to confront warrantless wiretapping; it was very difficult for judges in that age who were not tech-savvy to apply the Fourth Amendment to this technology, and they struggled to find a remedy when there was no actual intrusion into a structure. In the end, the court found that intrusion was not necessary and that people's expectation of privacy included their phone conversations. This of course has been extended to various other means of technology including GPS tracking and cellphone use generally.

What's the direction this could go in at this point?

What I fear here - and I think ICE probably knows this - is that more often than not, a person who may not have legal standing to be in the country, notwithstanding the fact that there was a Fourth Amendment violation by ICE, may ultimately be out of luck. You could say that the arrest was illegal, and you go back to square one, but at the same time you've apprehended the person. So I'm struggling to figure out how you remedy this.

Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice's unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted about in what was itself likely a violation of the law governing such complaints, accused Boasberg of violating judicial ethics by… privately expressing concerns to other judges that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.

Concerns that, as we noted at the time, turned out to be entirely justified.

Let's back up and explain what happened. The DOJ's complaint centered on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a private Judicial Conference meeting on March 11, 2025, where he supposedly "push[ed] a wholly unsolicited discussion about 'concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.'" The complaint cited "Attachment A" as evidence of what Boasberg said.

There was just one small problem: the DOJ never actually provided Attachment A with the complaint. Actually, there were many, many problems, but we'll get to those.

The complaint has now been fully resolved, and it went about as well for the DOJ as you might expect. Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, to whom Chief Justice Roberts transferred the complaint, dismissed it in a brusque seven-page ruling that reads like a judge who is deeply unimpressed with having his time wasted.

As court-watcher Steve Vladeck put it in his detailed breakdown of the ruling:

Chief Judge Sutton's ruling is not just a tour de force in how a judicial ruling can persuasively give the back of its hand to a claim; it is, or at least ought to be, a humiliating smackdown for the Department of Justice—which bungled every single aspect of its misconduct complaint, from publicly announcing it to making spurious arguments about what the alleged misconduct actually was (the distinction between "public" and "private" really shouldn't be hard, nor should the fact that March 11 is prior to March 15) to refusing to provide the very evidence on which the complaint purported to rest.

Vladeck also noted, in discussing how the DOJ never actually followed through on the steps it would obviously take if it were a legitimate complaint,that this proved how it was all political in the first place:

It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg's behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ's specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.

Besmirching a long-time judge… for the memes.

The problems with the DOJ's complaint were numerous, but let's start with the most embarrassing one mentioned above: the DOJ never actually provided the evidence it claimed supported its accusations.

The Department identified one source of evidence, Attachment A, for the judge's statement and for the setting in which it occurred. The complaint, however, did not include the attachment. The D.C. Circuit contacted the Department about the missing attachment and explained that, if it failed to submit the attachment, the circuit would consider the complaint as submitted. The Department did not supply the attachment.

In the absence of the attachment, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said during the Conference, when he said it, whether he said it in response to a question, whether he said it during the Conference or at another meeting, and whether he expressed these concerns as his own or as those of other judges. Later in the complaint, to be sure, the Department refers to a Fox News clip discussing the same allegation. But it does not identify any source, contain any specifics, or answer any of the above questions. A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint

So the DOJ filed an unprecedented misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge, made a huge public spectacle of it, and then when asked to actually produce the evidence supposedly supporting its claims… just didn't. Vladeck's assessment is appropriately blunt:

DOJ's failure to produce Attachment A is, frankly, mind-boggling…

But even putting aside the DOJ's failure to provide any actual evidence, Sutton methodically demolished every other theory in the complaint.

On the claim that Boasberg's comments at the Judicial Conference were somehow improper, Sutton pointed out that this is literally what the Judicial Conference is for:

A key point of the Judicial Conference and the related meetings is to facilitate candid conversations about judicial administration among leaders of the federal judiciary about matters of common concern. In these settings, a judge's expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct. Confirming the point, the Chief Justice's 2024 year-end report raised general concerns about threats to judicial independence, security concerns for judges, and respect for court orders throughout American history

(For what it's worth, as someone who had the privilege a couple years back of being invited to a judicial conference to give a talk, I can confirm firsthand that there were many fascinating informal conversations that occurred over the course of a few days among judges comparing notes and thinking through larger issues that might impact the judiciary).

On the DOJ's claim that Boasberg's comments constituted an improper "public comment" on a pending case, Sutton noted two rather obvious problems: the comments were private, not public, and the case the DOJ was concerned about hadn't even been filed yet:

The alleged comment does not refer to a case, and the J.G.G. action was not filed until four days later: March 15, 2025. Because the judge did not refer to a case, that all but guarantees that his comments did not "violate[] Canon 3A(6), Canon 2A, or the Judicial-Conduct Rules." In re Charges of Jud. Misconduct, 769 F.3d 762, 788 (D.C. Cir. 2014). The comment at any rate was not a "public" one, as it was made in a closed-door meeting in which the communications are off the record and confidential. The complaint, notably, does not claim that the judge made public what was said in private at the Conference or its related meetings.

As for the DOJ's argument that Boasberg's subsequent handling of the J.G.G. case (involving the shipping of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp) somehow proved bias, Sutton wasn't having that either. The complaint, he noted, "does not explain how a Supreme Court ruling about a prior action by the judge necessarily shows willful indifference when the judge addresses a distinct set of circumstances in a later ruling."

Furthermore, Sutton points out that if the DOJ doesn't like Boasberg's rulings in a particular case, its remedy is… to appeal. Not claim misconduct:

When the executive branch's deep convictions about the law meet the judicial branch's deep convictions about the law in a trial court, the answer is to invoke the appellate process, not the misconduct process, to resolve the dispute.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Sutton reminded the DOJ that even if it had prevailed, the judicial misconduct process can't do what the DOJ apparently wanted it to do:

To the extent the complaint asks that the underlying case be reassigned to another judge, that is not a form of relief available through the complaint process.

In other words:

1. the DOJ filed a complaint
2. that was based on misleading evidence
3. which it never produced
4. alleging misconduct that (even if true) wasn't actually misconduct
5. propped up with claims of bias based on actions that occurred later
6. which could not be signs of bias, and finally
7. sought relief that wasn't even available.

If the DOJ were capable of embarrassment, this would be the time for it.

In his initial post on the complaint last year when it was filed, Vladeck had noted that the entire complaint was supposed to be a warning to other judges to shut up about any concerns about the Trump admin. One hopes that this ruling by Judge Sutton will reverse that and embolden more judges to do what's right.

But wait, there's more.

Because we now have even more evidence of just how absurd this whole episode was, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the mysterious Attachment A that the DOJ never produced. And thanks to that lawsuit, we've learned something remarkable: neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can actually explain how the DOJ came to possess this document in the first place.

In a declaration filed in that case, DOJ Senior Counsel Vanessa Brinkmann reveals some truly remarkable details about this document that was supposedly central to the DOJ's case against Boasberg. First, the DOJ confirms the document exists and describes what it is:

Upon initial review of the document identified in this action as "Attachment A," OIP observed that the document is a memorandum that bears the markings of a United States Court, is authored by a Federal Judge, and discusses matters internal to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

So it's a document created by the judiciary, for the judiciary, about internal judiciary matters. And what does the judiciary think about the DOJ having this document? They're not happy:

AOUSC Counsel conveyed to OIP, in no uncertain terms, the Federal Judiciary's strenuous objection to the Department's release of "Attachment A." AOUSC Counsel further articulated that "Attachment A" was created to be an internal Judiciary document, for a specific Judiciary audience, concerning confidential Judiciary matters and is not now, nor was it ever an Executive Branch document. In sum, AOUSC Counsel advised OIP that it is the position of the AOUSC that "Attachment A" remains under the control of the Judicial Branch, is confidential, and is not subject to disclosure pursuant to the FOIA.

But here's where it gets really interesting. How did the DOJ get this internal judiciary document in the first place? Apparently, nobody knows:

AOUSC Counsel further stated that the Judiciary made efforts to identify how "Attachment A" ended up in the possession of the Department and has not been able to identify a source of transmission of "Attachment A" from within the Judiciary to the Department. AOUSC Counsel additionally articulated that the Judiciary did not officially transmit or authorize the transmission of "Attachment A" to the Department or any external recipient. Specifically, AOUSC Counsel explained that, given the privileged nature of the document, the Judicial Conference at large would be the only entity that could approve its official release, and that it is the view of the AOUSC that the document is not an Executive Branch record subject to FOIA disclosure, but rather, a judicial record that remains under the control of the Judicial Branch.

And the DOJ's own investigation into how it acquired this document?

Searches conducted of DOJ leadership office officials' Departmental email accounts using e-discovery software revealed no electronic trail indicating transmission of "Attachment A" into the Department, nor has OIP's point of contact within OAG been able to identify how "Attachment A" was received by the Department.

So let's recap again:

1. the DOJ filed an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge based on a document that
2. it never actually provided as evidence
3. was created by the judiciary for internal purposes
4. the judiciary never authorized to be shared with the DOJ, and
5. neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can explain how the DOJ obtained in the first place.

This is the same DOJ that Attorney General Bondi claimed was acting to protect "the integrity of the judiciary."

All of this suggests that perhaps one of Vladeck's theories for why the DOJ refused to hand over Attachment A may have some weight behind it. He theorized that either Attachment A doesn't actually say what the DOJ claims or that they got it "through means that it's unwilling to have to identify—even confidentially as part of the judicial misconduct process." The declaration in the FOIA case would seem to bolster that last point.

As Vladeck notes, Sutton's dismissal should be the final word on this matter:

The outcome here should be seen for what it is: how a sober-minded jurist actually views these charges, versus how they're manipulated and broadcast by the Department of Justice and right-wing mouthpieces to serve partisan political ends.

As for the less sober-minded among the commentariat:

Anyone who continues to claim at this point that Chief Judge Boasberg has done anything worthy of further investigation and/or impeachment is telling on themselves.

But of course, that would require the people pushing this narrative to care about things like facts, evidence, and the rule of law. Based on the DOJ's conduct in this case, that seems like a lot to ask.

Back in 2023 we noted how a company named Telly proclaimed it had come up with a new idea for a TV: a free TV, with a second small TV below it, that shows users ads pretty much all of the time. While the bottom TV could also be used for useful things (like weather or a stock tracker), the fact it was constantly bombarding you with ads was supposed to offset any need for a retail price.

But apparently there's been trouble in innovation paradise.

Shortly after launch, Telly proclaimed that it expected to ship more than half a million of the ad-laden sets. Within a few months it had announced it had already received 250,000 pre-orders. But a recent report by Lowpass indicates that only 35,000 of the sets had made it to peoples' homes.

What was the problem? Ars Technica, Lowpass and The Verge note that the problems began with a substandard shipping process that resulted in a lot of TVs showing up broken to folks who pre-ordered. Reddit is also full of complaints about general quality control issues, like color issues, ads being played too loudly, odd connectivity issues, remote controls randomly unpairing, and more.

Still, there's evidence that the idea might still have legs, as the premise itself appears profitable:

"The investor update reportedly said Telly made $22 million in annualized revenue in Q3 2025. This could equate to about $52 in advertising revenue per Telly in use per month ($22 million divided by 35,000 TVs divided by 12 months in a year is $52.38).

That's notably more than what other TV companies report, as Lowpass pointed out. As a comparison to other budget TV brands that rely heavily on ads and user tracking, Roku reported an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $41.49 for 2024. Vizio, meanwhile, reported an ARPU of $37.17 in 2024."

The TV industry had already realized that they can make more money tracking your viewing and shopping behavior (and selling that information to dodgy data brokers) long term than they do on the retail value of the set. This just appears to be an extension of that concept, and if companies like Telly can get out of their own way on quality control, it's likely you'll see more of it.

In one sense that's great if you can't afford the newest and greatest TV set. It's less great given that the United States is too corrupt to pass functional consumer privacy protections or keep its regulators staffed and functional, meaning there are increasingly fewer mechanisms preventing companies like this from exploiting all the microphone, input, and other data collected from users on a day-to-day basis.

I personally want the opposite experience; I'm willing to pay extra for a dumb television that's little more than a display panel and some HDMI inputs. A device that has no real "smart" internals or bloated, badly designed GUI made by companies more interested in selling ads than quality control. Some business class TVs can sometimes fit the bill, but by and large it's a segment the industry clearly isn't interested in, because there's much, much more money to be made spying on and monetizing your every decision.

For over half a century, the CIA's World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, "Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful."

And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has "sunset." That's it. That's all you get.

Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn't mince words about what happened:

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they've also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There's no reason not to continue to serve archived versions - a banner at the top of the page saying it's no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely..

That's exactly right. If the CIA decided they no longer wanted to maintain the Factbook—fine. You could make an argument for that. But the decision to not just stop updating it, but to actively destroy access to it without any advance notice is something else entirely. You couldn't even grab a final copy before it vanished.

The CIA's official statement on the closure is a masterclass in saying nothing:

One of CIA's oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.

Okay and… why did you suddenly shut it down? They don't say.

That's followed by a brief history of the publication—it started classified in 1962, went unclassified in 1971, hit the web in 1997—and then this parting thought:

Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it… in person or virtually.

Gee, thanks. Super helpful. "We deleted the thing you relied on. Go touch grass or something."

The New York Times reported that the shutdown happened while students at Boston University were literally in the middle of an open-Factbook exam:

The sudden closure of the Factbook's website, with all of its entries no longer available to the public, left Jay Zagorsky's business students at Boston University in the lurch midway through an exam due at midnight the next day.

His exams are regularly open-Factbook, and two questions relied on its famously tidy tables of economic certainty. In an instant, a trusted companion of lectures and late-night problem sets was gone.

"That was a great joy this afternoon," Mr. Zagorsky said in an interview on Wednesday evening, recalling the moment faculty colleagues had begun talking to one another in disbelief. "Oh my god. What do we do? The Factbook just went offline? How do we let them finish the answers on the exams?"

Professors scrambling to figure out how to let students finish exams because a government agency couldn't be bothered to give notice before nuking a 54-year-old publication. That'll teach you to rely on anything from this government, I guess.

The Factbook wasn't just a nice-to-have reference for academics. Lawyers have noted that it was regularly used in asylum cases as a trusted, objective source for country conditions (maybe that's why they killed it?). When you're trying to establish that a country is dangerous enough to warrant asylum, citing the CIA's own publicly available data tends to carry some weight. That resource is now just… gone. With no replacement.

To try to salvage what he could of the Factbook, Willison took matters into his own hands. He found that until 2020, the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site to the Internet Archive. He downloaded the 2020 version and threw it up on GitHub with Pages enabled, so at least something remains accessible. It's now six years out of date, but it's better than the nothing the CIA has left us with.

And that's what makes this so frustrating. The Factbook was public domain. It was created with taxpayer money. There was absolutely no legal or technical reason the CIA couldn't have left the existing site up with a banner saying "no longer maintained" or given users time to archive their own copies. Instead, they chose to 302 redirect every single page to their farewell note, as if the goal was specifically to make sure no one could access anything.

There's already a FOIA request in the works to try to obtain both the current data and the explanation for why this happened. But the fact that we need a FOIA request to find out why a public domain government reference tool was suddenly erased should tell you everything you need to know about where we are.

I have FOIAd the CIA World Factbook and the reasons for its removal

— Kevin H Bell (@kevinok.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T04:34:14.460Z

The Times did find one former intelligence official who wasn't sad to see it go:

"C.I.A. is not the Library of Congress," Ms. Sanner said with a laugh. "The intelligence community shouldn't be your librarian."

Sure. But when you've been the librarian for 54 years and people have built workflows around your library, you don't get to just burn it down overnight and tell everyone to "stay curious."

This has all the hallmarks of the current administration's broader war on publicly available information. Data.gov scrubbed of climate information. USAID websites vanishing completely (along with the agency). Government research going dark. The World Factbook is just the latest casualty in what appears to be a systematic effort to make the federal government's own information harder to access.

The CIA hasn't said why they did this. It hasn't said who made the decision. It didn't even release the data in some other format. It just went dark and told everyone just to "stay curious about the world."

Some of us are curious why our own government keeps removing public access to information.

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In the grand scheme of things — the wanton cruelty, the routine violations of rights, the actual fucking murders — this may only seem like a blip on the mass deportation continuum. But this report from Dell Cameron for Wired is still important. It not only explains why federal officers are approaching people with cellphones drawn nearly as often as they're approaching them with guns drawn, but also shows the administration is yet again pretending it's a law unto itself.

On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the face recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS's 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically.

The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify—one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and says the app is in the "deployment" stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became "operational" at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025. That date is about a month before 404 Media first reported on the app's existence.

A lot was going on last May, in terms of anti-migrant efforts and the casual refusal to recognize long-standing constitutional rights. That was the same month immigration officers were told they could enter people's homes while only carrying self-issued "administrative warrants," which definitely aren't the same thing as the judicial warrants the government actually needs to enter areas provided the utmost in Fourth Amendment protection.

The app federal officers are using is made by NEC, a tech company that's been around since long before ICE and CBP become the mobile atrocities they are. Prior to this revelation, NEC had only been associated with developing biometric software with an eye on crafting something that could be swiftly deployed and just as quickly scaled to meet the government's needs. This particular app was never made public prior to this.

ICE claims it's not a direct customer. It's only a beneficiary of the CBP's existing contract with NEC. That's a meaningless distinction when multiple federal agencies have been co-opted into the administration's bigoted push to rid the nation of brown people.

As is always the case (and this precedes Trump 2.0), CBP and ICE are rolling out tech far ahead of the privacy impact paperwork that's supposed to filed before anything goes live.

While CBP says there are "sufficient monitoring protocols" in place for the app, ICE says that the development of monitoring protocols is in progress, and that it will identify potential impacts during an AI impact assessment. According to guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, which was issued before the inventory says the app was deployed for either CBP or ICE, agencies are supposed to complete an AI impact assessment before deploying any high-impact use case. Both CBP and ICE say the app is "high-impact" and "deployed."

This is standard operating procedure for the federal government. The FBI and DEA were deploying surveillance tech well ahead of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) as far back as [oh wow] 2014, while the nation was still being run by someone who generally appeared to be a competent statesman. That nothing has changed since makes it clear this problem is endemic.

But things are a bit worse now that Trump is running an administration stocked with fully-cooked MAGA acolytes. In the past, our rights might have received a bit of lip service and the occasional congressional hearing about the lack of required Privacy Impact Assessments.

None of that will be happening now. No one in the DHS is even going to bother to apply pressure to those charged with crafting these assessments. And no one will threaten (much less terminate) the tech deployment until these assessments have been completed. I would fully expect this second Trump term to come and go without the delivery of legally-required paperwork, especially since oversight of these agencies will be completely nonexistent as long as the GOP holds a congressional majority.

We lose. The freshly stocked swamp wins. And while it's normal to expect the federal government to bristle at the suggestion of oversight, it's entirely abnormal to allow an administration that embraces white Christian nationalism to act as though the only holy text any Trump appointee subscribes to was handed down by Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the law.

The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids.

In just the last year the Trump administration has:

• Rewritten the infrastructure Act at the behest of telecom giants, ensuring that they can take $42.5 billion in taxpayer money without worrying about making sure the resulting broadband is affordable.
• Illegally threatened to withhold broadband grants from states that try to hold telecom monopolies accountable for overbilling or anti-competitive behavior.
• Destroyed a popular program that provided free broadband to poor rural school children.
• Tried relentlessly to destroy an FCC program that provides cheaper broadband to schools and rural communities (many of which voted for Trump).
• Dismantled the FCC's ability to stop telecom giants from ripping you off with hidden fees and usage caps.
• Illegally destroyed a law passed by Congress mandating the fair deployment of broadband to poor people and minority communities.
• Hijacked a program aimed at providing affordable fiber in order to slather Elon Musk with subsidies.

I'm sure I missed a few.

This week, the administration's war on affordable broadband shifted back to attacking the FCC Lifeline program, a traditionally uncontroversial, bipartisan effort to try and extend broadband to low income Americans. Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) has been ramping up his attacks on these programs, claiming (falsely) that they're riddled with state-sanctioned fraud:

"Carr's office said this week that the FCC will vote next month on rule changes to ensure that Lifeline money goes to "only living and lawful Americans" who meet low-income eligibility guidelines. Lifeline spends nearly $1 billion a year and gives eligible households up to $9.25 per month toward phone and Internet bills, or up to $34.25 per month in tribal areas."

For one, $9.25 is a pittance. It barely offsets the incredibly high prices U.S. telecom monopolies charge. Monopolies, it should be noted, only exist thanks to the coddling of decades of corrupt lawmakers like Carr, who've effectively exempted them from all accountability. That's resulted in heavy monopolization, limited competition, high prices, and low-quality service.

Two, there's lots of fraud in telecom. Most of it, unfortunately, is conducted by our biggest companies with the tacit approval of folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr. AT&T, for example, has spent decades ripping off U.S. schools and various subsidy programs, and you'll never see Carr make a peep about that. Fraud is, in MAGA world, only something involving minorities and poor people.

The irony is that the lion's share of the fraud in the Lifeline program has involved big telecom giants, like AT&T or Verizon, which, time and time again, take taxpayer money for poor people that the just made up. This sort of fraud, where corporations are involved, isn't of interest to Brendan Carr.

In this case, Carr is alleging (without evidence) that certain left wing states are intentionally ripping off the federal government, throwing untold millions of dollars at dead people for Lifeline broadband access. Something the California Public Utilities Commission has had to spend the week debunking:

"The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) this week said that "people pass away while enrolled in Lifeline—in California and in red states like Texas. That's not fraud. That's the reality of administering a large public program serving millions of Americans over many years. The FCC's own advisory acknowledges that the vast majority of California subscribers were eligible and enrolled while alive, and that any improper payments largely reflect lag time between a death and account closure, not failures at enrollment."

Brendan Carr can't overtly admit this (because he's a corrupt zealot), but his ideal telecom policy agenda involves throwing billions of dollars at AT&T and Comcast in exchange for doing nothing. That's it. That's the grand Republican plan for U.S. telecom. It gets dressed up as something more ideologically rigid, but coddling predatory monopolies has always been the foundational belief structure.

This latest effort by Carr and Trump largely appears to be a political gambit targeting California Governor Gavin Newsom, suggesting they're worried about his chances in the next presidential election. This isn't to defend Newsom; I've certainly noted how his state has a mixed track record on broadband affordability. But it appears this is mostly about painting a picture of Newsom, as they did with Walz in Minnesota, as a political opponent that just really loves taxpayer fraud.

Again though, actually policing fraud is genuinely the last thing on Brendan Carr's mind. If it was, he'd actually target the worst culprits on this front: corporate America.

Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it's good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to the top, believed in the power and benefit of vaccines. Sadly, that isn't the case.

RFK Jr. has fired many people for not agreeing with his stance that vaccines make people autistic, kill them, are bad because too many undesirables poison the gene pool, or whatever other crap he's spewing these days. He fired Susan Monarez after only weeks on the job, reportedly for not agreeing to rubber stamp changes to vaccine schedules he wanted to make. He fired literally everyone on the CDC's ACIP panel, the group that advises the CDC on those very same changes to vaccine schedules. There's probably been more, as well.

We'll have to see if NIH boss Jay Bhattacharya just started the countdown to his own termination, now that he has publicly broken with Kennedy on vaccines. In a Senate Committee hearing, Bhattacharya was grilled by Bernie Sanders.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, "Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?"

After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, "I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism."

Asked specifically about what his approach would be to the current measles outbreak in America, Bhattacharya was even more forceful.

Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday's hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, "I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles."

Reluctantly stated or not, those are sane comments that are completely at odds with Kennedy. Now, so there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is still terrible. He made his name railing against COVID-19 policies and vaccine schedules. He's also engaged in some politically targeted attacks on elite universities when it comes to grant money and the like.

But on this, he's right. And that potentially puts his job at risk. RFK Jr. doesn't like dissenting opinions. He tends to avoid them through firings. On the other hand, I don't know if he can afford more chaos at HHS and its child agencies.

But when it comes to placing bets, betting against RFK Jr.'s ego is rarely a winner.

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.

In this week's round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• House Judiciary Releases EU X Fine Details (House Judiciary X Account)
• New Report Exposes European Commission Decade-Long Campaign to Censor American Speech (House Judiciary Committee)
• X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok (BBC)
• Hey Gavin Newsom! Investigating TikTok's Moderation Is Just As Unconstitutional As When Texas & Florida Tried It (Techdirt)
• Spain Aims to Ban Social Media for Children Under 16, Prime Minister Says (NY Times)
• TikTok Keyword Analysis (LinkedIn)
• Why newsrooms are taking comments seriously again (New_ Public)
• Whoops, Websites Realize That Killing Their Comment Sections Was A Mistake (Techdirt)

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech's 2026 Bingo Card!

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

Days into President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. "Please Donald Trump, I need your help," he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. "I am an American. … Help me come home." 

The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed "Bitcoin Jesus" for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.

Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump's new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn't have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.

Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump's Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped. 

Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump's former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the "Friends of Trump."

The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.

The Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter, and more than a third of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit. 

But even amid this turmoil, Ver's case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump's family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver's team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word "fraud." 

It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.

Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.

"Roger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality," said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.

In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department."I know of no cases like this," said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. "They're basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution."

Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump's or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called "the happiest day of my entire life." In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world's supply. 

Ver is clean-cut and fit — he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He's often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.

Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new "non-country" without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.

"Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people's income to control them in any way," he told a gathering of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. "It makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes." More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They "say, 'Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?'"

Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn't a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep "exit tax" on the appreciation of all their property.

In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes. 

Ver's defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors' advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies' holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.

The Biden administration's Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver's team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was "rock solid," according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver's defense that he made a good-faith error.

By the time of Trump's election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials worried he might use to escape on the high seas.

In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was "barking up every tree," said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump's orbit.

Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president. "If anybody knows what it's like to be the victim of lawfare it's Trump, so I think he'll be able to see it in this case as well," Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson's show. On Charlie Kirk's show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word "censored" written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver's prosecution was unfair. Ver paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.

Ver's pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign — in which he kept comparing himself to Trump — was not landing, according to Pierce. "You aren't doing yourself any favors — shut up," his friend recalled saying. 

One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver's flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, "Roger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges."

But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the "Friends of Trump," a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state's solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump's inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.

Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump's cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche to join Trump's legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump's family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022. 

On Ver's legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver. 

Kise scored the legal team's first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.

In that meeting, however, it wasn't clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver's case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged.

Bhirud initially expressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was "hard to believe" that a man going by "Bitcoin Jesus" would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.

Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.

The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.

But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees' zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges. 

Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.

"While there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence," said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver's tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.

It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being "weaponized" against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.

While many cases failed to grab the administration's attention, Kise got results. Last week, Kise's client Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon from Trump.

"Every defense attorney is running the 'weaponization' play. This guy gets an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise," said a person who recently attended a high-level meeting Kise secured to talk the Justice Department down from prosecuting a client.

As Kise stepped up the pressure, Ver's case ate up a significant share of Bhirud's time, despite his job overseeing more than 1,000 Justice Department attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter. Ordinarily, it would be rare for a political appointee to be so involved, especially to the exclusion of career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.

Bhirud began to muse to coworkers about whether failure to pay one's taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn't it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware Ver's advocates could try to elevate the case to the White House.

The government ceded ground and offered to take prison time off the table. Eventually, Ver's team and Bhirud hit on the deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed on a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for a payout and an agreement not to violate any more laws. The government usually reserves such an agreement for lawbreaking corporations to avoid putting large employers out of business — not for fugitive billionaires.

By the time fall approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche's blessing, were negotiating Ver's extraordinary deal line by line. Once more, career prosecutors were cut out from the negotiations.

Ver's team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government's supposed final offer because it required him to admit to "fraud," according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In the end, Ver agreed to admit only to a "willful" failure to report and pay taxes on all his bitcoin and turned over the $50 million.

The government arrived at that figure in a roundabout manner. It dropped its claim that Ver had lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on how much he had evaded in taxes in 2014 alone, plus what the government asserted were interest and penalties. In the end, the deal amounted to the sum he allegedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a U.S. court.

Under any previous administration, convincing the leadership of the tax division to drop an indicted criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a nonstarter. While the Justice Department settles most tax matters civilly through fines, when prosecutors do charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate is over 90%. 

People "always ask you, 'Can't I just pay the taxes and it'll go away?'" said Jack Townsend, a former DOJ tax attorney. "The common answer that everybody gave — until the Trump administration — was that, no, you can't do that."

When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it touted it as a victory.

"We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and satisfied his obligations to the American public," Bhirud said in the Justice Department's press release announcing the deferred prosecution agreement. "This resolution sends a clear message: whether you deal in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe."

Inside the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: "He's admitted he owes money, and we get money, but everything else about it stinks to high heaven," said a current DOJ official familiar with the case. "We shouldn't negotiate with people who are fugitives, as if they have power over us."

Among the wealthy targets of white-collar criminal investigations, the Ver affair sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in that kind of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are asking which of the "Friends of Trump" they should hire. One prominent criminal tax defense lawyer said he would give his clients a copy of Ver's agreement and tell them, "These are the guys who got this done."

The only one of Ver's many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.

For years, we've been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration's supposed "censorship industrial complex." We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion (and even suggested that the plaintiffs had fabricated some of the facts, unsupported by reality).

But now we have actual, documented cases of the federal government using its surveillance apparatus to track down and intimidate Americans for nothing more than criticizing government policy. And wouldn't you know it, the same people who spent years screaming about censorship are suddenly very quiet.

If any of the following stories had happened under the Biden administration, you'd hear screams from the likes of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, about the crushing boot of the government trying to silence speech.

But somehow… nothing. Weiss is otherwise occupied—busy stripping CBS News for parts to please King Trump. And the dude bros who invented the "censorship industrial complex" out of their imaginations? Pretty damn quiet about stories like the following.

Taibbi is spending his time trying to play down the Epstein files and claiming Meta blocking ICE apps on direct request from DHS isn't censorship because he hasn't seen any evidence that it's because of the federal government. Dude. Pam Bondi publicly stated she called Meta to have them removed. Shellenberger, who is now somehow a "free speech professor" at Bari Weiss' collapsing fake university, seems to just be posting non-stop conspiracy theory nonsense from cranks.

Let's start with the case that should make your blood boil. The Washington Post reports that a 67-year-old retired Philadelphia man — a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the UK — found himself in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security after he committed the apparently unforgivable sin of… sending a polite email to a government lawyer asking for mercy in a deportation case.

Here's what he wrote to a prosecutor who was trying to deport an Afghani man who feared the Taliban would take his life if sent there. The Philadelphia resident found the prosecutors email and sent the following:

"Mr. Dernbach, don't play Russian roulette with H's life. Err on the side of caution. There's a reason the US government along with many other governments don't recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency."

That's it. That's the email that triggered a federal response. Within hours — hours — of sending this email, Google notified him that DHS had issued an administrative subpoena demanding his personal information. Days later, federal agents showed up at his door.

Showed. Up. At. His. Door.

A retired guy sends a respectful email asking the government to be careful with someone's life, and within the same day, the surveillance apparatus is mobilized against him.

The tool being weaponized here is the administrative subpoena (something we've been calling out for well over a decade, under administrations of both parties) which is a particularly insidious instrument because it doesn't require a judge's approval. Unlike a judicial subpoena, where investigators have to show a judge enough evidence to justify the search, administrative subpoenas are essentially self-signed permission slips. As TechCrunch explains:

Unlike judicial subpoenas, which are authorized by a judge after seeing enough evidence of a crime to authorize a search or seizure of someone's things, administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies, allowing investigators to seek a wealth of information about individuals from tech and phone companies without a judge's oversight.

While administrative subpoenas cannot be used to obtain the contents of a person's emails, online searches, or location data, they can demand information specifically about the user, such as what time a user logs in, from where, using which devices, and revealing the email addresses and other identifiable information about who opened an online account. But because administrative subpoenas are not backed by a judge's authority or a court's order, it's largely up to a company whether to give over any data to the requesting government agency.

The Philadelphia retiree's case would be alarming enough if it were a one-off. It's not. Bloomberg has reported on at least five cases where DHS used administrative subpoenas to try to unmask anonymous Instagram accounts that were simply documenting ICE raids in their communities. One account, @montcowatch, was targeted simply for sharing resources about immigrant rights in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The justification? A claim that ICE agents were being "stalked" — for which there was no actual evidence.

The ACLU, which is now representing several of these targeted individuals, isn't mincing words:

"It doesn't take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again. That's why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don't have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn't take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming."

This is textbook chilling effects on speech.

Remember, it was just a year and a half ago in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court found no First Amendment violation when the Biden administration sent emails to social media platforms—in part because the platforms felt entirely free to say no. The platforms weren't coerced; they could ignore the requests and did.

Now consider the Philadelphia retiree. He sends one polite email. Within hours, DHS has mobilized to unmask him. Days later, federal agents are at his door. Does that sound like someone who's free to speak his mind without consequence?

Even if you felt that what the Biden admin did was inappropriate, it didn't involve federal agents showing up at people's homes.

That is what actual government suppression of speech looks like. Not mean tweets from press secretaries that platforms ignored, but federal agents showing up at your door because you sent an (perfectly nice) email the government didn't like.

So we have DHS mobilizing within hours to identify a 67-year-old retiree who sent a polite email. We have agents showing up at citizens' homes to interrogate them about their protected speech. We have the government trying to unmask anonymous accounts that are documenting law enforcement activities — something that is unambiguously protected under the First Amendment.

Recording police, sharing that recording, and doing so anonymously is legal. It's protected speech. And the government is using administrative subpoenas to try to identify and intimidate the people doing it.

For years, we heard that government officials sending emails to social media companies — emails the companies ignored — constituted an existential threat to the First Amendment. But when the government actually uses its coercive power to track down, identify, and intimidate citizens for their speech?

Crickets.

This is what a real threat to free speech looks like. Not "jawboning" that platforms can easily refuse, but the full weight of federal surveillance being deployed against anyone who dares to criticize the administration. The chilling effect here is the entire point.

As the ACLU noted, this appears to be "part of a broader strategy to intimidate people who document immigration activity or criticize government actions."

If you spent the last few years warning about government censorship, this is your moment. This is the actual thing you claimed to be worried about. But, of course, all those who pretended to care about free speech really only meant they cared about their own team's speech. Watching the government actually suppress critics? No big deal. They probably deserved it.

I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness.

Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a "Weaponization Working Group" …

We all know the DOJ is fully weaponized. It's little more than a fight promoter for Trump's grudge matches. The DOJ continues to bleed talent as prosecutors and investigators flee the kudzu-esque corruption springing up everywhere in DC.

But naming something exactly what it is — the weaponization of the DOJ to punish Trump's enemies — wasn't something I ever expected to see.

I didn't see it, which fulfills my expectations, I guess. That's because it isn't what it says on the tin, even though it's exactly the thing it says it isn't. 1984 is apparently the blueprint. It's called the "Weaponization Working Group," but it's supposedly the opposite: a de-weaponization working group. Here's the second half of the paragraph we ellipsised out of earlier:

…[t]o review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as "politicized justice."

The Ministry of Weaponization has always de-weaponized ministries. Or whatever. The memo that started this whole thing off — delivered the same day Trump returned to office — said it even more clearly:

ENDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Administration officials are idiots, but they're not so stupid they don't know what they're doing. They don't actually want to end the weaponization. They just want to make sure all the weapons are pointing in one direction.

Trading in vindication hasn't exactly worked well so far. Trump's handpicked replacements for prosecutors that have either quit or been fired are a considerable downgrade from the previous office-holders. They have had their cases tossed and their careers as federal prosecutors come to an end because (1) Trump doesn't care what the rules for political appointments are and (2) he's pretty sure he can find other stooges to shove into the DOJ revolving door.

The lack of forward progress likely has Pam Bondi feeling more heat than she's used to. So the deliberately misnamed working group is going to actually start grouping and working.

The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months, according to the person familiar with the plan.

Nothing good will come from this. Given the haphazard nature of the DOJ's vindictive prosecutions efforts, there's still a chance nothing completely evil will come from this either. It's been on the back burner for a year. Pam Bondi can't keep this going on her own. And it's hell trying to keep people focused on rubbing Don's tummy when employee attrition is what the DOJ is best known for these days.

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If you've been paying attention to surveillance and civil liberties issues over the past fifteen years, you've likely learned to recognize a particular pattern. Senator Ron Wyden will occasionally send a public letter that essentially says "hey, I can't tell you what's happening because it's classified, but something really bad is going on and you should all be paying attention."

A decade ago some dubbed this the Wyden Siren. And when the Wyden Siren goes off, history tells us we should listen. Because every single time he's done this, he's eventually been proven right.

On Tuesday, Wyden sent a remarkably short letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The entire substantive content is this:

I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.

That's it. That's the whole thing. "Deep concerns about CIA activities." He can't say what. He can't say why. But he's making damn sure there's a public record that he raised the alarm.

And if he's done that, it means something very, very, very bad is happening.

If you're not familiar with the Wyden Siren, let me walk you through the pattern, because it's been remarkably consistent.

Back in 2011, Wyden and Senator Mark Udall tried to warn the public that the federal government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to mean something entirely different from what the text actually said. They couldn't reveal the details because they were classified, but Wyden made the situation clear:

We're getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.

For a couple years, civil liberties advocates were left guessing what that secret interpretation might be. Then Ed Snowden came along and revealed the NSA's bulk metadata collection program—the exact thing Wyden had been warning about. Apparently, one of the things that reportedly pushed Snowden to leak was watching then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie to Wyden's face in a hearing about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans. Wyden knew the answer. Clapper lied anyway. Snowden had the proof.

In 2015, Wyden was at it again, this time warning about a secret Justice Department legal opinion related to cybersecurity legislation:

I remain very concerned that a secret Justice Department opinion that is of clear relevance to this debate continues to be withheld from the public. This opinion, which interprets common commercial service agreements, is inconsistent with the public's understanding of the law, and I believe it will be difficult for Congress to have a fully informed debate on cybersecurity legislation if it does not understand how these agreements have been interpreted by the Executive Branch.

In 2017, we wrote about the Wyden Siren going off again when Dan Coats, then Director of National Intelligence, gave an answer about Section 702 surveillance that Wyden pointed out was to a different question than the one he'd actually asked:

That was not my question. Please provide a public response to my question, as asked at the June 7, 2017, hearing.

The pattern repeats. Wyden asks a specific question about surveillance. The intelligence community answers a slightly different question in a way that technically isn't lying but is designed to mislead. Wyden calls them out. Eventually, the truth comes out, and it's always worse than people assumed.

It's not just surveillance, either. Wyden has used this same approach to expose ICE illegally collecting millions of Americans' financial records through bulk administrative subpoenas—a program that was hastily shut down the moment Wyden's office started asking questions about it. He's caught the government gathering push notification data from Apple and Google while forbidding those companies from telling anyone about it. He's questioned domain seizures, the FBI's power to look at your browsing history without a warrant, and countless other government activities that were happening in secret.

The track record here is essentially perfect. When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening behind the classification curtain.

So what's happening at the CIA that has Wyden sending a two-sentence letter that amounts to "I legally cannot tell you what's wrong, but something is very wrong"?

We don't know yet. That's the whole point of classification—it keeps the public in the dark about what their government is doing in their name. But Wyden's letter is the equivalent of a fire alarm. He's seen something. He can't say what. But he wants there to be a record that he raised the concern.

Given the current administration's approach to, well, everything, the possibilities are unfortunately vast. Is it about domestic surveillance? Something about current ODNI Tulsi Gabbard? International operations gone sideways? Some new interpretation of the CIA's authorities that would make Americans' hair stand on end if they knew about it? We're left guessing, just like we were guessing about the PATRIOT Act's secret interpretation back in 2011.

But here's what we do know: Ron Wyden has been doing this for at least fifteen years. And every single time, he's been vindicated. The secret programs were real. The abuses were real. The gap between what the public thought was happening and what was actually happening was real.

The Wyden Siren is blaring. Pay attention.

We've been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix's proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It's part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what's left of U.S. media and turn it it to MAGA state television (see: Hungary).

Of course, if you're a corrupt, Trump-bootheel-licking, GOP lawmaker looking to turn U.S. media (or what's left of it) into a Trump-friendly agitprop machine, you can't just openly admit this. So the GOP have had to dress up their attacks on Netflix as some sort of principled stand against media consolidation, "leftist propaganda," child indoctrination, and "wokeism." Real pudding-brained cult shit.

Enter ever-the-opportunist Josh Hawley, who "grilled" Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos this week in Senate hearings, leveraging anti-trans hysteria and fear-mongering to pretend Netflix is somehow radically leftist:

"Why is it that so much of Netflix content for children promotes a transgender ideology?" Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked Sarandos on Tuesday. "Almost half of your content for children—I'm talking about minor children now, I'm not talking about teenagers, minor children—promotes a transgender ideology agenda."

If you're a grown adult, you probably realize Netflix's primary interest is in making money by producing whatever gets people's attention. That has ranged from military dramas featuring (gasp) homosexuals (something you'll recall made the Trump Pentagon cry), to hack comedians who like to punch down against trans folks. If Netflix has an ideology, it's opportunism.

Hawley's (false) claim that half of Netflix's children's programming supports a "trans agenda" was simply made up, and originates in a Heartland Institute "study" making the rounds in DC designed to demonize Netflix. Allowing, as we noted above, Larry Ellison to swoop in, dominate U.S. media, and do all of the ideological bullshit the GOP is pretending to be worried about. Just like we saw with the Trump GOP's hijacking of TikTok by weird right wing zealots like Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen.

As I've noted previously, ideally you'd block all additional media consolidation, since these megadeals are consistently terrible for labor, consumers, and product quality. But that's not happening under a Trump administration that has lobotomized all key regulators. So ideally, while not great, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the best of a bunch of bad options, and probably the route Dem lawmakers and activists should be backing.

Such are the strange days we live in.

The GOP and Heartland attack on Netflix serves two functions: it either scuttles the deal so that Larry Ellison can buy Warner Brothers, and/or it forces Netflix to continually debase itself to please Trump if it wants merger approval. Since Netflix isn't interested in CNN and Warner Brothers' Discovery channels due to sagging ratings, it's likely these are spun off and sold to Ellison anyway even if Netflix's deal succeeds.

Again, look to Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia if you want to see what the Heartland folks and Josh Hawley are keen on building. Our broken, corporate press is already largely incapable of being factually honest (particularly about corporate power or the GOP), and they're well on the way toward being consolidated into what will ultimately become a 24/7 autocrat ass kissing machine.

You know, to protect the children.

It's darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn't funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we're proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel the effects.

Earlier this week reports indicated the Dilley detention center in Texas was going on a sort of soft lockdown due to confirmed cases of measles among those detained.

"ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected," McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking "appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection."

"All detainees are being provided with proper medical care," she added.

We are definitely in "prove it" territory when it comes to this administration and immigration questions. That's all the more so if the government, as they've done via other excuses in the past, limits or restrains entry to these facilities from other lawmakers who want to check DHS' homework and uses the measles outbreak as the reason for it.

Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to "unnecessarily" prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.

"In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley," Desai said. "It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making."

It's also worth remembering that the spread of disease is a recurring feature in the concentration camp industry. Deaths from disease as well. And, unlike the trope mentioned above, these are infections immigrants are getting from America, not bringing to her soil.

And it's not just one detention camp, either. The Florence Detention Center in Arizona is also dealing with measles infections.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports one ICE detainee in the Florence Detention Center in Pinal County tested positive for measles on Jan. 21.

Two more measles cases have recently been confirmed among people who are also in federal custody in the county, according to a spokesperson for the Pinal County Public Health Services District. But the spokesperson did not provide details about which facility the other two infected individuals are in, or whether any of the three cases in the county are linked.

As Desai said in the quote above, this is a choice. Or, rather, a series of choices. It's a choice made by Trump and his minions to carry out this inhumane, disorganized, haphazard campaign of brutality on illegal immigrants. This could have gone many ways, but Trump chose cruelty on purpose. It's a choice to put RFK Jr. in charge of America's health and then watch idly, leaning back with folded arms, as the country experiences the worst measles outbreak in decades over the past 13 months. It's a choice to not pivot on any of the above.

And it's a choice to leave South Carolina swinging in the wind as the measles outbreak there will no doubt continue to spread to the rest of the country.

State health officials are reporting 29 new cases of measles in the state since Friday, bringing the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 876. The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) said there are currently 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these cases is Feb. 24.

Those numbers will continue to rise, but they are already breathtaking. 2025 saw a measles infection count nationwide of 2,267. South Carolina has generated nearly 40% of that total in one month in one state. 18 states have already had measles infections within their borders this year. The 2026 totals are going to make 2025 look like peanuts.

And it could potentially be hardest on the human beings who are shoved like sardines into these immigrant detention camps. Diseases like the measles will spread incredibly fast there. And, despite DHS' claims to the contrary, I just can't find it in me to believe that this administration is going to put a priority on detainee's health.

The Baton Rouge Police Department announced recently that it will begin using a drone designed by military equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin and Edge Autonomy, making it one of the first local police departments to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a history of primary use in foreign war zones. Baton Rouge is now one of the first local police departments in the United States to deploy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with such extensive surveillance capabilities — a dangerous escalation in the militarization of local law enforcement.

This is a troubling development in an already long history of local law enforcement acquiring and utilizing military-grade surveillance equipment. It should be a cautionary tale that prods communities across the country to be proactive in ensuring that drones can only be acquired and used in ways that are well-documented, transparent, and subject to public feedback. 

Baton Rouge bought the Stalker VXE30 from Edge Autonomy, which partners with Lockheed Martin and began operating under the brand Redwire last week. According to reporting from WBRZ ABC2 in Louisiana, the drone, training, and batteries, cost about $1 million. 

All of the regular concerns surrounding drones apply to this new one in use by Baton Rouge:

• Drones can access and view spaces that are otherwise off-limits to law enforcement, including backyards, decks, and other areas of personal property.
• Footage captured by camera-enabled drones may be stored and shared in ways that go far beyond the initial flight.
• Additional camera-based surveillance can be installed on the drone, including automated license plate readers and the retroactive application of biometric analysis, such as face recognition.

However, the use of a military-grade drone hypercharges these concerns. Stalker VXE30's surveillance capabilities extend for dozens of miles, and it can fly faster and longer than standard police drones already in use. 

"It can be miles away, but we can still have a camera looking at your face, so we can use it for surveillance operations," BRPD Police Chief TJ Morse told reporters.

Drone models similar to the Stalker VXE30 have been used in military operations around the world and are currently being used by the U.S. Army and other branches for long-range reconnaissance. Typically, police departments deploy drone models similar to those commercially available from companies like DJI, which until recently was the subject of a proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ban, or devices provided by police technology companies like Skydio, in partnership with Axon and Flock Safety. 

Additionally troubling is the capacity to add additional equipment to these drones: so-called "payloads" that could include other types of surveillance equipment and even weapons. 

The Baton Rouge community must put policies in place that restrict and provide oversight of any possible uses of this drone, as well as any potential additions law enforcement might make. 

EFF has filed a public records request to learn more about the conditions of this acquisition and gaps in oversight policies. We've been tracking the expansion of police drone surveillance for years, and this acquisition represents a dangerous new frontier. We'll continue investigating and supporting communities fighting back against the militarization of local police and mass surveillance. To learn more about the surveillance technologies being used in your city, please check out the Atlas of Surveillance.

Reposted from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.

It is no secret that large language models (LLMs) are being used routinely to modify and even write scientific papers. That's not necessarily a bad thing: LLMs can help produce clearer texts with stronger logic, not least when researchers are writing in a language that is not their mother tongue. More generally, a recent analysis in Nature magazine, reported by Science magazine, found that scientists embracing AI — of any kind — "consistently make the biggest professional strides":

AI adopters have published three times more papers, received five times more citations, and reach leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers.

But there is also a downside:

Not only is AI-driven work prone to circling the same crowded problems, but it also leads to a less interconnected scientific literature, with fewer studies engaging with and building on one another.

Another issue with LLMs, that of "hallucinated citations," or "HalluCitations," is well known. More seriously, entire fake publications can be generated using AI, and sold by so-called "paper mills" to unscrupulous scientists who wish to bolster their list of publications to help their career. In the field of biomedical research alone, a recent study estimated that over 100,000 fake papers were published in 2023. Not all of those were generated using AI, but progress in LLMs has made the process of creating fake articles much simpler.

Fake publications generated using LLMs are often obvious because of their lack of sophistication and polish. But a new service from OpenAI, called Prism, is likely to eliminate such easy-to-spot signs, by adding AI support to every aspect of writing a scientific paper:

Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration, with GPT‑5.2⁠—our most advanced model for mathematical and scientific reasoning—integrated directly into the workflow.

It brings drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace. Rather than operating as a separate tool alongside the writing process, GPT‑5.2 works within the project itself—with access to the structure of the paper, equations, references, and surrounding context.

It includes a number of features that make creating complex — and fake — papers extremely easy:

• Search for and incorporate relevant literature (for example, from arXiv) in the context of the current manuscript, and revise text in light of newly identified related work
• Create, refactor, and reason over equations, citations, and figures, with AI that understands how those elements relate across the paper
• Turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX, saving hours of time manipulating graphics pixel-by-pixel

There is even voice-based editing, allowing simple changes to be made without the need to write anything. But scientists are already worried that the power of OpenAI's Prism will make a deteriorating situation worse. As an article on Ars Technica explains:

[Prism] has drawn immediate skepticism from researchers who fear the tool will accelerate the already overwhelming flood of low-quality papers into scientific journals. The launch coincides with growing alarm among publishers about what many are calling "AI slop" in academic publishing.

One field that is already plagued by AI slop is AI itself. An FT article on the topic points to an interesting attempt by the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a major gathering of researchers in the world of machine learning, to tackle this problem with punitive measures against authors and reviewers who violate the ICLR's policies on LLM-generated material. For example:

Papers that make extensive usage of LLMs and do not disclose this usage will be desk rejected [that is, without sending them out for external peer review]. Extensive and/or careless LLM usage often results in false claims, misrepresentations, or hallucinated content, including hallucinated references. As stated in our previous blog post: hallucinations of this kind would be considered a Code of Ethics violation on the part of the paper's authors. We have been desk -rejecting, and will continue to desk -reject, any paper that includes such issues.

Similarly:

reviewers [of submitted papers] are responsible for the content they post. Therefore, if they use LLMs, they are responsible for any issues in their posted review. Very poor quality reviews that feature false claims, misrepresentations or hallucinated references are also a code of ethics violation as expressed in the previous blog post. As such, reviewers who posted such poor quality reviews will also face consequences, including the desk rejection of their [own] submitted papers.

It is clearly not possible to stop scientists from using AI tools to check and improve their papers, nor should this be necessary, provided authors flag up such usage, and no errors are introduced as a result. A policy of the kind adopted by the ICLR requiring transparency about the extent to which AI has been used seems a sensible approach in the face of increasingly sophisticated tools like OpenAI's Prism.

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Jeff Bezos this week continued to dismantle what's left of the Washington Post via another massive round of layoffs that left remaining staff stunned. Among the latest cuts is the elimination of the paper's popular sports desk, scaling back of international and local news, the firing of an untold swath of journalists, and the ending of the paper's book sections, among other major changes.

This comes on the heels of other decisions by Bezos to fire all of the paper's black columnists, turn the op-ed section into pro-corporatist agitprop, censor cartoonists that criticize Jeff, and generally shift the paper's journalistic tone in a more right wing, autocrat-friendly, corporatist direction. You know, like every other major corporate media outlet from CNN to CBS.

Of course, nobody actually wants this. The actual audience for extraction class agitprop is arguably very small and already quite well served. So it's amusing to see WAPO leadership insist that these additional, brutal cuts are necessary because the paper has been losing subscribers and "wants to be competitive":

"Murray acknowledged that the Post has struggled to reach "customers" and talked about the competitive media marketplace. "Today, the Washington Post is taking a number of actions across the company to secure our future," he said, according to an audio recording of the meeting."

Let's be clear: billionaires like Jeff Bezos don't want a functioning press. They want the lazy simulacrum of a functional press that caters to their ideology (more for me, less for you) and protects their interests. As with Larry Ellison's acquisition of CBS and TikTok, and Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, it's best to view this as a global project to defang accountability for the planet's richest, shittiest people and corporations.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron didn't really mince words about what this means for a once-functional newspaper that, at this point, probably can't be salvaged:

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

— Ben Mullin (@benmullin.bsky.social) 2026-02-04T14:34:22.001Z

WAPO management insist that they're going to "narrow their focus on politics." By this they mean more of the feckless, "both sides," "view from nowhere" DC gossip reporting you see at other billionaire-owned outlets like Axios, Semafor, and Politico. Glad-handy journalism that's less concerned with the truth than it is appeasing ownership, protecting access, and keeping the ad money flowing.

The kind of wimpy, soft-knuckled cack that can (and repeatedly is) exploited by authoritarian zealots who know these outlets lack the courage to call them out for what they really are. You see, if you're honest about the extremist nature of our unpopular autocratic government, you might lose access, upset paper management, alienate Republican ad viewers, or piss off regulators eyeing your latest merger.

Bezos could fund functional journalism at the Washington Post for decades to come without making a dent in his finances, were that something of actual interest to him. This is a guy who just blew $75 million on a propaganda puff piece kissing the ass of the president's wife. That kind of money could fund most independent newsrooms for the better part of the next decade.

Jeff wants to ensure the administration will pay him to launch his unreliable rockets into space, slather his fledgling LEO satellite network with subsidies, coddle his cloud computing empire, allow him to dominate every last aspect of modern retail, and generally be broadly exploitative in a way that undermines competition, consumers, and labor. He wants, and applauds, Trump's destruction of the regulatory state.

Bezos still "wins" even if the Post doesn't survive his "leadership." At worst (for Jeff) the paper is converted into a sad, pseudo-journalistic simulacrum that exists largely to blow smoke up the ass of wealth and power. At best another major media institution is destroyed, eliminating yet another outlet that used to (admittedly with increasing inconsistency) hold billionaires and corporate power to account.

But it's really something even worse than just rich people destroying journalism to coddle their delicate egos and protect their financial interests. All of this really is part of a broad, multi-generational effort by the extraction class to eliminate checks and balances and accountability, erode informed consensus, befuddle the electorate, and dismantle not just democratic norms, but democracy itself.

And, if you hadn't noticed, it's been a smashing success so far.

If there's a plus side to this mess, it's that Jeff and Elon and Larry's clumsy efforts to dominate and destroy U.S. journalism create vast new opportunities for indie newsletter authors, worker-owned newsrooms, and independent outlets (like Techdirt), to serve a public that's desperate for something tangible, courageous, and real in a sea of bullshit and clumsy artifice. Give them, and us, your time and money.

Over the past week, two federal judges have issued rulings on immigration cases that aren't just legally significant—they're genuinely extraordinary documents. One includes a photo of a five-year-old in a Spiderman backpack, biblical citations, and closes with Ben Franklin's warning about keeping the republic. The other spends 83 pages methodically dismantling a cabinet secretary's decision, includes screenshots of her social media posts, and concludes that she "pounds X (f/k/a Twitter)" instead of following the law. Both judges reached back to the Founders to make their points. Both dropped any pretense of the typical judicial deference afforded to the executive branch. And both made crystal clear that they see what's happening for exactly what it is.

Let's start with the shorter one. Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas issued a brief but devastating opinion granting habeas corpus to Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son, Liam—the child whose photo went viral wearing a blue hat with ears and a Spiderman backpack when he was kidnapped by federal agents in Minnesota and shipped to a detention center in Texas. Judge Biery didn't mince words:

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.

He then offered what he called a "civics lesson to the government," including reminding them of some key parts that were in the Declaration we signed 250 years ago to be free from a monarch:

Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old ThomasJefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

1. "He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People."
2. "He has excited domestic Insurrection among us."
3. "For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us."
4. "He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures."

"We the people" are hearing echos of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.

U.S. CONST. amend. IV.

And the startling conclusion to the civics lesson the US federal government got from a judge.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

And in case anyone missed the point, Biery closed with a reference you don't often see in federal court opinions: "Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: 'Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?' 'A republic, if you can keep it.'" Followed by: "With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, It is so ORDERED."

The ruling includes the photo of the five-year-old child, and two biblical citations. The first to "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'" and the second to… "Jesus wept."

If Judge Biery's ruling was a shot across the bow—short, sharp, impossible to miss—then Judge Ana Reyes's 83-page ruling in the Haitian TPS (Temporary Protected Status) case is a full broadside. Where Biery reached for the Declaration and the Bible, Reyes brings receipts—83 pages of them—that lay bare just how far federal judges have moved from customary deference to open incredulity.

The ruling opens with a letter from George Washington in 1783 declaring that "America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions."

Then it gets to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's position on immigration:

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has a different take.

The ruling then includes a screenshot of Noem's X post declaring "WE DON'T WANT THEM. NOT ONE. THEY ARE ALL KILLERS, LEECHES, AND ENTITLEMENT JUNKIES. WE DONT WANT THEM HERE."

Judge Reyes notes dryly: "So says the official responsible for overseeing the TPS program."

The plaintiffs in the case are five Haitian TPS holders whom Judge Reyes takes pains to introduce:

They are not, it emerges, killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies. They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer's disease; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department; Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.

The ruling systematically dismantles every single aspect of Secretary Noem's decision to terminate Haiti's TPS designation. But the section on DHS's supposed "consultation with appropriate agencies" is particularly brutal.

The TPS statute requires the Secretary to consult with appropriate agencies before making a termination decision. Here's what that "consultation" actually looked like:

On Friday, September 5, 2025—that is, the same day that the NTPSA court set aside the Partial Vacatur of Haiti's TPS designation—a DHS staffer emailed a State staffer at 4:55 p.m.: "Due to the litigation, we are re-reviewing country conditions in Haiti based on the original TPS deadline. Can you advise on State's views on the matter?" The State staffer responded within 53 minutes: "State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS statue of Haiti."

This was it. The full extent of the supposed consultation with appropriate agencies.

The judge notes that she believe she "must be missing something" and included a bit of the transcript from the hearing:

Court: So in the Federal Register notice, the Secretary wrote, "After reviewing country conditions and consulting with appropriate U.S. Government agencies, the Secretary determined that Haiti no longer meets the conditions for the designating as TPS"; right?

Government Counsel: Yes.

Court: What were the appropriate agencies that the Secretary consulted? . . .

Government Counsel: So, Your Honor, it's the Department of State email found at 409 and 410. That is what we have. . . .

Court: No other agency was consulted?

Government Counsel: No other agency was consulted. . . .

Court: And the extent of the Department of State consultation was the email exchange at 409 and 410.

Government Counsel: That is my understanding

The judge's response to this 53-minute email exchange being presented as statutory "consultation" is unsparing:

Congress did not vest the Secretary with Humpty Dumpty-like power to make the word "consultation" mean "just what [she] chooses it to mean—neither more nor less."

It gets worse. The court notes that the State Department's own Travel Advisory for Haiti—the document that literally says "Do not travel to Haiti for any reason"—was updated after Noem's first termination attempt. The updated version, warning of worsened conditions, doesn't even appear in the administrative record. The Secretary responsible for making this determination simply didn't look at her own government's assessment of the country's safety.

Then there's the pattern. As of this ruling, Secretary Noem has terminated TPS designations for every single country that has come up for review since taking office. Twelve countries. Twelve terminations. The ruling includes a handy chart:

Twelve for twelve. Judge Reyes notes this is "unprecedented in the thirty-five years since the establishment of the TPS program for a DHS Secretary to terminate every TPS designation that crosses her desk for review."

The ruling then gets into the substance of Noem's reasoning—or lack thereof. The Secretary claims there are parts of Haiti "suitable to return to" but never identifies a single safe location. Indeed, the Court gave the government a chance to explain exactly where these "parts" of Haiti that were safe were, and was not impressed by the answer:

According to Secretary Noem, "data surrounding internal relocation does indicate parts of the country are suitable to return to." But the Secretary cited no data to support this proposition and failed to identify a single safe location. In response to an inquiry from the Court, the Government cited an October 29, 2025, USCIS memo in the administrative record as the supporting analysis. "The memo," it noted, "reflects that individuals have been internally displaced, thereby indicating that Haitian residents found certain areas in Haiti that could be suitable for return." But the memo also fails to identify a single safe location by name or even geographic area. And the fact that, as the memo notes, 1.3 million Haitians—around twelve percent of the population—have been "internally displaced due to escalating violence" says nothing about whether they escaped to suitable areas. If anything, those areas are presumptively now less suitable for return, having been inundated with internal refugees.

Meanwhile, the administrative record is full of statements like these:

"Haiti's crisis has reached catastrophic levels" — Human Rights Watch, January 2025

"The violence has increased dramatically in 2024" — Doctors Without Borders, January 2025

"Haiti is paralyzed" — Crisis Group, February 2025

"Top United Nations Officials Urge Swift Global Action as Haiti Nears Collapse" — UN Security Council, July 2025

"The people of Haiti are in a perfect storm of suffering" — UN Secretary-General Guterres, August 2025

Against all of this, Secretary Noem concluded that "there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian TPS holders from returning [to] safety." Judge Reyes is incredulous that the Secretary's analysis relies on "emerging signals of hope" rather than actual changed conditions:

Unable to identify present conditions supporting her conclusion, Secretary Noem turns instead to speculation about future improvement. Each source she cited speaks to how Haiti might improve in the future. She quoted a UN article referencing Secretary-General António Guterres's statement that despite ongoing violence in Haiti, "'there are emerging signals of hope.''' He cautioned that "these fragile gains" depend on "more decisive international support." Emerging signals of hope, of course, are not actual change. Secretary-General Guterres's full remarks to the UNSC underscore this point. They do not describe a nation on the brink of recovery. Rather, they describe a nation in crisis, whose future hinges on internal "unity" and "resolve from [the UNSC]."

The ruling also destroys the government's "national interest" analysis, which focuses on immigrants attempting to enter the US illegally and those who overstay visas. The problem? TPS holders are already here. Legally:

Secretary Noem's analysis also focused on those who "overstay their visas" and so remain in the country unlawfully. Id. She claimed that these overstayers "may be harder to locate and monitor," increasing vulnerabilities in immigration enforcement systems. See id. She also said they "place an added strain on local communities by increasing demand for public resources, contributing to housing and healthcare pressures, and competing in an already limited job market." Id. But Haitian TPS holders are not in this cohort either. They are in the U.S. lawfully. See Jan. 6 P.M. Hr'g Tr. at 85:15-87:12. Indeed, TPS holders are easy to locate because they regularly update their address information with DHS to maintain that status and their work authorization. See id. at 94:25-95:6. And Secretary Noem provides no data to support the overgeneralization that those who overstay their visas are a strain on their local communities. See Dkt. 122. They may well cause a strain, but terminating Haiti's TPS termination not alleviate it because, again, Haitian TPS holders do not fall into this cohort.

Regarding that confusion of TPS visitors being here legally, meaning they literally cannot overstay their visas, the judge notes in a footnote how absurd part of the government's argument is:

With respect, this borders on the absurd. The latter has zero relation to the former or reality.

When asked where in the record the Court could find data on TPS holders represented in "overstay" rates (based on those who maybe overstayed visas prior to getting TPS status), the government comes up empty. See if you sense where the judge loses patience:

The Government responds by speculating that maybe some Haitians overstayed their visas before obtaining TPS status. Maybe. Who knows? Not Secretary Noem. The Court asked the Government: "[w]here in the [CAR] can the Court find the percentage of TPS holders represented in the overstay rates?" The response: "The [CAR] does not contain data that is this finely dissected." Which is to say, not enough people to even bother counting.

The equal protection analysis is where things get really pointed. Judge Reyes catalogs President Trump's statements about Haitians and other nonwhite immigrants:

President Trump has made—freely, at times even boastfully—several derogatory statements about Haitians and other nonwhite foreigners. To start, he has repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity, declaring that "illegal immigrants"—a category he wrongly assigns to Haitian TPS holders—are "poisoning the blood" of America. He has, Plaintiffs allege, complained that recently admitted nonwhite Africans would "never 'go back to their huts' in Africa." He has complained further that nonwhite immigration is an "invasion," creating a "dumping ground" that is "destroying our country." He has described immigrants as "not people," "snakes," and "garbage," who have "bad genes." He has also stated that he prefers immigrants from "nice"—predominantly white—countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark over immigrants from "shithole countries"

President Trump has referred to Haiti as a "shithole country," suggested Haitians "probably have AIDS," and complained that Haitian immigration is "like a death wish for our country." He has also promoted the false conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were "eating the pets of the people" in Springfield, Ohio. Even after that (ridiculous) claim was debunked, he claimed they were eating "other things too that they're not supposed to be." About two weeks after the Termination, he again described Haiti as a "filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting" "shithole country." He stated: "I have also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries." Then continued, "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why cannot we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few, let us have a few, from Denmark." It is not a coincidence that Haiti's population is ninety-five percent black while Norway's is over ninety percent white.

The ruling notes that Trump's statements came close in time to Noem's decisions, and that Noem herself has made her own views clear, as noted in the screenshot, calling Haitians "leeches, entitlement junkies, and foreign invaders" just three days after making the Termination decision.

And then we get to the conclusion. It's worth quoting at length because you really don't see this kind of language from the bench:

There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).

And then the kicker:

Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.

These rulings represent something we've been watching develop for months now: federal judges completely abandoning the traditional deference typically afforded to government positions, because the government has made clear it doesn't deserve it. The DOJ's credibility has been in freefall, and judges are no longer pretending otherwise. They're reaching back to Franklin and Washington as genuine warnings about what happens when executive power operates unchecked by law or facts.

Some people will dismiss this as "activist judges." But what we're seeing is something different: judges trying to do their actual jobs—reviewing whether the government followed the law—and finding that the government isn't even pretending to follow it anymore.

The administration is ignoring statutory requirements entirely, fabricating rationales after the fact, and treating judicial review as an inconvenience to be steamrolled rather than a constitutional check to be respected. We're not talking about simple judicial disagreements of interpretation of the law. These opinions read more like desperate signals from the bench that something has gone very, very wrong.

I've seen some complaints—in particular about the first short ruling—that it doesn't read in a very judicial manner. The lack of citations is a bit startling, and probably bodes ill if the government appeals. But that's almost the point. When a judge includes a photo of a child in a Spiderman backpack, cites "Jesus wept," and closes with Ben Franklin's warning about keeping the republic—or when another judge spends 83 pages documenting that the Secretary of DHS ignored her own agencies, ignored the evidence, ignored the law, and instead "pounds X"—they're writing for more than an appeals court. They're writing for history. They're writing for the public. They're sick of the lies and the gaslighting, and the simple fascism of it all in a supposed constitutional democracy. And they want to make damn sure that someone, somewhere, is paying attention.

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The two murders by immigration officers during Trump's vengeful "surge" in Minneapolis, Minnesota have grabbed most of the headlines recently. And deservedly so. The violent rhetoric used by nearly every administration official — combined with a lack of training and the explicit understanding no one will be punished by Trump for whatever's done in Trump's name — has delivered a day-to-day purge of minorities that this government and its supporters continue to pretend is nothing more than good, solid (immigration) law enforcement.

But before those shootings turned the nation's attention to Minnesota, hundreds of federal officers had been turned loose in other "Democrat" states. Because officers were encouraged — by arrest quotas and the administration's portrayal of anyone from other countries as inherently dangerous — to succeed by any means necessary, they did… even if it meant filling people with bullet holes for being on the wrong side of Trump's version of history.

In January, two Venezuelans were shot by ICE officers. The DHS immediately claimed this was a good shoot, considering how potentially violent these recipients of bullets were.

Yesterday, two suspected Tren de Aragua gang associates—let loose on American streets by Joe Biden—weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol in Portland. The agent took immediate action to defend himself and others, shooting them. 

After fleeing, the suspects drove nearly five miles to an apartment complex and called emergency medical services. They were transported to separate hospitals. Luis David Nino-Moncada sustained an injury to the arm while Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest. Nino-Moncada is now in FBI custody. These individuals are not married.  

I've highlighted two things from this January DHS press release. Sure, it's all bullshit but these two sentences need to be called out.

First, just because someone managed to cross the border doesn't mean they were "let loose on American streets" by a presidential administration.

Second, what the fuck even is this? "These individuals are not married." Who gives a shit? What bearing does this have on anything? Or are we so far down the white Christian nationalist rabbit hole that simply co-habitating a moving vehicle is justification enough for being shot by federal officers?

Any normal administration would never have included those two sentences, even if it wanted to push the narrative that the people who were shot were dangerous enough to justify the violent reaction. Throwing this shit into the mix is just how the Trump administration does business: like two kids piggy-backed in a trenchcoat, pretending to be a full-grown adult.

And that's enough to let everyone know very little of what is being said is true. It's a dog whistle for racism, sexism, and making-a-bunch-of-shit-upism that is meant to appease the Bigot in Chief and make MAGA's collective panties so wet they should be asking FEMA for flood relief grants. (I'm paraphrasing Shoresy here.)

While that may look good on the permanent DHS press release record, it doesn't look nearly as bully-smart (I'm coining that) as the people spewing it thinks it does when it runs up against the part of the government that isn't so easily swayed by bigoted gibberish that's interspersed with partisan attacks and non sequiturs.

Now that these shootings are being handled in court, the narrative (and I'm being extremely gracious here in treating this froth as the equivalent of an actual narrative) is disintegrating. It turns out prosecutors and investigators can't actually back up these wild-ass DHS claims. Forced to rely on facts, the DOJ is finding out it doesn't have many to work with.

During the border patrol stop, the driver, Luis Niño-Moncada, "weaponized their vehicle against" officers, DHS said, prompting an agent "to defend himself and others" by shooting the occupants. Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest, Niño-Moncada was hit in the arm and both were hospitalized, then taken into federal custody, DHS noted. The agents were uninjured.

But court records obtained by the Guardian reveal a Department of Justice prosecutor later directly contradicted DHS's Tren de Aragua statements in court, telling a judge: "We're not suggesting … [Niño-Moncada] is a gang member." An FBI affidavit issued following the incident also suggests that in the previous shooting cited by DHS, Zambrano-Contreras was not a suspect, but rather a reported victim of a sexual assault and robbery. Neither Niño-Moncada or Zambrano-Contreras have prior criminal convictions, their lawyers have said.

This is just as sloppy as the quasi-gang database the DHS has been using as an excuse to send Venezuelans to El Salvador's CECOT hell hole. There's no investigation going on here. There's just the DHS claiming that any Venezuelan it shoots or otherwise brutalizes is probably a Tren de Aragua gang member.

No doubt some prosecutors are going to get shit-canned for daring to oppose the DHS's self-serving narrative in their sworn statements to judges. Given that the DOJ really can't afford to lose many more of these, one wonders why this administration can't simply provide a "no comment," rather than immediately push narratives that it has to know will be contradicted once the facts arrive at the scene.

I mean, just stating what happened in whatever exonerative form you want to use ("officer-involved shooting"), followed by the assertion that the shooting is currently under investigation would be far better than what this administration chooses to do EVERY CHANCE IT GETS.

Whatever dubious charm these statements might have held during Trump's blustery return to office has long worn off. I suspect even many of the MAGA faithful are getting a little tired of every incident being greeted by government statements that are long on hyperbole but short on facts. Sure, there are still a number of people so fully-cooked that they can't achieve an erection without being lied to for paragraphs at a time, but given this constant onslaught of pure garbage in response to government violence, I have to believe some of the people who very definitely voted for this are rolling their eyes every time DHS front-mouth Tricia McLaughlin opens her mouth.

So we've been noting how the Trump administration has been helping Larry Ellison wage war on Netflix's proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust (that's always been a lie), but because they want Larry Ellison to be able to dominate media and create a safe space for unpopular right wing ideology.

After Warner Brothers balked at Larry's competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry and MAGA have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that "woke" Netflix is attempting a "cultural takeover" that must be stopped for the good of humanity.

With hearings on the Netflix merger looming, MAGA has ramped up those attacks with the help of some usual allies. That includes the right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has apparently been circulating a bogus study around DC claiming that Netflix and Warner Brothers are "engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma":

"Without ever saying Warner Bros or bid rival Paramount by name, the Oversight Project's analysis, titled Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State, insists that "relevant federal agencies must scrutinize with extreme intensity any potential Netflix acquisitions of other media and entertainment companies to take into account the full ramifications of the impacts on American society and the health of the Constitutional Republic."

Again, the goal here is to ensure that Larry Ellison can buy Netflix (and HBO and CNN). Larry, as we've seen vividly with his acquisitions of CBS and TikTok, is buying up new and old media to create a propaganda safe space for America's increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class. Like Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the goal is propaganda and information control.

And like any good propagandists, MAGA has tried to invert reality, and is increasingly trying to claim it's Netflix that covertly wants to create a left-wing propaganda empire that spreads gayness and woke:

"With its subtitle of "The Weaponization of Entertainment for Partisan Propaganda," the report is tailored for the MAGA base. Full of talking points and and mentions of Stranger Things, the Lena Dunham-produced Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, the controversial Cuties docu from 2020, and the Obamas-produced American Factory, the 47-page report takes repeated swipes at any expansion of the streamer and its library of "leftwing and progressive" content."

Of course that's nonsense. Netflix has demonstrated that they're primarily an opportunist, and will show whatever grabs eyeballs and makes them money (from gay military dramas that upset the pentagon to washed up anti-trans comedian hacks). And they're certain to debase themselves further to please the Trump administration in order to gain approval of their merger.

That's not to say that the Netflix Warner Brothers merger will be good for anybody. Most media consolidation is generally terrible for labor and consumers as we've seen with the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery mergers. They almost always result in massive debt loads, tons of layoffs, higher prices, and lower quality product.

Enter an old MAGA playbook: try to convince a bunch of useful idiots that the authoritarian corporatist MAGA coalition somehow really loves antitrust reform and is looking out for the little guy, despite a long track record of coddling corporate power and monopoly control.

That's again the game plan here by Heritage and administration mouthpieces like Brendan Carr; pretend you're obstructing the Netflix deal for ethical and antitrust reasons, when you're really just trying to help Larry Ellison engage in the exact sort of competitive and ideological domination you're whining about.

Among the folks helping this project along is former Trump DOJ "antitrust enforcer" Makan Delrahim, who is now Paramount's Chief Legal Officer. Delrahim played a starring role during the first Trump term in rubber stamping the hugely problematic Sprint T-Mobile merger, and attempting to block the AT&T Time Warner deal (to the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, who opposed the tie up).

And now here we are again, with many of the same folks joining forces to try and scuttle Netflix's latest merger, simply to ensure their preferred, anti-democratic billionaire wins the prize.

Ideally, again, you'd block all media consolidation.

Since that's clearly not happening under the corporation-coddling Trump administration, activists — and the two or three Democratic lawmakers who actually care about media reform — are probably better served by aligning themselves with Netflix. It's most definitely a lesser of two evils scenario, with, as the chaos at CBS shows, greater Larry Ellison control of media being the worst possible outcome.

In any case, expect right wing propagandists and right wing media to start really lighting into Netflix in the weeks and months to come. You know, because they just really love truth and freedom and hate consolidated corporate power.

Kash Patel, FBI Director, is not very good at his job. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate that notion, from him apparently completely misunderstanding the purpose and protections of the 2nd Amendment and Minnesota gun laws (whatever your thoughts on gun rights might generally be), to his gathering of barely trained castoffs to serve in the FBI, to the absolute wild waste of resources he spent last summer trying to root out independent thought within his agency. None of this is justice. None of it is good policing. All of it is the result of putting a podcast host shitposter in charge of America's federal police force. Ol' Crazy-Eyes just might not be the right person for the role.

And if you're going to be the leader of a federal police force, one of the skills you probably want to have is the capability of shutting the fuck up. Kash can't do this. Rather than simply not answering, it appears Patel may have lied to Congress about the Epstein files (remember those?). In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Patel blabbed about suspects all over social media and elsewhere, leading to wasted time and attention on completely innocent parties.

And, now, in the wake of an operation by the FBI that would appear to violate Mexican law, Patel decided to gush about the whole thing on the internet. What other option did he have, I wonder?

Ryan Wedding is a former Olympian who, by all accounts, turned himself into a violent cocaine drug kingpin working with a Mexican cartel. He was charged in Canada in 2015 for cocaine trafficking and in America in 2025 for that and for murder. Recently, Wedding found himself in American custody to face those charges. How that happened wasn't initially disclosed in coverage of the arrest. But then Kash Patel got out his phone and decided to gush about the whole thing on internet.

On Friday, however, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the joint operation publicly on X. "Our FBI HRT teams executed with precision, discipline, and total professionalism alongside our Mexican partners to bring Ryan James Wedding back to face justice," he wrote, sending shock waves through Mexico.

Except there's a problem with that statement. A pretty big one, actually. Mexican law is very clear that foreign LEOs are not to operate on Mexican soil. That would make the FBI's participation as outlined by Patel illegal. And that might create problems for his eventual prosecution and a really big headache for the Mexican government.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum scrambled to perform damage control, as foreign intervention in Mexico is politically toxic. She said that there was no U.S. involvement in the operation and that U.S. agents in Mexico are limited by law.

"I'm not going to get into a debate with the FBI director, nor do I want there to be a conflict," Sheinbaum said at a press conference Tuesday. "What they, the U.S. authorities, told the Mexican authorities is that it was a voluntary surrender." She pointed to a picture Wedding posted to his Instagram account at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico announcing that he was turning himself in.

Wedding's lawyer disputes that account, because of course he did. Whether Wedding actually surrendered or not is unknown to me, of course, but I've been well-trained the past 13 months not to believe a single thing my government says, so who the fuck knows. Wedding's lawyer claims he was handcuffed and transported to California and that this runs contrary to any claim any of this was voluntary. And because of all of this, the Mexican government now has both an internal problem and has to deal with an unreliable shitposting partner in the American government.

Patel's rash decision to post about Wedding's arrest online doesn't help the situation right now. It opens Sheinbaum up to political attacks in Mexico and makes the U.S.-Mexico relationship even shakier. Under Trump, though, American law enforcement is playing fast and loose with not just the law but diplomatic relations.

I'm not exactly advocating that the American government carryout these illegal extraditions violating our allies' own laws and then hiding it through silence. That would be crazy.

Instead, the point is that this administration's goons, such as Kash Patel, are so shitty that they can't even carry out such nefarious actions in silence because they can't shut the fuck up about them.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a "paramilitary force."

Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE "a personal paramilitary unit of the president." Journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a book about how American police forces have been militarized, has argued that President Donald Trump was using the force "the way an authoritarian uses a paramilitary force, to carry out his own personal grudges, to inflict pain and violence, and discomfort on people that he sees as his political enemies." And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie characterized ICE as a "virtual secret police" and "paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule."

All this raises a couple of questions: What are paramilitaries? And is ICE one?

As a government professor who studies policing and state security forces, I believe it's clear that ICE meets many but not all of the most salient definitions. It's worth exploring what those are and how the administration's use of ICE compares with the ways paramilitaries have been deployed in other countries.

The term paramilitary is commonly used in two ways. The first refers to highly militarized police forces, which are an official part of a nation's security forces. They typically have access to military-grade weaponry and equipment, are highly centralized with a hierarchical command structure, and deploy in large formed units to carry out domestic policing.

These "paramilitary police," such as the French Gendarmerie, India's Central Reserve Police Force or Russia's Internal Troops, are modeled on regular military forces.

The second definition denotes less formal and often more partisan armed groups that operate outside of the state's regular security sector. Sometimes these groups, as with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, emerge out of community self-defense efforts; in other cases, they are established by the government or receive government support, even though they lack official status. Political scientists also call these groups "pro-government militias" in order to convey both their political orientation in support of the government and less formal status as an irregular force.

They typically receive less training than regular state forces, if any. How well equipped they are can vary a great deal. Leaders may turn to these informal or unofficial paramilitaries because they are less expensive than regular forces, or because they can help them evade accountability for violent repression.

Many informal paramilitaries are engaged in regime maintenance, meaning they preserve the power of current rulers through repression of political opponents and the broader public. They may share partisan affiliations or ethnic ties with prominent political leaders or the incumbent political party and work in tandem to carry out political goals.

In Haiti, President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's Tonton Macouts provided a prime example of this second type of paramilitary. After Duvalier survived a coup attempt in 1970, he established the Tonton Macouts as a paramilitary counterweight to the regular military. Initially a ragtag, undisciplined but highly loyal force, it became the central instrument through which the Duvalier regime carried out political repression, surveilling, harassing, detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Haitians.

The recent references to ICE in the U.S. as a "paramilitary force" are using the term in both senses, viewing the agency as both a militarized police force and tool for repression.

There is no question that ICE fits the definition of a paramilitary police force. It is a police force under the control of the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, and it is heavily militarized, having adopted the weaponry, organization, operational patterns and cultural markers of the regular military. Some other federal forces, such as Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, also fit this definition.

The data I have collected on state security forces show that approximately 30% of countries have paramilitary police forces at the federal or national level, while more than 80% have smaller militarized units akin to SWAT teams within otherwise civilian police.

The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades. Indeed, the creation of ICE in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of just four instances I've found since 1960 where a democratic country created a new paramilitary police force, the others being Honduras, Brazil and Nigeria.

ICE and CBP also have some, though not all, of the characteristics of a paramilitary in the second sense of the term, referring to forces as repressive political agents. These forces are not informal; they are official agents of the state. However, their officers are less professional, receive less oversight and are operating in more overtly political ways than is typical of both regular military forces and local police in the United States.

The lack of professionalism predates the current administration. In 2014, for instance, CBP's head of internal affairs described the lowering of standards for post-9/11 expansion as leading to the recruitment of thousands of officers "potentially unfit to carry a badge and gun."

This problem has only been exacerbated by the rapid expansion undertaken by the Trump administration. ICE has added approximately 12,000 new recruits - more than doubling its size in less than a year - while substantially cutting the length of the training they receive.

ICE and CBP are not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure; both have gained exemptions from oversight intended to hold officers accountable for excessive force. CBP regulations, for instance, allow it to search and seize people's property without a warrant or the "probable cause" requirement imposed on other forces within 100 miles, or about 161 kilometers, of the border.

In terms of partisan affiliations, Trump has cultivated immigration security forces as political allies, an effort that appears to have been successful. In 2016, the union that represents ICE officers endorsed Trump's campaign with support from more than 95% of its voting members. Today, ICE recruitment efforts increasingly rely on far-right messaging to appeal to political supporters.

Both ICE and CBP have been deployed against political opponents in nonimmigration contexts, including Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, in 2020. They have also gathered data, according to political scientist Elizabeth F. Cohen, to "surveil citizens' political beliefs and activities - including protest actions they have taken on issues as far afield as gun control - in addition to immigrants' rights."

In these ways, ICE and CBP do bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries to carry out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.

An extensive body of research shows that more militarized forms of policing are associated with higher rates of police violence and rights violations, without reducing crime or improving officer safety.

Studies have also found that more militarized police forces are harder to reform than less-militarized law enforcement agencies. The use of such forces can also create tensions with both the regular military and civilian police, as currently appears to be happening with ICE in Minneapolis.

The ways in which federal immigration forces in the United States resemble informal paramilitaries in other countries - operating with less effective oversight, less competent recruits and increasingly entrenched partisan identity - make all these issues more intractable. Which is why, I believe, many commentators have surfaced the term paramilitary and are using it as a warning.

Erica De Bruin, Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College

On a recent episode of our other podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike was joined by guest host Konstantinos Komaitis for a far-reaching discussion about online speech. One point that was briefly raised in that discussion was the question of whether AI tools are good or bad for user agency, and since Mike and Konstantinos didn't entirely agree, it seemed like a good question to unpack in more detail — and that's exactly what they do on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

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The administration's racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump's return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable.

The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process and access to legal representation. Officers grabbed people, sent them far from their home states, and shoved them into planes headed to foreign hellhole prisons as quickly as possible in hopes of nullifying the inevitable legal challenges.

The 14th Amendment got kicked while it was still down when the administration decided birthright citizenship was no longer a thing. And the entire administration simply pretends the First Amendment doesn't apply to anyone who says things or does stuff it doesn't like.

The Fourth Amendment got turned into a doormat last May when the DHS Office of Legal Counsel (usurping the role usually held by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel) told federal officers they no longer needed judicial warrants to enter homes so long as they could semi-credibly claim the person they were seeking was subject to immigration court order of removal.

Now, ICE is coming for what's left of the Fourth Amendment, as the New York Times reports:

Amid tensions over President Trump's immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

"Amid tensions," Polish journalists wrote in late 1939. That bit of coyness aside, there's additional coyness in the memo issued by ICE's acting director Todd Lyons. There's very little in the way of legal citations. But there's definitely a permission slip ICE agents can write for themselves when they head out to terrorize US residents.

Lyons thinks he can redefine legal terms on the fly to allow immigration officers to arrest people without warrants. The memo says "flight risk" (which allows for a warrantless arrest) is not the correct term since it can only be applied after an arrest:

Without explanation, and without any formal policy, ICE previously applied the phrase "likely to escape" as being the equivalent of "flight risk. " This unreasoned position was incorrect. In fact, there are significant differences between the two standards in the immigration regulatory context and immigration officers should avoid conflating them. A flight risk analysis looks at whether an alien is likely to attend future immigration court hearings, appear before ERO as directed, surrender for removal, and comply with other immigration obligations. Flight risk determinations are made after an alien's arrest, where the alien has already been identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, and may have had DNA collected.

That's simply no good for this administration — especially when immigration forces are expected to come up with 3,000 arrests per day. Lyons says (again, without supporting legal citations) that "likely to escape" should be the standard for warrantless arrests, which is a determination agents should be able to make on their own without having to seek an arrest warrant. After all, if they go get a warrant, there's a good chance the person they want to arrest might be a bit more difficult to find.

While the flight-risk analysis assesses whether an already identified and detained alien is likely to comply with future immigration obligations such as court appearances and appearances before ERO , the likelihood-of-escape analysis is narrowly focused on determining whether the person is likely to escape before the officer can practically obtain an administrative arrest warrant, while in the field. This on-the-spot determination as to the likelihood of escape is often made with limited information about the subject's identity, background, or place of residence and no corroboration of any self-serving statements made by the subject.

The goalposts are moved. If an officer thinks a person they just happened to come across while performing an arrest with an actual warrant might not stick around to be arrested later, the officer can just arrest them as well, citing the lowered standard of "likely to escape."

And what makes one "likely to escape" under this arbitrary, completely made the fuck up "legal" standard? Well, it's a fine blend of "anything" and "everything."

The subject's behavior before or during the "encounter," which covers anything from "suspicious behavior" to simply refusing officers' commands to let them in a house (without a warrant) or yank them from a car (without a warrant). For that matter, being in a car is all that's needed to be considered "likely to escape." ("The subject's ability and means to promptly depart the scene.")

Or maybe the "subject" looks like they just may be healthy enough to leave on foot:

The subject's age and health…

Also on the list: documents an officer "suspects" might be fraudulent (with no demand made that officers attempt to verify documents before engaging in a warrantless arrest). The list also says officers can make warrantless arrests if they suspect the person has violated any immigration law, even though they are not required to do anything at all to seek information that might corroborate their suspicions.

The end result is exactly what this administration wants it to be: a blank check for warrantless arrests that can then be justified after the fact by the officers who performed the arrest. And if they happen to be wrong, they'll just cut the person loose, secure in the knowledge they'll never be punished by their superiors, much less held accountable in court now that the Supreme Court has made it impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations.

Given this further erasure of civil rights, one can only assume the coming weeks will bring us DHS/ICE memos declaring the use of private homes as federal operation centers to be well within the confines of the Third Amendment. Perhaps we'll even see some women jailed for attempting to vote during the upcoming midterms. ALL RIGHTS MUST GO!, says the administration proudly hosting this dumpster fire of a civil liberties fire sale. And once again, the party claiming to make America great continues to eliminate all the stuff that makes America America.

For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about "values" and "belonging" and "bringing your whole self to work." If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats.

Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the tech industry's sudden, conspicuous rightward lurch. His argument is refreshingly blunt: this isn't about ideology. It never was. It's about leverage.

There are many theories about Silicon Valley's swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump's re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I've worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley's chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It's not personal — it's strictly business.

This tracks with everything we've observed about how these companies actually operate. The notion that tech CEOs underwent some kind of ideological awakening—either leftward in 2020 or rightward in 2024—always gave them way too much credit for having coherent beliefs about anything other than what would help them with Wall Street in the long run.

What actually happened? This is where my undergrad degree in labor relations actually comes in handy: because, as Aaron notes: labor economics happened. When you're in a vicious war for talent and engineers have infinite options, you do whatever it takes to keep them happy. And if that means mental health stipends and letting employees "bring their whole selves to work," then that's what you do. Not because you believe in it. Because replacing a top engineer costs a fortune.

Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode, and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning.

The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly intense period in the industry's war for talent. Hiring exploded. Meta nearly doubled to 86,000 employees in 2022 from approximately 45,000 three years earlier. Amazon added over 400,000 employees in 2020 alone. As Silicon Valley recruiting teams relentlessly poached one another's people, tech labor had infinite choices and all the leverage.

So what did companies do when a generous compensation package was no longer enough to win over candidates? They instead sold a sense of belonging. Amid fierce competition, many companies realized that encouraging workers to bring their perspectives and passions to the office could increase their loyalty and their willingness to work hard. That, in turn, served the real financial objective: higher job acceptance rates, lower employee attrition and faster growth.

So when tech companies said all those nice things about diversity and belonging and employee voice, it was merely a calculated business decision to attract and retain workers in a brutally competitive labor market. The "whole self" culture wasn't a political movement. It was, as Zamost puts it, "a labor-market artifact where talent war conditions made employee empowerment economically rational."

And then the market shifted.

Growth slowed. Interest rates rose. Suddenly companies didn't need to compete for labor at any cost. And the moment that leverage flipped back to management, all those "values" evaporated faster than you can say "return to office mandate."

It's worth asking whether many tech companies' professed values were ever real. We've seen leaders who built their reputations on defying authority become foot soldiers for the administration. The same elasticity informs their rollback of the culture they once championed.

Four years ago, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce boss, said, "Office mandates are never going to work." He now works from home in Hawaii much of the time while most of his employees are required to be in-office three to five days a week. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would donate $10 million to groups working on racial justice. Last year he rolled back Meta's D.E.I. programs. Did his values change? Or did the power dynamics?

The answer, obviously, is the power dynamics. And this isn't a particularly controversial thing to say. The thing that gets lost in all the discourse about tech's "MAGA turn" is how utterly banal the explanation actually is. It's got nothing to do with ideology. These are business actors responding to incentives. When employees had leverage, executives catered to them. When executives got leverage back, they stopped.

Zamost makes an important point that may get buried by the rest of the article though: the response to all this from tech workers hasn't been outrage. It's been detachment. And that's going to boomerang back on these tech leaders.

This about-face will prove counterproductive over the long term. In my conversations with tech employees, the result hasn't been anger at hypocrisy so much as detachment — a loss of tribal loyalty (fewer T-shirts emblazoned with tech company logos), and a clearer understanding of the limits of corporate idealism.

This is the part that should worry these executives. They've revealed the game. They've shown that all the talk about values and culture and belonging was contingent on market conditions. And employees noticed. They're not mad—they're just not going to forget.

And, yes, the cynical among you will say "come on, no one ever believed these companies were serious" and perhaps that's true. But there was a time when Silicon Valley employees really liked where they were working and really felt like, as a team, they were achieving stuff.

That's gone.

Labor markets are cyclical. At some point, these companies will need to compete for talent again. And when they do, they're going to discover that the employees they're trying to recruit remember what happened. They remember that the "values" disappeared the moment they became inconvenient. They remember which executives lined up behind Trump. They remember the layoffs and the return-to-office mandates and the sudden silence when it actually mattered.

The recent reassertion of managerial prerogative was only possible in an economic environment where top executives could flex their muscles like a boss. It won't last forever. When labor is scarce again, many of these companies will rediscover the values they abandoned. The question is whether employees will forget just as quickly.

The optimistic read is that employees won't forget. That this period will serve as a permanent reminder that corporate values are, at best, marketing. That the next generation of tech workers will enter these companies with clear eyes about what the relationship actually is: transactional.

The pessimistic read is that Zamost is right to pose it as a question. Because companies have been pulling this bait-and-switch for decades, and workers keep falling for it. Maybe the cycle just repeats.

Either way, the lesson isn't really about politics. It's about understanding what these companies actually are. They're not movements. They're not communities. They're not families. They're businesses that will say whatever they need to say to achieve their business objectives. And right now, the (somewhat short-sighted) business objective is staying in the good graces of an administration that has made clear it rewards loyalty and punishes dissent.

So no, they didn't really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The "whole self" thing was just the price of admission in a seller's market. Now that it's a buyer's market, they'd prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code.

The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they're building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

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No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let's just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration's bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio:

MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday to prevent federal immigration agents from taking a local resident into detention, although the city of St. Peter denied the intervention in a statement Saturday.

It's believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago.

It won't be the last. But it's sure to anger the administration, which has already made it clear it thinks local officials are to blame for the two people federal officers have murdered in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.

The person federal officers ran off the road, threatened at gun point, dragged out of the car, and arrested was someone who was merely observing what they were doing. It was one woman in one car and yet federal officers felt compelled to box her in and approach her with weapons drawn. They treated this like a felony stop, as though they were in the process of apprehending a known violent criminal, rather than one person armed with a dash cam and a cellphone.

She wasn't doing anything illegal. She was doing what anyone could have done: recorded law enforcement officers performing their public duties. Just because ICE et al would prefer to go about their business unobserved (hence the rented cars, dummy license plates, and face masks) doesn't make being seen by others an illegal act.

Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to tell others to call 911 on her behalf. Federal officers arrested her and drove her towards the Whipple Federal Building, presumably in hopes of getting her on the next plane to wherever the fuck before she had a chance to contact anyone.

But her 911 call derailed this:

"I couldn't hear what was being said, but within 30 seconds after they hung up, they exited on, an exit that goes into Le Sueur… and then turned around, didn't say anything to me, and started heading back towards St. Peter."

The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.

Shortly after that, Chief Grochow drove her home from the St. Peter police station, where the federal officers had left her.

This is frightening stuff. If her husband hadn't managed to talk to an attorney and if that attorney hadn't reached out to the police chief, this US citizen might still be sitting in an ICE detention center.

And if that's not frightening enough, there's this coda, which makes it clear this administration is willing to punish anyone who won't immediately try to lick the boots pressed to their necks:

MPR News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident.  A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman's name, date of birth and "A-number," or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them. 

What the fuck. This isn't normal. This is a rogue administration that answers to no one and has made it clear to the federal officers who serve it (rather than the public they're supposed to be serving) that they'll never be punished for behaving like violent, lawless thugs. Many more people are going to be brutalized, if not actually killed, by this government simply because they refuse to ignore what ICE, etc. are doing.

So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive.

One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with your community — and a lot of additional impressions and engagement — to generally shitty and badly run companies like Facebook.

That not only made public discourse worse, it ignored that the public comment section (and the correction and accountability for errors that sometimes appeared there) were helpful for the journalistic process and ultimately, the public interest.

Anyway, more than a decade later and Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation (and Mike's co-host on the Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast as well as a former editor at the Times of London in charge of the paper's user comment section) notes that many websites and editors have had second thoughts.

A growing number of websites, burned from an unhealthy relationship with Facebook (a company too large and incompetent to function), are restoring their online comment sections, looking to automation to help with moderation, and are trying to rekindle functional, online discourse.

He does a nice job pointing out many of the benefits of on-site public comment sections that were ignored by editors a decade ago as they rushed to relieve themselves of the responsibility of trying:

"Most journalists whose articles face criticism below the line may be surprised by the following statement: people who post a comment are more likely to return to the site and be loyal to the brand, even if the comment isn't glowing praise."

When editors, circa 2010-2015, announced they were killing their comment sections, it was usually accompanied with some form of gibberish about how the decision was made because they just really "valued conversation" or wanted to "build better relationships."

Sometimes newsroom managers would be slightly more candid in acknowledging they just didn't give enough of a shit to try very hard, in part because they felt news comments were just wild, untamable beasts, outside of the laws of physics and man, and irredeemable at best. Often, this assault on the comment section went hand in hand with editors hostile to the public generally (see: the New York Times' still criticized 2017 decision to eliminate the role of Public Editor.)

The rush to vilify and eliminate the comment section ignored, as Ben notes, that a subscription to news outlets doesn't just have to provide access to journalism, it can feature participation in journalism. As an online writer for decades, I've seen every insult known to man; at the same time I've routinely seen comment insight that either taught me something new or helped me correct errors in my reporting that both I and my editors missed.

The obliteration of the comment section threw that baby out with the bath water. Facebook comments are, if you haven't noticed, a homogenized shit hole full of bots, rage, and bile that undermines connection and any effort at real conversation. These sorts of badly run systems are also more easily gamed by bad actors (like, say, authoritarians using culture war agitprop to confuse the electorate and take power).

More localized on-site comments are, as Ben notes, potentially part of our path out of the modern information dark ages:

"Within the shifting environment that digital publishers have found themselves in, it's vital to reckon with the needs of news-consuming audiences beyond timely information. People are eager to connect and have real dialogue about topics that inform their lives. Comment sections need to change, but I think they can serve a vital role."

Of course, it's hard to repair ye olde comment section when modern journalism itself is suffering from so much institutional rot. But you've got to start somewhere. And rekindling a smaller, highly localized relationship with your regular visitors is as good of a place to start as any.

In any war, information is power. Be it kinetic wars, cyberwarfare, or information wars, data is everything. And since RFK Jr. has clearly declared war on vaccines in America, it's not a huge surprise that he is looking to control information about vaccines. Or, as it turns out, simply sweep that information away.

Nearly half of the databases that public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were updating on a monthly basis have been frozen without notice or explanation, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study—led by Janet Freilich, a law expert at Boston University, and Jeremy Jacobs, a medical professor at Vanderbilt University—examined the status of all CDC databases, finding a total of 82 that had, as of early 2025, been receiving updates at least monthly. But, of those 82, only 44 were still being regularly updated as of October 2025, with 38 (46 percent) having their updates paused without public notice or explanation.

Examining the databases' content, it appeared that vaccination data was most affected by the stealth data freezes. Of the 38 outdated databases, 33 (87 percent) included data related to vaccination. In contrast, none of the 44 still-updated databases relate to vaccination. Other frozen databases included data on infectious disease burden, such as data on hospitalizations from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

The following are points that should be as uncontroversial as they are plain and clear. Medical and health professionals cannot operate without data and information. Government agencies and professionals cannot make good public health decisions without good and current data and information. Operating in a vacuum could mean a death sentence for some, or mere horrific health outcomes for others.

Whatever Kennedy is aiming at when it comes to American health, it clearly isn't for the sort of positive health outcomes mentioned above. If it were, this obviously coordinated attack on information about vaccinations and the diseases they combat in these databases wouldn't be carried out.

"Given the vaccine skepticism of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, it is concerning that nearly 90 percent of the paused databases related to vaccination surveillance, with additional gaps in respiratory disease monitoring," Freilich, Jacobs, and their co-authors write in the study.

These databases and the information within them are used to identify under-vaccinated populations relating to specific diseases so that public health officials can coordinate on responses to outbreaks of those diseases. Responses that typically involve vaccination campaigns to protect a population that hitherto has failed to protect themselves.

But it's clear this iteration of government isn't interested in those kinds of responses. You can see it plain as day in the reaction, or rather inaction, concerning the country's current measles outbreak. Ostriches don't actually stick their heads in the sand when in danger, but it appears RFK Jr. does. Or perhaps this isn't being done out of fear. Perhaps this is all part of a coordinated plan.

In an accompanying editorial, Jeanne Marrazzo, CEO of the Infectious Disease Society of America and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stated the concern in starker terms, writing: "The evidence is damning: The administration's anti-vaccine stance has interrupted the reliable flow of the data we need to keep Americans safe from preventable infections. The consequences will be dire."

Marrazzo emphasizes that the lack of current data not only hampers outbreak response efforts but also helps the health secretary realize his vision for the CDC, writing: Kennedy, "who has stated baldly that the CDC failed to protect Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy. The CDC as it currently exists is no longer the stalwart, reliable source of public health data that for decades has set the global bar for rigorous public health practice."

This is dangerous. I would love to hear a single, coherent explanation why it would be a good thing for this data to no longer be available to public health professionals. Other than Kennedy wanting to play hide and seek due to his anti-vaxxer stances, of course. What good comes of us being more ignorant?

There is no answer, of course. There is only agenda. Facts inconvenient to that agenda will be disappeared.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week posted a photo of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St. Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. 

A short while later, the White House posted the same photo - except that version had been digitally altered to darken Armstrong's skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. The Guardian one of many media outlets to report on this image manipulation, created a handy slider graphic to help viewers see clearly how the photo had been changed.  

This isn't about "owning the libs" — this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the entire world. 

The New York Times reported it had run the two images through Resemble.AI, an A.I. detection system, which concluded Noem's image was real but the White House's version showed signs of manipulation. "The Times was able to create images nearly identical to the White House's version by asking Gemini and Grok — generative A.I. tools from Google and Elon Musk's xAI start-up — to alter Ms. Noem's original image." 

Most of us can agree that the government shouldn't lie to its constituents. We can also agree that good government does not involve emphasizing cruelty or furthering racial biases. But this abuse of technology violates both those norms. 

"Accuracy and truthfulness are core to the credibility of visual reporting," the National Press Photographers Association said in a statement issued about this incident. "The integrity of photographic images is essential to public trust and to the historical record. Altering editorial content for any purpose that misrepresents subjects or events undermines that trust and is incompatible with professional practice." 

Reworking an arrest photo to make the arrestee look more distraught not only is a lie, but it's also a doubling-down on a "the cruelty is the point" manifesto. Using a manipulated image further humiliates the individual and perpetuate harmful biases, and the only reason to darken an arrestee's skin would be to reinforce colorist stereotypes and stoke the flames of racial prejudice, particularly against dark-skinned people.  

History is replete with cruel and racist images as propaganda: Think of Nazi Germany's cartoons depicting Jewish people, or contemporaneously, U.S. cartoons depicting Japanese people as we placed Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Time magazine caught hell in 1994 for using an artificially darkened photo of O.J. Simpson on its cover, and several Republican political campaigns in recent years have been called out for similar manipulation in recent years. 

But in an age when we can create or alter a photo with a few keyboard strokes, when we can alter what viewers think is reality so easily and convincingly, the danger of abuse by government is greater.   

Had the Trump administration not ham-handedly released the retouched perp-walk photo after Noem had released the original, we might not have known the reality of that arrest at all. This dishonesty is all the more reason why Americans' right to record law enforcement activities must be protected. Without independent records and documentation of what's happening, there's no way to contradict the government's lies. 

This incident raises the question of whether the Trump Administration feels emboldened to manipulate other photos for other propaganda purposes. Does it rework photos of the President to make him appear healthier, or more awake? Does it rework military or intelligence images to create pretexts for war? Does it rework photos of American citizens protesting or safeguarding their neighbors to justify a military deployment? 

In this instance, like so much of today's political trolling, there's a good chance it'll be counterproductive for the trolls: The New York Times correctly noted that the doctored photograph could hinder the Armstrong's right to a fair trial. "As the case proceeds, her lawyers could use it to accuse the Trump administration of making what are known as improper extrajudicial statements. Most federal courts bar prosecutors from making any remarks about court filings or a legal proceeding outside of court in a way that could prejudice the pool of jurors who might ultimately hear the case." They also could claim the doctored photo proves the Justice Department bore some sort of animus against Armstrong and charged her vindictively. 

In the past, we've urged caution when analyzing proposals to regulate technologies that could be used to create false images. In those cases, we argued that any new regulation should rely on the established framework for addressing harms caused by other forms of harmful false information. But in this situation, it is the government itself that is misusing technology and propagating harmful falsehoods. This doesn't require new laws; the government can and should put an end to this practice on its own. 

Any reputable journalism organization would fire an employee for manipulating a photo this way; many have done exactly that. It's a shame our government can't adhere to such a basic ethical and moral code too. 

Republished from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.