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Last July, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court handled a geofence warrant case, marking the first time this issue had been handled at the appellate level. The robbery suspect, Okello Chatrie, challenged the constitutionality of the warrant, arguing that its non-particular nature placed it outside the bounds of the Fourth Amendment.

A half-decade ago, this argument wouldn’t have worked. But the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision — which followed from its warrant requirement for device searches in Riley — changed all of that. Gone were the routine assumptions about the Third Party Doctrine. If cell phones needed connections to towers (and were filled with far more information than could be found in the search of a house), then the Fourth Amendment needed to be extended to cover these utilitarian computers everyone now carries with them everywhere they go.

The problem with geofence warrants is that they work backwards. Unlike the cell site location info (CSLI) cited in the Carpenter case, investigators were still searching for suspects, rather than tracking the movements of known suspects. Similar to cell tower dumps, geofence warrants ask Google to provide location data and device info on everyone in a certain area at a certain times, even though investigators know going into this that 99.9% of the people being “searched” aren’t actually criminal suspects.

The Fourth Circuit ultimately ruled that geofence warrants were constitutional. And, even if they weren’t, the subject matter was novel enough that investigators should be granted the good faith exception. Its reasoning, however, focused on Chatrie himself and the data he “shared” with Google.

[W]e find that the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained two hours’ worth of Chatrie’s location information, since he voluntarily exposed this information to Google.

That’s where Carpenter factors in. Is it really “voluntary” when certain functions, services, and apps simply won’t work unless device owners “opt in” to location sharing? That rhetorical question was answered by the Fifth Circuit a month later: there’s not much about this that’s actually “voluntary.” To make that point, it quoted one of Chatrie’s submissions to the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court:

[T]he fact that approximately 592 million people have “opted in” to comprehensive tracking of their locations itself calls into question the “voluntary” nature of this process. In short, “a user simply cannot forfeit the protections of the Fourth Amendment for years of precise location information by selecting ‘YES, I’M IN’ at midnight while setting up Google Assistant, even if some text offered warning along the way.”

The Fifth Circuit said searching the data of all Google users to produce a list of those matching the criteria of the geofence warrant specifications was nothing more than a “general warrant,” the sort of non-specific government rummaging that’s specifically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Five months after its original decision was handed down, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court announced it was going to rethink its first take on geofence warrants, a reconsideration no doubt prompted by the Fifth Circuit’s rejection of geofence warrants.

Unfortunately, putting this in front of all 15 Appeals Court judges hasn’t changed anything. The entirety of the official decision [PDF] reads thusly:

*PER CURIAM:*The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.

But it’s not quite that simple. It’s followed by 122 pages of opinions from the en banc crew. While there are some objections to geofence warrants from several judges, almost every judge issuing a concurring or dissenting opinion have decided that whether or not the warrants are constitutional doesn’t really matter — at least as this point.

Here’s the breakdown from Orin Kerr, whose excellent post on the outcome of this en banc hearing deserves to be read in full.

[I]f I’m counting the votes correctly, there is a 7-7 split on whether a search occurred—with the 15th judge, Judge Diaz, not expressing a view either way.  So there is no majority opinion, but instead just a crazy amount of uncertainty. What is the law now, after all this?  I haven’t a clue.

After all of this time and a full reconsideration, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court has managed to leave the law unsettled. Most of the judges who feel a Fourth Amendment search did occur (meaning the Third Party Doctrine does not apply) would still give the government a good faith pass because… the law is unsettled.

Nearly half the judges went the other way, deciding geofence warrants are a Third Party issue, rather than a Fourth Amendment issue, which means the government doesn’t even need the good faith exception to deploy general warrants.

The five judges who chose to discuss the Fifth Circuit’s take on the issue all agreed the Fifth Circuit was wrong, which means there’s definitely a circuit split that will need to be resolved in the future.

And, because the good faith exception was applied by most of the judges, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court still has yet to rule definitively on the constitutionality of geofence warrants, which means yet another case must hit this level before the Appeals Court might be forced to issue a ruling on the merits, rather than duck out through the “warrant exception” side door.

We’re back to where we started, at least in the Fourth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit’s take has yet to be overruled by the Supreme Court. And the Fourth Circuit doesn’t even have solid take on the issue, other than it’s probably going to give cops a pass, rather than give the general public better protections against warrants that work their way backwards from “search ’em all” to probable cause.

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Do you have what it takes to run a social media network that grows to one billion users and beyond? That’s the question in our new card game, One Billion Users, which we successfully funded on Kickstarter last year. Now the game is entering production, and since we have no plans to make more copies after this, it’s your last chance to get one for yourself. The Kickstarter is accepting late pledges through the end of tomorrow, Wednesday May 7th.

(For those of you who already backed the campaign but want to purchase additional copies, you’ll have a chance to do that before your order is fulfilled, as long as you let us know about your intent to buy additional copies by the end of tomorrow.)

We’re very excited to get the game into people’s hands, and are on track to do so towards the end of this summer. Here’s another peek at our sample copy from the printer:

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We’ve covered for years the ugly retransmission feuds that break out between your cable company and broadcasters during contract negotiations. These fights routinely result in you losing access to channels you pay for with no real recourse. The FCC has perpetually refused to protect consumers from this stuff, taking a sort of “boys will be boys” approach, regardless of party.

Now the Trump FCC has decided to pretend to take action, but their “solution” is super dodgy, likely illegal, and primarily aimed at propping up the local right wing propaganda broadcast ecosystem.

Some simple background: cable, satellite, and streaming platforms pay retransmission fees to local broadcast television stations for the right to retransmit their signals to subscribers. Reverse retransmission fees are payments local television stations make to national broadcast networks for all the leverage and perks that come from being associated with a national broadcast brand (ABC, CBS, NBC).

In an editorial over at The National Pulse, rarely-heard-from Trump FCC pick Nathan Simington has crafted an op-ed proposing reform of retransmission and reverse retransmission fees. His proposal, to cap “retransmission fees” at 30 percent to harm the “corrupt media cartel”:

“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should cap reverse retransmission fees (revenue that local TV stations pay back to their affiliated broadcast networks) at 30 percent to protect local broadcasters, lower consumer costs, and strike a decisive blow against the corrupt media cartel.”

On the surface that’s kind of a snoozer. But if national broadcaster or cable company doesn’t provide appropriate deference and terms to one of these local right wing propaganda peddlers pretending to do journalism, the FCC says it would intervene:

“And if the networks try to make an end-run by demanding an unfair cut in ad sales, restricting available airtime for local news and weather, or prohibiting broadcasters from trying to reach new audiences through alternative distribution channels, then the FCC should be prepared to step in and stop it.”

It’s “funny” because the government, for decades, refused to intervene in the very real problem of retrans feuds and soaring programming costs because they insisted it was overreach. And now that the FCC is intervening, it’s in this super dodgy, bad faith way that’s likely illegal. Simington tries to frame this proposal as a solution to media consolidation and a plan to benefit small town Americans:

“We must return power to the communities and stations serving the people. Local broadcasters provide vital coverage—emergency alerts, school board meetings, small business spotlights—that you’ll never find on CNN or MSNBC. They reflect the values of the towns and cities they serve. “

Except most local U.S. broadcasters do no such thing. Most of America is dominated by consolidated right wing local broadcasters like Nexstar, Fox or Sinclair, which long ago replaced traditional news with a lot of lazy-ass infotainment (the local zoo has a new Panda!) heavily peppered with right wing propaganda on issues like crime, homelessness, drug use, and immigration.

You might recall that Sinclair got the wrong kind of attention a few years back for its “must run” propaganda segments kissing Donald Trump’s ass:

Simington basically wants to exploit a real problem (media consolidation and messy retransmission disputes) and leverage it to push a fake solution favorable to Republican-friendly local broadcasters. As Free Press CEO Craig Aaron notes on Bluesky, it’s illegal for the FCC to take regulatory action based on the political content of broadcasts (I recommend reading his whole thread, especially the bits about Simington’s Chief of Staff Gavin Wax).

Saw this Bloomberg story, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. Retransmission reform seemed like a strange place for Nathan Simington, the seldom seen other Republican on the FCC, to show up. But it gets weirder and more unconstitutional.

— Craig Aaron (@notaaroncraig.bsky.social) 2025-05-02T20:34:35.799Z

This is, as always, about money, size, and influence. Nexstar and Sinclair don’t want to have to pay as much to have their propaganda carried. They also want the FCC to eliminate whatever’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits so they can expand their influence. And Trump Republicans want to continue their radical ideological mission of replacing all journalism with Trump-friendly propaganda.

So Simington and FCC boss Brendan Carr have been making the rounds dressing up this whole plan as a way to “empower local broadcasters.” Something that’s then parroted by lazy journalists or media companies that don’t want to get on the wrong side of King Dingus:

But again, the goal here has nothing to do with helping local journalism, the goal here is to empower right wing propaganda that’s favorable to Trump. As with so much stuff the Trump administration does, this obvious hand out to a handful of rich guys is being portrayed as somehow “populist”:

“This reform is in the same spirit as President Trump’s efforts to break up Big Tech, bring back American manufacturing, and take on the pharmaceutical lobby. It’s a populist solution to a top-down problem. It reduces costs, decentralizes power, and reorients the system to serve the needs of regular Americans, not just media executives and political elites.”

The Republican con here should be obvious by now. They want to destroy journalism and replace it with propaganda. If you do anything other than coddle and amplify that propaganda, you’re accused of “censorship” (remember when they freaked out after DirecTV refused to carry OAN?). They then set about censoring any viewpoints critical of authoritarianism while pretending to be “free speech absolutists.”

Just more dodgy shit from an agency whose primary job appears to be harassing companies for not being racist enough, or launching faking investigations into media companies that do journalism critical of King Trump. It’s like watching the Ministry Of Truth out of 1984 be constructed in real time, except by absolute fucking idiots who worship a used car salesmen operating at a fourth grade reading level.

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It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have taken the form of everything from so-called “Broadcast TV Fees“, really just the cost of programming as part of the television service, or “Internet Cost Recovery Fees” on the internet side, whatever the hell that means. The end result has been decades of pissed off customers who are only now beginning to have other viable options for content and internet services, with much of the frustration stemming from these inflated prices, sneaky fees, and a complete lack of transparency as to what any of this is for.

I’ve know this for years and years now. So, likely, have you, along with most of the rest of the public. Comcast’s President, Mike Cavanagh, acknowledged what we’ve all known, seemingly for the first time, on a recent Comcast earnings call.

“In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of the network and connectivity products that I just described,” Cavanagh said. “[Cable division CEO] Dave [Watson] and his team have worked hard to understand the reasons for this disconnect and have identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us. The good news is that both are fixable and we are already underway with execution plans to address these challenges.”

The 183,000-subscriber loss lowered Comcast’s residential Internet subscribers to 29.19 million. Comcast also reported a first-quarter drop of 17,000 business broadband subscribers, lowering that category’s total to 2.45 million.

Nothing focuses the mind of a president of a major public company quite like a falling stock price, which is exactly what is happening to Comcast, with its stock dropping nearly 10% over the last five years. It’s a bit jarring to hear this said out loud by Cavanagh as though this is some kind of revelation, particularly given how often Comcast and other cable providers have appeared on lists of the companies that the public dislikes the most. Were they somehow not paying attention to those?

In any case, Cavanagh is saying all the right words about simplifying and locking in prices to avoid this frustration moving forward.

Cavanagh said that Comcast plans to make changes in marketing and operations “with the highest urgency.” This means that “we are simplifying our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments,” he said.

Comcast last week announced a five-year price guarantee for broadband customers who sign up for a new package. Comcast said customers will get a “simple monthly price starting as low as $55 per month,” without having to enter a contract, giving them “freedom and flexibility to cancel at any time without penalty.”

How well they pull this off is a matter of the specifics and the adherence to the promise. If Comcast finally fully goes all in on simplicity, knocks it off with the bullshit fees, and stops with the sneaky tactics to raise or otherwise hide prices, this will be received positively. Whether it’s enough to put the genie back in the bottle on public perception to turn around subscriber numbers is a different question, of course. I tend to think the train has already left the station on that one. Comcast apparently thinks that might be the case for a bit as well.

Comcast investors shouldn’t expect an immediate turnaround, though. “We anticipate that it will take several quarters for our new approach to gain traction and impact the business in a meaningful way,” Cavanagh said.

Look, Comcast has sucked on this stuff for many, many years. It’s going to take a bit of time and good behavior to gain the general public’s trust back, never mind someone like myself that cut the Comcast cord entirely years ago.

But if the company has finally found religion on its crappy behavior, that’s ultimately a good thing.

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At a time when Section 230 has become one of the most politically divisive tech policy issues, our final episode of the Otherwise Objectionable podcast brings together an unusual panel for a “roundtable discussion” between myself, Jessica Melugin of CEI, Charles Cooke from the National Review, and Dave Willner (well-known trust & safety expert who has worked at Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI).

Episode 8: Prescriptions to Save the Internet

While these voices span the ideological spectrum and likely disagree on many policy issues, all of them think that Section 230 is an important and useful law. And in this discussion, we explain why we all believe Section 230 was (and remains) the right law for the internet.

Much of the discussion focused on whether or not there were any lessons from Section 230 for new technologies, like AI. There was also surprising optimism about 230’s chances for survival — though I remain more skeptical given the current political climate (and widespread ignorance about the law).

This episode wraps up this eight-part podcast series. It was really fun to work on, and I think is especially useful for folks who want to understand the history of why Section 230 exists and how well it’s worked.

Looking back across the episodes, what’s struck me most is how a law that was crafted in response to a specific bad early-internet court ruling has proven remarkably adaptable to challenges of an evolving internet. While the debates around Section 230 have become increasingly heated, the fundamental principles — that we want to encourage community, user empowerment, and innovation at the internet’s edges — remain as vital as ever.

If you missed it, here are all the episodes:

Episode 1: The Most Misunderstood Law on the InternetEpisode 2: The Dawn of the InternetEpisode 3: Law and DisorderEpisode 4: The SolutionEpisode 5: Blowback, and the Dust SettlesEpisode 6: The Rest of the WorldEpisode 7: The Future of Speech OnlineEpisode 8: Prescriptions to Save the Internet

This was a fascinating project to work on, and it was great to see it regularly ranked in the top tech podcasts on Apple’s podcast charts over the last few months. Thanks to everyone who listened! While this series is now done, you can continue to listen to the Techdirt podcast and Ctrl-Alt-Speech in your podcast apps of choice!

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Today Microsoft shut down Skype, a company that helped revolutionize phone calls online. To commemorate the death of Skype, we’re running a recent “Pessimist’s Archive” article on the history of internet calls, and how it almost wasn’t allowed. If you’re not already, you should subscribe to the Pessimist’s Archive.

It used to cost money to call someone, and if that someone was in another country – you would pay a premium: in the mid-90s a prime time call to Paris from New York cost around $113 an hour (in 2025 dollars)

Then came the internet, paving the way for cheap and free calls to and from anywhere in the world… Guess what? Traditional long-distance telephone companies felt threatened.

In 1995, the internet had just 16 million users — but it was enough to make online phone calls useful. That year, startup VocalTec launched the first commercial internet phone software, amusingly named ‘i-phone’ (short for internet phone.) It quickly caught on with early web users, offering cheap long-distance calls – partly thanks to being exempt from FCC tariffs like local access charges. This prompted action from incumbents, who deemed it unfair.

In 1996 America’s Carriers Telecommunications Association (ACTA) – representing over 300 of them – filed a petition with the FCC that sought to ban the sale of long distance internet telephone services until they were regulated as ‘common carriers.’ The internet friendly Clinton Administration would oppose the petition – but it was up to the FCC to make a final ruling.

The Backlash

This is when the nerds stepped in: web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen told The San Francisco Examiner that his browser – Netscape – would build online calling into a future software update seemingly in protest (the feature never materialized.)

“Are we hurting their ability to charge you $10 for a long-distance phone call? Tough bananas” – Harvey Kaufman, vice president of NetSpeak Corp.

Jeff Pulver – an early i-phone user, who’d started a popular mailing list for online phone enthusiasts, would take it upon himself to lead the resistance. Prior to the FCC petition he launched the first online telephone network called ‘Free World Dialup’ (using the VocalTec system.) His mailing list turned into the ‘Voice on the Net coalition’: a group of internet phone enthusiasts and tech startups building out the technology.

This rag tag bunch of innovators would cobble together a lobbying effort to fight incumbents and allow this nascent technology to flourish…

In the following 8 years the VON coalition would fend off various attempts to rein in the technology, while the FCC would hold off ruling on the ACTA petition (VON is still operating today.)

1998 would see the FCC make a number of statements sympathetic to online phone services – meanwhile iphone.com would host an effort to petition lawmakers against online phone services. It isn’t clear if this was a real grassroots effort, or an astroturfed one by traditional phone providers…

Wayback machine capture

In 2000 a bill passed the US house of representatives preventing phone companies charging by the minute for internet access – but it excluded internet telephony services. This prompted Jeff Pulver and his VON coalition to organize the ‘Internet Freedom Rally’ in Washington DC. It would feature the chairman of the FCC and classic rock performances.

In 2004 the FCC would finally rule on the ACTA petition after 8 years – but not before the Justice Department asked for a delay on a decisions until online phones call could be as easily wire tapped as regular calls. The FCC would make its final ruling dubbed the ‘Pulver Order’ allowing for cheap and free online phone calls to anywhere in the world we take for granted today.

This is a good example of how incumbents will try to use old rules to thwart competition enabled by new technologies – had the long distance telecoms companies succeeded, services like Facebook and Google might not be able to offer free voice and video calls globally.

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In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration’s executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an “overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints” through the targeted destruction of a law firm that represented Trump’s political opponents.

The ruling excoriates not just the Trump administration’s unconstitutional overreach, but also delivers a withering critique of the law firms that chose to capitulate to similar threats. Drawing on sources from Shakespeare to the Founding Fathers, Judge Howell frames the order as part of a dangerous historical pattern of would-be autocrats targeting lawyers as a path to power:

No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 2, act 4, sc. 2, l. 75. When Shakespeare’s character, a rebel leader intent on becoming king, see id. l. 74, hears this suggestion, he promptly incorporates this tactic as part of his plan to assume power, leading in the same scene to the rebel leader demanding “[a]way with him,” referring to an educated clerk, who “can make obligations and write court hand,” id. l. 90, 106. Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power. See Walters v. Nat’l Ass’n of Radiation Survivors, 473 U.S. 305, 371 n.24 (1985) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (explaining the import of the same Shakespearean statement to be “that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government”).

The importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice has been recognized in this country since its founding era. In 1770, John Adams made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre and “claimed later to have suffered the loss of more than half his practice.” DAVID MCCULLOUGH, JOHN ADAMS 68 (2001). “I had no hesitation,” he explained, since “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country,” and “the Bar ought . . . to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.” 3 DIARY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ADAMS 293 (L.H. Butterfield et al. eds., 1961). When the Bill of Rights was ratified, these principles were codified into the Constitution: The Sixth Amendment secured the right, in “all criminal prosecutions,” to “have the Assistance of Counsel for . . . defence,” U.S. CONST. amend. VI, and the Fifth Amendment protected “the right to the aid of counsel when desired and provided by the party asserting the right,” Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68 (1932). This value placed on the role of lawyers caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville, who in reflecting on his travels throughout the early United States in 1831 and 1832, insightfully remarked that “the authority . . . intrusted to members of the legal profession . . . is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.” ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 301 (Henry Reeve trans., 2002) (1835).

Quoting Shakespeare, John Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville all in the first two paragraphs? You can tell we’re in for quite a ride. But the key point is this: Trump is acting like a dictator, doing things he cannot be allowed to do:

The instant case presents an unprecedented attack on these foundational principles. On March 6, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14230 (“EO 14230”), 90 Fed. Reg. 11781 (Mar. 11, 2025), entitled “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP.” By its terms, this Order stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees—from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries, and mailroom attendants—due to the Firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current President disagrees, as well as the Firm’s own speech. In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” EO 14230 takes the approach of “Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,” sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.

At the end of this paragraph, there’s a footnote which calls out those law firms that capitulated, noting that this should scare clients away from using those law firms, as you can never believe that they’re not just aligned with the government’s interests over a client’s.

This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees. Yet, some clients may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel, since at least the publicized deal terms appear only to forestall, rather than eliminate, the threat of being targeted in an Executive Order. As amici former and current general counsel caution, a “fundamental premise of the rule of law” is that “when parties challenge the government, their lawyers ‘oppose[] the designated representatives of the State,’ and ‘[t]he system assumes that adversarial testing will ultimately advance the public interest in truth and fairness.’ This safeguard against government overreach fails when attorneys cannot ‘advanc[e] the undivided interests of [their] client[s]’ for fear of reprisal from the government.”…

Only when lawyers make the choice to challenge rather than back down when confronted with government action raising non-trivial constitutional issues can a case be brought to court for judicial review of the legal merits, as was done in this case by plaintiff Perkins Coie LLP, plaintiff’s counsel Williams & Connolly, and the lawyers, firms, organizations, and individuals who submitted amicus briefs in this case. As one amicus aptly put it, “[o]ur judicial system is under serious threat when determining whether to file an Amicus Curiae brief could be a career ending decision. But, when lawyers are apprehensive about retribution simply for filing a brief adverse to the government, there is no other choice but to do so.”…. If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.

This echoes what we wrote back in March. When the history books are written on this, those who capitulated will be remembered as pathetic cowards lacking the backbone to stand up for themselves against injustice.

Judge Howell then calls out just how unconstitutional this is, rightly pointing to two free speech cases that MAGA celebrated in the past two years when they came down: 303 Creative (the case about the fictional homophobic website designer) and Vullo (in which an elected official tried to coerce companies who worked with the NRA to stop doing business with them).

Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, however, is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with “tolerance, not coercion.” 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570, 603 (2023). The Supreme Court has long made clear that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics . . . or other matters of opinion.” W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). Simply put, government officials “cannot . . . use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024).

This is smart, even if the MAGA faithful don’t care about their own hypocrisy. Judge Howell is putting an exclamation point on that hypocrisy by directly calling out how their stance is a complete 180 to what they claimed to celebrate from the Supreme Court in the last two years.

She’s both calling out their total lack of principles and signaling to the same Supreme Court that made those rulings that, to be consistent with them, they should come to the same conclusion: that these executive orders are both unconstitutional and unconscionable.

I won’t go through all the reasoning (it is a 102-page order, after all), I will call out a few key bits, starting with the Court calling out just how incompetent the DOJ’s filings in the case were:

Neither the government’s motion to dismiss itself or its proposed order cites to any procedural rule as the basis for the requested dismissal*, see Gov’t’s MTD; id., Proposed Order, ECF No. 43-2), and the government’s memorandum in support likewise* contains no clear statement of the procedural rules relied upon as to each claim, leaving the legal bases for the motion to the Court to discern from vague headings used in the government’s memorandum or to tease out of the text of the same document, despite the critical differences in applicable standards depending on which rule is relied upon. Regardless of whether this reflects a strategy to “disguise[] the nature of its motion,” Pl.’s Opp’n at 5, plaintiff requests denial of any intended government cross-motion for summary judgment “for failure to comply with [D.D.C.] Local Rule 7(h)(1), which requires a statement of undisputed material facts supported by record citations,”

This is notable, if only to call out how almost all of the lawyers at the DOJ who know what the fuck they’re doing in court are either gone or sidelined from these cases. The lawyering from those left over is incompetent, and judges recognize that.

Also called out: the idea that the President can just claim something is “in the national interest” and that makes it unreviewable by a court. Not how it works:

When the government does not even claim that a general policy about security clearances was motivated by national security, judicial review of that policy could not threaten unduly entangling the judicial branch in questions of national security. Instead, the EO invokes “the national interest,” id., a concept seemingly far broader and more nebulous than threats to national security. When asked, government counsel was unable to define what exactly falls within the scope of “the national interest,” see, e.g., TRO Hr’g Tr. at 52:21-53:4, and the scope appears to be essentially unlimited, since disagreements about the benefits of diversity programs in hiring apparently qualify, see EO 14230 § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11781 (stating that plaintiff’s alleged discrimination “represents good cause to conclude that they [should not] have access to our Nation’s secrets”); Gov’t’s Reply at 1 (complaining about plaintiff’s “aggressive DEI practices”). Finding any such government actions judicially unreviewable simply because the Executive branch invoked “the national interest” would represent a breathtaking expansion of executive power at the expense of the constitutionally mandated role of the judicial branch and the concomitant safeguards for the individual rights of Americans.

Judge Howell is also paying attention to Trump bragging about how much money he’s getting from capitulating law firms for doing nothing wrong:

President Trump referred to these deals being cut with law firms, in a speech on April 8, 2025, stating: “Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump? $100 million, another $100 million, for damages that they’ve done. But they give you $100 million and then they announce, ‘We have done nothing wrong.’ And I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell, they’ve given me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong. And we’ll use some of those people, some of those great firms, and they are great firms too—they just had a bad moment.”….

The end result of all this is that a permanent injunction has been issued, which Trump is likely to appeal.

The U.S. Constitution affords critical protections against Executive action like that ordered in EO 14230. Government officials, including the President, may not “subject[] individuals to ‘retaliatory actions’ after the fact for having engaged in protected speech.” Hous. Cmty. Coll. Sys., 595 U.S. at 474 (quoting Nieves, 587 U.S. at 398). They may neither “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,” Vullo, 602 U.S. at 188, nor engage in the use of “purely personal and arbitrary power,” Yick Wo, 118 U.S. at 370. In this case, these and other foundational protections were violated by EO 14230. On that basis, this Court has found that EO 14230 violates the Constitution and is thus null and void. For the reasons explained, plaintiff is entitled to summary judgment and declaratory and permanent injunctive relief on Counts II through IX of the Amended Complaint. The government’s motion to dismiss is denied.

What makes this ruling particularly powerful is how Judge Howell deliberately frames it within recent Supreme Court precedents that Trump’s own supporters celebrated. By name-checking both 303 Creative and Vullo, the court makes it clear that those who cheered decisions protecting a website designer’s right to discriminate or defended the NRA against government coercion must now reckon with those same principles protecting law firms from presidential retaliation. While many will fall back on cognitive dissonance to ignore the contradictions, it will hopefully work on some (especially those at the Supreme Court).

The ruling also exposes, yet again, the institutional decay within the Justice Department, where competent career attorneys appear to have been sidelined in favor of those willing to advance legally incoherent arguments. When government lawyers can’t even properly cite procedural rules or define what constitutes “the national interest,” it signals a department that has abandoned legal principle for political compliance.

While this ruling alone won’t stop Trump’s campaign of lawless retribution, it creates a crucial judicial record documenting Trump’s continued weaponization of executive power to destroy those who challenge him. Judge Howell’s opinion doesn’t just reject Trump’s order — it methodically exposes it as part of a deliberate strategy to dismantle the rule of law itself. The question now is whether other courts — and the legal profession as a whole — will demonstrate similar courage in defending constitutional principles against authoritarian assault.

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Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government.

The basics of the playbook are as follows:

Search through copious amounts of internal messaging and documents for anything that can be positioned (usually misleadingly) to be spun by ignorant idiots as damning.Feed that work to a group of the most credulous, simping journalists that can be found.Let them run with reports on those “released” documents, which will massively misrepresent the reality within them.Sit back and relax as the totally false made-up narrative is considered “accepted truth” by a large segment of the population (even those outside of the MAGA brainwash cult).

As Charlie Warzel aptly explained, this approach works because “what mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents — a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along.”

The evidence itself is secondary to the performance of “revelation.”

And now it appears this playbook is set to play out at the State Department.

Darren Beattie is a top State Department official who had been in the first Trump administration before being fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and who later founded an independent news site mostly known for having effectively no credibility and pushing utter nonsense that somehow always seems to align with the MAGA cult view of the world.

Last week, MIT’s Tech Review revealed that one of the things Beattie has done at the State Department is begin a total witch hunt for documents he can use to mislead the public in Twitter Files-like fantasyland.

The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.

The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.”

For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk.

Specifically, Beattie went looking at the internal documents for the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, which was set up to — as it says on the tin — counter foreign information manipulation.

As we’ve discussed for quite some time now, the MAGA world insists that any discussion of “countering foreign manipulation” is really a cover story for “censoring domestic truths.” That’s never been the case, and it makes MAGA people look very foolish every time they make this claim, but it won’t stop them.

People within the State Department who have called this out as problematic are drastically understating what’s really happening. They’re treating this like a simple records request gone wrong, rather than recognizing it as part of a calculated disinformation campaign (which is ironic, since they’re supposed to be the disinfo experts):

Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation.

While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different.

Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer.

Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie.

While it certainly is improper for Beattie to be doing this, it seems likely that it’s about a lot more than finding out whether or not anyone in this group said anything mean about Beattie and his friends. Assuming this follows from past practice around the Twitter Files or Jim Jordan’s weaponizing of his congressional committee against anyone he believes is insufficiently willing to suck up to Trump, it appears that the intent here is to publish out of context, misleading versions of what they find to try to justify the false claims that operations like R/FIMI are actual part of the “censorship industrial complex.”

Tech Review has published an excerpt of Beattie’s “sensitive but unclassified” request for records, which shows just how unserious this is:

That’s literally “please do a search of previous records for any time anyone mentioned me or my shit-peddling friends.”

It also asks for any documents with a long list of “keywords” or “phrases” related to topics that the MAGA world obsesses over:

If you don’t soak your brain regularly in the vats of the MAGA world’s distortion field, you might not realize there are specific stories behind most of these, but you can tell that this is a mass fishing expedition, to see if the State Department was calling out the absolutely constant flood of bullshit that Beattie and his friends were peddling throughout the majority of the Biden administration, while also checking to see if the State Department folks had been calling out how the nonsense peddlers were coming from inside house.

It’s likely that some of these topics came up at some point or another, though generally under the context of whether foreign adversaries were looking to use domestic culture war controversies to stir up more anger and divisiveness. But if there are any mentions of any of this we’ll be hearing for days upon days from the names listed that it was an example of the government being “weaponized” against them, when the reality will likely be more along the lines of “get a load of this useful idiot pushing nonsense again.”

Meanwhile, rest assured that this fishing expedition is, itself, an example of an illegal weaponization of the government against people for their own speech and expression regarding how best to respond to things like purposeful disinformation. That’s because many of Beattie’s targets appear to be the voices most associated with researching disinformation and the ways to counter it (which, again, don’t mean “censorship” and quite frequently mean “with more speech.”)

Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

[….]

Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals.

Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny.

The Tech Review article says that it’s unlikely there will be all that much responsive to these requests because that’s not what these organizations actually do:

(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)

But, again, just as with the Twitter Files, that is unlikely to matter that much. Something will be found that can be presented out of context or surrounded with a bunch of misinformation to make it appear like something it is not. We’ve seen this before.

And, as the article notes, that’s definitely in the works:

Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI.

An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”

“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.

This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create.

Actual people with knowledge of what’s going on or how this works will have two choices:

Put in the ridiculous amount of work and effort to debunk the misleading narratives that will come out of this, while at a disadvantage of not having all of the details or documentsJust shut up and let the narrative overwhelm the wider ecosystem, even breaking out of MAGA confines into the general public

Neither is a great situation — and that’s by design. The Muskian/MAGA world knows that manufacturing bullshit takes minutes, while properly debunking it takes days or weeks of painstaking work. The asymmetry is the point.

Tom Nichols wrote about this at The Atlantic, suggesting that this whole thing is “strange” given that the Twitter files “revealed very little” and assumes that it’s more about creating a kind of blacklist of “bad people” in the government or that he’s trying to “chill any contact between his office and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.”

That might have something to do with it, but I think it misreads the MAGA world’s steadfast belief that the Twitter Files actually “revealed” a vast, horrendous, “censorship industrial complex” in which the “Biden Crime Family” would direct Twitter to delete patriotic posts of people revealing “the truth” about COVID and the 2020 election. That it did literally none of that doesn’t matter. The narrative is all that matters, and Beattie is looking for scraps to feed the narrative.

I think a different piece at The Atlantic, by Charlie Warzel, gets this part more correct:

The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter’s rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who’d paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter’s executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Of course, none of this stopped Musk from portraying the project as a Pentagon Papers–esque exercise in transparency. Teasing out the document dump back in December 2022, Musk argued that the series was proof of large-scale “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” but then later admitted he had not read most of the files. This was fitting: For the Twitter Files’ target audience, the archives and their broader contexts were of secondary importance. What mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents—a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along. As I wrote in 2022, Twitter had been quite public about its de-amplification policies for accounts that violated its rules, but the screenshots of internal company documents included in the Twitter Files were interpreted by already aggrieved influencers and posters as evidence of malfeasance. This gave them ammunition to portray themselves as victims of a sophisticated, coordinated censorship effort.

For many, the Twitter Files were just another ephemeral culture-war skirmish. But for the MAGA sympathetic and right-leaning free-speech-warrior crowds, the files remain a canonical, even radicalizing event. RFK Jr. has argued on prime-time television that “I don’t think we’d have free speech in this country if it wasn’t for Elon Musk” opening up Twitter’s archives. Similarly, individuals mentioned in the files, such as the researcher and Atlantic contributor Renée DiResta, have become objects of obsession to MAGA conspiracy theorists. (“One post on X credited the imaginary me with ‘brainwashing all of the local elections officials’ to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump,” DiResta wrote last year.) Simply put, the Twitter Files may have largely been full of sensationalistic claims and old news, but the gambit worked: Their release fleshed out a conspiratorial cinematic universe for devotees to glom on to.

So, as Warzel points out, Beattie’s efforts are “an attempt to add new characters and updated lore to this universe.”

The MAGA cinematic universe is about as connected to reality as the Marvel or Star Wars cinematic universes, yet they’re taken as true by a huge segment of the population. And, worse, even as it’s a matter of religious faith among the true MAGA cultists, the ideas behind them get laundered through so many people that they often breach that barrier.

To this day, I still hear from otherwise normal non-MAGA people, who think that the Twitter Files actually revealed “something bad” happening between Twitter and the government, they just think it probably wasn’t “as bad” as MAGA made it out to be. The reality that it revealed… basically nothing of interest, just doesn’t seem possible.

Beattie is trying to extend that to other parts of the government as well, and using that plan to protect his friends, and to attack and diminish the work of those who called out their bullshit.

Again, Warzel is directly on point:

Perhaps the records request could dredge up something concerning. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there could be examples of bias or worse in a large tranche of private conversations between a government agency and outside organizations on a host of polarizing topics. But Beattie’s effort, as far as MIT described it, bears none of the hallmarks of an earnest push for transparency. Instead, it reeks of cynical politicking and using one’s privileged government position to access private information for political gain.

The point is not necessarily to find anything real, though that would be a nice bonus. The point is the act of “revealing” something which can then be weaponized to support prior claims, even if the actual evidence doesn’t support the claim. It’s not the evidence, but the structures that suggest evidence. Because these are “internal” communications that have been “revealed,” they must contain important valuable secrets, otherwise why would they be leaked.

It’s all part of the show, the kayfabe — a carefully choreographed performance where the trappings of revelation matter more than the substance. Beattie is following the Twitter Files playbook to the letter: gather documents, prep friendly media, and get ready for the spectacle. It’s a vibes-based narrative designed to work whether anything noteworthy is found or not. And if history is any guide, it will work again.

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Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and voluntarily. The Carpenter decision pointed out this simply wasn’t true: cell tower location data is demanded from all cell phones in the tower coverage area and location data (along with identifying info about the device itself) was taken, rather than volunteered.

This has led to a number of interesting decisions, including a couple of state-level court decisions regarding mass collections of cell tower location data. Cell tower dumps generate records of all cell phones in certain areas during certain times, the same way geofence warrants work, but using more accurate cell site location info (CSLI).

Now, even with a warrant, courts are finding cell tower dumps to be unconstitutional. In 2022, the top court in Massachusetts said these warrants may still be constitutional, but only if law enforcement followed a stringent set of requirements. Earlier this year, a magistrate judge in Mississippi came down on cell tower dumps even more forcefully, declaring that if geofence warrants (those seeking Google location data) were unconstitutional, then it just made sense warrants seeking more accurate data with a similarly-sized dragnet also violated the Fourth Amendment.

Those rulings are limited to those states (and, in the case of the magistrate judge, likely just limited to his jurisdiction). But now there’s something at a much higher level, which is definitely headed to a showdown at the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court as soon as the DOJ gets around to appealing this ruling. Here’s Matthew Gault, reporting on this decision for 404Media.

A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11.“

The government tried to argue that if the warrant was unconstitutional, it didn’t matter because this really wasn’t a search under the Fourth Amendment. It hinted the Third Party Doctrine applied instead. The court disagrees, citing the expert for the defense, who pointed out not only was the data not voluntarily handed over to cell service providers, but even the de-duplicated list of responding devices turned this into an extremely broad search.

Spurlock’s expert Ms. Guay examined the same records Investigator Pelichowski got in response to warrant 20-SW-56 in preparation for the Hearing and clarified a few important evidentiary points for the Court. First, she demonstrated that, while Investigator Pelichowski does not appear to have done this in his investigation, from the tower dump records, she was able to determine roughly where the various phones listed in the data were and could plot them on a map if she wanted to. Second, she determined that after accounting for de-duplication the tower dump records contained records—again, including rough location information—for 1686 unique phones. Third, she clarified that the wireless company users whose phones showed up in the tower dump data did not opt in to sharing their location with their wireless provider, and indeed, could not opt out from appearing in the type of records received in response to warrant 20-SW-56.

Even if further efforts were made to eliminate false positives, it’s too little too late. A warrant can’t be salvaged because things were done after the warrant had been served and information obtained. It’s a general warrant, says the court, precisely the thing the Fourth Amendment was erected to protect against.

Taken together, the Court agrees with Spurlock that these characteristics of warrant application 20-SW-56 render it equivalent to a request for “access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”

Now, the bad news, at least for Spurlock. Pretty much every judge involved, along with the investigators who crafted the warrant, had almost zero experience in handling cell tower dump warrants. (I suspect that this is because, prior to Carpenter, most law enforcement agencies handled this with subpoenas that weren’t subject to judicial review. On the other hand, this happened in a sparsely populated area where double murders aren’t exactly common, so there may have never been a reason to use one before.) Since everyone appears to be breaking new ground here, the good faith exception applies. No evidence is suppressed.

But this holding stands going forward, which means Nevada law enforcement will need to be a lot more careful when crafting cell tower dump warrants or, better off, avoid them altogether and get back on the right side of the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements. Since this requires federal and local law enforcement to be better at their jobs, it’s safe to assume the DOJ will ask for this ruling to be overturned. Until that happens, the law of the land is clear: Cell tower dumps (and geofence warrants) are unconstitutional.

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Washington will soon become the eighth state in the country to pass Right to Repair legislation. While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the “right to repair” movement — making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own — continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair.

Technically Washington state is poised to pass two new right to repair bills.

HB 1483, which covers consumer electronics and appliances, was passed by a strong bipartisan vote of 48-1 on April 10, following a similar near-unanimous vote through the House on March 4. HB 1483 helps expand access to manufacturers’ spare parts, physical and software tools, and diagnostic and schematic information needed to make repairs on personal electronics and home appliances.

The Right to Repair bill for wheelchairs and mobility devices (SB 5680) also passed both chambers with unanimous votes. Getting both bills passed required a lot of hard work from activists across consumer rights, disability, and environmental sectors:

“I spent seven months in a wheelchair that would turn itself off without warning and refuse to start for varying periods of time. I found out after the chair was scrapped that it should have been an easy fix,” said Marsha Cutting, a member of the Governor’s Committee on Disability Issues and Employment. “This bill would have allowed me to fix my wheelchair instead of having to wait for several months. I’m grateful for the years of work on Right to Repair done by Rep. Mia Gregerson, and I hope that our community will continue to work together to make life better for people with disabilities.”

Ohio could potentially be the ninth state to pass such a law, again showcasing how the issue has broad, bipartisan support. Thanks in part due to the monopolistic behavior of agricultural giants like John Deere.

One problem, as noted recently, is that none of the states that have passed such laws have bothered to enforce them. Companies in most states haven’t really been asked to do anything different. In some states, like New York, the bills were watered down after passage to be far less useful.

That’s going to need to change for the reform movement to have real-world impact; but with states facing unprecedented legal threats across the board during Trump 2.0, it’s not hard to think that meaningful consumer protection — and picking bold new fights with corporate giants — will be among the first things on the cutting room floor for cash-strapped states.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bruce C. with a reply to a comment that attempted to downplay the recent behavior of federal agents:

Even plain clothes officers are required to carry their badge.

If they were undercover officers they shouldn’t be presenting themselves as officers to civilians unless they desire to blow their cover.

In second place, it’s Strawb with another comment about that same incident in Texas:

What is it law enforcement is fond of saying? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the arrest of a Wisconsin judge by the FBI. First, it’s That One Guy with thoughts on why she did what she did:

The party of law and order yet again encourages people to break the law

Ah yes, what possible reason could a judge have for not wanting federal agents to use their courtroom as an easy way to score arrests on people that willingly showed up to court, incentivizing those people to instead pull a republican and just start ignoring the law and legal orders…

Next, it’s Tanner Andrews on why it was not strange of her to do so:

Historically, we as a people have decided that we want people to show up for court, whether as witnesses, parties, or otherwise. As a result, we have frequently held that service of process cannot be effected against someone coming or going to court.

What the judge did is, essentially, uphold a couple hundred years of tradition and common law whose justification is still sound today. Sane people may commend her, and magats will of course celebrate the arrest.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Stephen T. Stone on our post about Donald Trump’s ChatGPT-like hallucinations:

So what you’re saying is that the lizard people did a shit job of programming Trump.

In second place, it’s our own Dark Helmet with a reply to a tiresome troll smearing Abrego Garcia:

It’s quite easy to understand how the actual points in the post flew over your head, given you were down on the ground licking Trump’s boots….

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from The Grumpicorn about Trump and ChatGPT:

So ChatGPT can accurately simulate the output of an intellectually vacant narcissist? This explains why so many tech bros think the software is intelligent.

Finally, it’s That One Guy again, this time with a comment about the capabilities of Dr. Ben Edwards:

Personally the biggest tell for me that he’s not qualified to practice medicine is that RFK Jr. thinks that he is.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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As we announced last week, our recently-Kickstarted card game One Billion Users is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th.

We recently received our proof copy, and it looks and feels great. We can’t wait to get the game into people’s hands:

Currently we don’t have any plans to produce more copies of the game beyond this run for our Kickstarter backers, so this is very likely your last chance to get your own copy of One Billion Users.

We’re on track to deliver the games by late summer, and we don’t want anyone to miss out. Add your pledge to the Kickstarter today to secure your copy.

(For those of you who already backed the campaign but want to purchase additional copies, you’ll have a chance to do that before your order is fulfilled, as long as you let us know about your intent to buy additional copies by the end of May 7th.)

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This is the fourth in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and today we’re looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: Calder’s Circus by David Harris.

Regular followers of the jam are surely familiar with David Harris, our one regular entrant who has won a category every single year. And I promise the judges aren’t just playing favorites: this year’s entry is once again suffused with the sort of thoughtful creativity that always makes David’s games stand out. Calder’s Circus (I Think Best In Wire) is inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, best known as one of the earliest creators of kinetic sculptures or mobiles. In 1929, he presented Cirque Calder, an improvised circus performance utilizing dozens of wire and wood figurines. Calder’s Circus the game doesn’t just take inspiration from these performances — it continues them.

Players are tasked with creating their own circus, by building their own wire figurines and telling tales of their performances. Thus it becomes a combination of a crafting/artmaking game with a storytelling game, which thrusts players right into the heart of Cirque Calder‘s unique combination of sculpture and performance. Thanks to the robust design notes David Harris has included with the game, which walk through his creative process in detail, we can understand this aspect of the game design his own words:

Isn’t this a game about wire-bending not narrative? Only if you’re looking at the tree and not the forest. Calder was sketching in wire but he was creating a circus and the performance of that circus was his end goal.

In the game, this manifests as a lightly-competitive group exercise in which, after constructing their free-standing circus scenes from wire (or pipe cleaners if you want to play with kids, who would definitely get a kick out of this), they compete to tell the stories of each others’ performances, randomly determined to be either triumphant or disastrous. The player who tells the best stories becomes the ringleader, and must name the circus and present its dramatic introduction.

As the aforementioned design notes describe, to create this game David immersed himself not only in Calder’s work but also in the context surrounding it: Calder’s life in the art scene in Paris and his comments on his own creative process, and his relationship with real life circuses and the fraught history surrounding circuses themselves as a form of entertainment. It’s no surprise that the result is a game that feels more like a continuation of Cirque Calder than just an homage to it, and a game that is a fitting winner of Best Adaptation.

Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Calder’s Circus, as well as David’s design notes, from its page on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.

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One of things we’ve talked about repeatedly is how much better it would be for content producers, instead of immediately defaulting to behaving like IP protectionists, to treat their fans in a human and awesome way. There are times when the need for protecting IP makes sense, but there are far more times when creative avenues could be explored to allow fans to express themselves, or to simply leave the whole thing alone if it doesn’t represent any actual danger or negative outcomes. Far too often those considerations are sidelined and mercenary lawyers get involved instead.

It’s one of the reasons we were so pleasantly surprised recently that a fan-led team developing a remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the Skyrim engine appeared to have Bethesda’s and Microsoft’s silent approval to continue moving forward, even after Bethesda released its own remaster of Oblivion. At that time, we had to take the word of the team behind Skyblivion, who stated that they were assured their project wouldn’t be shut down.

But it actually gets way, way better than that. What was once silent approval just became very, very vocal approval, as Bethesda’s latest developer spotlight fully celebrated Skyblivion’s existence.

On May 1, Bethesda published a new developer spotlight video focused on art and development lead Dan Lee. He’s been at Bethesda for a long time now, having worked on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, and the original Oblivion as well as the newly released remaster. And in his dev spotlight video he called out Skyblivion, a mod that’s been in development since 2012 and aims to recreate the OG game in the Skyrim engine. Bethesda even included gameplay footage of the ambitious fan mod in the spotlight video.

“Even though I worked on Oblivion Remastered, I’m still excited for Skyblivion,” said Lee at the end of the spotlight. “I think what they’re doing is very special and I’m excited to see their interpretation of what we’ve done in the past. And I think it’s a great year for Oblivion fans.”

Straight from an official channel for Bethesda, here we have not just the approval for the fan-made remake, but a full-throated endorsement of it. And you will notice how the developer focused on how good this is for fans of the original game. He’s right! Because Bethesda and Microsoft are being so awesome about this, fans will eventually have two different iterations of an updated Oblivion to play.

The company rightly understood there was no negative impact from Skyblivion existing. It didn’t stop over four million players of the official remastered version from getting the game. The fan game isn’t going to carry a price tag and requires players to have official versions of both games to play it. It didn’t reuse any Bethesda assets. This is just fans doing things fans love to do and the publisher being awesome about it.

And the Skyblivion team is managing to be human and awesome right back at them.

Dan, we’re just as excited to get Skyblivion into your hands this year as you are to play it,” posted the Skyblivion devs on social media. “Thanks for the shoutout and kind words. You said it best: It is a great year for Oblivion fans.”

Imagine how nice a place this would be if this approach was the norm rather than the exception.

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The free, independent state of Texas continues to make it clear it only respects certain rights and freedoms and only those that adhere to the Holy Trinity of guns, God, and, um… Nazi-adjacent Cybertruck manufacturers.

A number of efforts have been made to remove books from schools and public libraries in recent years. None of those efforts are still intact, despite the decidedly conservative stance of local state and federal courts. Even the Fifth Circuit somehow managed to avoid giving a book ban a total blessing while still managing to muddy the waters so thoroughly there’s no clear path to victory for either censorial legislators or plaintiffs challenging these unconstitutional laws.

Another ridiculous effort has been mounted by a member of the Texas legislature, one that would allow pretty much any allegedly aggrieved Texas resident to sue any bookseller just because their kid happened to come across a book containing (again, allegedly) “harmful material.”

Fortunately, this bill has already met stiff opposition from those affected by it, as Ashly Ibarra reports for Big Country News.

A bill set to be heard by the Judiciary and Jurisprudence Committee at the Texas House is sparking criticism from small business owners across the state. Arlene Kasselman, who owns Seven and One Books in downtown Abilene, is raising awareness on social media about House Bill 1375.

Here’s what concerns Kasselman and other bookstore owners:

Kasselman began researching the bill and discovered it could have serious implications for small businesses, potentially leading to censorship and limits on educational materials. HB1375 allows individuals to sue if they’re harmed by obscene or harmful content, particularly when it’s accessible to minors. Under the bill, businesses that help distribute such content can be held liable, and the law lowers the bar for plaintiffs to win those lawsuits.

This law creates a private cause of action for Texas residents to sue “any commercial entity” that “distributes, transmits, or displays harmful content” to minors. Obviously, most commercial entities dealing exclusively with adult-oriented material take care to prevent minors from accessing this content. However, bookstores aren’t in the adult-oriented business, even if some of the stuff on the shelves definitely isn’t meant for kids. Proprietors don’t card bookstore patrons because… well, before this new wave of bigoted censorship swept across the nation, it was never necessary.

That’s not the only problem with the bill. It also says individual employees of “news-gathering organizations” and “broadcasters” can be sued for making “harmful content” accessible to children, which is insane because, unlike a brick-and-mortar store with limited numbers of entrances, broadcasts and reporting can be accessed by anyone with the capability to do so.

It’s a litigation machine designed to provoke self-censorship. And whatever the intended victims (that being those targeted by the law) don’t censor for themselves, the Texas legislature will presumably get around to outlawing.

There’s also this addition from the legislature’s kangaroo courtesans: the barring of almost any defense that could be raised in the lawsuits this bill fully intends to generate. Under the heading PROHIBITED DEFENSES are all of these items (and more!):

–claims ignorance or mistake of law-has a belief that the requirements of this chapter are unconstitutional or were unconstitutional-relies on any court decision that has been overruled on appeal or by a subsequent court, even if that court decision has not been overruled when the defendant engaged in the conduct that violates this chapter-relies on any state or federal court decision that is not binding on the court in which the action has been brought

That’s some weird stuff right there, including the lead-off denial of mens rea requirements. And while the rest of it might work in terms of criminal prosecutions, this deals with civil litigation where the things the bill aims to deny defendants access to are actually meaningful parts of the equation. It’s a bold swing, but the only thing it really guarantees is the likelihood of it being struck down as unconstitutional before it can go into effect.

It’s a moonshot, as even the local GOP official admits:

Taylor County Republican Chairman Ryan Goodwin has previously voiced support for removing books deemed inappropriate for minors. He noted that conversations about book restrictions have been ongoing for years, but he’s skeptical that this particular bill will gain traction.

But not for the obvious reasons people who aren’t bigots and are capable of understanding civil liberties would assume:

If similar legislation moves forward in the future, he hopes it will include clear and specific language defining what constitutes material harmful to minors.

Bro, there are plenty of laws on the books that deal with preventing minors from accessing harmful content. They’ve been on the books for years. Violations are normally handled through criminal prosecutions or administrative action against adult businesses (which are already heavily regulated). The problem isn’t the vagueness of the definitions (although that certainly doesn’t help). The problem is the bill drags broadcasters, journalists, and booksellers into an arena they’ve never deliberately entered.

It’s not like there’s a long history of these entities providing children with access to obscene or harmful content. The bill isn’t seeking to regulate a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s deliberately seeking to censor entities that have almost always complied with existing laws by giving hecklers the opportunity to veto content they don’t like via BS litigation and government power. Simply saying the bill has no chance to survive doesn’t make you any less complicit in its existence, you absolute schmuck. Just because certain constituents cheer when you hurt other constituents doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you nothing more than a cog in the machine that runs on bloodlust.

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A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data.

These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement.

Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades.

These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale.

Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos.

By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance.

Key to this data repurposing are public-private partnerships. The DHS and other agencies have turned to third-party contractors and data brokers to bypass direct restrictions. These intermediaries also consolidate data from social media, utility companies, supermarkets and many other sources, enabling enforcement agencies to construct detailed digital profiles of people without explicit consent or judicial oversight.

Palantir, a private data firm and prominent federal contractor, supplies investigative platforms to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Internal Revenue Service. These platforms aggregate data from various sources – driver’s license photos, social services, financial information, educational data – and present it in centralized dashboards designed for predictive policing and algorithmic profiling. These tools extend government reach in ways that challenge existing norms of privacy and consent.

The role of AI

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated this shift.

Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats.

These systems ingest data from school enrollment records, housing applications, utility usage and even social media, all made available through contracts with data brokers and tech companies. Because these systems rely on machine learning, their inner workings are often proprietary, unexplainable and beyond meaningful public accountability.

Sometimes the results are inaccurate, generated by AI hallucinations – responses AI systems produce that sound convincing but are incorrect, made up or irrelevant. Minor data discrepancies can lead to major consequences: job loss, denial of benefits and wrongful targeting in law enforcement operations. Once flagged, individuals rarely have a clear pathway to contest the system’s conclusions.

Digital profiling

Participation in civic life, applying for a loan, seeking disaster relief and requesting student aid now contribute to a person’s digital footprint. Government entities could later interpret that data in ways that allow them to deny access to assistance. Data collected under the banner of care could be mined for evidence to justify placing someone under surveillance. And with growing dependence on private contractors, the boundaries between public governance and corporate surveillance continue to erode.

Artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems and predictive profiling systems lack oversight. They also disproportionately affect low-income individuals, immigrants and people of color, who are more frequently flagged as risks.

Initially built for benefits verification or crisis response, these data systems now feed into broader surveillance networks. The implications are profound. What began as a system targeting noncitizens and fraud suspects could easily be generalized to everyone in the country.

Eyes on everyone

This is not merely a question of data privacy. It is a broader transformation in the logic of governance. Systems once designed for administration have become tools for tracking and predicting people’s behavior. In this new paradigm, oversight is sparse and accountability is minimal.

AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony.

The risk extends to everyone. While these technologies are often first deployed at the margins of society – against migrants, welfare recipients or those deemed “high risk” – there’s little to limit their scope. As the infrastructure expands, so does its reach into the lives of all citizens.

With every form submitted, interaction logged and device used, a digital profile deepens, often out of sight. The infrastructure for pervasive surveillance is in place. What remains uncertain is how far it will be allowed to go.

Nicole M. Bennett is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University

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

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Bizarrely buried near the bottom of NY Times article about the chaos behind the renditioning of people to a Salvadoran gulag is an important detail: the US and El Salvador have already brought back eight people who were “mistakenly” sent there:

In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele’s confusion about whom the United States had sent him. Eight women who had been mistakenly sent were swiftly flown back.

That seems to go hand in hand with something else the President said this week. In a revealing “100 days” interview with ABC’s Terry Moran, Donald Trump finally admitted what we’ve been saying all along: he absolutely could get Abrego Garcia — the man his administration illegally shipped to El Salvador — back to the US with a single phone call. And then, in the same breath, he explained why he won’t do it, which directly disobeys a court order, while insisting he “follows the law.”

The exchange about getting Garcia back is stunning in its brazen disregard for court orders and a weird claim that he’s somehow not in charge of his own presidency:

TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.

TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could

TERRY MORAN: — the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.

TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.

TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —

TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —

TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —

TERRY MORAN: The Supreme Court says what the law is.

As you’ll recall, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the district court’s order to “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador” was perfectly valid. For months, the administration has pretended it was somehow impossible to get Garcia back. Now, with a single exchange, Trump — the ChatGPT President who typically generates plausible-sounding words disconnected from reality — accidentally stumbled into admitting the truth.

And that should be interesting to Judge Xinis in the district court, who has repeatedly asked the government what steps it has taken to do that facilitation.

It has been obvious that the answer is “fuck all” this whole time, but for a little while the administration kept (ludicrously) pretending that it was functionally impossible for the US to try to get him back.

So, now you have the President of the US admitting what everyone already knew: that of course he could call up Bukele and get Garcia back. I am assuming that this statement will show up in court before long, if it hasn’t been filed already.

The next part, though, is where things get ridiculous. For Trump to claim “I’m not the one making the decision” is laughable. Dude, you’re the President. You’re the one who keeps running around claiming to have the full power over the executive branch that no one can review. Now, suddenly it’s “the lawyers that don’t want to do this.” C’mon.

And then to put a cherry on top of this gaslighting sundae, he claims “I follow the law” in a discussion about how he is literally doing the exact opposite of that.

Trump’s admission about being able to get Garcia back couldn’t come at a worse time for the DOJ, which has been desperately trying to slow-walk the court case. Judge Xinis, already fed up with their delay tactics, recently shot down their latest attempt to stall. Despite a sealed motion from the government last week that briefly paused proceedings, on Wednesday she ordered discovery to continue on an expedited schedule — everything must be completed by May 14th.

Now the DOJ will need to explain to an increasingly impatient judge why they can’t get Garcia back when their own boss just admitted on national television that he could easily do it with a single phone call and the only thing holding him back were the very DOJ lawyers telling the judge that the President can’t do what she’s ordered.

Which he’s just admitted he can. You almost (but not really, they chose this) feel sorry for the DOJ lawyers who will have to face the judge.

And yet, somehow, admitting he could easily comply with a court order but won’t wasn’t even the craziest part of Trump’s Garcia comments. That distinction belongs to his utterly unhinged insistence that Garcia had “MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles. Let’s start with the actual evidence: when Senator Chris Van Hollen met with Garcia in El Salvador, the photos clearly showed his hand tattoos:

The very next day, Trump held up what he claimed was proof of MS-13 tattoos — but it was clearly just a visual aid with typed letters and explanatory text:

The disconnect between reality and Trump’s claims led to this surreal exchange:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I campaigned on that issue. I’ve done an amazing job. I have closed borders. He said you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t be able to do it, it would never happen. Well, it happened. And it happened —

TERRY MORAN: Alright.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — very quickly. Wait a minute. When we have criminals, murderers, criminals in this country, we have to get ’em out. And we’re doing it.

TERRY MORAN: By law —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you’ll pick out one man, but even the man that you picked out —

TERRY MORAN: He’s got —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — he said he’d — wasn’t a member of a gang. And then they looked, and —

TERRY MORAN: Alright.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: On his knuckles — he had MS-13 —

TERRY MORAN: Alright. There’s dis — there’s a dispute over that —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He had MS-13 —

TERRY MORAN: Well —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — on his knuckles tattooed.

TERRY MORAN: — he — he — he — it didn’t say– oh, he had some tattoos that are inper — interpreted that way. But let’s move on

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wait a minute.

TERRY MORAN: I want —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.

TERRY MORAN: He — he did not have the letter —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don’t do that — M-S-1-3 — It says M-S-one-three.

TERRY MORAN: I — that was Photoshop. So let me just–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can’t do that — he had —

— he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doin’ the interview. I picked you because — frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay —

TERRY MORAN: This — I knew this would come —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you — Terry — but you’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed —

TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We’ll agree to disagree. I want to move on —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.

TERRY MORAN: — to something else.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry. Do you want me to show the picture?

TERRY MORAN: I saw the picture. We’ll — we’ll — we’ll agree to disagree —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, and you think it was Photoshop. Well —

TERRY MORAN: Here we go. Here we go.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — don’t Photoshop it. Go look —

TERRY MORAN: Alright.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — at his hand. He had MS-13 —

TERRY MORAN: Fair enough, he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way. I’m not an expert on them.

I want to turn to Ukraine, sir —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Terry —

TERRY MORAN: I– I want to get to Ukraine–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not “interpreted.” This is why people —

TERRY MORAN: Alright.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — no longer believe —

TERRY MORAN: Well.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — the news, because it’s fake news —

TERRY MORAN: When he was photographed in El Sal — in– in El Salvador, they aren’t there. But let’s just go on —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He is —

TERRY MORAN: They aren’t there when he’s in El Salvador.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –there — oh, oh, they weren’t there —

TERRY MORAN: Take a look at the photograph —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now, right?

TERRY MORAN: No. What —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now?

TERRY MORAN: They’re in your picture.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.

TERRY MORAN: Ukraine, sir.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.

TERRY MORAN: Alright. I —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay?

TERRY MORAN: — we’ll — we’ll take a look at it —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s — it’s — you do such a disservice —

TERRY MORAN: We’ll take a look. We’ll take a look at that, sir —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Why don’t you just say, “Yes, he does,” and, you know, go on to something else —

TERRY MORAN: It’s contested.

The video of this exchange is even more jarring than the transcript suggests — Trump growing increasingly agitated as he insists on something demonstrably false:

This exchange is so very telling.Trump repeatedly claims the photoshopped MS-13 on Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckles is real, Terry Moran keeps telling him it isn't, prompting Trump to say this:"I never heard of you. I picked you. You’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed… Just say yes!"

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2025-04-30T00:46:29.334Z

Just to be 100% clear, the photo Trump held up has the letters M S 1 3 typed on the photo, where it was clearly meant to “explain” the actual symbols. It’s a bit hard to see but the text beneath each symbol is clearly typed on to explain things as well which (to be clear, since apparently this needs to be spelled out for some) do not actually appear on Abrego Garcia’s hand, say “Marijuana,” “Smile”, “Cross,” and “Skull.” The “Marijuana” and the “Smile” are meant to stand in for the supposed M and S of MS13.

This appears to have come via the dumbest game of “Telephone” ever, in which stupid nonsense gets passed along from one ignorant fool to another.

It started with an extremist racist MAGA account on ExTwitter who, four days before the Trump post, had posted a different picture of Garcia’s tattoos and claimed that they stood for MS13, saying “this looks like the most damning evidence yet” and then explaining his ridiculous theory:

Marijuana leaf = M

Smiley face = S

Cross coverup = 1

Skull coverup = 3

MS-13.

Note that, at this point, even he is claiming that the tattoos symbolize the characters. It seems likely that the White House team, whose brains are pickled in the ExTwitter MAGA swamps, likely saw this and decided to try to make a visual aid to match that dipshit’s “damning evidence.”

It appears they then handed their photo and visual aid to Trump, who held it up for a picture to push out on social media, but Trump is seemingly so confused that he saw the obviously typed over bits that are meant to explain the made up symbols that days ago were meant to “coverup” the true meaning… and believed they were actually on his hand, which they clearly are not.

And, just to be absolutely clear, no one who actually understands this stuff thinks those symbols mean MS-13. Every expert that everyone has spoken to gives some version of “what… no… that’s not how any of this works.”

Here’s one fact check that spoke to multiple experts:

“I don’t believe a dangerous individual would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand,” said Liliana Castaneda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience.

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, “The tattoos in the photo don’t look familiar to me.”

Such designs are out of character with typical MS-13 tattoos, Kennedy said.

“Within MS-13 culture, such markings would likely be frowned upon and even viewed as a sign of cowardice, as they could be interpreted as an attempt to hide or downplay gang affiliation,” Kennedy said. “That type of concealment goes against the gang’s norms, which often demand bold, visible demonstrations of identity and loyalty.”

Charles Katz, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, concurred.

While Katz said local law enforcement would be more familiar with specific tattoo designs in a given region, “I have worked on issues related to MS-13 for the past 15 years in El Salvador and the US, and I have never seen tattoos or graffiti suggesting that these particular tattoos are associated with MS-13.”

Another fact check had even more experts saying these claims make no sense:

“These are definitely NOT MS-13 tattoos,” Thomas Ward, a University of Southern California professor who spent years embedded with MS-13 researching the gang, and is the author of an ethnography that studies MS-13, said in an email.

“Those tattoos do not prove that he’s a member of MS-13,” said Susan Phillips, a Pitzer College professor who has studied gangs and written a book on gang graffiti.

While some gangs will opt for more low-profile or ambiguous means of identifying members to evade detection from law enforcement or rival gang members, MS-13 tattoos, according to Leap, aren’t exactly subtle. They are used to market the gang’s brutality.

“MS-13 members have tattoos that say ‘MS-13,’” Leap said. “They’re not head-scratchers; they’re billboards. There’s no ambiguity.”

So, just to drive this point home: he does not have MS13 tattooed on his hand. He has four symbols, which some rando MAGA dipshit on ExTwitter claimed was a hidden MS13 message that was “covered up.” Brain-pickled White House people tried to run with that rando’s claim by creating a visual aid, and our brain-fogged President stupidly interpreted the visual aid as things that were actually on Abrego Garcia’s hand, leading him to angrily insist to a hapless ABC News anchor that he really had the actual characters M S 1 3 on his knuckles.

It’s a multi-layer cake of stupidity.

This whole debacle exposes two terrifying realities about our current moment:

First, we have a President who can’t distinguish between a visual aid created by his own staff and reality, and who becomes increasingly aggressive when confronted with facts that contradict his delusions. This isn’t just about tattoos. It’s about the most powerful man on the planet with control over our nuclear arsenal, who can’t process basic visual evidence placed directly in front of him.

Second, we have a press corps that remains paralyzed when faced with easily disprovable lies. Moran had everything he needed — the actual photos, the visual aid Trump was misinterpreting (which Trump directly offered to go get!), the experts all saying this made no sense — to decisively show the President was wrong. Instead, he retreated to “let’s agree to disagree” and “it’s contested.”

That’s not journalism. That’s stenography with a side of cowardice.

A real journalist, faced with the most powerful man on earth caught in an easily proven lie, would have pulled up the photos and shown the truth. Instead, we got multiple attempts to “move on” while looking meek and confused. The term “photoshopped” might be technically accurate, but it missed the deeper absurdity: the President of the United States couldn’t tell the difference between his staff’s explanatory text and reality. This wasn’t a cleverly “photoshopped” image designed to fool the President. It was a visual aid that the President was supposed to use to explain the tattoo symbols, yet the President… believed the visual aid markings as if they were real.

The combination — a delusional president and a timid press — is how we got here in the first place. And it’s why Abrego Garcia remains in El Salvador, despite a court order and Trump’s own admission that a single phone call could bring him home.

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This comes as no surprise. Pretty much everything about Trump’s extrajudicial rendering of undocumented migrants to a foreign hellhole prison has been awful, but rarely lawful, to twist a phrase that’s already pretty twisted.

Resurrecting a law last used to justify the mass incarceration of migrants during World War II, Trump 2.0’s acceleration of his previous administration’s expulsion of foreigners now involves multiple lawsuits, violated court orders, an absolutely inhumane refusal to facilitate the return of people who should never have been sent to El Salvador, and the deliberate refusal to recognize the due process rights those being expelled are entitled to.

That the Trump Administration is violating even more laws is about as surprising as water’s inherent wetness. This is what this administration is: a death cult that says it’s bringing back law and order while using both of those ideals as doormats for its jackboots.

Here’s Ariana Figueroa, reporting for News from the States, with the latest batch of unlawfulness from the Trump Administration.

The U.S. State Department is paying El Salvador $6 million to house hundreds of immigrants deported from the United States in an immense and brutal prison there, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.

But a U.S. law bars State’s financial support of “units of foreign security forces” — which can include military and law enforcement staff in prisons —  facing credible allegations of gross human rights violations. That has led those who wrote what’s known as the Leahy Law and enforced it for years to question the legality of the $6 million payment made as President Donald Trump carries out his campaign of mass deportation.

Of course, State Department head Marco Rubio claims nothing illegal is happening here, just the routine extrajudicial rendition of migrants the government has unilaterally alleged to be foreign gang members. Thanks to the utter lack of due process, those claims continue to go unchallenged by the only people who can actually challenge them. Instead, they’re hustled off El Salvador’s CECOT, which is the very reason this $6 million payment is illegal under the Leahy Law.

Here’s the State Department’s official statement on the matter:

“The Department is following all applicable laws related to foreign assistance, including the State Leahy Law,” a State Department spokesperson wrote in a statement to States Newsroom.

The spokesperson said the U.S. is engaged with El Salvador through foreign assistance to address unauthorized migration and human trafficking.

While it may be true existing foreign assistance agreements allow the US to deport migrants to El Salvador, the Leahy Law makes it pretty clear they can’t be housed in CECOT, at least not on the US government’s dime.

And the State Department definitely knows this because it wrote a report detailing the human rights violations occurring in El Salvadoran prisons. And there’s no reason to believe this doesn’t apply to the recently constructed CECOT, considering it’s run by the same government and its guards have been trained by those from existing prisons.

The State Department’s2023 Human Rights Report on El Salvador noted there were credible reports from human rights organizations “of abuse and mistreatment of detainees by prison guards.”

Groups cited in the report interviewed people who were released from prisons in El Salvador and “reported systemic abuse in the prison system, including beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks.”

Given that, it’s clear the Trump Administration is ignoring both the spirit and the letter of the law. There’s no reason to believe things have changed all that much at CECOT since 2023. But it’s clear this administration simply doesn’t care and definitely won’t be looking too hard at its favored drop-off point for renditioned migrants because ignorance is useful bliss when it comes to defending its actions against multiple lawsuits.

Unfortunately, breaking this law has almost zero consequences, at least for the moment. While this new information may be of some use in ongoing court cases, the law ultimately has to be enforced by Congress. And there’s no way that’s happening, not while the Republican party holds a majority.

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Well look who else thinks Trump’s plan to use a centuries-old law to vanish people to El Salvador is batshit crazy: one of his own judges, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. I’m sure the admin will be out there calling him a far-left radical Marxist before long.

Let’s be clear about how absolutely unhinged this whole thing is. Using the Alien Enemies Act to rendition people to a foreign concentration camp is shameful. The law itself was part of a package of historically shameful bills from the earliest decades of the US, the Alien and Sedition Acts. Every other law from that collection of bad laws was rightly tossed in history’s garbage bin, except this one, which has been used only a few times. Even there, the short history of its usage is embarrassing to the US as well: the last time it was used was to inter Japanese Americans during WWII. You know, that thing we now recognize as a shameful event in American history.

The courts have been looking at this nonsense and going “wtf are you doing?” Because here’s the thing: this law can only be used when we’re either at war or facing an invasion from a “foreign nation or government.” Last time I checked, Congress hasn’t declared war (yeah, that’s still their job, even if the entire country has been pretending otherwise for decades) and — shocking revelation here — no country has actually invaded us.

Stephen Miller’s Trump’s workaround? He just… declared by proclamation that the greatly exaggerated Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), is totally working with Maduro. Evidence? Who needs evidence when you’ve got a proclamation? Certainly not this government!

Which takes us to the ruling barring the use of the AEA to remove Venezuelans. In short: the AEA requires things to happen that haven’t happened, and you can’t get around that by just having the President “declare” that it happened. That’s not to say the ruling is totally good, as there are some problematic aspects, even if it gets the larger picture correct.

The question that this lawsuit presents is whether the President can utilize a specific statute, the AEA, to detain and remove Venezuelan aliens who are members of TdA. As to that question, the historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms. As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.

The judge walks us through the AEA’s greatest hits (spoiler alert: it’s a very short playlist, and every track is garbage), noting how it’s only ever been used during actual, official, Congress-declared wars. You know, real ones, and not just because the president had a bad morning and decided to declare war on reality to justify shipping brown people to a foreign gulag.

Without an actual declared war, the whole effort by the Trump administration hinges on a ridiculous interpretation of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation or government. The judge starts out by exploring the meaning of those terms, including at the time the law was written back in the 18th century. And wouldn’t you know it? They were talking about actual military forces, not just people moving to America, trying to find a better life:

In the significant majority of the records, the use of “invasion” and “predatory incursion” referred to an attack by military forces. This held true even when the historical record did not concern the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812. The usages of “predatory incursion” at times referred to entries by Native Americans into the western territories, as did usages of “incursion.” But even these records refer to an organized group of armed individuals entering an area to attack a fort, settlement, or town, and the writer typically discussed the need for a military response to the entry. In only a few sources did the use of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” reference a non-military action. While the Court does not represent that its review constitutes a vigorous corpus linguistics analysis, the results provide a significant level of confidence that a complete review would generate similar conclusions.

Also, it turns out that the Congressional record from the 18th century makes it clear that this is also what Congress intended:

In addition, the Court located only one relevant historical record from the debates over the AEA. Representative Robert Harper moved to strike the phrase “predatory incursion” from the proposed legislation, based on his belief that the bill granted “very extensive” powers that “he did not think ought to be given except in case of serious attack.” 8 Annals of Congress 1786.

Given that, the Court sees no way that the administration can properly argue that TdA has invaded or engaged in a “predatory incursion” into the country. While it admits that TdA is obviously dangerous and a real problem, and even accepts as given (more on that in a bit) that they can be tied to the Venezuelan government, it’s still a bridge too far to say that they invaded.

Based on the plain, ordinary meaning of those terms in the late 1790’s, the Court concludes that the factual statements do not. The Proclamation makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation. Thus, the Proclamation’s language cannot be read as describing conduct that falls within the meaning of “invasion” for purposes of the AEA*. As for “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation does not describe an armed group of individuals entering the United States as an organized unit to attack a city, coastal town, or other defined geographical area, with the purpose of plundering or destroying property and lives. While the Proclamation references that TdA members have harmed lives in the United States and engage in crime, the Proclamation does not suggest that they have done so through an organized armed attack, or that Venezuela has threatened or attempted such an attack through TdA members. As a result,* the Proclamation also falls short of describing a “predatory incursion” as that concept was understood at the time of the AEA’s enactment*.*

The judge basically said: “let me explain what words actually mean, since you seem confused.”

For these reasons, the Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful. Respondents do not possess the lawful authority under the AEA, and based on the Proclamation, to detain Venezuelan aliens, transfer them within the United States, or remove them from the country.

So what’s the bottom line here? The administration can’t use this centuries-old law as their personal disappearing people machine — at least not for Venezuelans in the Southern District of Texas.

That said, there are still some parts of the ruling that are pretty scary, including that the judge feels that plenty of what Trump has done here is unreviewable by the courts as “political questions.” And he also makes it clear that Trump could use other laws to kick them out of the country (though, those other laws historically have more due process associated with them, which is why the admin went to the AEA in the first place).

Specifically, the court says that it can’t determine if the factual claims made in the White House’s proclamation (such as that TdA is working for Maduro and therefore an agent of the state of Venezuela) are true or not. Rather, it can only interpret the words in the statute, such as “invasion” and “predatory incursion.”

Based on the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the AEA, as well as the principles enumerated in Baker, the Court concludes that while it may not adjudicate the veracity of the factual statements in the Proclamation, or the propriety of the steps taken by the President as to Venezuelan aliens and TdA members*, the Court retains the authority to construe the AEA’s terms and determine whether the announced basis for the Proclamation properly invokes the statute.*

That could create problems down the road if it remains. In part, the judge is giving the administration a roadmap to continue doing what they want to do. And it gets even worse:

Once a court defines the parameters of what conduct constitutes an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” for purposes of the AEA, the court leaves to the Executive Branch the determination of whether such conduct has been perpetrated, attempted, or threatened*. For example, a court may decide that one aspect of “invasion” and “predatory incursion” requires physical entry into the United States. In other words, a court may conclude that no invasion or predatory incursion has occurred or has been threatened if the alleged conduct does not involve the entry of individuals into the country. The court having determined the meaning of these terms,* it is left to the Executive Branch to determine whether a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated activity that includes such an entry*. As to this decision,* the court may not delve into whether the Executive Branch possesses sufficient support for its conclusion, or whether the court agrees with the Executive Branch’s determinations*. That analysis would require the Executive Branch to disclose to the court the domestic and foreign intelligence that undergirds the finding of an actual or threatened invasion or predatory incursion. And requiring the Executive Branch to do so would run counter to the admonition that “it is inconceivable that before an alien enemy could be removed from the territory of this country in time of war, the President should be compelled to spread upon the public record in a judicial proceeding the method by which the Government may detect enemy activity within our borders[.]”*

That creates a pretty big loophole for the Trump administration to go through even with this particular decision.

So yeah, this is a win — a Trump-appointed judge looked at this legal nonsense and said “nah.” That’s huge. But don’t get too excited. The administration’s already shown they’re willing to do just about anything to justify their actions. They’re not going to let a little thing like “judicial interpretation” or “what words actually mean” stop them from trying again.

The real question isn’t whether they’ll try to get around this ruling — it’s what creative legal interpretation they’ll cook up next. This particular dumpster fire is far from out.

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In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, data suggests that wireless carriers immediately stopped trying to compete on price (exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition).

Recently, T-Mobile imposed another $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans — including customers who believed they were under a “price lock” guarantee thanks to a 7-year-old promotion promising that their price would never change. But when users explored the fine print of that agreement it indicated that by “price lock,” T-Mobile actually meant it would pay your final monthly bill if the carrier raised the price and impacted customers decided to cancel. In other words, bullshit.

T-Mobile was flooded with complaints and lawsuits over the practice, but it has so far faced absolutely no accountability for lying to users. Now T-Mobile is back with yet another, new “price lock” guarantee that in no way locks in your pricing.

T-Mobile’s previous, shitty plans at least had “taxes and fees” included. This new promotion doesn’t do that, ensuring that T-Mobile can impose all manner of dodgy fake fees to jack up the advertised price and ignore its promise to not raise prices:

“This will make the plans cost more initially than customers might expect, and it gives T-Mobile wiggle room to raise prices during the five years of the price guarantee since it could increase any fees that are tacked onto the new plans. The fine print in today’s press release describes taxes and fees as “exclusions” to the price guarantee.”

U.S. telecoms have a long and proud history of imposing all sorts of bullshit and fake fees — many disguised to pretend they’re coming from government — to jack up the below the line costs. The Biden FCC and FTC had been taking some steps to combat that, but the second Trump administration has effectively abandoned consumer protection entirely. You know, for populism (?).

So instead of cracking down on telecoms that lie about pricing, FCC boss Brendan Carr spends his days harassing companies that aren’t racist and sexist enough, and bullying media companies that don’t kiss Donald Trump’s ass.

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RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS must be put to an end. We already have ample evidence for that necessity, both in the form of his complete mismanagement of a ballooning measles outbreak that continues to expand, his vaccine skepticism that has led to him stating that he’s going to have the origin of autism all figured out in a couple of months despite years of research from actually qualified people being done, or even just the fact that a goddamned worm ate part of his fucking brain.

But now this is just getting ridiculous. In the midst of the measles problem that he really should be focusing on combatting, Kennedy instead went on Dr. Phil’s show. There he took questions about health from the audience and, in response to one question, committed to getting to the bottom of this whole chemtrail thing.

Toward the end of Dr. Phil’s town hall, an audience member named Emily stated that she was most concerned about the constant “aerosol injections” of aluminum, strontium, and other purported toxins being sprayed into the skies—a statement that RFK Jr. completely took at face value when asked how he was going to address this issue.

“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel—so those materials are put in jet fuel,” Kennedy responded, appearing to blame the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, for chemtrails. DARPA has long been a conspiracy bogeyman, though it’s not the only government agency that’s been accused of creating chemtrails.

Kennedy added, “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable.”

Let that sink in for just a moment. As HHS has cut 1/8th of its workforce, including clinics and resources for fighting the measles outbreak, he is committing to bringing in a fulltime employee who will spend all of their time, all of it, “thinking only about” chemtrails. This isn’t just incompetence; it’s a criminal waste of taxpayer dollars, time, and energy on a conspiracy theory that many conspiracy theorists think is fucking stupid. Any brain cycles spent thinking about this by anyone is of zero value. And here is the head of healthcare in America not only taking it seriously, but promising to commit resources to it.

Even among conspiracy theories, the logic underlying chemtrails is especially stupid. The theory goes that planes have been secretly seeding the skies with all sorts of chemical weapons that have been poisoning people for decades—weapons that conveniently leave behind easily visible trails. Some people claim these chemicals are also—or instead—being used to modify the weather.

In truth, these trails are the product of condensation that usually happens when jet fuel exhaust—mostly made out of water vapor but also containing small particles of soot—mixes with cold, humid air at high altitudes. In other words, they’re basically just temporary clouds made out of ice crystals (natural clouds are more often composed of water droplets). They’re formally known as contrails, short for condensation trails.

And the head of HHS wants you to know he’s on the case. Because we’re apparently going to allow him to be and not impeach him or otherwise pressure the administration to put someone with a full intact brain in the position.

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

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

The group chats that changed America (Semafor)Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening (New York Times)Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators (The Guardian)Social media moderators’ lives are getting worse. Big Tech needs to take responsibility (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism)Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users—Even Children (Wall Street Journal)Kids should avoid AI companion bots—under force of law, assessment says (CalMatters)I’m a mom who works in tech, and AI scares me. I taught my daughter these simple guidelines to spot fake content (Business Insider)Playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with Meta over my fraudulent avatars (Financial Times)Meta slowest to remove scam content, says City watchdog (The Guardian)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Modulate. In our Bonus Chat, we speak with Modulate CEO Mike Pappas about the evolving landscape of online fraud and how the company’s work detecting abuse in gaming environments is helping identify financial misconduct across different types of digital platforms.

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

A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency’s dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the investments earlier this year in his public financial report, which lists as much as $365,000 worth of shares in four entities that the CFPB can regulate. According to court records and government emails, he later helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 employees at the bureau.

Ethics experts say this constitutes a conflict of interest and that Kliger’s actions are a potential violation of federal ethics laws.

Executive branch employees have long been subject to laws and rules that forbid them from working on matters that “will affect your own personal financial interest.” CFPB employees are also required to divest from dozens of additional, specific companies that engage in financial services and thus either are or could be subject to agency supervision, rulemaking, examination or enforcement.

The CFPB oversees companies that offer a variety of financial services, including mortgage lending, auto financing, credit cards and payment apps.

Two of the companies in which Kliger is invested — Apple and Tesla — are on the CFPB’s list of prohibited holdings. Two other cryptocurrency holdings — Bitcoin and Solana — aren’t on the list but are nevertheless barred under agency guidance on investing in cryptocurrency firms.

Court records show that Kliger was among a small handful of top CFPB and administration officials discussing the implementation of the layoffs in emails. Separately, a federal employee who works on the layoff team said that Kliger “managed” the firings of about 90% of the bureau’s staff earlier this month, according to a sworn declaration filed by lawyers opposing the administration.

The employee, using the pseudonym Alex Doe for fear of retaliation, said they learned of Kliger’s role from colleagues and described Kliger keeping the CFPB employees “up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out,” the declaration states. “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” and “calling them incompetent.”

Among those fired were the bureau’s ethics team, according to an agency lawyer, who wrote in an April 25 court filing that “I am not aware of anyone remaining at the CFPB who has the requisite expertise to fulfill the CFPB’s federal ethics requirements.”

Ethics experts said that getting rid of government regulators who oversee companies and set industrywide rules could impact the share price of the businesses subject to that regulation, since doing away with oversight can free companies from compliance costs and the exposure that stems from enforcement actions.

“Destroying the CFPB is likely to have, I believe, a direct and predictable effect on his financial stock,” Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at the Washington University in St. Louis, said of Kliger.

Unionized bureau employees have sued the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop the administration’s efforts to wind down its operations and reduce its staff. The subsequent months of litigation have been head-spinning.

At the end of March, a district court judge issued a sweeping stay on the administration’s actions. Then on April 11, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., partially lifted that stay. In its order, the panel wrote that bureau leaders must conduct a “particularized assessment” before firing workers.

Days later, most of the agency’s staff was notified that they were being fired.

The bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, and two other lawyers conducted the court-ordered review, the government said in legal papers. In a recent filing, Paoletta wrote that the administration is attempting to achieve a “streamlined and right-sized Bureau.” Instead of 248 enforcement division employees and 487 in the supervision division, he wrote, he planned to keep 50 workers in each.

But on Monday evening, amid vigorous dispute over the legality of the firings and the definition of “particularized assessment,” the appeals court backtracked, upholding the trial court’s initial stay on the mass layoffs as the case plays out. The CFPB then notified the more than 1,400 employees who’d been laid off that their firings were being rescinded. The lawsuit is ongoing, with oral arguments before the appeals court scheduled for next month.

Kliger didn’t respond to voicemails or emails seeking comment for this story. The CFPB didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the White House said that “these allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission.”

Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, the statement said, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”

Asked to clarify Kliger’s role in the administration’s cuts, a spokesperson said, “You have 90 days from the start date to divest which is May 8th — it is only April 28th.” It’s unclear what rule the White House was referencing; the spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions. But ethics experts said there are two scenarios that could apply: Sometimes, high-level government officials pledge to divest their holdings by a certain date to avoid conflicts of interest. And at the CFPB in particular, regulations give employees 90 days to divest prohibited holdings.

In either case, though, the employee is required to recuse themselves from any actions that could affect their investments.

Delaney Marsco, a government ethics expert at the Campaign Legal Center, said Kliger’s holdings and his involvement in winding down the agency erode the public’s faith that government officials are serving its best interests.

“When you have these facts, it raises the question, which is just as bad as when you have the actual violation because it makes the public question,” she said.

Kliger owns between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in Apple, which the CFPB regulates. The company agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty last October following a bureau investigation into Apple Card, a credit card in the company’s software. The bureau said that Apple did not have a proper transaction dispute system when it launched and also that it misled some customers about its financing. The company ​​agreed to the consent order, records show, “without admitting or denying any of the findings of fact or conclusions of law.” In a statement at the time, Apple said that “while we strongly disagree with the CFPB’s characterization of Apple’s conduct, we have aligned with them on an agreement.”

Kliger also owns between $100,000 and $250,000 of Tesla stock. The company, founded by DOGE boss Elon Musk, falls under the bureau’s purview because it offers financing, a key area of scrutiny for the CFPB.

Kliger also owns cryptocurrencies: between $1,000 and $15,000 of Solana and between $15,000 and $50,000 of Bitcoin.

Any federal worker who “holds any amount of a cryptocurrency or stablecoin may not participate in a particular matter if the employee knows that particular matter could have a direct and predictable effect on the value of their cryptocurrency or stablecoins,” according to a legal memo issued in July of 2022, under then-President Joe Biden, by the independent federal agency tasked with advising executive branch employees on how to avoid conflicts of interests.

An internal notice to CFPB employees the following month instructed anyone with such a holding to “immediately recuse yourself from working on any Bureau particular matter,” report the ownership and divest within 90 days, records reviewed by ProPublica show.

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second presidency, the administration has sought to significantly reduce the size, scope and nature of America’s consumer watchdog, which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

ProPublica reported last month that dozens of investigations the agency had launched were stalled amid stop-work orders.

In a recent court filing that supplements a newly released policy memo, Paoletta wrote that, in recent years, “the Bureau has also engaged in intrusive and wasteful fishing expeditions against depository institutions and, increasingly, non-depository institutions” and that it had “pushed into new areas beyond its jurisdiction such as peer-to-peer lending, rent-to-own, and discrimination as unfair practice.”

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a state legislature, caught up in the moral panic about social media, passes yet another clearly unconstitutional bill that will waste taxpayer money on doomed legal battles. This time it’s Colorado, whose legislature passed a ridiculously bad social media regulation bill (SB25-086) that looks suspiciously similar to bills that have already failed in Utah, Arkansas, and other states. But this story has a slightly different ending.

Like many such bills, this one had an age verification component, which would require massive privacy violations for all users, and also would have draconian and clearly unconstitutional requirements for websites to police certain specified “bad” content online, including suspending accounts of certain users based on Colorado claiming that some people don’t deserve social media accounts (which would clearly run afoul of the Supreme Court’s Packingham ruling from 2017).

In this case, though, Governor Jared Polis (who is often, though not always, good on internet issues) chose to veto the bill with a very clear letter explaining his (correct) reasons. He notes that while there are real concerns about problems online, much of the reasoning behind the bill feels like a moral panic, blaming the tech for how it is used:

SB25-086 is intended to address legitimate concerns regarding the safety of children online. My administration takes very seriously our obligation to promote and protect the public safety of everyone across our state, especially minors, both in physical spaces and online ones, and we share the concerns that prompted this bill. Just as when the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell to connect people and ideas, it was later used for criminal activity and government surveillance, it’s also true that as social media platforms have become more popular, they too are used for illegal activity. Notably, e-mail, including group listservs, can and is also used for illicit activity and receives a full exemption from the legislation.

Despite good intentions, this bill fails to guarantee the safety of minors or adults, erodes privacy, freedom, and innovation, hurts vulnerable people, and potentially subjects all Coloradans to stifling and unwarranted scrutiny of our constitutionally protected speech.

Make no mistake, I share the concerns of parents and law enforcement across our state about minors and adults exposed to illegal activity on social media platforms as well as in neighborhoods. This is why my office offered suggestions focused on strengthening tools to help law enforcement successfully apprehend criminals. Sadly, the bill sponsors rejected these ideas and passed legislation that, to my mind, unduly infringes on the speech, privacy, and liberty rights of all users.

But it’s not just that the bill is based on a moral panic falsely targeted at the technology rather than specific abuses, it’s that the nature of the bill is deeply problematic and does away with some basic due process and privacy rights:

This law imposes sweeping requirements that social media platforms, rather than law enforcement, enforce state law. It mandates a private company to investigate and impose the government’s chosen penalty of permanently deplatforming a user even if the underlying complaint is malicious and unwarranted. In our judicial proceedings, people receive due process when they are suspected of breaking the law. This bill, however, conscripts social media platforms to be judge and jury when users may have broken the law or even a company’s own content rules. This proposed law would incentivize platforms, in order to reduce liability risk, to simply deplatform a user in order to comply with this proposed law.

Further, the costly and mandatory data and metadata collection requirements in this bill throw open the door for abuse by guaranteeing the availability of sensitive information such as user age, identities, and content viewed, and these reports could even be made public at the discretion of the Attorney General. This is not a speculative concern: people have been prosecuted for online searches related to reproductive health care access, and people have been detained and deported due to activity on social media platforms.

This kind of data collection threatens user privacy for those who may be searching for reproductive or gender affirming care in Colorado, as well as for our immigrant communities, especially without safeguards in the bill for how this data would be secured or shared. This creates additional legal jeopardy, as well as the potential for blocking Colorado users from accessing or participating in social media to avoid costly compliance with this law. Importantly, recent U.S. Supreme Court cases suggest that content moderation laws that result in the deplatforming of users will not withstand constitutional scrutiny. For a state that prides ourselves on being forward-looking and innovative, this is simply an unacceptable outcome.

He also notes that for all of the screaming about the supposed evils of the internet, the authors of the bill seem to ignore that many, many people are actually helped by the internet. And enabling government-backed censorship would create a huge mess:

Of course, many Coloradans rely on friends they’ve made through online social networks to help them get through hard times and as a personal support structure. But social media platforms do more than provide a platform for free expression and engagement. These platforms are also inextricable from the successes of small businesses and individuals who make a living online. Removing users as this bill demands will have devastating consequences on the livelihoods of many Coloradans that use social media platforms, with the largest economic impact being felt by content creators and small businesses that cannot afford website platforms or professional marketing campaigns*. There have been instances across platforms of influencers, entrepreneurs, and even individual users being deplatformed for content related to breastfeeding, for example* this measure would give that action the full force of government*. Any sales pitch-be it for wellness products, gunsmithing classes, or mental health supports for marginalized youth would be subject to a private entity’s interpretation of its legality, with an incentive to err on the side of deplatforming, and the consequence could be permanent removal. Stripping users of cost-effective customer engagement and marketing opportunities is a potential consequence of this law.*

He closes by also noting (as almost no other state does) the absolute ridiculousness of thinking that a single state should regulate the internet, which would create a 50-state statutory patchwork for businesses that operate without borders.

It’s a great letter.

Of course, almost immediately, the Colorado legislature sought to override his veto, and the Senate voted to override Polis 29-6 the very next day. The sponsors of the bill didn’t address any of Polis’ stated concerns (including the fact that the Supreme Court had made it clear that a bill like this was unconstitutional). Instead, they trot out the usual propaganda about how they’re just out there “protecting the children” and who could possibly be against that?

“I think it’s time that we dig deep and find the courage that is within all of us and the conviction that is within all of us to protect the children within the state of Colorado,” Sen. Lisa Frizell, a Castle Rock Republican and one of the bill’s main sponsors, said before the vote was taken.

[….]

“This bill gives us the tools to help remove predators and traffickers from using social media to harm our kids,” said Democratic Sen. Lindsey Daugherty of Arvada, one of the main sponsors. “This is not about censorship, it’s not about speech. It’s about standing up for the safety and dignity of our youngest and most vulnerable.”

So much unconstitutional, unconscionable garbage is passed by legislatures under the false banner of “protecting the children.” As Polis rightly noted, this bill won’t do that — it will actually make many children significantly less safe by driving them away from supportive online communities and forcing them to hand over sensitive personal data. But these moral panic-driven authoritarians don’t care about the real-world consequences. They just want their name in the headlines with false claims of how they saved kids they actually put at risk.

Thankfully, the override was halted earlier this week when the legislature realized it didn’t have the votes for the override in the larger House and punted on the bill.

The override effort failed when the state House laid over the vote to override the veto until May 9, which is after the legislative session ends. That prevented representatives from having to vote against the override after backing the bill.

“The votes are not here,” said Rep. Andy Boesenecker, a Fort Collins Democrat and one of the lead sponsors of the bill. “That’s a fact.”

These bad bills keep popping up over and over again, so I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of this kind of bill. What’s particularly concerning is watching supposedly informed players jump on the moral panic bandwagon. Take current Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a leading candidate to replace Polis. As a former law professor specializing in internet and telecom law, Weiser should understand exactly why these bills are constitutionally problematic. Instead, he’s championing the same failed approaches we’ve seen crater in courtrooms across the country.

It’s a stark reminder that when it comes to internet regulation, even those with the expertise to know better often can’t resist the siren song of “protecting the children” — even when their proposed solutions do anything but.

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Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple’s App Store being an illegal monopoly. The company just had to make one small change: let developers tell users they could make purchases elsewhere. Simple enough.

Instead, Apple apparently decided that the best response was to design elaborate schemes to make that “elsewhere” as scary and expensive as possible, hide evidence of those schemes from the court, and then lie under oath about all of it. This strategy has worked out about as well as you’d expect, leading to what may be one of the most scathing judicial opinions you’ll ever read.

As we noted at the time, this seemed like the correct outcome. Many of the antitrust claims from Epic seemed ridiculous and the court agreed, but the provisions forbidding app developers from even communicating to users that it was possible to do non in-app purchases seemed extremely restrictive and problematic.

Apple should have been happy with this result. But Apple apparently was not. Yesterday, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued one of the most scathing rulings I’ve ever seen a court issue, calling out what appears to be Apple’s willful decision to disobey the injunction and play games to avoid doing the little bit it was required to do.

Let’s let the judge take it from here:

To summarize: One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive. Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing, and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Apple’s goal: maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. Two, the Court had prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct consumers to, other purchasing mechanisms. Apple’s response: impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full page “scare” screens, static URLs, and generic statements. Apple’s goal: to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.

In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option*. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance,* Alex Roman, outright lied under oath*. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but* Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly*. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to* investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate*.*

Cook chose poorly? Yikes. Being referred for criminal contempt? Double yikes.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation*.* There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.

Ouch.

Apple has a history of engaging in malicious compliance to regulatory requirements, but this seems particularly egregious.

The court’s ruling reveals a deliberate three-part strategy by Apple: First, design a system that would appear compliant while actually maintaining their monopoly. Second, hide evidence of this strategy through dubious privilege claims. And finally, when caught, lie about it under oath.

The deliberate nature of Apple’s defiance is perhaps best captured in internal communications about their “scare screen” strategy.

In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. (CX-206.) Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” *(Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further wrote, “*to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh – keep going.”

Again, Apple decided on the most anticompetitive option, that is, the “even worse” option of including the developer’s name rather than the app name … All of this was hidden from the Court and not revealed in the May 2024 evidentiary hearings.

Apple folks tried to claim that when they said “scary” they didn’t mean “scary” and really said that “scary” was “a term of art” rather than what everyone knows it means:

Mr. Onak testified that “in term of UX writing, the word ‘scary’ doesn’t . . . mean the same thing as instilling fear.” (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:10–12 (Onak).) Rather, “scary” is a term of art that “means raising awareness and caution and grabbing the user’s attention.” (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:13– 15 (Onak).) Mr. Onak repeatedly asserted that the team’s goal was simply “to raise caution so the user would have all the facts so that they can make an informed decision on their own.” (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:22–1341:2 (Onak).) Mr. Onak’s testimony was not credible and falls flat given reason, common sense, and the totality of the admitted exhibits*. The designers’ discussions contextualize their use of the word “scary” to indicate its ordinary meaning and, most applicable here, indicate the goal of deterring users as much as possible from completing a linked-out transaction.*

Beyond the psychological manipulation through the UI, Apple’s strategy centered on implementing a 27% commission on outside purchases — just a 3% discount from their usual rate for on-platform purchases — while knowing full well this would make external payment options economically unviable for developers.

Apple senior management held a meeting after the injunction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit, in which notes were taken, discussing two options: one where they didn’t charge for off-platform purchases (but which “would restrict the placement and appearance” of any links to off-AppStore purchasing options). The other one, which they went for, was to let them place the info more broadly, but take a 27% cut, rather than a 30% cut.

Unfortunately for Apple, the notes for that meeting noted that a reason to reject the first proposal was that it would “create competitive pressure.” As the judge notes: that was exactly the point of the injunction, to create competitive pressure. So, Apple’s meeting to figure out how to minimize competitive pressure can be seen as seeking to get around the injunction.

And then, on top of that, Apple went with a combination of both proposals to make it designed to stymie the injunction’s purpose. They included the link-out restrictions from the first proposal AND the commission from the second proposal.

Even more damning, Apple’s internal notes reveal that Apple (most likely correctly) predicted that the 3% discount on commissions wouldn’t be economically viable, because the cost to run your own payment setup would likely exceed that 3%. And, Apple already knew that no one would sign up for this because they had used similar off-site commission programs in Korea and the Netherlands:

At the time, Apple also knew of the virtually nonexistent adoption rates of the Netherlands and Korea programs. Those, similar to the at-issue program, additionally suggested to Apple the non-viable economics of the proposed program. See Feb. 2025 Tr. 1407:1-5 (“Q. [F]or example, as of October 2022, ten months into the Netherlands program and four months into the Korea program, only one developer had signed up for alternative payments across the two programs. A. That seems roughly correct, yes.”) (Oliver).

If you only have one developer, you don’t have to say “roughly correct.” There’s no estimating there.

But amazingly, it gets worse. Apple’s internal documentation more or less admits that they might be violating the injunction with this approach:

Crucially, at this point, Apple’s notes reflect uncertainty about whether it could in fact impose a commission without violating the Injunction. In one slide deck, Apple’s notes explain that “[i]f we decided and had the ability to charge a commission, we believe there would be very little developer adoption of link-out, assuming a scenario where we would give a cost of payments discount at 3%.” (CX-859.33 (emphasis supplied).) Those same notes indicate that Apple planned to “[c]ome up with a couple of models in the spectrum of what we think the judge will accept” but to “[s]tart with the minimum.”

The judge also points out that the exec who was pushing for the “no commission” approach, Phil Schiller, had closely followed the trial and read the injunction, while the execs pushing for the sketchy commission approach had not.

Prior to the June 20 meeting, there were individuals within Apple who were advocating for a commission, and others advocating for no commission. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1521:3–12 (Oliver).) Those advocating for a commission included Mr. Maestri and Mr. Roman. (Id. 1522:3–10 (Oliver).) Mr. Schiller disagreed. (Id. 1521:13–18 (Oliver).) In an email, Mr. Schiller relayed that, with respect to the proposal for “a 27% commission for 24 hours,” “I have already explained my many issues with the commission concept,” and that “clearly I am not on team commission/fee.” (CX-224.1.)29 Mr. Schiller testified that, at the time, he “had a question of whether we would be able to charge a commission” under the Injunction, a concern which he communicated. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1177:24–1178:9 (Schiller).) Unlike Mr. Maestri and Mr. Roman, Mr. Schiller sat through the entire underlying trial and actually read the entire 180-page decision. That Messrs. Maestri and Roman did neither, does not shield Apple of its knowledge (actual and constructive) of the Court’s findings.

When faced with judicial scrutiny of these practices, Apple didn’t just defend its actions — it launched an extraordinary campaign of document suppression and delay tactics that would ultimately backfire spectacularly.

As testimony unfolded, and Apple attempted to justify its response, the Court became increasingly concerned that Apple was not only withholding critical information about its business decision for complying with the Injunction, but also that it had likely presented a reverse-engineered, litigation-ready justification for actions which on their face looked to be anticompetitive. The Court immediately ordered Apple to produce all injunction-compliance related documents

And then Apple appeared to play games in providing the demanded documents:

Apple engaged in tactics to delay the proceedings. The Court later concluded that delay equaled profits*. By September 30, 2024, Apple represented that it had produced around 89,000 documents out of the 1.5 million it had reviewed and expected to produce a few thousand more by October 7, 2024. (Dkt. No. 1024.) Apple, however, had asserted privilege over more than a third of responsive documents….*

Magistrate Judge Hixon largely found Apple’s privilege claims to be unsubstantiated after reviewing eleven exemplar documents (characterized by Epic as evidence of Apple’s overreach). (Dkt. No. 1056.) Apple used this decision to delay further and “offered” to re-review all 57,000 documents for which it claimed privilege in full or in part. Ultimately, Apple withdrew approximately 42.1% of its privilege claims. Although Apple now tries to recast its re-review as “of its own accord,” that framing belies the reality that the documents should have never been withheld in the first instance. (Dkt. No. 1151 at 5–6.) Ultimately, Epic and Apple hired three special masters to review Apple’s privilege claims after its re-review.

But Apple’s strategy of obstruction eventually crumbled, revealing something even more serious: executives appearing to deliberately lie under oath.

The judge describes how Apple hired some consultants, “Analysis Group” or “AG,” to conduct research on the value of their platform to try to find justification for the 27% costs charged to developers. They then told the court that they used that analysis as the basis of what to charge, even though the notes now prove that the decision was actually made about six months earlier. In other words, Apple execs appear to have lied under oath.

On top of that, Apple execs claimed that they hadn’t evaluated if external costs of a developer running their own payment setup would exceed the 3% discount, even though it has since come out that they very much did do that analysis, and it was a key part of the decision to only discount commissions by 3%. More lies:

Despite its own considerable evaluation, during the first May 2024 hearing, Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report*. (See, e.g., May 2024 Tr. 544:16–24 (Oliver); see also Dkt. No. 1324, Apple Trial Brief at 12.) The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance,* was replete with misdirection and outright lies*. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases.*

The Court finds that Apple did consider the external costs developers faced when utilizing alternative payment solutions for linked out transactions, which conveniently exceeded the 3% discount Apple ultimately decided to provide by a safe margin. (See CX-265.27 (Apple’s estimates of external costs for developers); Feb. 2025 Tr. 1627:15–1628:10 (Vij) (discussing external costs).) Apple did not rely on a substantiated bottoms-up analysis during its months-long assessment of whether to impose a commission, seemingly justifying its decision after the fact with the AG’s report.

Also, given that the decision to charge 27% commissions happened in July of 2023, and the AG report was only delivered in January of 2024 (well after the decision was made), the same Apple exec then apparently lied and claimed the commission decision was made after the report was delivered, which the now-revealed notes show was just blatantly false:

Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases:

Q. And I take it that Apple decided to impose a 27 percent fee on linked purchases prior to January 16, 2024, correct?

A. The decision was made that day.

Q. It’s your testimony that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what — what fee it’s going to impose on linked purchases?

A. That is correct. (May 2024 Tr. 202:12–18 (Roman).)

Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023.

Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.

Ouch.

There’s a lot more as well, but the judge is rightly pissed off. She has issued an injunction making it pretty clear that Apple has to knock off all its tricks:

PERMANENTLY RESTRAINS AND ENJOINS Apple Inc. and its officers, agents, servants, employees, and any person in active concert or participation with them, from:

Imposing any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app, and as a consequence thereof, no reason exists to audit, monitor, track or require developers to report purchases or any other activity that consumers make outside an app;**Restricting or conditioning developers’ style, language, formatting, quantity, flow or placement of links for purchases outside an app;**Prohibiting or limiting the use of buttons or other calls to action, or otherwise conditioning the content, style, language, formatting, flow or placement of these devices for purchases outside an app;**Excluding certain categories of apps and developers from obtaining link access;**Interfering with consumers’ choice to proceed in or out of an app by using anything other than a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site; andRestricting a developer’s use of dynamic links that bring consumers to a specific product page in a logged-in state rather than to a statically defined page, including restricting apps from passing on product details, user details or other information that refers to the user intending to make a purchase.

Normally, I would say some of those go a bit far in limiting certain things that Apple would be expected to do, but… given just how much Apple tried to lie and mislead the court, it’s kinda what you’d expect. It also says it will not put a stay on this assuming Apple appeals “given the repeated delays and severity of the conduct.”

While Apple also has to pay for the special master that it and Epic had to bring in to review the falsely claimed “privileged” documents, there aren’t any other sanctions (nor did Epic seek them). And that’s why there’s a criminal referral.

What makes this ruling so remarkable isn’t just the scathing language or even the criminal referral — it’s the sheer pointlessness of Apple’s defiance. The company had won almost all of this case. All it had to do was make one small change. Instead, its executives chose to lie, obstruct, and treat the judicial system with contempt. Even with Tim Cook’s recent cozying up to Trump and the Trump/Bondi Justice Department’s tendency to view justice through the lens of personal loyalty (which might help make the criminal referral disappear), it’s hard to understand what Apple thought it would gain through such brazen actions.

Yes, Apple managed to drag out its monopoly rents on app commissions for a bit longer. But it could have crafted a more open system that would have satisfied the court while preserving significant control over its platform (along with the associated commissions) — all without executives potentially facing criminal contempt charges. The short-term profits from delay hardly seem worth the cost of credibility with courts and regulators going forward.

As Judge Gonzalez Rogers put it simply: Tim Cook chose poorly.

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