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Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher’s titles. This was all well and good until Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft. Straddling the before and after of that acquisition are some ambitious fan-led projects, perhaps none larger than Skyblivion, a project to completely remake The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion inthe Skyrim engine.

The team behind the project previously indicated that it should be completed at some point this year, but I wondered aloud several months ago whether it would be allowed to move forward, or if this would be one of those fan-made projects that is killed off by the lawyers at the last minute, now that Microsoft is in charge. Complicating this further is the long-rumored remaster of Oblivion from Bethesda itself, released just this week. With what would be a competing project, even though Skyblivion is going to be released for free, what would this mean for the project being able to go forward?

Thankfully, and much to this writer’s surprise, it appears that Microsoft and Bethesda are playing cool with the entire project.

Fortunately for the Skyblivion team, Bethesda has apparently decided there’s room enough in this world for both official and unofficial remakes of Oblivion. The team took to social media Tuesday to thank Bethesda for “their continued support” and for “the generous gift of Oblivion Remastered game keys for our entire modding team.”

“To clear up any confusion Bethesda made it clear that they have no intention of shutting down our project,” the team added in a social media reply.

Now, hopefully, that also means that Microsoft has no intention of shutting this down, either. One would hope that any messaging about this from Bethesda has cleared whatever internal bureaucratic hurdles with the parent company required to make that stance firm.

It’s worth noting several things here. First, this fan project did not make use of any Bethesda assets beyond using Skyrim’s engine. Everything has been recreated from scratch, from what I understand. Second, you can’t play Skyblivion without having bought specific versions of both Oblivion and Skyrim, so there really is no threat to the publisher here. In fact, this should be a boon to them and, if anything, drive more sales for these older titles.

And, finally, these fans have, by all accounts, been very cool and respectful of Bethesda throughout the process.

Earlier this month, when credible rumors of the official Oblivion remaster were running rampant, the Skyblivion team posted that it was “eagerly aniticipating” the official release and that there was “no need for comparisons or a sense of competition between Skyblivion and a potential official remaster.” That’s particularly true, the team wrote, because Skyblivion’s PC mod won’t be available for console players, who will be able to enjoy Bethesda’s official version instead.

And now, Bethesda and Microsoft are being human and cool right back at them. I haven’t spilled much ink praising large companies like Microsoft for being sensible on matters that include their intellectual property, but here we are. When Microsoft does something cool, I suppose we owe it to the universe to say so out loud.

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Gavin Newsom’s characterization of the Abrego García deportation as a “distraction” represents a catastrophic failure of moral clarity and constitutional understanding.

This isn’t a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that the administration facilitate the return Abrego García to the United States. A 9-0 ruling. In today’s polarized Court. This isn’t partisan; it’s fundamental. The President, bound by oath and the Constitution to “faithfully execute the laws,” is openly defying the highest judicial authority in the land.

If a President can simply ignore a direct, unanimous Supreme Court order with no consequences, then what remains of checks and balances? What remains of the separation of powers? What remains of the rule of law itself? This is not hyperbole—this is the actual constitutional crisis we were warned about, happening in real time.

The so-called “pragmatists” like Newsom who suggest we focus on “kitchen table issues” instead reveal a profound misunderstanding of what’s at stake. They present a false choice between economic concerns and constitutional principles—as if Americans cannot care about both their retirement accounts and whether we still have a functioning constitutional republic.

Perhaps Governor Newsom should visit Abrego García’s children—two with autism, one prone to seizures—and explain to them that their father’s wrongful imprisonment and torture in El Salvador is a “distraction” from more important matters. Perhaps he should tell these American citizens that the erroneous deportation of their father, in direct violation of his legal protections, is less important than poll-tested talking points about tariffs.

This is the Theater of Neutrality in its most shameful form—pretending that constitutional crises are merely political disagreements, that fundamental questions of rule of law are just one “issue” among many. It’s the cowardly posture that treats moral clarity as a political liability rather than a governing necessity.

What’s particularly galling is how Newsom frames this as political strategy: “Are they defending MS-13?” he asks, parroting the administration’s falsehoods even after a federal judge found that the gang allegations against Abrego García were based on a discredited database and testimony from a disgraced detective.

No, Governor. They’re defending the Constitution. They’re defending due process. They’re defending the principle that no one—not even a President—is above the law. They’re defending the idea that when the Supreme Court issues a unanimous order, it must be followed, not mocked or ignored.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And if we cannot summon the moral clarity to stand firmly against a President openly defying a direct Supreme Court order, then we have already surrendered the constitutional republic we claim to cherish.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires recognizing that some issues aren’t distractions but foundations. The rule of law isn’t a policy preference. It’s the condition that makes all other governance possible.

The ground approaches. And in this moment of constitutional gravity, those who cannot find their moral compass may find themselves remembered among those who stood aside while the Republic itself was undermined.

At this point, I’m not sure Gavin Newsom remembers what’s real.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

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This post is about two things: that it looks like DOGE has violated an injunction, at least in spirit if not letter, and why it matters.

The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE and agency officials at the Social Security Administration.  It began as a TRO issued on March 20, which then became a preliminary injunction on April 17. The district court also refused to stay its enforcement.

The injunction does several things, but most notably it keeps DOGE from accessing identifiable personal information held on Social Security Administration systems except if certain conditions are met. See, for example, this part which generally bars DOGE’s access:

[T]he United States Social Security Administration (“SSA”), Leland Dudek, and Michael Russo and/or his successor (collectively, “SSA Defendants”), and any and all of their agents and employees, and any person working in concert with them, directly or indirectly, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from granting access to any SSA system of record containing personally identifiable information (“PII”), as defined in paragraph 9 hereof, or PII obtained, derived, copied, or exposed from any SSA system of record, including, but not limited to, records known as the Enterprise Data Warehouse (“EDW”), Numident, Master Beneficiary Record (“MBR”), Supplemental Security Record (“SSR”), and Treasury Payment Files, to the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”); the United States DOGE Service; the United States DOGE Service Temporary Organization; members of the DOGE Team established at the Social Security Administration, as defined in ¶ 11(a); Elon Musk; Amy Gleason; and/or any DOGE Affiliate(s), as defined in ¶ 11(b)[.]

Then this part describes conditions that must be met before any exception can be made:

3. SSA may provide members of the DOGE Team with access to discrete, particularized, and non-anonymized data, in accordance with the Privacy Act, and in accordance with the conditions set forth herein: SSA must first comply with the provisions in ¶ 2 of this Order and, in addition, SSA must first obtain from the DOGE Team member, in writing, and subject to possible review by the Court, a detailed explanation as to the need for the record and why, for said particular and discrete record, an anonymized or redacted record is not suitable for the specified use. The general and conclusory explanation that the information is needed to search for fraud or waste is not sufficient to establish need.

According to a declaration by Leland Dudek and certification by the government, the Social Security Administration and DOGE are complying with the injunction, although the SSA acknowledged what it described as two “inadvertent” violations during the pendency of the TRO.

While the Temporary Restraining Order was in effect, SSA had two occasions where systems access was inadvertently granted to systems containing PII. In one instance, controls were in place so the access permissions could not actually be used. In the other, the access was granted inadvertently and the agency confirmed that the systems were not actually accessed, and prompt action was taken to remove the access permissions.

But it is difficult to square this certification with news that DOGE has apparently altered the status of millions of people to make the living seem dead, or specifically move the 6000+ immigrants to the dead list. Furthermore, according to some reports, DOGE renamed the Death Master File to the “Ineligible Master File.”

It is of course theoretically possible that the status changes for the millions of people was done via a script, and DOGE never saw the individual records it changed. It is also possible that the deliberate placing of the 6000+ people was done at the direction of SSA leadership and not DOGE, to the extent that it is believable that such decisions could be taken independently of DOGE’s influence – we’ve seen this issue before, where the Trump Administration has tried to get his appointed toadies to “ratify” terrible things DOGE demanded to give them a veneer of legitimacy, even though they still are things they never could have lawfully done themselves under the APA or other operable laws.

But the injunction (and the TRO, which, although it might have varied slightly from the more recent injunction, does not seem to be significantly different in general substance) also restrained DOGE from altering any code, which, if they ran a script or converted a database name, these actions would seem to violate:

All DOGE Defendants, as well as all SSA DOGE Team members and DOGE Affiliates, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from accessing, altering, or disclosing any SSA computer or software code.

And as for whether they forced SSA staff to do these things themselves, it’s the forcing that is the issue. The court was very careful to make sure that SSA staff could still conduct business as normal – it’s partly why the injunction was deemed proper and staying of it not, because the agency was in no way harmed since it could still do its regular work – it was only the DOGE misadventures that were being delayed.

To avoid confusion or doubt, this Order expressly applies only to SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or otherwise involved in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the Order. Therefore, this Order has no bearing on the ordinary operations of SSA.

Only it turns out they don’t seem to have been delayed at all.

What the news is reporting happened here is very wrong, in multiple ways. Not only does it seemingly violate the injunction (and presumably also the TRO, which was likely in force when much of what happened happened – and although the TRO might differ in small detail from the later formal injunction, it seems to be largely the same in substance), but it is also wrong on its face to do what DOGE has apparently done and cause people to wrongfully, and without due process, be deprived benefits and more.

These sorts of concerns about harm to the public seem to have been on the court’s mind for quite some time. For instance, while this injunction was being litigated the government said that DOGE needed access to personally identifiable information to root out fraud. But to the court it sounded like what DOGE claimed it needed to do was an unconstitutional fishing expedition:

As I understand [it], the Fraud Detection Project appears to amount to an attempt to uncover fraud, without particular, specific grounds that suggest fraud. With the Privacy Act in mind, as addressed in ECF 49, it is unclear to me why there is any need to disclose PII before there is a basis to believe that fraud has occurred. Therefore, the Supplemental Declaration should also clarify the work of the Fraud Detection Project, to include whether there are known, identifiable instances of fraud for which particular PII is sought. And, if there are no such specific, identifiable instances of fraud, then Mr. Dudek should address the need for the disclosure of non-anonymized data before there is a factual basis to support a belief that fraud has occurred or is occurring.

Although this language does not specifically raise the issue of the Fourth Amendment, it echoes it. Per the Constitution people are to be secure in their private matters (“papers and effects”) unless there is probable cause, which would entitle the government to invade their privacy and conduct a search and seizure with sufficient particularity. And here the court appears to be saying, “Where is your probable cause that would entitle you to invade people’s privacy in the information on these systems? Where is the particularity?” The Fourth Amendment says that the government doesn’t get to rummage through people’s private records to look for a crime; it has to already have probable cause to believe there was one and then it can get a warrant allowing it to go find the proof. Whereas here DOGE was saying they had a “need” to conduct a warrantless search, and the court reminded them that no, they don’t.

But the concerns that the court stood up for in ordering its injunction is why all this Privacy Act litigation is so important. One way the Fourth Amendment stops being a barrier to the government getting access to people’s private affairs is if they consent to it. Here, the government has an awful lot of private data people have consented for it to have because it made sense to give that consent in that context. For instance, if people want social security benefits, it makes sense to consent for the Social Security Administration to have enough information about them to provide that benefit.

The point of the Privacy Act is to make that limited consent possible by providing the statutory barriers to make sure it is limited. People don’t consent that “the government” has access to their private information; they consent that the relevant agency has it for the limited purpose that they need it.  The rest of the government doesn’t get to say, “Hey, we don’t need a warrant because look! We already have all the data we need!” The Privacy Act essentially says the government only “has” the data insofar as the public has consented for it to have it for the limited purpose it was needed and makes it illegal for any agency to share it with other parts of the government, even though technically it could.

Here, DOGE (and also the corrupt leadership of the agency) is trying to shatter those statutory barriers preventing that sharing, and for exactly the reason that we have them: to cause harm to the public.  Which is what courts are noticing and why injunctions are being granted in other DOGE Privacy Act cases. Because, as we see with people wrongfully placed on the “dead” list, when the public’s private information is not shielded from unfettered government access, injustice is what follows.

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The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just… helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not “they won’t let me tweet slurs” censorship, but literal “we’re going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship” censorship.

It’s painfully stupid, but that’s just what we get with the folks running the government these days.

This all starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the belief that any research into “disinformation” must itself be a censorship program. This is a bit like assuming that studying cancer is actually a plot to give people cancer, but this is the state of the crazy world we live in today. It ignores the rather obvious fact that disinformation and foreign influence campaigns do exist, and that studying them usually aims to counter them with more speech, not less.

But you will never get that through to the truly brain-wormed among the MAGA-Musk cinematic universe. Just recently, Elon announced that “several more censorship organizations will be released” after a Steve Bannon acolyte falsely posted to ExTwitter that USAID’s non-classified efforts to fund digital literacy efforts was about censorship (she claimed the programs were “declassified,” as she’s too ignorant to know that the “U” in the description means they were always unclassified).

Of course, digital literacy has nothing to do with “censorship” at all. It’s not about “getting news solely from legacy sources.” It simply is about teaching people how to understand what they’re reading (like knowing when something is unclassified already, rather than declassified) and understanding how to recognize when you’re being lied to.

Either way, in pursuit of dumbing down Americans and making them much more susceptible to foreign influence campaigns, last week the NSF got around to pulling a bunch of grants that were (often loosely) related to mis- and disinformation. NSF put out a statement claiming these cuts are about better aligning their efforts.

Awards that are not aligned with NSF’s priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation.

While the targeting of DEI initiatives has received significant attention, the wholesale elimination of mis- and disinformation research represents an equally concerning development.

While apparently 430 such grants have been unceremoniously canceled, one academic forwarded me a spreadsheet listing out about 50 such canceled grants. I don’t want to release the whole thing, but while NSF’s email to academics claimed that each cut was carefully vetted, that’s obviously bullshit.

The most obvious example of how haphazard and stupid these cuts are is that they cut Associate Professor Eric Wustrow’s CAREER grant on “Combating Censorship from Within the Network.” You can kinda tell that some DOGE bro likely did a keyword search on “censorship” and probably just killed all such projects. But if anyone actually read even just the description of the project, they’d realize that this was about countering censorship through technology. You’d think that’s the sort of thing that the DOGE folks would support? Unless of course, they actually support censorship. (Also, canceling CAREER grants is utter bullshit, as they’re specifically designed to help out early career professors, who will be massively harmed by this).

Other canceled grants include one on “empowering fact checkers” because we can’t have that. There’s a canceled grant about “enhancing attribution, detection, and explanation” of foreign influence campaigns (you can see why MAGA might not like that one very much). Also a program on “using markets to address manipulated information online.” You’d think that the “more speech” crew would like that sorta thing, but apparently not.

The impact of these cuts will be profound: reducing America’s ability to counter actual censorship, understand foreign influence operations, and maintain technological leadership in these critical areas.

We will all be dumber because of this nonsense.

The whole thing is so stupid that even the Trump-appointed head of the NSF resigned just after these cuts were announced.

“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”

Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.

As Science notes, DOGE showed up in the NSF offices a few weeks ago and basically just started slashing stuff without much concern or understanding. And Panchanathan gives a little nod towards that nonsense in his resignation letter:

Panchanathan refers obliquely to that draconian reduction in his resignation letter. “While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he writes, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”

This is, like so much from this administration, needless destruction of important American infrastructure and knowledge base through ignorance, anger and stupidity. We will all be worse for it, but thank goodness, no one will ever have to face being… digitally literate in the Trump universe.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Operatives from ElonMusk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.

DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.

That’s the opening of Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott’s report for Wired. Even before you get to the part that indicates this is just a conglomeration of bigots concocting a massive database solely for the purpose of finding foreigners to deport, there’s the fact that this will become one of the most enticing targets for state-sponsored hackers and criminals ever created. Imagine having all of this data in one place and knowing those included in the database are already highly leveraged by their increasingly tenuous living situations. Being merely scammed would be the best possible outcome. Extortion might end up being far more common.

But let’s get back to the, shall we say, more practical aspects of this mass surveillance database. This sort of thing has never been done before for obvious reasons. One of the reasons is listed above. Another reason is that certain information serves certain specific purposes. Putting it all together just makes it more difficult to perform these specific functions. Converting data silos into one giant haystack isn’t necessarily efficient. It’s just something that ignores all the practical reasons data like this is siloed because this current administration is too hateful and stupid to understand the underlying problems or care about the collateral damage.

This is a surveillance state that aspires to be a police state, all while under the nominal “leadership” of a racist billionaire and the terrible person who has now become president twice, despite clearly being unable to do the job the first time around.

While this might look like a cool new way to find brown people, rest assured it will be used to find anyone the Trump administration and its components dislike, as EFF staff attorney Victoria Noble explains in the Wired article:

“When you put all of an agency’s data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don’t need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”

Normal people see bugs. The GOP only sees a list of features. Even when the inevitable data breach occurs, the administration will shrug it off because it mostly affects people it doesn’t consider to be actual people. At best, they’re 3/5ths human and 2/5ths future El Salvadoran prison inmates.

The nastiest part of this “data lake” DOGE is recklessly creating is this: it will be used to find and deport immigrants who are doing everything the government asks them to do to stay on the path to citizenship.

DOGE wants to upload information to the data lake from myUSCIS, the online portal where immigrants can file petitions, communicate with USCIS, view their application history, and respond to requests for evidence supporting their case, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. In combination with IP address information from immigrants that sources tell WIRED that DOGE also wants, this data could be used to aid in geolocating undocumented immigrants, experts say.

This is from an administration that (dishonestly) claims it doesn’t have a problem with migrants who reside in this country legally. These actions say otherwise. This is the administration leveraging data and good faith efforts by immigrants to eject them before they can complete the citizenship process. This is on top of the now-routine revoking of perfectly legal visas and unilateral proclamations that the immigration/visa/temporary residency rules no longer apply.

Attempting to comply just puts immigrants on the DHS radar. A database like this fills in the missing info to allow ICE and others to eject people who are here legally or are doing everything they can to stay here as legal residents. And once this administration feels comfortable doing so, the same pool of information will be used to target immigration lawyers, pro-migrant advocates, and anyone else that has managed to cross-pollinate in the data lake. It might even go after you, Joe Taxpayer and lifetime US citizen.

“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they’re also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits,” Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, tells WIRED.

It’s stupid and dangerous, which is unsurprising. That’s Trump’s brand. As long as it gives the government enough brown people to go after, Trump and his enablers will shrug off the collateral damage suffered by actual US citizens, much in the way they’ve shrugged off the gutting of social services and setting fire to people’s retirement accounts. In exchange, we’re getting a Gestapo of our own and the opportunity to be on the wrong side of history for the foreseeable future.

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A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and “antitrust reform.” Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, and public safety.

It’s really not subtle. It’s also not very populist, or popular, so the Trumplings need to occasionally put on a good face to maintain the ruse they care about “antitrust reform” and consumer protection in what’s looking to be a new golden age of corruption.

Enter the FTC, where Trump just illegally fired the agency’s two Democrat commissioners. The FTC has been maintaining some of Lina Khan’s inquiries into California “big tech” companies. Not because they actually care about corporate power, but because they care about leverage. That leverage, so far, has quite successfully turned most Silicon Valley giants into obedient, authoritarian-coddling invertebrates.

The FTC this week also announced it had sued San Francisco based, Tesla-competitor Uber for deceptive billing practices, stating that the company charged consumers for its Uber One subscription service without their consent, failed to deliver promised savings, and made it difficult for users to cancel the service despite its “cancel anytime” promises. Said FTC boss Andrew Ferguson:

“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people.”

Indeed. That’s a bummer for Uber and Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who collectively donated $2 million for the Trump inauguration fund.

Trump has made it clear their regulatory targets will usually be highly selective, and usually chosen for cronyism purposes (like, say a company directly competing with the billionaire running your DOGE department). There’s no limit of dangerous misrepresentation and potential fraud you could target Elon Musk’s companies for, but that’s clearly not happening under Trump 2.0.

Meanwhile most Trump agencies, like the FCC, are openly making it clear they plan to utterly eviscerate consumer protection. All while Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright make it so regulators can’t do much of anything without it being overturned down the road. These are actions that are going to make corporate malfeasance worse, not better.

At the same time, agencies like the FCC are hypocritically claiming to have authority they don’t have to do bizarre and legally incoherent things, like the harassment of companies for not being racist and sexist enough, accurately reporting on the Trump administration, or not going far enough to coddle right wing ideology or protect and nurture right wing online propaganda.

FTC boss Andrew Ferguson’s first act before joining the FTC was to announce he’d leverage the agency’s dwindling authority to do things like “fight back against the trans agenda,” and take aim at the tech industry’s “censorship” (read: refusing to coddle right wing ideology and propaganda).

A lot of gullible press outlets are going to see the cases against Meta, Uber, and Google and proclaim that Trump 2.0 is “perpetuating the antitrust legacy of Lina Khan.” But they’ll downplay the much larger reality that is the complete evisceration of most regulatory agencies and corporate oversight in a way that’s going to make all corporate misbehavior much, much worse.

There’s still a lot of normalization bias among people who don’t want to believe the reality of what’s happening. And a lot of major media outlets that are too afraid of losing money and access to accurately call a duck a duck.

When Trump 2.0 does take consumer-protection action, it’s going to be incredibly important to wait and see what the actual remedies for harm look like (if there are any). And whether any of these efforts survive the Trumplican court system being custom-repurposed to derail reform and corporate accountability of every kind, performative or otherwise.

For example the Trump-stocked Fifth and Sixth circuits have taken an absolute hatchet to efforts like net neutrality or location-data privacy enforcement. Any consumer protection efforts you do see are being taken knowning that they’re likely not going to survive the Trump-stocked court’s assault on regulatory oversight.

Which is to say I think most Trump 2.0 consumer protection efforts are still a sort of performance art, generally designed to trick the press and public into believing that the administration is populist, when on every level beneath that façade, it’s being built to coddle corporate power and a relatively tiny subset of white rich men.

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Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggrevating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondant to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly suffered its share of leaked content and it’s response generally ranges from attempting to DMCA the leaks into oblivion — which never actually works — to unmasking and then bringing down the heaviest legal hammer it can wield upon the leaker. Lost in the sauce in all of this appears to be just how much this keeps those leaks Nintendo wanted to bury in the news, working at a complete cross-purpose to what the company’s stated aims are.

It gets all the more silly when there are months and months in between the initial leak and this sort of legal action. Game Freak announced back in October of last year that it had suffered a breach and that content ranging from internal employee information to unreleased information about past and future Pokémon games had been exfiltrated. Shortly after the announcement, some of the leaked information began appearing on social media sites, including on Discord. There a user going by GameFreakOUT posted a bunch of the leaked content to a Discord Server called FreakLeak.

Again, that was all in October of last year. In April of this year, six months later, Nintendo has petitioned the court to unmask GameFreakOUT.

Nintendo is asking a California court to force Discord to give up the identity of the person behind last year’s massive Pokémon data breach, known among the Pokémon community as the “Teraleak.” It’s called the Teraleak because of just how much information was released online; the leaker claimed to have source code for the upcoming game Pokémon Legends: Z-A (though they did not release it), as well as next-generation Pokémon titles, builds of older games, and loads of concept art and lore documents.

The purpose of the subpoena is “to obtain the identity of the Discord user ‘GameFreakOUT,’ who posted infringing content,” wrote James D. Berkley, an attorney for Nintendo. Alongside the declaration, Nintendo included a partially redacted screenshot of the Discord server, in which the user GameFreakOUT posted a file and told users to “enjoy.”

Can Nintendo do this? Maybe. We’ve made this point before, but the unmasking of anonymous speakers on the internet ought to carry with it a very high bar over which petitioners should have to jump. Unmasking anonymous speech should be done to prevent future or current injury, not merely to punish accused bad actors. That said, that determination will be up to the court to decide.

But the broader point is why Nintendo is doing this now six months after the leak. All this serves to do for the time being is to keep the leak, and the information in the leak, in the news six months after the leak occurred. Nintendo may want to go the punitive litigation route as a deterrence, I suppose, but exactly how productive would that be? Is it really going to stop the next leak from happening? And if the answer to that is “no”, then what the hell is the point?

The answer is probably not that deep. Nintendo is a company with a litigious culture on matters of intellectual property. It may simply be that the questions above were never even asked of itself.

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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:

4chan is dead. It’s Toxic Legacy is everywhere (Wired)Wide-Ranging Decisions Protect Speech and Address Harms (Oversight Board)Meta’s oversight board rebukes company over policy overhaul (Reuters)Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) (Techdirt)Most young Aussie men are turning to masculinity influencers, and it’s impacting their mental health (ABC News)Young Men’s Health in a Digital World (Movember)Teens, Social Media and Mental Health (Pew Research Center)National Science Foundation cancels research grants related to misinformation and disinformation (Nieman Lab)Bluesky Is Rolling Out Official Verification (Wired)Government censorship comes to Bluesky, but not its third-party apps … yet (TechCrunch)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

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Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas.

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

The language is coded, but definitely not clever. Composed by a DOJ prosecutor perhaps best known for his hundred-plus appearances on Russian state-owned media outlets, the letter [PDF] is full of phrases that make it clear at least one federal prosecutor is interested in deterring scientific rebuttals to the parade of horrors that will be emanating from RFK Jr.’s Dept. of Health and Humans Services over the next few years.

Martin’s letter claims “more and more” scientific journals and publications are “conceding they are partisans in various scientific debates.” He alludes to possible federal crimes being committed by these journals if they are “advocating due to advertisement” (which Martin links to the postal code) or sponsorship (which Martin pretends might have something to do with federal fraud laws). In order to find targets for his prosecutorial attention, Martin asks every journal receiving this letter to respond to the following questions:

*How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation?*How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relationships with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?How do you assess the role played by government officials and funding organizations like the National Insitutes of Health in the development of submitted articles?How do you handle allegations that authors of your work in your journals may have misled their readers?

I am also interested to now if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints. Are there new norms being developed or authored?

These are pretty weird questions to be asking scientific journal publishers. These are exceptionally weird questions for a federal prosecutor to be asking scientific journal publishers. While there are certainly valid concerns about AI involvement in crafting scientific reports, along with some pay-to-play operations that undermine the scientific community in general, it’s generally accepted that these publishers usually publish work that has been subjected to peer review and scientific method best practices.

What this letter sounds like is a very vague threat that prosecutors will start hassling journals that refuse to publish unscientific garbage that appears to support the multiple conspiracy theories pushed by Trump, RFK Jr., and far too many of their supporters. It also suggests that if journals don’t cozy up to the Trump quacks, whatever NIH funding that still somehow exists post-DOGE will vanish completely. It would be worrying enough if this letter had been issued by the HHS. That it came from a federal prosecutor is legitimately horrifying.

Once again, the party of free speech and alleged participant in the marketplace of ideas is showing that it only thinks speech it agrees with should be “free” and that the marketplace of ideas should only offer up ideas it likes. At the very least, this letter has the chance to push some journals into self-censorship, limiting dissemination of studies and essays publishers know don’t align with the Trump Administration’s deep disdain for established scientific principles. And once that end of the idea marketplace begins to dry up, the administration will do all it can to fill the void in the market with bad science, bad ideas, and children’s corpses.

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There are a few ways to think about Elon Musk’s announcement this week that he’s stepping back from DOGE. The first is that he’s leaving a job he officially doesn’t have. The second is that he’s returning to a job (Tesla CEO) that he’s supposedly been doing this whole time. The third, and perhaps most interesting, is that none of this actually makes any sense at all.

The announcement came during Tesla’s latest earnings call (which was, to put it gently, not great). With Tesla’s sales and profits plummeting while Musk has been busy redesigning (read: destroying) the entire US government, you might think focusing more on Tesla would be logical. But that assumes any of this is actually about logic.

Like so many Musk pronouncements, this one’s mostly vaporware. Not only had this “stepping back” been reported weeks ago (though never confirmed), but if you look closely at what he actually said, he’s not really leaving DOGE at all, even as news headlines claimed otherwise. He just claimed he would spend less time on DOGE, giving a bit more time to his many other companies.

He said he’ll continue to spend a “day or two per week” on government issues “for as long as the president would like me to do so.”

But, of course, according to official filings from the US government, Elon Musk isn’t even a part of DOGE, an obvious lie that basically no one (other than the DOJ in sworn statements to a court) pretends are true.

Technically, Musk is a “special government employee” who supposedly can only advise the President, though in practice, we know that’s also not true. He’s basically running big parts of the government. And despite having no constitutionally-required appointment for such authority, he appears to be deciding what things can be cut, and shutting down entire agencies. While some have speculated the supposed “May” step down is because those SGE jobs are only supposed to last 130 days, apparently the government can issue waivers to allow those SGEs to stay on significantly longer.

And, really, Musk has violated a ton of other rules that apply to SGEs, including those around conflicts of interest, impartiality, and a ban on “partisan political activities.” Given how much Musk has done that involves a conflict of interest, and his ongoing partisan political activities, it seems that he doesn’t much care to follow the rules. So, the idea that anyone in this government cares about the supposed 130 day limit is laughable.

A closer reading of Musk’s actual words shows he’s not really going anywhere. He’s just promising not to spend all his time in DC anymore. And even that comes with a rather significant caveat:

“I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back, which will do if it has the chance,” Musk said

Let’s talk about those savings Musk is so worried about protecting. There are basically three stories here, each more puzzling than the last.

First, there’s the story of the incredible shrinking savings target. Musk started by promising to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget right before the election. Post-election, perhaps realizing people might actually try to hold him to that number, it suddenly became $1 trillion. A few weeks ago, he lowered expectations again to $150 billion.

If you’re playing at home, the difference between $2 trillion and $150 billion is… just about $2 trillion.

The second story is about what’s actually being cut. Even the $150 billion is nonsense — not only has DOGE failed to demonstrate any actual waste or fraud (certainly no one’s been charged with fraud), but the programs they’re recklessly cutting are likely to cost taxpayers way more than they save.

And the third story? That’s about how DOGE counts its supposed savings. As the NY Times detailed, those numbers look to be pretty much fictional:

One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist*. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.*

It said it had saved exactly $318,310,328.30.

Even as the media keeps fact-checking these claims, DOGE just quietly makes random changes to its website, hoping no one notices. The NY Times caught them deleting entries that triple-counted the same savings, confused “billion” with “million”, and even claimed credit for canceling contracts that ended during the George W. Bush administration.

But the errors keep coming. Their second-biggest claimed savings? A supposedly canceled IRS contract worth $1.9 billion that was actually canceled under Biden. Their third-biggest? A $1.75 billion savings from canceling a vaccine nonprofit grant that had already been paid in full.

This might all be amusing if it weren’t so stupid and causing so much damage. Even as Musk was publicly walking back expectations to $150 billion in savings, DOGE’s own website was still claiming $160 billion. And then there’s the matter of Musk’s Twitter activity, where he seems to have discovered an entirely new category of fictional math, in which he will regularly and repeatedly retweet claims that disagree with his own admission that DOGE will only save $150 billion.

The latest example? Musk enthusiastically amplifying claims about massive Social Security fraud. Here he is, just yesterday, retweeting someone claiming $12.6 billion in monthly savings from supposedly removing “7 million scammers” from the system:

There are several problems here. The first, as Wired detailed, is that not a single part of this claim is true. The Social Security Administration has long had systems to prevent payments to deceased beneficiaries, including (but certainly not limited to) their automated processes to stop anyone over 115 from receiving any payments at all. Which means, rather awkwardly for Musk’s claims, none of these supposedly fraudulent recipients were actually receiving any money to begin with, and even if they were cut from the system, the savings would be $0.

Actually, it would be worse than that, because the SSA had already considered this exact issue. A report shows they deliberately chose not to update death records for these super-elderly non-recipients, because doing so would cost far more than any theoretical fraud it might prevent. The few actual cases of payments to deceased beneficiaries are handled through other means.

More than anyone else in the world, Musk is in a position to find out what’s really happening, but he’s been repeating the false claims about Social Security for months now. And, hell, for a supposed genius, even he should be able to do the basic math and realize that if his SS savings alone were $12.6 billion a month, that alone would basically equal the claimed $150 billion in annual savings.

Even worse, right around the time that Musk was telling the world to maybe expect $150 billion in savings, he retweeted some rando’s account claiming DOGE had already saved nearly twice that:

That retweet claiming $291.6 billion in savings came… three days before Musk announced at a cabinet meeting that savings for the entire fiscal year might reach $150 billion. In a normal world, you might expect his supporters (or the media?) to notice this rather stark contradiction. But this isn’t a normal world. Both numbers are somehow treated as equally valid, equally true, equally worth celebrating.

There’s a pattern here that goes beyond just bad math. Musk leads DOGE while government lawyers swear under oath that he doesn’t. He’s supposedly running Tesla while spending his time dismantling the federal government. He claims massive savings that don’t actually exist. He retweets numbers that directly contradict the numbers he personally announced just days earlier.

The whole thing feels like it should collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. But it doesn’t, because it was never meant to make sense. It’s basically all kayfabe — that peculiar form of theatrical fakery where the audience chooses to believe despite knowing better.

The difference is that unlike wrestling, where the fakery is harmless entertainment, this performance is actively destroying what had been the most amazing democracy and economy on the planet. And that’s a lot less fun to watch.

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Gang databases are just handy racism. They’re a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities’ lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That’s why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled “gang members” by deliberately broken processes and systems.

So, it’s no surprise the same faulty logic and “any minority existing in public” attitude is being applied to the mass, forcible exodus of minorities from this country. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act made it clear this was about exiling foreigners, rather than protecting this nation from foreign enemies, because the last time it was used, the US government sent thousands of legal US residents to internment camps.

This time, we’re sending residents and undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons. El Salvador is our new best friend, willing to (inhumanely) house whoever we eject, whether it’s hardened criminals with violent histories or just people who happen to have been born in another country. Trump’s latest hallucination is that the Venezuelan government has sent thousands of Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the US for the sole purpose of harming America and Americans in, I guess, a warlike fashion.

The mass ejection is so big it can no longer be handled by the DHS and its components. Since his re-arrival in DC, agencies from the FBI to the IRS to private prison companies have been deputized to assist in multiple unlawful acts that make the US look more like WWII Germany than the alleged 2025 Leader of the Free World.

Private prison companies and the disgraced ex-cops they’re all too willing to hire have helped send possibly innocent people to El Salvador, where they’ll be stacked like cordwood right next to vicious killers with lifelong MS-13 affiliations.

It takes a fucking village to burn this nation down. The all-hands-on-deck approach to cruelty also involves gang databases so toxic, even the cops who created them aren’t allowed to use them anymore. Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a person this administration first admitted was wrongly deported but now claims is actually a violent criminal — was the victim of this gang database, one once relied on by multiple law enforcement agencies.

Here’s the latest on this despicable twist from the Washington Post.

The path to Kilmar Abrego García’s deportation to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador began six years ago, when a suburban Maryland police detective typed a critical allegation into a Gang Interview Field Sheet.

“An active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” wrote the detective in 2019, after detaining Abrego García at a Home Depot in Prince George’s County while he stood in the parking lot looking for construction work.His evidence: an unnamed confidential informant and Abrego García’s Chicago Bulls cap, which the officer wrote in his report was “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.”

In other words, any “Hispanic” with a sports team’s hat on is probably in a gang. And any Black person as well, for that matter.

More unbelievably, the “this guy is gang member” narrative composed by the so-called “investigator” also made these claims in support of his MS-13 fantasies:

Abrego García, Mendez wrote, had been identified by an unnamed confidential informant as an “active member” of MS-13’s Western clique in Upstate New York — a place he has never lived. Mendez cited Abrego García’s clothes as further proof, including a hooded sweatshirt that featured green bands covering the eyes, ears and mouth of Benjamin Franklin’s face as printed on the $100 bill. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, would later say she bought him the sweatshirt — for sale on FashionNova — because she liked the design.

In other words, only whites are allowed to support sports teams in public. And only white people are allowed to reference fiat currency via outwear. Everyone else is a gang member. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the only honest conclusion that can be drawn from the gang database run by Prince George’s County PD’s “gang unit.”

The gang unit in Prince George’s County, whose residents are majority Black and Latino, stopped using the Gang Field Interview Sheet as a source of intelligence gathering about three years ago, amid a civil lawsuit that alleged young men of color were disproportionately represented in it.

The justifications for “nominating” gang members were so weak and the targeting so prevalent, federal officials in the area decommissioned this database voluntarily during this litigation. One reason for doing so? Hardly anyone was added to the database once courts and plaintiffs started asking questions about the processes used to determine who was or wasn’t a suspected gang member.

In this particular case, a dirty cop dirtied the database with his foregone conclusions about “Hispanics” and their possibly un-gang-related support of the Chicago Bulls. Ivan Mendez — since suspended from the Prince George’s County PD for tipping off a sex worker about an investigation into the brothel she allegedly ran — was one of several members of the PD’s gang unit, a number of which were criminally indicted for charges ranging from gross misconduct to conspiracy to commit criminal acts.

This questionable database, run by and contributed to by even more questionable law enforcement officers, is Donald Trump’s sole basis for the baseless “gang member” accusations he’s been hurling at Abrego Garcia ever since this whole thing blew up in federal court.

To date, the only evidence federal authorities have produced in court to support such allegations is the Maryland police detective’s 2019 gang sheet.

Well, that and a photo of someone’s hand that someone else has Photoshopped to pretend four different images on four fingers adds up to MS-13.

The administration has an obviously faulty report and a hazy image that isn’t the Zapruder freeze frame it seems to think it is. Instead, it’s carrying about the odious byproduct of gang unit officers so inherently untrustworthy, neither they nor their database are still in operation today.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President’s star witnesses!

From 2004 to 2009, the department was placed under federal oversight after the agency was investigated for canine unit brutality and shooting more people than any other police department in the country. A group of Black and Latino officers sued the department in 2018, alleging police leaders discriminated against officers of color and enabled racist behaviors that harmed residents.

Last year, the department was sued again over the gang unit and its use of the GangNET database after community members repeatedly complained that officers were racially profiling young Latino men and incorrectly labeling them as gang members.

On one hand, you want to be shocked that federal officers would use a defunct database and disgraced officers to justify extrajudicial ejections of people from this country. On the other hand, you can see who’s running the country and understand it doesn’t really matter to them whether or not they even possess the shittiest, weakest “evidence” to support deportations. They’re just going to keep doing it because they can.

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There’s simply no limit of problems in telecom and media that competent FCC regulators could be taking aim at. Broadband price gouging by monopolies, widespread telecom privacy and security failures, the obvious harm of unchecked media consolidation all come quickly to mind.

Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion’s share of his first months in office engaged in erratic authoritarian zealotry, whether it’s abusing FCC authority to harass journalists who refuse to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, or “investigating” Verizon, Comcast, and Disney for not being racist enough.

Now Carr is again taking aim at Comcast, simply because journalists at MSNBC and NBC gave King Donald a sad.

Over at the right wing propaganda website known as X, Carr whined about Comcast over MSNBC and NBC’s coverage of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland dad the government “accidentally” kidnapped, sent to a foreign gulag, and now refuses to return to the U.S.

You’ll notice Carr isn’t actually launching any sort of actual “investigation” into Comcast here because the accusation is baseless bullshit.

There is no evidence that Garcia was a gang member. Garcia’s only arrest was in 2019 for “loitering” in a Home Depot parking lot. Carr is of course mad because NBC and MSNBC told people the truth: that the government fucked up, appear to have falsely and lazily identified a man as a gang member and dangerous career criminal, then “accidentally” shipped him off to a foreign work gulag.

Even if Garcia was a gang member, Brendan Carr is behaving like a foolish clown. The rule he’s trying to leverage here, the FCC’s “distortion rule,” is a very rarely enforced rule that says news outlets can’t suppress important journalism or take cash bribes to modify journalism. It clearly doesn’t apply if NBC and MSNBC were just explaining the situation accurately. And it doesn’t apply to cable news.

Carr, of course, knows this, he’s just hoping that a shitty U.S. press system will help him pretend he’s launching a “serious investigation,” so the accusations get repeated across the media and other news outlets think twice before criticizing Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter if NBC (or anybody else) is guilty, the press will dutifully parrot the accusation far and wide, implying guilt.

Because U.S. consolidated corporate journalism is generally very shitty and concerned about losing access or costly fake investigations, it’s an effective tactic.

If you search through the news wires, most of the reporting on this story parrot Carr’s claims without pointing out he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Or that the rule in question doesn’t apply to cable. Or that Carr’s primary goal is very clearly to bully media companies and suppress journalism, a curious choice for a party that spent the last few years babbling endlessly about their love of free speech.

Again there will never be a case against Comcast here because this is thin bullshit and Carr has absolutely no leg to stand on. The whole point of the tweet was to get the press to parrot the false claims to a broader audience and to soften their criticism of the Trump administration. Most were happy to oblige.

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The fear over industry disruptions due to technological advances is so predictable that we have the entire “buggy whip” analogy pre-built to rebut it. For the uninitiated, the analogy harkens back to when the automobile came into wide circulation and the disruption it had on the makers of horse buggy tools, like the whip for the horses, if they didn’t adapt. While some may have argued that the automobile was a danger to those businesses, the truth is that these new vehicles opened up so many other economic opportunities both for newly created jobs opened up by cars and within the transportation industry for those willing to adapt that it was actually a net benefit to jobs and the economy.

It may feel like artificial intelligence is everywhere these days, but the truth is that we’re still in the very early stages when it comes to how this technology will be used in the future and what effects it will have in all kinds of markets. In the video game industry specifically, we already have examples of how generative AI used in gaming isn’t even close yet to the product of human artists, nor a replacement for the gaming output of human beings. But that isn’t stopping some folks from worrying out loud that use of AI in the gaming industry is a threat to industry jobs.

In some cases, it will be, of course. But that should be a temporary concern, just like the buggy whip manufacturers. More important is what the use of AI in gaming can mean for increased output and as another tool for developers to use to create a better industry ecosystem. Industry legend John Carmack recently made this point when responding to some criticism for Microsoft’s recent demo of an AI-generated facsimile of Quake 2.

Carmack’s comments came after an X user with the handle “Quake Dad” called the new demo “disgusting” and claimed it “spits on the work of every developer everywhere.” The critic expressed concern that such technology would eliminate jobs in an industry already facing layoffs, writing: “A fully generative game cuts out the number of jobs necessary for such a project which in turn makes it harder for devs to get jobs.”

Carmack responded directly to these concerns in a lengthy post. “I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is,” he wrote, before addressing the broader concern about “AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.” Carmack positioned AI as the latest in a long history of technological advancements that have transformed game development.

“My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance,” Carmack explained. “Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.”

It’s the right argument to make, frankly. We’re a long ways off from AI being able to build entire, quality games from start to finish, as Microsoft’s own tech demo showed. Its output was nowhere close to being a one to one recreation of Quake 2. It was much closer to something like allowing players to experience the AI’s impression of the game. In the immediate, this demonstrates that human beings are still very much needed and that the output of AI is more akin to Carmack’s analogy than a job-stealing dev-bot.

But maybe someday it gets way, way better. In fact, that’s probably nearly an inevitability. There’s no reason to think that the long term is one where AI creates video games all on its own sans human handlers that have no input and therefore no jobs. Instead, it’s far more likely that this will be yet another tool human developers will have to create output faster, to create output better, or to otherwise assist human beings in their work.

Tim Sweeney of Epic Games chimed in on the conversation as well.

Ultimately, Sweeney says not to worry: “There’s always a fear that automation will lead companies to make the same old products while employing fewer people to do it,” Sweeney wrote in a follow-up post on X. “But competition will ultimately lead to companies producing the best work they’re capable of given the new tools, and that tends to mean more jobs.”

And Carmack closed with this: “Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor-saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.”

We have no choice but to progress, in other words. Adapt or die. All the clichés. But we should also have our eyes open to the opportunities AI could create in the gaming industry and others, rather than wallow in doom and gloom.

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As Artificial Intelligence reshapes the internet landscape, we’re watching history repeat itself: The same people who fundamentally misunderstood Section 230’s role in enabling the modern internet are now making eerily similar mistakes about how we should approach AI regulation. This week’s episode of Otherwise Objectionable dives into these parallel debates, exploring both how Section 230’s principles might apply to AI and why some continue pushing to dismantle the law entirely.

The timing couldn’t be more relevant. As Congress (less so) and state legislatures (much more so) rush to regulate AI, they seem determined to ignore the lessons learned from decades of internet regulation. The principles that made Section 230 so crucial for the internet’s development — protecting innovation while enabling responsible content moderation — are more relevant than ever in the AI era.

Episode 7: The Future of Speech Online

While previous episodes explored Section 230’s history and the internet it enabled, this week’s discussions tackle two crucial questions: How should Section 230’s principles inform our approach to AI development? And why do some continue insisting the law needs to be dismantled despite its proven importance?

The episode begins with an exploration of how Section 230’s core principles might guide AI development and regulation. Neil Chilson and Dave Willner offer insights into the parallels (and a few differences!) between early internet and today’s AI debates. Just as Section 230 created a framework that both protected innovation and encouraged responsible moderation, we need similar nuanced approaches for AI — not the sledgehammer regulations many states are currently proposing.

Their discussion highlights a crucial point: the same fundamental tensions that Section 230 addressed — balancing innovation with responsibility, enabling filtering without mandating it — are at the heart of current AI policy debates. And just as with Section 230, many proposed AI regulations seem designed to solve problems that don’t actually exist while potentially creating massive new ones.

The episode then shifts to examine ongoing legal challenges to Section 230 itself, featuring interviews with attorneys Carrie Goldberg and Annie McAdams. Both have extensive histories challenging Section 230’s scope in court. While their cases have mostly (though not entirely) been unsuccessful — highlighting the law’s robust protections — it’s still worthwhile to get their perspectives on why they think the law is the problem (even as I disagree).

Perhaps most intriguingly, these two vocal critics of Section 230 ultimately reach different conclusions about the law’s future. Their disagreement underscores a key point: even among those who see problems with Section 230’s current interpretation, there’s no consensus on how to address those issues without undermining the law’s crucial protections.

As this series approaches its conclusion (with just one roundtable discussion remaining next week), these conversations highlight how Section 230’s principles remain vital for addressing new technological challenges. Whether we’re talking about content moderation on social media or the development of AI systems, we need frameworks that encourage innovation while enabling — but not mandating — responsible development practices.

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For a long time, we’ve believed no president would dare enact the Alien Enemies Act again, not after it was abused to send more than 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent to US concentration camps during the Second World War.

Even the administrative power grabs and uptick in bigotry that followed the 9/11 attacks never went as far as Trump has in his second presidential term. Trump, along with his supporters and enablers, are enacting a racial cleansing of America. That it’s been mostly bloodless so far isn’t much comfort. In fact, due to the lack of concerted push-back by any other branch of the government (a late-night order from SCOTUS notwithstanding), the only thing this bloodlessness indicates is that we’re still on the early end of the Trump 2.0 timeline

But even bad faith efforts to remove brown people from the US need some sort of excuse, no matter how unbelievable, to justify the abjectly horrible actions being taken by the Trump administration. It gives everyone involved the veneer of lawfulness they’ll need to cling to if, and more hopefully, when they’re held accountable for their actions.

The claim being used to buttress sending people who are here in this country legally to foreign prisons under the Alien Enemies Act is this: The deportees are actually enemies engaging in hostile acts under the direct supervision of a foreign, unfriendly government. Here’s how the Trump Administration has framed this flimsy argument:

Trump’s invocation of the act claims such a link: “TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

Almost no evidence has been offered to support these assertions. Similarly sloppy work is being done by federal officers, ex-cops, and private contractors to identify alleged gang members. From what we’ve seen so far, the mere presence of literally any tattoo on a detainee’s body is enough to get them shipped off to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison.

No one in the Trump administration cares how sloppy and how cruel this is. And they certainly won’t be moved by the determination of multiple US intelligence agencies, whose combined forces have yet to uncover anything linking the Venezuelan government to Tren de Aragua gang activity in the United States, much less anything that ties hundreds of detainees to activities that would justify their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.

The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determinedin a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United Statesby the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.

The determination is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive assessment to date undercutting Trump’s rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process…

Even if this full assessment is made public, it won’t change anything. It’s not going to stop the Trump administration from ignoring due process rights and expelling as many foreign residents from the US as possible. All that’s guaranteed to happen is the mass firing of every intelligence official involved in generating this assessment. Bigoted sociopaths are running the country now and there’s not a single person in any position of power in this administration who gives one solitary fuck about the truth. We citizens, however, don’t have to pretend to believe Trump’s bullshit. That’s still a luxury we can afford, which is more than can be said about the billionaires and bootlickers he’s surrounded himself with, who are clearly willing to watch an entire country burn in exchange for a little bit of Oval Office access.

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Last fall  Trump sued CBS claimed (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.

CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.

Carr has launched an “investigation” into CBS claiming that the minor edits to the Harris interview violate the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy, a rarely enforced rule preventing news outlets from killing stories or dramatically changing stories in exchange for bribes. It’s completely bogus, but whether CBS is guilty doesn’t matter; right wing media will ensure CBS looks guilty of being unfair to the right wing.

It’s a fake inquiry, designed to pressure CBS to fold to the whims of Trumpism and weaken their journalism of the administration. And it’s working. Top 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens now says he’s quitting the program, making it clear that CBS is likely to fold to Trump’s whims:

“Bill Owens, executive producer of television’s most popular and influential newsmagazine since 2019, said in a note to staff that it has “become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ’60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

“The show is too important to the country,” he wrote. “It has to continue, just not with me as the executive producer.”

Owens might get chided for not standing up to Trumpism, but he’s facing a lose/lose scenario. Skydance owner and soon-to-be CBS boss David Ellison has been palling around with Trump at MMA fights. The company is also being pressured to fold like a coward (like Meta, ABC, or Paul Weiss) by Skydance exec and soon-to-be CBS boss Jeff Shell (booted from NBC after sexual harassment allegations).

If current CBS brass actually cared about journalism, they’d cancel the Skydance merger and tell the Trump administration to go fuck themselves. But that would eliminate all the benefits such pointless “growth for growth’s sake” mergers deliver, such as brief stock bumps, tax breaks, and flimsy justifications for massive layoffs and outsized executive compensation.

So expect CBS journalism moving forward to only further coddle and normalize radical Trumpism. Which is amusing given that, like so many major U.S. media companies, CBS had already spent the last few years responding to authoritarianism by coddling the right wing. Which, if you hadn’t noticed by now, is the entire goal.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

The Trump administration’s attempt to rendition people to El Salvador without due process has hit another judicial roadblock. Judge Charlotte Sweeney in Colorado has blocked the government from using the improper Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the US without due process.

The administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is both legally absurd and morally offensive. The history of the Alien and Sedition Acts is a shameful moment in American history, with three of the four acts long since repealed or expired. The surviving Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times in our history — during actual declared wars — and each use represents a stain on American principles of due process.

But here, it’s even worse. The administration isn’t even pretending there’s a real war. Instead, Trump simply declared by executive fiat that a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), constitutes an “invading force” under the control of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — a transparently false claim that ignores both reality and the Constitution’s assignment of war powers to Congress.

The court methodically dismantles the administration’s attempt to redefine basic constitutional concepts. Judge Sweeney explains that “invasion” has always meant military action by another nation — not, as the administration claims, criminal activity by a gang. The ruling points out (quoting other rulings) that this understanding of invasion “echoes throughout the Constitution” and “in every instance, it is used in a military sense.” The administration’s attempt to characterize TdA’s activities as an “invasion” fails “at a bare minimum,” regardless of how dramatically the government describes the gang’s “hostile actions.”

The opinion reads like a basic civics lesson for an administration that seems to need one. The judge appears particularly unimpressed with government lawyers trying to argue that “unambiguous words are ambiguous” just to justify their novel interpretation.

Similarly, the court rejected the administration’s attempt to transform a criminal gang into a “foreign nation or government” merely by asserting links to Maduro’s regime:

At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,”

From there, the judge calls out the horrifying lack of due process by the US government in trying to traffic these individuals to El Salvador:

This does not, as discussed during oral argument, instruct individuals that they have a right to pursue a habeas challenge. At most, the Notice “permits” individuals to make “a phone call.” Id. (emphasis added). And while the Notice requires government employees to certify they have read the Notice to an individual “in a language he or she understands,” this does not guarantee individuals are provided the Notice in a language they understand “in a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief,” J. G. G., 2025 WL 1024097, at *2. Vaguely granting someone permission to make one phone call if they ask—with, at most, a verbal read-aloud of the Notice that on its face says nothing about the right to seek habeas relief—does not rise to the level of “allow[ing] [detainees] to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before [their] removal occurs.” Id. (emphasis added); Mullane v. Cent. Hanover Bank & Tr. Co., 339 U.S. 306, 314 (1950) (“An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process . . . is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to present their objections.” … This is all the truer where, as Petitioners observe, the notice gives no timeframe for removal or even informs an individual how to contest their removal—much less, noted above, that notice judicial review could be pursued.

The judge also addresses the very different beliefs between the plaintiffs’ ACLU lawyers and the government on just how much notice people deserve to allow them to seek due process before being shipped to a foreign concentration camp. Remember, the Supreme Court explicitly said, just weeks ago, that there must be a “reasonable” amount of time for due process.

The DOJ argued that 24 hours was sufficient notice — a position that would effectively prevent any meaningful legal challenge. While the ACLU requested 30 days, the court settled on 21 days and laid out specific requirements for adequate notice:

Such notice must state the government intends to remove individuals pursuant to the Act and Proclamation. It must also provide notice of a right to seek judicial review, and inform individuals they may consult an attorney regarding their detainment and the government’s intent to remove them. Such notice must be written in a language the individual understands. These requirements are reasonable to ensure individuals are “actually inform[ed],” Mullane, 339 U.S. at 315, of their rights and the nature of proceedings against them, consistent with Supreme Court precedent on this very issue, and crafted to the “appropriate nature of the case,” see J. G. G., 2025 WL 1024097, *2 (quoting Mullane, 339 U.S. at 313. See also id. (“The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”).

In issuing the temporary restraining order, Judge Sweeney cut through the government’s arguments with a simple observation about what’s really at stake: without court intervention, these individuals face “significant risk” of being illegally trafficked to a foreign gulag. The court emphasized that its order merely enforces fundamental constitutional principles:

Practically speaking, a TRO would inflict little more on Respondents than ensure they adhere to the requirement the Supreme Court has already imposed on them: give Petitioners and putative class members adequate notice, with adequate time, to adequately pursue habeas relief

Expect the government to appeal and/or try to weasel its way out of what the judge orders here, because that’s what they’ve been doing in every one of these cases. But, for now, it’s another strong ruling against the fascist Trump administration’s efforts to disappear people to a foreign concentration camp under an inapplicable law without any due process.

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When a federal judge starts calling out government lawyers for “willful and bad faith” behavior and “deliberate evasion of fundamental discovery obligations,” you know things have gotten serious. But in the case of Abrego Garcia — the man who the DOJ admitted they accidentally sent to a Salvadoran gulag without due process — the DOJ seems determined to test just how far they can push a court’s patience.

First came the admission it was all an accident. Then, a week later, came the attempt to retroactively justify sending him to CECOT by retconning a made-up narrative about him being involved in MS-13. Now the DOJ is trying to argue that the Supreme Court didn’t actually order them to help get him released — directly contradicting the Supreme Court’s explicit language from less than two weeks ago.

The courts have shown remarkable restraint for such bad faith behavior. When the DOJ effectively ignored the district court’s initial order, Judge Paula Xinis gave them more chances to make things right — the kind of patience the DOJ rarely shows to the people it prosecutes. But last week’s hearing made it clear that patience has limits. Yesterday’s order crossed from judicial restraint into judicial rage.

In response to the DOJ’s continued stonewalling, you’ll recall that Judge Xinis ordered expedited discovery in which the government would have to hand over information it had regarding Garcia, about what (if anything) it had been doing to get him back, and some other information as well.

On Tuesday morning, the parties filed a status update, which made it quite clear the DOJ is continuing to play stupid games, avoid actually providing discovery, and just flat out lie about stuff. Perhaps the most egregious was the DOJ claiming that it is a “false premise” that the US government has been ordered to facilitate Garcia’s release:

Defendants object to Document Request No. 3 as based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador*. See Abrego Garcia, 604 U.S.—, slip op. at 2 (holding Defendants should “take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State”)*

This would be a bold legal strategy even if the Supreme Court hadn’t directly said literally the opposite just two weeks ago:

The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.

It takes a special kind of boldness to tell a federal judge that a Supreme Court order explicitly says exactly the opposite of what it actually says. But the DOJ wasn’t done testing judicial patience.

As if to prove how much gamesmanship the DOJ is playing here, in its response to the discovery requests, it challenges the definitions of the words “document,” “you,” and “your.”

Judge Xinis responded with a scathing eight-page order that tells us we’re entering the judicial version of the “find out” phase, following the DOJ’s determined efforts to “fuck around.” She starts with their ridiculous claim that they have not been ordered to facilitate Garcia’s release from El Salvador:

Defendants object to certain discovery because they claim the requests are based on the “false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”2 See Defs.’ Objs. & Resps. to Pls.’ First Set of Expedited Interrogs., ECF No. 98-1 at 3. Defendants—and their counsel—well know that the falsehood lies not in any supposed “premise,” but in their continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s Order*. That Order made clear that this Court “properly required the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” See Noem v. Abrego Garcia, 604 U.S. –– (2025), slip op. at 2; see also Abrego Garcia v. Noem, No. 25-1404, 2025 WL 1135112, at *1 (4th Cir. Apr. 17, 2025).* Defendants’ objection reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations*. The objection is overruled. Defendants are therefore ordered to supplement their answers in full compliance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Their answers must include facts responsive to the requests, not oblique and incomplete, non-specific characterizations.*

I recognize it may not feel that strong, but having a judge call out direct “falsehoods” while noting that the lawyers before her know they’re falsehoods, and then directly saying it “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal” is not something that happens often. Judge Xinis is furious. In judicial speak, this is the equivalent of flipping a table.

The DOJ then tried another time-honored strategy of throwing every possible privilege claim at the wall to see what sticks. Judge Xinis was… unimpressed:

Equally specious, Defendants’ objections on the grounds of privilege are rejected. Defendants invoke in name only a range of protections—attorney-client privilege, the work-product doctrine, the deliberative process privilege, the state secrets privilege, and an undefined “governmental privilege”—without providing any supporting information or analysis. As Defendants and their counsel know, the proponent of a privilege must demonstrate the legal and factual bases to invoke the protections that such privilege affords….

And yet, Defendants and counsel stubbornly refuse to provide any basis for the same. Given that this Court expressly warned Defendants and their counsel to adhere strictly to their discovery obligations, see Hr’g Tr. 11:24–12:2, Apr. 16, 2025 (“Because in fairness, Mr. Ensign, [if] you’re not going to answer the questions that the plaintiffs put within the scope of my order, then you’ll justify why. You’ll cite privilege, you’ll follow the rules, I’ll make a determination.”), their boilerplate, non-particularized objections are presumptively invalid and reflect a willful refusal to comply with this Court’s Discovery Order and governing rules. ECF No. 79. Although Defendants state now that they are willing to “meet and confer” with counsel about the production of such a log, ECF No. 98-1 at 23, their repeated refusals to meet and confer about much of anything else undermine the reliability of this assertion. ECF No. 98 at 2. The Court thus finds this offer was not made in good faith*.*

Xinis isn’t having it on the claims that the timeline is too aggressive. She basically says “you fucked around for too long, so too fucking bad” and orders them to provide what is required by 6pm today.

Nor does the Court find Defendants’ protestations regarding the abbreviated time-line persuasive. For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders. Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now. If Defendants want to preserve their privilege claims, they must support them with the required detail. Otherwise, they will lose the protections they failed to properly invoke.

And here’s the thing, when you’ve exhausted a judge’s patience this thoroughly, even potentially legitimate arguments start to look suspicious. The DOJ is learning the expensive way that credibility, once lost, is hard to recover:

Defendants object to any discovery requests concerning events predating the Court’s April 4, 2025 Order as beyond the scope of the expedited discovery. ECF No. 98-1 at 3 & 98-2 at 3. Defendants’ arbitrarily cramped reading of the Court’s order is rejected. At a minimum, the discovery period contemplates the time immediately preceding Abrego Garcia’s lawless seizure on March 12, 2025, and his transport to and confinement in CECOT, which all predate April 4, 2025.

But here, Judge Xinis goes one step further, making it clear that she’s willing to call out the Trump administration on its repeated — and obviously bogus — claims that Garcia is held entirely at the whims of El Salvador. She directly calls out that it’s quite likely the US could be seen as having joint custodial status over him:

This is particularly relevant to Abrego Garcia’s custodial status today, if for nothing else, the Plaintiffs are entitled to discover all relevant and probative evidence that undermines the Defendants’ incomplete and evasive answer that Abrego Garcia is in the “sovereign, domestic custody” of El Salvador. Indeed, custody can be joint, and custodial status may be controlled by the Defendants acting in concert with El Salvador. The Court thus overrules Defendants’ “beyond the scope” objections and directs that Defendants supplement their discovery answers and responses accordingly

This point about “joint custody” is crucial — it directly challenges the administration’s primary defense that they can’t do anything because Garcia is in another sovereign nation’s custody. The judge is laying groundwork to hold the US directly responsible.

The Trump admin also tried to claim that the details of Garcia’s lockup in CECOT, the Salvadoran concentration camp, are beyond the scope. No fucking way, says the judge, who notes it’s actually at the very heart of the issue before the court:

Defendants further object to discovery that is supposedly “outside the scope of expedited discovery authorized under the Order, to the extent is [sic] seeks information about Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador, his initial placement in CECOT or his continued confinement in CECOT.” The Court overrules this objection. Information regarding Abrego Garcia’s removal, as well as placement and confinement in CECOT cut to the heart of the inquiry*; namely, what steps, if any, Defendants have taken or will take “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” … The areas are also relevant and probative as to whether Defendants have made “in good faith all reasonable efforts to comply” with this Court’s Orders. … To aid the Plaintiffs in understanding whether the Defendants have sought to comply with such orders in good faith, this general objection must be rejected*

She also calls out the administration’s refusal to name two people who were involved in authorizing Garcia’s removal, once again calling out the lack of good faith and “willful and intentional noncompliance.”

Defendants’ answer to Interrogatory No. 5, in which they name exactly two individuals who “have been or will be involved in any of the actions responsive to Interrogatories 1–4 or in ordering or authorizing Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador, his initial placement in CECOT or his continued confinement in CECOT,” reflects a deliberate evasion of their fundamental discovery obligations. Defendants identify only Robert Cerna, Acting Field Office Director for Harlingen, and Evan Katz, Assistant Director for the Enforcement and Removal Operations at DHS, as the universe of individuals responsive to the question. Given the context of this case, Defendants have failed to respond in good faith*, and their refusal to do so* can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance*. Defendants must supplement their answer to include all individuals involved as requested in this interrogatory.*

And then this is the kind of thing you never want to hear a judge say:

Defendants’ answer to Interrogatory No. 7 is vague, evasive, and incomplete*. Defendants’ nonspecific reference to “a conversation” with “a representative” does not nearly satisfy their obligation to provide all relevant, nonprivileged information with specificity. Defendants must supplement*

She calls out that the DOJ is trying to avoid answering the fundamental question that Xinis’ previous order had demanded of them: to explain what efforts the government has taken to facilitate Garcia’s return.

Defendants must answer Interrogatory No. 12. The interrogatory is limited to all efforts the Government has taken to facilitate the return of aliens wrongfully removed to El Salvador. The request is particularly relevant and probative to whether Defendants are taking any steps in good faith to comply with this Court’s facilitation order involving the very country to which Abrego Garcia’s was wrongfully removed. The Court also rejects that this narrow request is “unduly burdensome” because Defendants have made absolutely no showing as to why it cannot, with a modicum of due diligence, answer the question…. Merely saying so will not suffice, especially where Defendants keep such records in the ordinary course.

She also systematically dismantles the DOJ’s attempt to retcon a totally ridiculous and fabricated set of claims that Garcia was a top member of MS-13, highlighting a particularly cynical aspect of the government’s strategy. They want to use alleged MS-13 membership as both sword and shield — serious enough to justify keeping him in CECOT, but too sensitive to provide any actual evidence:

As to Interrogatory No. 14 seeking the complete factual bases for Defendants’ assertion that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, Defendants’ relevancy and scope objections are rejected. Defendants have previously articulated in their daily updates as to Abrego Garcia’s custodial status and his potential return that DHS would eventually take Abrego Garcia into custody and either remove him to another country or terminate withholding of removal because of his purported “membership in MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organization.” ECF No. 77 at 2. Defendants cannot invoke the moniker of MS-13 as responsive to the Court’s previous order*, …* then object to follow-up interrogatories seeking the factual bases for the same*. Defendants must supplement this answer.*

This last point is particularly damning – the DOJ is trying to use alleged MS-13 membership both as a shield (to justify not bringing him back) and a sword (to paint him as dangerous), while simultaneously refusing to provide any evidence for these claims. The judge is calling them out on this transparent manipulation.

This order represents a significant escalation, even if it stops short of the contempt citations some observers are demanding. But the trajectory is clear: Judge Xinis has moved from giving the DOJ the benefit of the doubt to documenting, in painstaking detail, what appears to be a pattern of willful deception.

Judges are always going to be slow to do things like hold government lawyers in contempt. The government gets way, way, way more chances than anyone else in the judicial system.

But when a judge methodically documents government lawyers making representations they “well know” to be false, we’re moving past mere frustration into the territory where careers end and bar licenses get questioned.

This has to be about the angriest I’ve seen a judge towards a government lawyer in years, and it’s clear that the stupid games the DOJ is playing aren’t winning any fans. And if they think they can just appeal their way to getting around this, that seems unlikely as well. We already covered how the Fourth Circuit keeps smacking down the DOJ, including the ruling last week in which one of the biggest names in Republican judges called the DOJ’s behavior “shocking.” And it’s looking like a majority of the Supreme Court has increasing concerns about all this as well.

Of all the hills for the White House to die on, this one seems particularly poorly chosen. A constitutional showdown between the executive and judicial branches was inevitable with the Trump administration, but picking a fight over whether you can send someone to a foreign concentration camp without due process is… an interesting strategic choice. Talking with friends who aren’t big into politics or current events this past weekend, almost all of them were talking about how absolutely incensed they are that the government would send this guy to a Salvadoran concentration camp with no due process.

Unlike many complex constitutional disputes, this one has broken through to the general public in a visceral way. The basic facts — the government accidentally sent someone to a torture camp and is now arguing they don’t have to help get him back — cut through partisan narratives in a way few stories do.

The courts appear equally baffled by the administration’s intransigence. When both conservative appellate judges and the very conservative Supreme Court majority are signaling their displeasure, you might think the DOJ would recognize the wisdom of a tactical retreat. Instead, we’re watching in real time as the judiciary’s traditional deference to the executive branch dissolves in the face of increasingly transparent bad faith. The question now is what happens next?

There are rumblings in MAGA circles about just ignoring the courts altogether, and that’s a line I’m sure some in the administration are eager to cross. But it’s also one you don’t come back from easily. That’s when we start to enter truly uncharted territory, but better it be with the judiciary (and basic common sense and rule of law) on our side, than the other way around.

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For decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody from stalkers , law enforcement (or people pretending to be law enforcement), car companies, governments, and right wing extremists all happily abused the data in myriad, dangerous ways never made clear to the end user.

Though this behavior had been going on for years generating untold millions, it only gained mainstream attention thanks to a 2018 New York Times story showcasing how police and the prison system routinely bought access to this data and then failed completely to secure it. In 2020 the FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon).

After four years of legal wrangling and delays (caused in part by the telecom industry’s sleazy, successful attack on the Gigi Sohn FCC nomination) the FCC announced they had voted to finally formalize the fines in April of last year:

“When placed in the wrong hands or used for nefarious purposes, it puts all of us at risk. Foreign adversaries and cybercriminals have prioritized getting their hands on this information, and that is why ensuring service providers have reasonable protections in place to safeguard customer location data and valid consent for its use is of the highest priority for the Enforcement Bureau.”

AT&T and the wireless carriers have spent much of the time since urging the Trumplican-heavy Fifth circuit to vacate the fine entirely. Quite obediently, the Fifth Circuit has obliged, this week vacating the FCC’s fines. In its order, the court agreed with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s interpretation that the FCC violated wireless carriers’ Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial:

“We reject the Commission’s argument that a section 504 enforcement proceeding satisfies Article III and the Seventh Amendment. The Commission cites no authority supporting the proposition that the constitutional guarantee of a jury trial is honored by a trial occurring after an agency has already found the facts, interpreted the law, adjudged guilt, and levied punishment.”

You’re to ignore that AT&T has been at the American vanguard of making jury trials impossible for customers through its use of fine print forcing users pursue binding arbitration, a lopsided system that finds in favor of corporations a vast majority of the time. Or that AT&T actively spends millions of dollars annually successfully lobotomizing the entirely of telecom oversight, be it congressional, legal or regulatory.

This is all dressed up as very heady, serious, adult reasoning by the Fifth Circuit, but it’s another example of how the U.S. far right genuinely doesn’t believe in corporate oversight or consumer protection. AT&T very clearly violated section 222 of the Telecommunications Act by not getting consumer consent before collecting and monetizing sensitive user location data. Its punishment will be: bupkis.

The authoritarian right is genuinely destroying all regulatory oversight of corporations through either executive order, regulatory capture, or a very lopsided court system. AT&T gets extra attentive, special treatment because it’s effectively bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance systems, routinely making it beyond accountability despite a long history of very obvious fraud.

In the minds of AT&T-friendly judges, lawyers, and think tanks, FCC’s authority to do anything varies depending on the day, week, and direction of the breeze as AT&T exploits a generally corrupt U.S. court system to routinely dodge accountability for… everything. A series of court rulings (like the Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy ruling the Fifth circuit is leaning on, and more recently Loper Bright) have made it almost impossible to rein in U.S. corporate power, quite by design.

Want regulators to protect you? They can no longer do so without the explicit approval Congress. Want Congress to protect you? Congress is too corrupt to function. Want the courts to protect you? They’re stocked with far-right Trumpies keen on ushering forth the golden age of corruption. Want your state to protect you? It’s increasingly under-resourced as federal governance falls apart and it’s overloaded by legal fights. Want to protect yourself? Your rights are increasingly being boxed in at every turn.

Again you’re to ignore that dysfunction leaves the public at the whims of predatory amoral corporate giants, the often-deadly symptoms of which are everywhere you look. You’re to politely nod at the sage wisdom of the very objective, reasonable, and entirely good faith court rulings and move along with your day as accountability, consumer rights, public safety, and the environment crumble around you.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

A handful of Seattle police officers who had nothing better to do on January 6, 2021 than support a man whose followers spent the next several hours assaulting cops and committing a number of federal crimes are asking the Supreme Court to prevent having their names disclosed to public records requesters.

Using “John Doe” pseudonyms, they sued over whether the investigation into their activities should be made public. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in February that they can be identified and that they haven’t shown that public release of their names violates their right to privacy. The state supreme court denied reconsideration earlier this month and lawyers for the four officers submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that the names remain protected during their legal challenge.

Four officers who attended events in the nation’s capital on the day of an insurrection claimed they are protected under the state’s public records law. They say they did nothing wrong and that revealing their names would violate their privacy.

Two officers (who are married to each other), Caitlin and Alexander Everett have already had their names made public by the Seattle PD. This followed an investigation that found the couple not only attended the “Stop the Steal” rally, but crossed police barriers and stood near the Capitol building. Since both actions violated the law, their names were made public.

The same can’t be said about the remaining four officers, which likely means they’re in the right. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled the names could be released without violating their right to privacy. After all, they’re not only public employees but they attended a public event where anyone could have identified them.

However, that’s not the totality of the equation here. The officers do make some good points in their Supreme Court petition [PDF], chiefly that being a public employee doesn’t mean losing access to your civil liberties.

Although the public is entitled to be informed concerning the workings of its government, and the SPD is entitled to investigate potential wrongdoing on the part of its officers, this entitlement cannot be unlimited and inflated into general power to invade the constitutional privacy rights of individuals. Core components of personal identity, such as political activities, are deeply private and not the proper subject of a public records request. Police officers are entitled to the same constitutional protections as all other Americans, and do not forfeit those rights by merely attending a political rally.

While most of us would certainly prefer cops to be less supportive of someone who clearly has no real respect for the rule of law, the fact that this rally turned into an insurrection doesn’t necessarily make simply attending the rally itself some sort of criminal act.

And as much as I’d like to see every cop who supports convicted felons with autocratic urges named and shamed, that’s not how civil rights work. Attending a rally is political speech, which is one of those things we’re definitely supposed to protect and respect in the United States under the Constitution.

Allowing this order to expose the names of officers who engaged in political speech during their off-hours would allow people and public entities to punish officers who did far better things with their time, like attend rallies in support of LGBTQ+ people or in opposition of government violence. They should be able to do the same things other Americans can. It’s only when they cross the line into lawlessness that they should be subject to public exposure for their actions.

In these cases, nothing has been proven other than attendance. And I don’t think that should be where the bar is set, not if we want public employees to feel comfortable supporting issues and ideas that might make most of their co-workers uncomfortable.

And let’s not mistake my statements here as supportive for burying the names of officers who are accused of misconduct while engaging in their official duties. That’s something else completely. No one can plausibly argue that misconduct (proven or not) is something that’s protected by the Constitution. Even if officers are cleared of wrongdoing, they should not be shielded from public oversight by, you know, actual members of the public. In this case, however, none of this happened while in uniform or while the officers were on the clock. Seattle PD officials may be displeased some officers got that close to an insurrection, but unless they actively engaged in wrongdoing, they did nothing more than waste their First Amendment rights on a demagogue who doesn’t really care about them or their rights.

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While I’m sure all of us would like to completely forget about COVID-19, it is simply the case that the virus hasn’t forgotten about us. Gone are the days of the pandemic, of course, so this isn’t meant to fear monger. But the fact is that hundreds of Americans are still dying of this disease every single week, with even more hospitalizations for it as well. The point is that this is still a health issue that healthcare providers, and the public, can benefit from guidance on. Guidance that was, in part, found at www.covid.gov, which earlier this month offered up information on treatments, vaccinations, testing, strategies to avoid infection, and so on.

But now that page is gone. Instead, it redirects to a White House site that appears to be someone’s interpretation of a Donald Trump personal vendetta and conspiracy blog about the origins of the virus and how much Anthony Fauci sucks and just might be the devil.

Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.

While there remains no definitive answer on how the COVID-19 pandemic began, the scientific data available on the topic points to a spillover event from a live wild animal market in Wuhan, China. The scientific community largely sees this as the most likely scenario, given the data so far and knowledge of how previous outbreak viruses originated, including SARS-CoV-1. By contrast, the lab origin hypothesis largely relies on the proximity of a research lab to the first cases, conjecture, and distrust of the Chinese government, which has not been forthcoming with information on the early days of the health crisis. Overall, the question of SARS-CoV-2’s origin has become extremely politicized, as have most other aspects of the pandemic.

Now, I want to be very clear about something: I referred to the lab leak theory as a conspiracy in the title of this post not as a derogatory term, but because that is what is being alleged. The theory is that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that the leak was covered up by any number of individuals, depending on which version of the theory you believe. The fact is that the origin of the disease is not known as a matter of certainty and some number of intelligence groups and others suspect it leaked from a lab. Nobody should really care what I think about matters of healthcare, but I don’t view the theory that this disease may have leaked from a lab particularly unworthy of consideration, if not further study.

Which is entirely besides the damned point. The government site was meant to be a resource for healthcare providers and the public to help stay informed and combat this ongoing disease. There was no reason to do away with that guidance. If the current Trump administration, with its brand new and very incompetent head of HHS, RFK Jr., wanted to alter some of the guidance on the site, they were free to do so. This is something else, repurposing a tool for the public into Trump’s personal vendetta machine.

It’s not just a problem for those looking for information of the kind that used to be on the site. The other issue here is that the redirected site makes some very bold, very big claims about COVID-19. I’m not going to go through them one by one, nor am I going to attempt to debunk any of the claims. I would suggest only that you look at it through the eyes of someone looking for science or healthcare and is instead met with claims about both that are neither. Here is just one statement made near the top of the page:

By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.

By nearly all measures of science, a statement like that is completely antithetical to science. I don’t even need to go try to uncover the source of the statement to know one simple thing: that isn’t how scientists talk.

There have been more than enough actions taken in recent years that have promoted distrust of medicine, of science, and of experts. Actions like the above serve only to supercharge all of that distrust, further politicizing something that ought have no bearing in politics.

And, really, all that will do is spur on the next healthcare crises. Which, as we’ve been discussing, might already be beginning.

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It’s hard to create a law about children online without first identifying who the children are. We’ve written a lot about the problems that arise with mandated age verification, and a new paper by Eric Goldman, The “Segregate-and-Suppress” Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online, digs into why the entire popular approach to such laws is paradoxical and broken. This week, Eric joins us on the podcast for a discussion about why regulators should develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety measures.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

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“It’s no longer about you,” Marco Rubio declared in 2023, describing the transformative moment of becoming a father. “It’s the first time in my life that I have been responsible, entirely at that stage, for the life of another human being.” The Senator has repeatedly stressed the critical importance of fathers being present, going so far as to blame “fatherlessness” as the cause of “every major social problem.”

This week, those words ring particularly hollow. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States currently detained due to Rubio’s unprecedented campaign against student “thoughtcrime,” was denied the chance to witness the birth of his first child. While the formal denial came from ICE officials in the Department of Homeland Security, make no mistake — Khalil would never have been in this position if not for Rubio’s crusade.

After being shuttled between detention facilities in what was clearly a deliberate attempt to obstruct legal challenges, Khalil made a simple, human request: to be present for the birth of his first child. His lawyers proposed multiple security measures to accommodate the government’s concerns, including ankle monitoring and scheduled check-ins during a brief furlough.

Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia University campus, has been detained in Louisiana for more than a month. On Sunday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdalla went into labor, Mr. Khalil’s lawyers requested a two-week furlough so that he could attend the birth.

The lawyers proposed several ways for Mr. Khalil, 30, to be monitored. They said he could wear an ankle monitor and make scheduled check-ins.

“A two week furlough in this civil detention matter would be both reasonable and humane so that both parents can be present for the birth of their first child,” the lawyers wrote.

Less than an hour after they made their request, Melissa Harper, the director of the New Orleans field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, denied it. She wrote that the decision had been made “after consideration of the submitted information and a review of your client’s case.”

While ICE officials formally denied the request, the responsibility lies squarely with Rubio. His assertion of unilateral authority to determine who belongs in America based on their “expected beliefs” created this Kafkaesque scenario. A legal permanent resident, married to a US citizen, was effectively kidnapped by the state – not for any crime, not even for anything he said, but for thoughts Rubio claims he might have.

![Letter denying his request:

Mr. Kassem, Thank you for your email. After consideration of the submitted information and a review of your client's case, your request for furlough is denied. Mellissa B. Harper Field Office Director New Orleans Field Office](https://i0.wp.com/www.techdirt.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/image-12.png?resize=648%2C841&ssl=1)

This isn’t a hardened criminal. This is not a criminal at all. This is someone who is merely a political prisoner, locked up for his potential speech. A victim of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s new “thoughtcrime” regime.

Again, there’s no reason for Khalil to be locked up at all. Even if you agree with Rubio’s nonsensical assertion that Khalil is “a lunatic” who supports “terrorists,” he could have been notified of the process by which his green card was stripped and given a chance to fight it in court. Instead, he was grabbed by ICE officials and renditioned to Louisiana.

Just two years ago, Rubio appeared on a podcast all about fatherhood, where he talked about how precious fatherhood was and what an impact it made on him when he became a father for the first time (he now has four kids).

Well, I was 29 and it was in 2000 when my daughter was born in April, and you know it changes your life in a fundamental way. And that is it’s no longer about you.

I think it arises different feelings in in men and women and fathers and and mothers, but for me it was sort of like this sense of I now have… it’s the first time in my life that I have been responsible, entirely at that stage, for the life of another human being, for everything. From whether they’re going to have enough to eat, to whether they’re going to be able to make sure they get medical attention if they get sick. And that’s just the beginning, you know, from there.

And obviously with your first child, you know, I mean, I think back at that time, I mean, my daughter was two weeks old and I was in the state legislature and we just threw her in a car seat and drove up to Tallahassee, you know. And obviously the old, Cuban grandmother and Colombian grandmother were like, screaming at us, you can’t take a baby out of the house after the first two weeks, they can get infections, but we just sort of roll with it. And so, you know, it was a very special time in our life.

Later on in the podcast, he talks about his regrets being about how sometimes his job has meant he wasn’t able to be present for his children:

And I would say the biggest struggle has been this challenge between the guilt or in some cases the necessity of dedicating time to what it takes to raise a family and being not just around but present and the demands of a career and a job. And I I really wrestled with that for a very long time and kind of the balance I found is the following. Number one is it’s good for kids to see that dad has a job and that dad is working. It’s a good thing for kids to see that dad is busy, that dad has things to do.

But, even more importantly, he talks about how important it is for fathers “not to miss things that are never going to happen again.”

I would say this, there are things I’ve missed because of family, I’ve missed stuff at work if I can’t… If it’s something that’s never going to happen again, I don’t miss it. Unless it’s like the urgent end of the world thing, I try not to miss things that are never going to happen again. You know, you’re never going to play your last high school football game, you’re never going to you know, graduate. There are things you’re never going to get to do again. I don’t miss things that are never going to happen again.

Yeah, well, Mahmoud Khalil just missed the birth of his child entirely because Marco Rubio said he doesn’t like what Marco Rubio thinks Khalil might believe. If Marco Rubio actually believed in fatherhood and being there, he wouldn’t have wiped that experience away from Khalil.

Incredibly, in that same podcast, he and the host bemoan “absentee” fathers. How about the fathers that Marco Rubio made disappear? The party of “family values?” No, Marco Rubio is breaking apart families for no damn reason at all. Marco Rubio has created an unwilling absentee father here.

What little was left of Rubio’s reputation as a “more reasonable” Republican should now be gone. The government could have easily and rightfully allowed Khalil to be with his wife during the birth of their child. This needlessly cruel denial of a basic human moment — one that Rubio himself describes as transformative — reveals the truth about both Rubio and the Trump administration’s broader campaign to terrorize anyone who dares criticize their policies. It’s not about security. It’s not about law. It’s about raw power and punishment.

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The narrative during Trump’s first term is that he was going after the “worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants. But ICE and other DHS components ran out of actual dangerous criminals pretty quickly, largely because immigrants tend to be more law-abiding than regular US citizens.

Trump’s return to office came coupled with promises to deport more people than this nation ever has in its history, something aided and abetted by the president’s decision to revive the Alien Enemies Act — something best known for caging hundreds of thousands of immigrants (most of them Japanese) during the Second World War.

Towards the end of March, US citizen Julio Noriega was arrested and held overnight in an ICE detention facility just because he looked like an immigrant. Noriega wasn’t an anomaly, but at least he got to go home after just one night. ICE and far too many helpful local cops have been kidnapping people off the street, telling them their visas have been revoked. Some of these people appear to have been removed solely because they’ve engaged in protected speech this administration doesn’t like.

The still-ongoing horror of that is what’s happening to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia makes it clear this administration isn’t even willing to fix the mistakes it has admitted it has made. Though it changed its story later, the DOJ first stated Abrego Garcia had been arrested, deported, and caged in an El Salvadoran maximum security prison accidentally.

The new narrative is that Abrego Garcia is actually an MS-13 gang member, despite the DOJ’s previous admissions in court. And the US government still refuses to bring Abrego Garcia back to the US, preferring to extend his ordeal simply because it can.

With every ICE agent and cooperative police force (federal or local) being ordered to continue this mass assault on due process, more US citizens are being treated like illegal immigrants just because no one with any powers gives a single fuck what happens to innocent people that happen to be a bit browner than the blond, blue-eyed folks they seem to prefer.

Here’s one recent event that shows the administration just wants to rid this nation of foreign-looking people, rather than expel actual threats to public safety or national security (two of the listed excuses for resurrecting the Alien Enemies Act).

19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, who is visiting Tucson from Albuquerque, says he was lost and walking near the Border Patrol headquarters when an agent arrested him for illegally entering the country. Hermosillo was not carrying identification.

Court documents say a Border Patrol agent arrested Hermosillo “at or near Nogales, Arizona, without proper immigration documents” and that Hermosillo admitted to illegally entering the U.S.

Hermosillo and his girlfriend, who have a 9-month-old child together, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are visiting family in Tucson. He says he has never been to Nogales.

Now, there are going to be people rolling into the comments with their bad faith arguments about “who doesn’t carry their ID on them at all times.” Fuck that. This isn’t a “papers, please” nation. At least, it’s not supposed to be. We’re supposed to be able to freely move about without having to prove our nationality if we’re not, you know, actually crossing a border.

As for the Border Patrol statement, it’s obviously a lie the agent never thought he’d be caught making. It’s unlikely Hermosillo “admitted” to being in the country illegally. If any such “admission” was made, it was under duress. Furthermore, Hermosillo is a US citizen, which means he couldn’t have produced “proper immigration documents” no matter how many times this officer demanded to see them. If he’d had the documentation with him, he could have shown he was a US citizen, but a state ID or driver’s license is not an “immigration document.” It’s proof of citizenship.

He was immediately released after his family provided the judge with his identifying info. But if his relatives hadn’t acted as quickly as they did to locate him, chances are he’d already be on a bus on the way to plane that would fly him to some foreign country he’d never lived in, much less visited.

This isn’t an anomaly. Here’s another incident that involves someone being treated as an illegal immigrant despite being a US citizen and never once crossing a US border.

A U.S.-born American citizen was being detained at the request of immigration authorities Thursday despite an advocate showing his U.S. birth certificate in court and a county judge finding no reason for him to be considered an “illegal alien” who illegally entered Florida.

Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, was arrested Thursday evening by Florida Highway Patrol and charged under a state immigration law that has been temporarily blocked since early this month. Details of Gomez-Lopez’s arrest and detention were first reported by the Florida Phoenix news site.

Lopez-Gomez never “illegally entered” Florida. There’s a new state law in Florida that allows the state to add state criminal charges for “illegal entry” into the state, but this US citizen was in a car driving from Georgia that managed to run into a bunch of badge-wearing thugs who used the new law to turn him over to ICE.

This move allowed the local cops to prevent a US citizen from being released from an ICE detention center, despite showing proof of citizenship to a county judge. The judge said the paperwork was legit, but it was out of her hands because Lopez-Garcia was now in federal custody. ICE held him for two days before releasing him, and likely only did so because people were advocating on his behalf.

Speaking of advocates… the DHS claims this is just a clerical error, but I have my doubts. It seems more like deliberate intimidation under a thin veneer of plausible deniability:

When Massachusetts resident Nicole Micheroni received an email on Friday from the federal government telling her to leave the country, she was baffled.

“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine,” said Micheroni. “So it said my parole status had been terminated and I should leave the country within seven days.”

But the 40-year-old is a U.S. citizen, born in Newton and raised in Sharon.

“Probably, hopefully, sent to me in error,” she said. “But it’s a little concerning these are going out to U.S. citizens.”

Nichole Micheroni is an immigration attorney. The letter sent to her told her that her permission to remain in the country had been revoked and strongly suggested she “self-deport.” When confronted about this threatening email, the DHS said CBP (Customs and Border Protection) used “known email addresses of the alien” to send out these self-deportation orders. If the target of the email had listed their attorney’s email address as a contact, then the CBP sent the threat to an “unintended recipient.”

Even if it’s only an error, it’s far from harmless. First, there’s real reason to believe the DHS and its components are willing to do whatever it takes to limit opposition to their mass deportation programs, even if it means “mistakenly” ordering immigration lawyers to self-deport.

Second, if it is only an error, it’s inexcusable. When you’re in the business of depriving people of rights and liberty (even with lawful actions), it’s of extreme importance to get all of your facts straight before taking action. Sooner or later, these threats become shows of force, and there’s little reason to believe any ICE/CBP officer armed with little more than a warrant full of boilerplate and an email address would think twice before arresting, jailing, and — if things move fast enough — expelling US citizens. After all, they don’t care about the facts. And they can always ask for forgiveness later — something they’re sure to earn from federal courts because it’s all but impossible to win a civil rights lawsuit against a federal officer.

With all of this going for them, the enforcers of immigration law aren’t going to care much who gets caught in the crossfire. Neither will the bigots backing this president, both on Capitol Hill and inside voting booths. But being on the fence about this won’t get you any comfort here. This is nothing but evil wrapping itself in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “national security.” Giving this a pass because you think residing in a country illegally is worse for the nation than eliminating due process, trampling on constitutional rights, ignoring federal court rulings, and excising whatever’s left of your conscience just means you’re no better than the people currently in power.

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Last week, we wrote about Harvard showing a bit of institutional courage in telling the Trump administration to fuck off with its demands that the university fire certain professors, change its curriculum, and allow government oversight of campus activities. In response, Trump escalated things, as he tends to do, cutting off over $2 billion in promised funds and saying that Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status:

The IRS quickly got to work exploring just such a possibility, never mind that it’s a literal crime for the executive branch to weaponize the IRS to target any individual or entity.

For what it’s worth, there was a weird moment over the weekend when Trump officials tried to argue that the overly aggressive letter they sent Harvard was sent by accident:

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

The article claimed that the administration had actually been working with Harvard officials and seemed confident that a deal could be reached (i.e., Harvard was open to capitulating) when they sent this aggressive letter, leading to Harvard’s aggressive response. Yet another sign of administrative competence.

Either way, as you’d expect, Harvard has access to some lawyers, and on Monday they sued the administration seeking an end to all this bullshit (not quite the technical legal terms, but, close enough).

Defendants’ actions are unlawful. The First Amendment does not permit the Government to “interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance,” Moody v. NetChoice, 603 U.S. 707, 741 (2024), nor may the Government “rely[] on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech,” Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 189 (2024) (citation omitted). The Government’s attempt to coerce and control Harvard disregards these fundamental First Amendment principles, which safeguard Harvard’s “academic freedom.” Asociacion de Educacion Privada de P.R., Inc. v. Garcia-Padilla, 490 F.3d 1, 8 (1st Cir. 2007). A threat such as this to a university’s academic freedom strikes an equal blow to the research conducted and resulting advancements made on its campus.

The Government’s actions flout not just the First Amendment, but also federal laws and regulations. The Government has expressly invoked the protections against discrimination contained in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis for its actions. Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus. But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism and Title VI compliance. Moreover, Congress in Title VI set forth detailed procedures that the Government “shall” satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns. 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-1. Those procedures effectuate Congress’s desire that “termination of or refusal to grant or to continue” federal financial assistance be a remedy of last resort. Id. The Government made no effort to follow those procedures—nor the procedures provided for in Defendants’ own agency regulations—before freezing Harvard’s federal funding.

These fatal procedural shortcomings are compounded by the arbitrary and capricious nature of Defendants’ abrupt and indiscriminate decision. Even before the freeze, the Government had threatened to terminate up to $8.7 billion in federal funding not just to Harvard, but also to preeminent Boston hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. These hospitals are independent corporate entities with their own boards of directors or trustees and their own separate officers, leadership, and management. They are not under Harvard’s control. The hospitals have no control over Harvard’s enforcement of Title VI requirements, and vice versa. These hospitals have their own tax identification numbers, endowments, and accounts. And they seek and receive federal financial assistance directly from federal agencies, not through Harvard.

There’s more, but it’s a good, strong complaint.

What makes Harvard’s position particularly strong is how neatly it fits into recent Supreme Court precedent that we’ve discussed quite a bit on Techdirt. The complaint cites both Moody v. NetChoice and NRA v. Vullo, where the Court made clear that the government can’t use threats or actual coercion to pressure private entities into changing their speech or expression. Trump’s hamfisted attempts to dictate Harvard’s policies is just the latest in a long list of attacks on free expression from this administration.

It’s worth noting they have a ton of lawyers on the complaint, and their strategy is telling. The team includes Quinn Emanuel’s co-managing partner Bill Burck who was in George W. Bush’s White House (Quinn, notably, is also where Elon Musk’s favorite lawyer, Alex Spiro works). There are also lawyers from Ropes & Gray and King & Spalding. That’s three of the biggest “big law” firms all on the same filing. The King & Spalding lawyer is Robert Hur. If his name sounds familiar, he was the “special counsel” Merrick Garland appointed to investigate Joe Biden’s classified documents retention, and is known as a “Republican super lawyer.”

There are a bunch of other lawyers as well, including the named partners from the relatively new, boutique law firm Lehotsky Keller. While newer and smaller, Lehotsky Keller has been working on a number of high profile cases and are considered super well connected in the Republican world, with each of the named partners having roles in Republican politics (Keller, for example, was Solicitor General in Texas under Greg Abbott).

This isn’t just legal representation — it’s a political statement. Harvard has assembled a big list of big-name lawyers, many of them with strong Republican credentials, effectively telling Trump: “Even your own people think this is unconstitutional overreach.” It’s a move that makes it harder for the administration to dismiss the case as partisan politics (though it certainly won’t stop that argument from the true believer MAGA cultists).

The next phase will be critical. While the administration may continue pressuring Harvard, early court victories could decisively demonstrate the unconstitutionality of Trump’s attacks on academic institutions. Though some universities might still follow Columbia’s shameful example and capitulate, Harvard’s principled stand could embolden others to resist.

When the courts ultimately vindicate Harvard’s position — and they will — it will serve as more than just an institutional victory. It will reaffirm a fundamental constitutional principle: that no president, regardless of their political agenda or institutional threats, can leverage federal funding to override First Amendment protections. This reminder comes at a crucial moment, even if Trump and his allies rage against or attempt to circumvent these inevitable rulings.

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