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The DEA may not be an early adopter of forward-looking policies, but it certainly leads the pack when it comes to shedding accountability like a teen ditching an ill-fitting sports coat the instant a family portrait session has wrapped up.

Federal law enforcement agencies definitely trailed the trends when it came to body cam use by officers. For years, the DOJ forbade local cops from using their body cameras during joint task force operations involving federal officers. It wasn’t until November 2020 that it agreed local officers could use their cameras in joint operations, but only if they agreed to play by the DOJ’s extremely stringent rules.

It took nearly another year before the DOJ agreed to start outfitting its own agencies with body cameras — something undoubtedly provoked by several months of intense civil unrest following the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd by Minneapolis (MN) police officer Derek Chauvin.

Now that Trump has undone anything with Biden’s name on it, the DEA has informed its officers that body cams are no longer part of the federal drug enforcement process, as Mario Ariza reports for ProPublica:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica.

On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s website were broken.

The email said the agency made the change to be “consistent” with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras.

Also gone is its official body camera policy [PDF], which has been replaced with a 404 message. (Archived here and embedded below.)

The DEA told its employees this vanishing was required to be “consistent” with Trump’s repeal of a Biden police accountability executive order. But ProPublica reports at least two other federal law enforcement agencies are still requiring officers to wear body cameras. One would assume the other agencies will follow the DEA’s lead and do the same, even if there’s nothing in Trump’s Biden order rollback or even the president’s more recent “GO POLICE STATE!” executive order that forbids the use of body cameras by federal officers.

While the DEA is taking the lead on the domestic-facing side when it comes to ditching the BWC-based pretense of accountability, it’s following the trail set by one of the most-reviled federal agencies in the nation:

In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, was one of the first agencies to get rid of its body cameras. Subsequent videos show plainclothes immigration agents making arrests with no visible body cameras.

Of course it was. ICE doesn’t just make policies vanish. It makes human beings disappear. The last thing DHS and ICE need are a bunch of unblinking eyes creating a permanent record of extrajudicial arrests and renditionings.

Federal law enforcement is going dark again, returning to its normal state of nigh-impenetrable opacity. Trump and his team have reset the clock, rolling back the most minimal of gains in law enforcement accountability just because he and his administration love government thuggery more than they love this country or the millions of regular people they’re supposed to be serving.

It took years for the federal government to engage in an extremely timid roll out of tech that regular cops had been using for most of the past decade. It took only a few weeks to undo three years of progress. And when agencies were given the option to shed themselves of devices officers often consider to be impositions, they acted immediately, completely disregarding even the DOJ’s own assertions about the positive aspects of body-worn cameras. It’s 2025, but the DOJ has been given permission to pretend it’s 2015 all over again.

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Here’s a question about the First Amendment and social media companies that used to just be in the realm of crazy law school hypotheticals: What makes social media sites “state actors” subject to constitutional constraints? For years, we heard from some that merely talking to government officials was enough — at least according to Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr., and (disgraced) Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld. They argued, with increasingly creative (and decreasingly convincing) legal theories, that if a White House staffer sent an angry email about content moderation, that transformed Meta into an arm of the state.

But now we have an actually interesting scenario: What if the government officials literally own and run the social media companies?

Ramaswamy and Rubenfeld wrote an op-ed in the WSJ arguing that Section 230 alone made tech companies into state actors. Then, Rubenfeld joined RFK Jr. to make this argument in court, after Meta suspended some of RFK Jr.’s anti-vax nonsense. That argument failed in court as judges (rightly) noted that none of this turned companies into state actors. There would have to be a much clearer (and more coercive) relationship between government actors and social media companies.

But now we face a situation that makes those earlier claims look quaint: two of the most powerful people in our government — Donald Trump and Elon Musk — literally own and control major social networks. Does that finally make these platforms actual state actors? After all, ExTwitter and Truth Social aren’t just getting stern emails from government officials — they’re directly controlled by a sitting President and the guy who appears to have totally unprecedented and unlimited authority to reshape the federal government.

At the very least, the argument is way, way stronger than what the likes of Rubenfeld and RFK Jr. were arguing in court.

Eventually, someone had to try to make this argument for real, and it appears that someone is a rando named Thomas Richards.

According to the complaint he filed last month in the Northern District of Texas (where ExTwitter now tries to force all lawsuits to be filed due to its notably Musk-friendly judges), Elon Musk has been shadowbanning him. And, the complaint argues, because of Musk’s government-status, that means that ExTwitter is a state actor, and thus any shadowbanning infringes on his First Amendment rights.

While I’ve argued this exact theory might have merit, Richards’ complaint is, unfortunately, a mess. Filed by an out-of-state lawyer (apparently ignoring local counsel requirements), it’s bloated with irrelevant details and conspiracy theories masquerading as supposed “religious expression.” The core claim — that low engagement on his posts proves shadowbanning — is weak on its face. But the legal theory presented is even worse:

The Court’s intervention is urgently needed because under the clear precedent of Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, 531 U.S. 288 (2001), when a private entity becomes “entwined” with governmental authority, it becomes subject to constitutional constraints. And here, the link is even tighter. X’s owner and controller, Elon Musk, simultaneously holds significant federal authority as a Special Government Employee heading the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”), created by executive order on President Trump’s first day in office … This entwinement is further cemented by extraordinary financial ties — Musk invested approximately $300 million to help elect Trump, and his companies have received over $15.4 billion in government contracts.

Although recent reports suggest Mr. Musk may soon leave his governmental position, this timing — occurring immediately after receipt of Plaintiff’s demand letter — appears transparently strategic and does not negate the constitutional violations that have occurred while he exercises official authority. Moreover, Musk’s extraordinary government access will continue regardless of formal title, as evidenced by his: a) ongoing Top Secret security clearance, b) high-profile visits to the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA within a single month (March-April 2025), and c) documented back-channel communications with defense leadership.

The systematic suppression of Mr. Richards’ religious speech through sophisticated algorithmic techniques or manual censorship is not protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which only immunizes actions “voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material.” X’s deceptive practices — publicly denying shadowbanning while simultaneously engaging in it — fail the statute’s explicit “good faith” requirement, especially when senior legal leadership explicitly denies the very practices the company is implementing.

Musk’s actions as both government official and platform owner also directly violate the January 20, 2025 Executive Order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which explicitly prohibits federal government officials from “engag[ing] in or facilitat[ing] any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” As a Special Government Employee heading DOGE, Musk is bound by Section 3(a) of this Executive Order, which states that “No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.” His systematic suppression of Mr. Richards’ religious expression while simultaneously exercising governmental authority creates liability under both this Executive Order and the First Amendment.

The thing is, there really is a legitimate question here about whether government officials running social networks creates state action. It’s the kind of question that a law student could write an earnest paper about: “What if the government just… bought Facebook?”

But Richards’ complaint isn’t going to be the vehicle that answers it. For one thing, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Section 230 (conflating (c)(2)’s good faith provision with (c)(1)’s broader protections) suggests someone who skipped the basic reading. For another, there’s the small matter of claiming millions in damages from shadowbanning an account that admittedly never grew beyond 4,000 followers. And it’s barely worth mentioning the fact that there appears to be no local counsel on the complaint, which seems to violate the rules.

The complaint reads less like a serious constitutional challenge and more like the kind of thing you’d find pinned to a community center bulletin board in crayon. There are pages upon pages of conspiracy theories about everything from religious persecution to shadowy government psyops. Also, conspiracy theories about how content moderation works. It’s the kind of write-up that makes you wonder if maybe the shadowbanning wasn’t entirely algorithmic after all.

The judge assigned to the case, Brantley Starr — a Trump appointee and Ken Starr’s nephew — is less than impressed by Richards’ attempt to get a temporary restraining order.

On the present record, Richards does not meet the high standard for a temporary injunction. Richards must show that the “facts and law clearly favor” the injunctive relief. Richards argues that because the owner of X Corp., Elon Musk, took a temporary position as a special government employee, the platform is converted into a government forum, and thus subject to liability as a government actor. This is a novel argument, and far from clear in the terms of either controlling law or the facts in the record. It is clear that the law is not so overwhelmingly obvious that this Court should enter a mandatory injunction against X Corp. granting Richards ultimate relief at the outset of this litigation based on the current record. Therefore, the Court finds the application for a temporary restraining order should be DENIED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

The judge’s dismissal is exactly what you’d expect for this particular complaint. But the underlying questions aren’t going away. At some point, courts are going to have to figure out when a government official’s control of a social media platform crosses the line into state action. And they’ll need to answer some pretty fundamental questions: Is there a meaningful distinction between Trump running Truth Social while President (which seems… not great?) and Musk running ExTwitter while reshaping federal agencies with wild abandon (which seems… also not great?)? Can private platforms maintain any real independence when their owners are literally writing executive orders about how the government should work?

These aren’t just fun law school hypotheticals anymore. They go to the heart of how we balance free speech rights in an era where government officials aren’t just trying to influence social media through stern emails and mean tweets — they’re actually buying, creating, and running the platforms themselves. We need a better case to test these theories. Preferably one that doesn’t include pages of conspiracy theories about psyops and religious persecution.

There’s one more layer of absurdity here worth exploring. Remember when Elon Musk insisted that the Biden campaign (not administration — this was before they took office) sending warnings about links with leaked Hunter Biden’s dick pics to Twitter was such egregious government interference that it must violate the First Amendment?

Just to be clear: A presidential campaign (not in power) alerting a private company about leaked intimate photos was, in Musk’s view, unconstitutional government censorship. But now that same Elon Musk is literally running both the government and what’s left of Twitter, and suddenly government control of social media seems… totally fine?

The voices that spent years screaming about government “censorship” whenever a White House staffer sent a mean email have gone mysteriously quiet now that their preferred officials aren’t just influencing social media companies — they’re running them from inside the government. It’s almost as if their constitutional principles extend only as far as their political preferences. This won’t shock anyone around here, but it still deserves to be called out explicitly.

Perhaps there’s a certain cosmic justice in watching the person who bought Twitter to “prevent government censorship” become, quite literally, the government doing the censoring. Though it would be nice if, at some point, the judicial system noticed.

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For years, the DHS has been expanding its intrusive surveillance of anyone attempting to enter this country. (It has also expanded this to include people leaving the country.)

The current onboarding procedure for US entry includes demands for account passwords and deep dives into devices carried by migrants, visitors, asylum seekers, and anyone else CBP officers can talk into letting them wander around in their digital lives.

This intrusiveness has now become an anti-wrongthink imperative under Trump during his second term in office. In addition to the reckless and needlessly cruel mass expulsions of anyone appearing to have come from a nation south of the US, there’s a new angle: the expulsion and/or denial of entry to anyone who doesn’t agree with the administration’s views on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Hence this announcement from the DHS back in April of this year:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.

In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it will “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis].”

In other words, if you spoke out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine or any of the actions it has taken during this conflict, you’re probably an antisemite and/or a terrorist. The DHS would act swiftly to ensure only migrants siding with the US’s position on this conflict were allowed into this country, and only if it couldn’t think of another reason to deny them entry.

Of course, this is all based on a deliberate misunderstanding by Trump and his administration. Disagreeing with Israel’s actions and/or supporting Palestinian independence is — and never has been — antisemitism. At best, it suggested this administration was fine with other forms of bigotry, but simply would not tolerate anyone who thought Palestinians had a right to exist.

As it turns out, it’s even more hypocritical than is considered usual for this administration. The Big Boss has bought into the conspiracy theory that there’s some sort of race war targeting white people in South Africa — something that can only be attributed to the whitest Afrikaner to ever run a dodgy government agency, Elon Musk.

Musk is a huge conspiracy theorist, and Donald Trump seemingly hasn’t met a conspiracy theorist or conspiracy theory he hasn’t liked. This brain cloud masquerading as a presidential administration is now not nearly as concerned about antisemitism… at least not when it’s being spewed by one of theirs.

One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.

Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.

A number of Kleinhaus’s posts also promote the conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being particularlypersecuted.

So much for vetting the migrants. I guess there’s no reason to suspect a white guy might be a problem, not when there’s so many Venezuelans to send to El Salvador. Kleinhaus has since confirmed those posts came from his accounts, but not without deploying the only excuse less believable than “my account was hacked.”

[H]e insisted to the Times that he was not antisemitic and claimed to have written a post in error while on medication.

Ah, the Barr defense. And note that Kleinhaus only claimed “a” post (singular!) was written “in error” while all drugged up on whatever form of off-label self-medication is currently popular within the South African white trash community. Cue the goose meme:

I mean, the report listed at least two antisemitic tweets. And then it said this dude spent a lot of time promoting the “white men are the real victims here in post-apartheid South Africa” conspiracy theory. Blaming a single post on drug use isn’t the win Kleinhaus seems to think it is. Then again, the real win is getting a free pass to come to America to make it worse than it already is because the whole oppression thing is too hard back home.

And here’s how the DHS is handling this hypocrisy: by pretending it’s not even happening.

A senior DHS official said in a statement: “The Department of Homeland Security vets all refugee applicants. Any claims of misconduct are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action will be taken as necessary. DHS does not comment on individual application status.”

It’s a statement that says nothing one way or the other. It has all the distinctive features of a vacant apartment’s walls. It’s the color beige described in 32 words, each one more meaningless than the last.

We don’t expect honesty from our government PR reps. We certainly don’t expect it from Kristi Noem or her boss, whose eyelids and soles are far whiter than even this Afrikaner antisemite can ever hope to be. This is how things work in the United States: white is right, even when it’s wrong. The only thing that’s changed is that this administration can’t even be bothered to offer up a credible excuse for its racist policies and actions.

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There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic surveillance warrants.

If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality. Unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that breaks the sound barrier.

Despite this, the Biden era saw some modest progress in holding dodgy data brokers accountable for routinely over-collecting sensitive user location and behavior data, then selling it to any random idiot with few nickels to rub together (like far right wing propagandists, or authoritarian governments).

But that minimal progress is now, of course, being unwound by the Trump administration. For example, the Trump Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is quietly killing an effort to implement new rules on how data brokers sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers.

The new rule was proposed last December under former director Rohit Chopra. It would have allowed the CFPB to police dodgy data brokers under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), limiting their ability to traffic in financial data, credit scores, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and addresses. Chopra, at the time, noted that this data often winds up in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.

But Wired notes how the lobotomized agency, now under the “leadership” of acting director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, quietly withdrew the proposal last week, publishing a notice in the Federal Register declaring the rule no longer “necessary or appropriate.”

As Wired hints, the impact goes well beyond inane policy debates, and is likely to be potentially fatal for many Americans:

“Russell Vought is undoing years of painstaking, bipartisan work in order to prop up data brokers’ predatory, and profitable, surveillance of Americans,” says Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, a nonprofit that supported the rule. Added Vitka: “By withdrawing the CFPB’s data broker rulemaking, the Trump administration is ensuring that Americans will continue to be bombarded by scam texts, calls and emails, and that military members and their families can be targeted by spies and blackmailers.”

Senator Ron Wyden documented last year how far-right zealots were able to buy the location data of women seeking abortions and then use it to target vulnerable women with right wing propaganda. Lax oversight of wireless company monetization of location data has resulted in this data getting into the hands of stalkers and sexual predators. This corruption has real world costs.

Everywhere you look, Trump and his courts are making it easier for criminals and predatory scumbags to abuse this data. The Trump-stocked 5th Circuit, for example, recently vacated a $57 million fine against AT&T for collecting and selling sensitive user location data to data brokers without informing consumers. Auto giants have also been abusing sensitive data to jack up your insurance rates without telling you.

These are very real harms impacting everyone, regardless of partisan ideology. But instead of shoring up oversight of this sector, we’re rushing in the exact opposite direction, both by killing already modest efforts at new rules, and gutting federal regulatory ability to craft and enforce new ones. That leaves privacy reform in the hands of a well-lobbied Congress that’s too corrupt to function.

This is all occurring in an era where people are sharing more sensitive data than ever with their apps — and even AI therapists or sexbots. Opening the door to the kind of potentially deadly privacy invasions even the most alarmist of activists have yet to even dream of.

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It’s no secret that Nintendo is among the most draconian actors when it comes to intellectual property. Techdirt is rife with posts on the various ways the company has been a royal and overreaching pain in the ass on anything with even the most modest concern over copyrights, trademarks, or patents. From attempting to unmask anonymous internet denizens over leaks, to failed lawsuits against South American grocers over nonsense trademark concerns, to finding literally any reason to sue a competitor over patents that never should have been granted just because it can, the company simply never misses an opportunity to treat its own industry and fans poorly at the hands of its lawyers. This has even included threats to brick its customers’ consoles if they fail to agree to new EULAs after the console had been purchased.

That last one is particularly notable, as Nintendo is once again issuing a similar threat, but this time with a new EULA that outlines all the things, including legal things, that might cause Nintendo to turn your Switch or Switch 2 into a paperweight.

First spotted by Game File (readers may encounter a paywall), Nintendo has recently changed its online user agreement in multiple consumer-unfriendly ways just before the launch of the Switch 2. Chief among them: Nintendo asserts the right to render your console “permanently unusable” if it determines you’re in violation of the agreement.

Nintendo’s specific new phrasing, distinct from its prior EULA from 2021, is that “You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device [emphasis mine] permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

So what might so offend the company that they would remotely disable the device you bought? Some of it is what you’d expect. Don’t circumvent its anti-piracy protections. Don’t pirate its games.

These still aren’t kosher (more on that in a moment), but then there’s this.

Publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Nintendo Account Services.

The old EULA had some of this language, but it was inclusive of language that such acts had to violate local laws to be verboten. This new EULA includes no such language which, as PC Gamer rightly points out, is a pretty big problem.

The sections I most take issue with are the prohibitions on copying, modifying, or decompiling software—particularly as it no longer accounts for it being “expressly permitted by applicable law”—as well as hardware/software modifications “that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use.”

No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs⁠—something Nintendo continuously asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right⁠—and no dual booting to another OS.

Nintendo is once again asserting rights it doesn’t appear to have, at least in America. In what world can someone sell me a thing and then make the thing unusable because it doesn’t like a legal action I took with it? Do we own this fucking thing, or do we not?

Worse yet, the EULA makes it clear that Nintendo is judge, jury, and executioner on these matters. There’s nothing in the language about bricking your device that indicates Nintendo is going to go to any legal authority or third party before doing so. If it suspects you’re engaging in a forbidden (by Nintendo only) activity, the company can brick your shit.

So what happens when they’re wrong?

There’s also the very legitimate concern of the notoriously heavy-handed, litigious company acting on false positives. I don’t know what means Nintendo has to detect such activity and kill a console, but I’m getting a clear message: You spent $450 on this hardware, but Nintendo does not think you own it.

That there hasn’t been a bigger uproar over these changes is plainly absurd. They’re so anti-consumer as to be ridiculous and all of this is practically begging for interdiction from the federal government, assuming the Trump administration hasn’t hollowed out the government’s ability to protect its own people from this sort of thing.

But anyone buying a Switch 2 when its released is at risk of having an expensive paperweight otherwise. You’ve been warned.

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It’s not enough to simply go after anyone looking kinda Venezuelan these days. DHS components have an unquenchable thirst for arrest stats, especially now that Trump’s second Oval Office stay has removed any remaining discretion and restraint from border control actions. Installing Trump supplicant Kristi Noem to the top spot in the DHS has only made things worse, providing the administration with a pliable action figure with its own unquenchable thirst for power and all the cool shit that comes with it.

To make it easier to arrest brown people, the administration has recently declared hundreds of miles of border to be “military zones.” This serves two purposes. First, it helps shore up the administration’s shaky assertions blatant lies that we’re actually in the middle of the war, which aids and abets its resurrection of the Alien Enemies Act. Second, it gives the government a second set of charges to levy against migrants who happen to wander into these largely unmarked areas: unlawful entry of military property.

With this addition, it’s no longer just a civil offense to be undocumented. It’s now a federal charge with military add-ons. These charges would also apply to any US citizens (white people) who wander into these newly declared war zones, but of course, they’ll never be used that way. Everyone knows that, especially those involved in the erection of this military zone fantasy.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico says a total of 82 people have been charged through Thursday for unauthorized entry into the military’s new buffer zone along the border with Mexico.

A completely expected outcome. However, this has led to another development that’s not going to make Trump and his border thugs happy. As the New York Times reports, one judge is tossing these charges just as quickly as they’re being filed:

A federal judge this week dismissed charges against nearly 100 migrants detained under a Trump administration effort to arrest undocumented migrants for trespassing on a newly declared “national defense” zone along New Mexico’s border with Mexico.

The order from a federal magistrate judge, Gregory B. Wormuth, added to the confusion and legal turmoil that have gripped New Mexico in the month since President Trump declared a ribbon of land along the 180-mile length of the state’s southern border to be an Army base.

The court called bullshit on these charges, dismissing both the cases and the boilerplate the government relied on to bring these charges.

“The United States provides no facts from which one could reasonably conclude that the Defendant knew he was entering” the New Mexico National Defense Area, the newly declared military installation, Judge Wormuth ruled.

[…]

Nearly identical charges against hundreds of other migrants could also soon be thrown out, given what the judge described as the prosecution’s “cut-and-paste approach to factual allegations.”

Heartening to see, but the federal government is generating these charges at a rate only the most dedicated court could even hope to keep pace with. The new charge — one that only exists because the government has claimed new military zones suddenly exist — is a misdemeanor that could result in a year in jail. It’s unlikely to ever result in that. Instead, it will be added to migrants’ rap sheets and used against them in future deportation proceedings as evidence of their criminal behavior should they attempt to return to the United States. It will also be used to deny entry visas, asylum applications, and any of the legal routes to US citizenship.

According to the NYT, at least 400 people — all of them migrants — have been hit with these charges. There will be more and it will be up to the courts to dismiss these, since it’s clear no one patrolling the border cares how many people they lock up as long as those people simply look like they might be from another country.

And there’s another side effect of unilaterally declaring certain parts of the border to be military zones. The police state being created at the border is already starting to spread inland.

The Department of Homeland Security has asked for 20,000 National Guard troops to assist with immigration roundups across the country, and the Pentagon is reviewing the unusual request, a U.S. official confirmed to The Associated Press.

[…]

Unlike the troops deployed at the southern border, these National Guard units would come from the states and be used to assist in deportation operations in the interior of the country.

If that’s going to be the new normal, you can rest assured these “military zones” will increase in size as well, swallowing up rural communities and the roads connecting them. Once everyone gets used to soldiers doing immigration work, it won’t take much of a nudge to have them start pitching in with regular law enforcement work. There may be no grand design behind this, but you’d better believe there are enough gun-totin’, god-fearin’, good ol’ boys in the nation willing to pretend the Gadsden flag only means something when there’s a Democrat in the White House. And they’re more than willing to sacrifice everything America used to mean if it brings them just a little closer to creating the America they’ve always wanted.

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In a brazen attempt to avoid oversight, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is now trying to “audit” the very agency tasked with auditing them. On Friday, NOTUS reported that DOGE officials showed up at the Government Accountability Office — Congress’s independent watchdog — to attempt their signature hostile takeover routine. There’s just one small problem: DOGE has no authority whatsoever over the legislative branch.

This latest overreach comes after months of DOGE attempting to position itself as some kind of revolutionary government auditor — despite lacking the expertise or process knowledge that actual auditing requires. As we’ve covered before, everything DOGE claims to be doing was already being handled by skilled professionals within government — professionals whom Musk promptly fired, like the technical experts at 18F. Real government auditors have been watching in horror as DOGE has been doing the opposite of proper auditing procedures.

The GAO’s investigation of DOGE has been building for months. For decades, the office has earned bipartisan respect for its methodical, nonpartisan audits of government operations. So when reports emerged in April that Congress’s watchdog had begun examining DOGE’s activities, it suggested serious concerns about DOGE’s operations. The GAO requested comprehensive documentation about systems access, risk assessments, and potential misuse of agency data.

Records show that the GAO—an independent auditing, research, and investigative agency for Congress—appears to be requesting comprehensive information from the agencies in question, including incident reports on “potential or actual misuse of agency systems or data” and documentation of policies and procedures relating to systems DOGE operatives have accessed, as well as documentation of policies for the agency’s risk assessments, audit logs, insider threat programs, and more.

Just last week, while DOGE was busy slashing budgets without understanding the consequences, the GAO demonstrated what actual government efficiency looks like. The office identified over $100 million in potential IT savings — real cost reductions found through careful analysis of redundant systems and unnecessary investments, not arbitrary cuts.

Cost-trimming in the US federal government is all the rage right now – and a new report finds more than $100 million in savings available to the Feds by doing nothing but eliminating redundant and unnecessary IT investments.

Those savings are part of a much more significant $100 billion in potential cost reductions recommended by Uncle Sam’s Government Accountability Office (GAO), as detailed in the auditors’ 15th annual “fragmentation, overlap, and duplication” report, released this week. The annual federal budget is about $7 trillion total, for reference.

The contrast between GAO’s methodical approach and DOGE’s slash-and-burn tactics couldn’t be clearer.

The Register’s reporting highlighted an uncomfortable truth for DOGE supporters: when asked about DOGE’s role, GAO director Lucas-Judy diplomatically noted that while they’re “always happy if other groups want to implement our recommendations,” DOGE has largely ignored GAO’s existing work — except when cherry-picking recommendations that align with their predetermined cuts.

Rather than engage constructively with GAO’s findings, DOGE responded by attempting to assert control over the congressional watchdog itself. This move isn’t just inappropriate — it’s obviously unconstitutional. If DOGE has any authority at all (which multiple ongoing lawsuits dispute), it would be limited to executive branch agencies. Yet here they are, attempting to extend their reach into Congress’s independent oversight arm.

Elon Musk’s DOGE team is now starting to target government agencies outside of the executive branch, notifying the U.S. Government Accountability Office — the congressional watchdog that performs studies for legislators about federal waste, fraud and abuse — that it has “assigned a team” to assail that agency, according to an internal email obtained by NOTUS.

The GAO’s response was appropriately direct. In an internal email obtained by NOTUS, the office informed its staff that it had “sent a letter to the acting administrator of DOGE stating that GAO is a legislative branch agency that conducts work for the Congress. As such, we are not subject to DOGE or executive orders.” The office also notified congressional committees about DOGE’s attempted overreach.

This confrontation exposes two critical issues: first, DOGE’s constitutional illiteracy in attempting to assert executive branch authority over a congressional agency. Second, and perhaps more troubling, it reveals DOGE’s apparent strategy of trying to neutralize any meaningful oversight of its own activities.

Given Musk’s track record of lashing out when told “no,” this situation is likely to escalate. But the real story here isn’t just about DOGE’s continued incompetence — it’s about their increasingly desperate attempts to avoid actual accountability while masquerading as government watchdogs themselves.

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President Trump’s attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there’s a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing—one that will take away Americans’ right to unencumbered access to our publicly owned airwaves.

The FCC is quietly contemplating a fundamental restructuring of allbroadcasting in the United States, via a new DRM-based standard for digital television equipment, enforced by a private “security authority” with control over licensing, encryption, and compliance. This move is confusingly called the “ATSC Transition” (ATSC is the digital TV standard the US switched to in 2009 – the “transition” here is to ATSC 3.0, a new version with built-in DRM).

The “ATSC Transition” is championed by the National Association of Broadcasters, who want to effectively privatize the public airwaves, allowing broadcasters to encrypt over-the-air programming, meaning that you will only be able to receive those encrypted shows if you buy a new TV with built-in DRM keys. It’s a tax on American TV viewers, forcing you to buy a new TV so you can continue to access a public resource you already own.

This may not strike you as a big deal. Lots of us have given up on broadcast and get all our TV over the internet. But millions of American still rely heavily or exclusively on broadcast television for everything from news to education to simple entertainment. Many of these viewers live in rural or tribal areas, and/or are low-income households who can least afford to “upgrade.” Historically, these viewers have been able to rely on access to broadcast because, by law, broadcasters get extremely valuable spectrum licenses in exchange for making their programming available for free to anyone within range of their broadcast antennas.

Adding DRM to over-the-air broadcasts upends this system. The “ATSC Transition” is a really a transition from the century-old system of universally accessible programming to a privately controlled web of proprietary technological restrictions. It’s a transition from a system where anyone can come up with innovative new TV hardware to one where a centralized, unaccountable private authority gets a veto right over new devices.

DRM licensing schemes like this are innovation killers. Prime example: DVDs and DVD players, which have been subject to a similar central authority, and haven’t gotten a single new feature since the DVD player was introduced in 1995.

DRM is also incompatible with fundamental limits on copyright, like fair use.  Those limits let you do things like record a daytime baseball game and then watch it after dinner, skipping the ads. Broadcasters would like to prevent that and DRM helps them do it. Keep in mind that bypassing or breaking a DRM system’s digital keys—even for lawful purposes like time-shifting, ad-skipping, security research, and so on—risks penalties under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That is, unless you have the time and resources to beg the Copyright Office for an exemption (and, if the exemption is granted, to renew your plea every three years).

Broadcasters say they need this change to offer viewers new interactive features that will serve the public interest. But if broadcasters have cool new features the public will enjoy, they don’t need to force us to adopt them. The most reliable indicator that a new feature is cool and desirable is that people voluntarily install it. If the only way to get someone to use a new feature is to lock up the keys so they can’t turn it off, that’s a clear sign that the feature is not in the public interest.

That’s why EFF joined Public Knowledge, Consumer Reports and others in urging the FCC to reject this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea and keep our airwaves free for all of us. We hope the agency listens, and puts the interests of millions of Americans above the private interests of a few powerful media cartels.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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They may claim they care about the children, but the Republican push for age verification laws, book bans, and the general censorship of anything not specifically straight and (preferably) white is all about preventing adults from accessing content these lawmakers don’t personally care for. The kids are merely useful leverage for legislators pushing for the codification of their particular moral standards.

For no real reason at all other than their desire to control what content others can access, two Republican Congress members have decided it’s time to enact a federal obscenity standard, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports for Reason:

Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) wants to redefine obscenity in a way that could render all sorts of legal sexual content illegal. His proposal would make the definition of obscenity so broad that it could ban even the most mild pornography, and possibly even more.

Lee and Rep. Mary Miller (R–Ill.), who introduced a companion bill in the House, have made no secret of the fact that the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) is intended to get porn off the internet. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted,” Lee said as he introduced the legislation.

But his proposed definition of obscenity is “so broad” that the TV show Game of Thrones could fall under its purview, suggests Ricci Joy Levy, president and CEO of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation.

Senator Lee gives away part of the game in his statement. This isn’t about prosecuting actual obscenity cases. It’s all about whipping up a chilling effect that’s frigid enough to encourage plenty of self-censorship. It’s all stick and no carrot, crafted as broadly as possible in hopes of encouraging prosecutors to crack down on people engaged in protected speech to prevent their expression from reaching their intended audiences.

What the law would do is erase Supreme Court precedent. Since there’s no federal law defining obscenity, the Supreme Court has created what’s known as the Miller test — something that requires judges to consider not just the content, but the context and its possible value as protected expression. This law would eliminate the test and replace the community standard (what the “reasonable person” might think of the contested content) with whatever Mike Lee and the bill’s supporters think should be considered protected speech.

The Supreme Court’s obscenity test has three prongs the government must satisfy to pursue obscenity charges. This bill still keeps the prongs, but renders them mostly useless by declaring pretty much anything sexual to be criminally obscene.

[R]ather than requiring that something depict or describe sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way in order to be considered obscene, Lee thinks basically all depictions of sexual conduct or erotic nudity could count as obscenity.

The other worrying aspect of Lee’s bill [PDF] is a paragraph that, at first, seems to have no bearing on the rest of the proposed law.

(b) OBSCENE OR HARASSING TELEPHONE CALLS IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA OR IN INTERSTATE OR FOREIGN COMMUNICATIONS.—Section 223(a)(1)(A) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 223(a)(1)(A)) is amended, in the undesignated matter following clause (ii), 19 by striking ‘‘, with intent to abuse, threaten, or harass 20 another person’’.

Why is this tacked on to the end of an anti-porn bill? And why is it there solely to sever intent from a criminal act, which is the sort of thing that leads directly to abuse of these laws? Obviously, there’s a reason Mike Lee has added this clause to his bill, but it’s not exactly clear why he’s so interested in stripping criminal intent from a clause about “obscene or harassing telephone calls.”

But there’s a good chance it has something to do with preventing anyone — including adults — from accessing content Mike Lee would clearly like to ban. Here’s Nolan Brown, suggesting one possible reason for this addition to the bill:

All sorts of sex work that relies on video calls—whether via a dedicated web-camming platform or some other service—could potentially be banned by removing the requirement that “obscene” calls be harassing or abusive in order to be criminal.

The proposed change would possibly allow for targeting phone sex operators and dirty phone calls, too. While Lee’s revised definition of obscenity concerns visual depictions, not words, it still seems to allow for obscenity to exist in other contexts. In short, it defines all pornographic images as illegal obscenity, but it does not limit illegal obscenity to pornographic images.

That leaves room for phone calls that include sex talk to be labeled obscene even when everyone involved is a consenting adult.

That’s what happens when you strip intent from criminal laws. It means you can turn victimless, voluntary interactions into criminal acts. Harassment cases generally need a victim to instigate criminal proceedings. With this clause being rewritten, all the government needs to demonstrate is that an “obscene” communication took place, even if there was no victim and no one acting with criminal intent.

This isn’t Mike Lee’s first attempt to rewrite the obscenity standard in his own image. Lee tried this in 2022 and it went nowhere. But maybe he feels there’s a better chance of survival with Trump back in the White House and state legislatures all over the nation jumping on the censorship bandwagon, equally willing to ignore the Constitution and decades of Supreme Court precedent. Hopefully, this one will soon join his previous attempt in the dustbin of bad ideas. But even if it does, something equally stupid, pushed by someone equally stupid, will be ushered into existence to take its place.

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Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence critical speech. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” who signed the infamous Harper’s Letter five years ago have gone mysteriously quiet. They were absolutely frantic about “cancel culture” for years, but when actual government censorship comes along? Crickets.

A (seriously incomplete) list of current attacks on speech includes the FCC’s Brendan Carr’s multiple investigations over protected speech, the FTC’s Andrew Ferguson’s attempts to punish speech, interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin’s series of increasingly unhinged letters to people and organizations over their speech, and, of course, the attacks on foreign college students for things like writing an anodyne op-ed the administration disliked.

And I won’t even get into Donald Trump’s habit of directly threatening people for their speech like some dollar store dictator, including his weird threat to Bruce Springsteen late last week, in which he tells Springsteen he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country” and “then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

In this context of actual attacks on free speech, you’d expect the self-appointed Free Speech Brigade to be manning the barricades and sounding every alarm. But where are they? Probably busy drafting another letter about how someone was mean to them on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Five years ago, Harper’s Magazine published a fluffy, mostly content-free “letter on justice and open debate.” As someone who has spent decades fighting for and writing about free speech, I found the letter to be beyond useless. While there were legitimate attacks on free speech at the time, the letter did basically nothing to grapple with them. Instead, it used vague language to create a false equivalency between actual attacks on free speech with people just facing some consequences (mainly social opprobrium), mostly allowing people facing the latter to act as though they were facing the former.

In short, it allowed a group of overly sensitive writers who were upset about the criticism they faced to hide behind the few actual cases of attacks on free speech while pretending they were one and the same. Harper’s asked me to write (a very short) response to the letter, and this was what I churned out at the time.

After days of debate involving every conceivable perspective on the open letter—on social media, on blogs, on podcasts, in other publications, and in private conversations—I have concluded that the letter’s concern that “the free exchange of information and ideas . . . is daily becoming more constricted” is unfounded and frankly confusing.

Clearly there is robust debate on a variety of subjects, including many that not long ago were considered to be outside the boundaries of public discourse. “The free exchange of information and ideas” is perhaps stronger and more widely accessible today than ever before.

Oddly, the letter ignores more distinct threats to free speech: libel lawsuits that block legitimate criticism, abuse of copyright laws to hamper commentary and culture, and legal threats that intimidate speakers into silence.

Instead, the letter alludes to examples of publications exercising their editorial discretion, and speakers facing social consequences driven by vigorous counter-speech, while omitting the details. If any of these examples deserves serious debate and consideration, the letter fails to foster or even enable it, and certainly does not engage in it.

I also, as a pointless thought exercise, tried to write an alternative letter for what the Harper’s Letter could have said if it actually wanted to be useful. I still think that was pretty good, highlighting how, thanks to the internet, the world had become actually more free and more open to debate, but with that there was “a changing societal consensus on what is, and what is not, appropriate” and at times, this possibly went too far, mainly in that when people tripped over certain lines, some were too quick to assume malice. As I wrote then:

At the same time, in our ongoing and righteous zeal to revisit areas that were previously overlooked and underexplored, there are times when people may go too far. There are times when the nuance and details and context are not initially clear, and some people — including ourselves — may overreact. That overreaction often leads to consequences which, when the full situation is explored and understood, seem unfair. We should seek to be aware that this may happen, and try to avoid it. Furthermore, we should recognize that as fallible as humans are, we will sometimes discover this too late, and should seek to rectify it when we do.

The details will always matter. We should not assume simplistic narratives all of the time, when often there are mixed motivations and complex factors and variables involved. There may be situations that appear similar on the surface, but upon deeper exploration turn out to be quite different. We should be willing to explore those details and to recognize that, sometimes, people we like will face consequences for their speech for an extended pattern of truly reprehensible behavior.

However, we should leave space open for people to learn and to grow. We should recognize that a single misdeed may be innocent and should treat it as such. We should see how people respond to such feedback. At the same time, we should also recognize that a pattern and practice of questionable and hurtful behavior may suggest a person who is deliberately, and in bad faith, seeking to game the system.

The biggest problem I had with the original letter was simply that many of the signatories were clearly using it, deliberately and in bad faith, to game the system to their own advantage. That is, they wished to stake out ridiculous (and, at times, harmful) positions and not be challenged or criticized for those positions. In many ways, the Harper’s Letter itself was way more censorial than anything it claimed to criticize. “How dare you criticize my speech with your speech!” is essentially what it boiled down to for many signers. Free speech for me, but not for thee.

This wasn’t true of all signers, some of whom had legitimate grievances. But the list of signers was full of faux speech martyrs who were effectively standing on the shoulders of the very few people legitimately concerned with these issues, screaming “look how canceled I am!”

In the years since, little has caused me to change my opinion of the letter and its signers. A couple of years ago, I called out some of the signatories for cosplaying as free speech martyrs, and that seems to still be true.

So you might think that now that the attacks on free speech have moved even beyond the ones I had raised at the time of the Harper’s Letter (censorial defamation lawsuits, abuse of intellectual property law) and certainly beyond the perceived threats the signers crowed about (“cancel culture”) that they might speak up a bit? At least a little?

But, nope.

David Klion over at The Nation notes that the vast majority of the signers of the Harper’s Letter have stayed entirely silent regarding pretty much everything that’s going on. He points to a piece from In These Times from last month which even created a spreadsheet looking at all the signatories. It turns out that when actual attacks on free speech happen, many of them go silent:

… high-profile ​“free speech” advocates such as Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, David Brooks, David Frum, John McWhorter, and Malcolm Gladwell have either remained silent or championed the arrests. A review of the signatories of the now-infamous 2020 Harper’s Letter shows that of those who could issue statements (those who are still alive and not retired from public life), only 24 percent who put their name on the letter defending ​“Open Debate” have come out in opposition to Trump’s war on campus free speech. Some, like Harvard’s Steven Pinker, have aggressively spoken out about Trump’s withdrawing of funding from higher education, but have been notably quiet on the kidnapping of international students for the supposed crime of political speech.

If you find this shocking, I have an exciting, if slightly scratched, bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The letter was never about protecting free speech — it was about insulating certain people from criticism. “Free speech” was just the sneaky little facade they put on it to make their argument look respectable.

This weekend, we saw yet another absolutely perfect example of this kind of free speech hypocrisy in action. Many of the signatories to the Harper’s letter were also big fans of the unaccredited, hilariously pretentious “University of Austin,” which got a lot of attention for claiming that it would be a university that supported “free speech” (in the misleading sense of the Harper’s Letter), “academic freedom,” and “heterodox” thinking. Really, the only qualifications for being associated with the University of Austin seemed to be that you had to have been criticized for taking a stupid position on something. A university run by the perpetually aggrieved doesn’t seem all that interesting, but it’s a home for some folks.

Bari Weiss both signed the Harper’s letter and helped to create UATX and remains a trustee of the organization. Jonathan Haidt signed the letter and is on the advisory board. Coleman Hughes signed the letter and is listed as a visiting professor at UATX. There are others as well. The Venn diagram of Harper’s Letter signatories and UATX affiliates isn’t quite a circle, but you might need a microscope to find the differences.

Again, as with the Harper’s Letter, it was obvious from the beginning that the people behind the University of Austin never actually believed in actual free speech. They just wanted a “university” (very much in sarcasm quotes) where their beliefs wouldn’t be regularly challenged and mocked as unserious.

This weekend, there was a hilarious piece in Quillette, which is basically the far-too-serious publication of the perpetually silly faux speech martyr, in which Ellie Avishai wrote about how she was drummed out of the University of Austin for posting a very bland LinkedIn post that quoted Yale Psychologist Michael Strambler’s article suggesting that both sides on the debate over DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) were going too far.

Whether you feel that’s a reasonable argument or not, it’s obviously trying to create some middle ground. And for that, Avishai — who has apparently been whining about Harvard (where she received her doctorate) being too woke because they… asked students to “reflect” on how to be more inclusive (the horror) — was told her services were no longer needed at the University of Austin:

My colleague told me that we needed to talk about a social-media post of mine that “had become a big problem.” I rarely post anything online, so I was confused about what he meant. Apparently, it had something to do with DEI, and had angered a major funder. “We’re trying to slow things down,” my colleague told me. I got the impression that he was upset about the message he was delivering.

[….]

By 5pm on 3 March—the same day I first heard that my LinkedIn post was a “problem”—my team of five and I were all on our way to being pushed out of UATX. I got the news from a junior dean whom I barely knew. He told me bluntly, “the trustees and the management have decided that we’d like to wind up Mill, and I’m calling to let you know that we’re letting you go.”

So much for “academic freedom,” huh? Who could have possibly predicted that the Free Speech University would cancel someone for expressing a moderate opinion? I mean, besides literally everyone?

The University’s response was pretty much exactly what you would expect: Why would we let someone say something nice about DEI when DEI is bad?

When a Quillette editor contacted UATX for comment in regard to the events and issues discussed in this article, we received the following response: UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI. We believe these programs institutionalize ideological orthodoxy, lower academic standards, and promote a view of human identity that undermines individual dignity. That position is central to our mission*.*

Of course, that’s exactly what they whined about at other universities, screaming their silly little heads off about how it was against the “pursuit of knowledge” and “academic freedom” for students and faculty to dare suggest that some topics were beyond the pale.

But, apparently, the only subject that is beyond the pale is: DEI.

And, like, you can take that position (as silly and backwards as it is), but it’s way worse than anything any university has done to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the first place.

It was never about free speech, academic freedom, or heterodoxy. It’s about being free to say whatever offensive thing you want and never, ever having to face criticism for it. It’s “heterodox” in the same way North Korea is a “People’s Democratic Republic.” It is, in many ways, way more censorial, more against academic freedom, and more rigidly orthodox than anything any actual university is doing.

We’ve pointed out for a while now how many of the people who described themselves as “free speech warriors” over the last decade were not just cosplaying, but were actually using the language of free speech to justify the suppression of speech. This is just one more example to throw on the pile.

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Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for decades in the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. It’s what started the net neutrality wars. More recently, it has evolved into claims that we need to tax streaming companies to help fund broadband deployment.

This taxation effort always involves some variant of the (false) claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the Internet. So it’s “only fair” that they help pay telecom giants for broadband expansion that is, quite mysteriously, perpetually only half finished despite billions in taxpayer subsidies already.

Such efforts popped up again last week with the introduction of the Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act of 2025 (S. 1651), sponsored by Senators Markwayne Mullin, Mark Kelly, Mike Crapo, and Kevin Cramer.

The bill would update Section 254 of the Communications Act to make tech companies pay into the Universal Service Fund (USF), which helps bring broadband access to underserved neighborhoods, libraries, and schools. In reality, that means a new surcharge on all of your streaming video and online services, making those services (already consistently facing rate hikes) even more expensive.

It would, contrary to the bill’s name, do nothing to actually lower broadband costs for consumers. That would require actually standing up to powerful telecom monopolies. It would make streaming services more expensive. In exchange for fiber deployments that, if U.S. history is any guide, probably won’t materialize. Especially under our current corrupt authoritarian regime.

On its surface, requiring that tech companies contribute to the USF isn’t the dumbest idea in the world. If it was well managed and launched in good faith.

The USF is funded primarily by surcharges on dying copper voice lines. As those connections die off, the contribution base has shrunk. So foundationally, the idea that you’d shore up a low-income, rural broadband subsidy program with the help of tech companies isn’t the most insane concept ever. Again, if it was well managed and launched in good faith by competent people.

Here’s the problem: U.S. telecom subsidy programs have a long, long history of giants like AT&T and Verizon taking billions of dollars for networks they then fail to deploy. They’re routinely defrauding U.S. subsidy programs because we routinely fail to hold these companies accountable. We fail to hold them accountable because they’re politically powerful and tied to our domestic surveillance systems.

Enter Trumpism, which already has a long history of botching subsidy programs (like the FCC’s RDOF program) resulting in a ton of additional fraud and waste. At the same time, Trumpism’s assault on the regulatory state is making it almost impossible for regulators to hold companies accountable for any fraud, whether it’s ripping off government programs or harming consumers with price gouging.

So in essence you’d be throwing billions of additional dollars at large telecom companies with rich histories of fraud, overseen by corrupt incompetents with their own vast experience in defrauding taxpayers. People actively ending the government’s ability to do anything should AT&T, say, take billions in exchange for fiber networks it then fails completely to fully deploy. Or, say, rip off programs designed to help school kids.

There’s the added complication that an even more radical wing of Trumpism is currently trying to outlaw the USF entirely. The deeply unserious Fifth Circuit recently ruled the USF unconstitutional based entirely on the baseless claims of a fake, weird, right-wing “consumer group” simply upset at the idea government program might help people.

The Supreme Court is poised to make a ruling in that case any day now. I suspect they’ll keep the USF intact, which will (quite intentionally) create more pressure to “fix the USF” and implement something like this new tax on big tech. But contrary to the narratives being pushed by telecom industry backed think tankers or guys like Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, this isn’t a good faith effort (though there are some smaller and more rural telecoms that support it because their survival depends on the USF).

The real goal is to create a largely unaccountable slush fund for companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon with rich histories of abuse. Again, run by the worst sort of corrupt incompetents imaginable. The resulting funds are far more likely to go toward outsized executive compensation and stock buybacks than meaningful rural fiber deployment.

The press is, and will, flub this story badly, falsely framing it as a good faith effort to “bridge the digital divide” and lower consumer costs. In fact, that’s already happening:

Again, many of the groups and providers that depend on the USF to survive will support this because a corrupt hot mess of a reform is better for them than the USF dying. That doesn’t inherently make this particular reform “good” or well intentioned by its architects (which again, is the biggest telecoms).

As this story emerges in the weeks and months to come, one thing to look out for when trying to recognize bad actors is to try and spot the folks claiming that tech companies get any sort of a “free ride” on the internet. We’ve been debunking this flimsy claim for literally decades now.

Tech companies already pay billions of dollars annually for bandwidth, cloud, CDN, transit, undersea cable, and other infrastructure. Google technically is already a broadband provider when you factor in Google Fi (wireless) and Google Fiber. When it comes to U.S. telecom, nobody gets a free ride thanks to corruption, consolidated monopoly power, and market failure policymakers refuse to address.

Again, leveraging billions in tech company money to shore up broadband access isn’t the worst idea in the world. It’s just that this particular application isn’t being done in good faith, and it’s going to be implemented by one of the most corrupt federal governments the U.S. has ever seen. The outcome is obvious. I can see it coming before the news cycle even fully takes off.

The billions of dollars in new fees and misdirected consumer anger that will come as a result of this effort is probably something tech companies should have thought about before they tripped over their own asses to support Trumpism. It wasn’t hard to see coming. Trump earlobe-nibbler Brendan Carr has been telegraphing this whole plan for a while, including in his chapter in Project 2025.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Stephen Miller suggesting the suspension of habeas corpus:

Remember: Once they suspend the civil rights of non-citizens, they’ll only ever need to declare someone a non-citizen to justify black-bagging an American citizen off the street and sending them to a blacksite or a foreign concentration camp.

If you voted for Trump, you voted for this. Accept it. Own it. This is who you wanted; this is what you got; this is the kind of person you are, were, and always will be unless you prove otherwise. And saying “no, this isn’t what I wanted” won’t be enough⁠—not this time, not ever again.

In second place, it’s Bilateralrope with a comment about how Hasan Piker handled being detained by CBP:

Requesting a lawyer probably would have worked much faster. Maybe a few minutes of questioning before they realize that they aren’t going to get anything, then letting him go so they can move to their next target.

But now they have two hours of testimony that they can go through looking for any lies they can blackmail him with.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Citizen and another comment about the notion of suspending habeas corpus:

“I voted for the leopards to eat other people’s faces.”

And MAGA cheers the prospect. They’re confident that they’ll never be targeted, even by mistake, so they don’t really care if they no longer have habeas corpus rights themselves since it just hinders efforts to get rid of the people they hate. The few who realize that mistakes will happen are perfectly fine with playing the role of Archibald Buttle as long as it means the people they hate are gone, too.

Next, it’s luxx with a comment about Democrats helping to bring back KOSA:

Turns out that when people like Schumer talk about “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship,” what they really mean is that the division between Republican and Democrat is far less divisive than the uniting force of being an out-of-touch septuagenarian in the pockets of corporate power brokers.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a reply to another comment correcting a typo in a common phrase we used:

Yes, because tongue in creek would be rather gross.

In second place, it’s That One Guy with a thought about Trump firing the Librarian of Congress:

‘A non-white in a postion of power/employment? Must be a result of DEI!’

“In the grand scheme of things, firing the Librarian of Congress may seem minor, but this was yet another example of a highly qualified, dedicated public servant that Trump fired for no good reason.”

I’m sure there’s a reason, but I can’t qwhite put my finger on what it might be…

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad about our post that referred to Clarence Thomas as Samuel Alito’s sidekick:

Hey now. If anything, Alito is Thomas’s sidekick.

Finally, it’s MrWilson with a reply to another comment noting that “vaccine skeptic” is much too mild as a description of RFK Jr.:

Not skeptic, just septic.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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We’re nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, and the honorable mentions, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Cocoanut Hotel by Geoffrey Golden & G.C. Katz.

1929 was the year the Marx Brothers made their film debut in The Cocoanuts, a movie where they ostensibly run a resort hotel but mostly just engage in their regular antics. Cocoanut Hotel adapts this career turning point for the famed comedians in both content and spirit, turning it into (what else?) a full-fledged hotel management sim. Just as in the original, the story (and now the mechanics) primarily serve as a vehicle for the comedy, resulting in a game that’s both fun to play and filled with entertaining material from start to finish.

As the player, you are tasked by your boss Mr. Hammer (a.k.a. Groucho) with getting the hotel to maximum capacity in 30 days. To achieve this, you must tweak the rate for rooms and your various expenses. You’re given little information on precisely what impact these choices will have, which turns the beginning of the game into an intriguing and often-surprising puzzle as you experiment with your options. Each day brings various events, whether that’s shady characters checking in because you don’t spend enough on security, not-so-clever con men raiding your savings, and of course, U.H.A. (Unexplainable Harpo Activity):

Ultimately the game isn’t too challenging, but it isn’t mindless: you need to engage with the mechanics and figure out how to win. It’s peppered with fun details, including a couple jokes about copyright, and above all it feels like a complete and quite polished product. For that, Cocoanut Hotel is this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Geoffrey Golden & G.C. Katz for the win! You can play Cocoanut Hotel in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the last in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.

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If you’re from Texas or its surrounding states, you’ve probably heard of Buc-ee’s. The gas station and convenience store chain is a staple of the area and has a well-known branded logo that looks like this.

I recently came across a settlement that was the result of a trademark suit Buc-ee’s initiated back in November against Duckees Drive Thru, which is a liquor store in Missouri. The details of the settlement were, as frustratingly usual, not made public. But I would have to damned well hope the settlement wasn’t too much in favor of Buc-ee’s given the details of the case. Liquor stores aren’t gas stations, Buc-ee’s and Duckees aren’t actually all that similar thanks to the distinctive dash in the former’s name, and you couldn’t possibly get me high or drunk enough to make me think this logo looks confusingly similar to Buc-ee’s.

Unless Missouri beavers look different than what I’m used to, that’s a duck. The only settlement that should have occurred would be for Buc-ee’s to “settle” for being told to “duck” all the way off.

It turns out this isn’t some one-off. Apparently anytime Buc-ee’s sees another company out there in even a remotely tangential industry that has an animal cartoon with a yellow circle behind it for a logo, they go full feral beaver over it. There are many, many examples of this.

There is the active suit right now between Buc-ee’s and Choke Canyon, a barbeque joint, with the former arguing this looks too much like a beaver.

Thank god Steve Irwin isn’t alive to see that one.

How about this one, which also ended in a settlement, for a chicken joint?

During the case, which Chicks settled out of court, Buc-ee’s brazenly accused the store of improper use of: “friendly smiling cartoon animals,” “the use of a black circle,” “the use of a yellow background,” “the use of the red-colored cockscomb on the heads of the chickens,” “the prominent use of sharply drawn black edges,” and “the use of six letters in raised and lowered block font in the name.”

Besides the fact that Buc-ee’s accused someone who wasn’t cooking their Trail Boss Habanero Hot Beef Jerky of improper use of a chicken’s cockscomb in an official court document, two other takeaways are clear: Buc-ee’s seems to believe that it owns yellow backgrounds and it doesn’t fuck around.

Or how about Irv’s, a restaurant that doesn’t even feature a non-human animal?

“Defendants’ blatant copying of the Beaver Logo shows that Defendants’ actions are willful, knowing, and committed with the intent of benefiting from the goodwill and concept of Buc-ee’s…,” the complaint against Irv’s states, before offering a photo comparison (included below).

“From a distance it is difficult to discern the logo from the logo of Buc-ee’s.”

And yet that one also ended in a settlement.

To be clear, this is pure trademark bullying bullshit. Buc-ee’s is big and these others are small and so they cave. And since nobody in the legal and court systems are willing or capable of doing anything about it, the bullying continues unabated. In a just world, Buc-ee’s would be sanctioned for even wasting the court’s and its victims’ time, money, and energy with this bullshit.

But in lieu of justice, we can at least highlight the company’s bullying ways for the public.

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The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month’s midnight emergency order. That emergency ruling came as the administration was literally loading detainees onto buses headed to airports, racing to deport them before courts could intervene.

Justice Alito filed a dissent to that ruling a couple of days later, whining about the procedural nature of it and (falsely, it turns out) claiming that there was no rush and that detainees weren’t going to be trafficked to a foreign gulag in the meantime.

Now the Supreme Court has come out with a more detailed ruling in the case, per curiam (meaning none of the Justices put their names directly to it) saying that the Government is simply wrong to use the Alien Enemies Act like this.

The ruling starts out by highlighting just how wrong Alito was in pretending that the government was in no rush to send the detained Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, while noting the stance the Trump admin has taken in the Abrego Garcia case that once they’ve removed someone from the country the courts have no jurisdiction any more:

We understood the Government to assert the right to remove the detainees as soon as midnight central time on April 19. The Government addressed the detainees’ allegations on April 18 only at an evening hearing before the District Court for the District of Columbia, where the detainees had separately sought relief. The Government guaranteed that no putative class members would be removed that day. Tr. of Proceedings in J. G. G. v. Trump, No. 25−cv−766, ECF Doc. 93, p. 9. But it further represented that, in its view, removal of putative class members as soon as the next day “would be consistent with” its due process obligations, and it “reserve[d] the right” to take such action. Id., at 26; see id., at 16 (explanation by the court that “tomorrow . . . starts at 12:01 a.m.”). Evidence now in the record (although not all before us on April 18) suggests that the Government had in fact taken steps on the afternoon of April 18 toward removing detainees under the AEA—including transporting them from their detention facility to an airport and later returning them to the facility. See Supp. App. to Reply 1a−5a. Had the detainees been removed from the United States to the custody of a foreign sovereign on April 19, the Government may have argued, as it has previously argued, that no U. S. court had jurisdiction to order relief. See Application To Vacate Injunction in Noem v. Abrego Garcia, No. 24A949 (Apr. 7, 2025), pp. 11−20.

But, as the seven justices who signed on note, that’s not at all how this works, and it highlights that the administration’s posturing in other cases show how important this issue is, and why it’s fine for the Supreme Court to take it up so quickly:

The Government does not contest before this Court the applicants’ description of the notice afforded to AEA detainees in the Northern District of Texas, nor the assertion that the Government was poised to carry out removals imminently. The Government has represented elsewhere that it is unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador, see Abrego Garcia v. Noem, No. 25−cv−951 (D Md.), ECF Docs. 74, 77, where it is alleged that detainees face indefinite detention, see Application for Injunction 11. The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.

And then, most importantly, the Supreme Court makes it clear that giving detainees just 24 hours to try to respond to a notice of removal is not actually due process:

Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.

That’s the key line in the latest ruling.

But, still, it believes the case should now move through a more proper process in the lower courts, but that requires the US government to allow for those cases to move properly, rather than just throwing these people on airplanes. Thus, it sends the case back to the lower courts while making it clear no one should be removed while those courts handle the detainees’ due process.

To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18, and we grant temporary injunctive relief to preserve our jurisdiction while the question of what notice is due is adjudicated.

Justice Alito, along with his sidekick Justice Thomas, unsurprisingly dissents. As per usual, they pretend that this is entirely about the procedural aspects of the case and that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over the case. Alito claims it’s unfair to expect a district court to respond so quickly and that he just doesn’t see what all the fuss and rush is about. The majority decision points out (in nicer terms) that he’s living in a fantasy world:

First, we reject the dissent’s characterization of the events that transpired on April 18, which lead it to question our jurisdiction. District courts should approach requests for preliminary relief with care and consideration, see post, at 3−4 (ALITO, J., dissenting), but exigent circumstances may impose practical constraints. Preliminary relief is “customarily granted on the basis of procedures that are less formal and evidence that is less complete than in a trial on the merits.” Lackey v. Stinnie, 604 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 6) (quoting University of Tex. v. Camenisch, 451 U. S. 390, 395 (1981)). The purpose of such relief is “merely to preserve the relative positions of the parties” pending further proceedings. Lackey, 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 6) (quoting Camenisch, 451 U. S., at 395).

In this case, the record before the District Court, although limited, indicated that removals of putative class members were likely imminent. Contra, post, at 4−6 (ALITO, J., dissenting). The detainees attached four declarations to their emergency motion for a TRO. In one, for example, an attorney relayed a detainee’s report that immigration officers “had informed them that they will be deported either today or tomorrow.” ECF Doc. 30−1. In a second, a nonprofit director described conversations with family members of detainees and linked to a video of detainees holding notices of removal as evidence that detainees “were being removed.”

Importantly, the relevant question for purposes of our jurisdiction is whether, at the time this Court was called upon to intervene, the District Court’s inaction had the effect of refusing an injunction. In their application to this Court, the detainees represented that “[m]any individuals [had] already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.” Application for Injunction 1. Shortly thereafter, the Government represented on the record in federal court that it reserved the right to remove detainees after midnight. We had the power to issue injunctive relief to prevent irreparable harm to the applicants and to preserve our jurisdiction over the matter

Perhaps most tellingly, Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence cuts through the procedural dance, essentially acknowledging that the current system of emergency orders and circuit court ping-pong isn’t serving anyone. His suggestion that the Court should just take the case directly highlights both the urgency of the constitutional questions at stake and a growing institutional impatience with the administration’s tactics:

The circumstances call for a prompt and final resolution, which likely can be provided only by this Court. At this juncture, I would prefer not to remand to the lower courts and further put off this Court’s final resolution of the critical legal issues. Rather, consistent with the Executive Branch’s request for expedition—and as the detainees themselves urge—I would grant certiorari, order prompt briefing, hold oral argument soon thereafter, and then resolve the legal issues.

There’s still much more to go in this case, but it does appear that a clear majority of the Court is at least somewhat concerned about the way the Trump admin is rushing people onto planes to kick them out of the country without due process, and then you have Alito and Thomas whining in the corner that there’s no need to rush, even as detainees were being loaded into buses to take them to the airport.

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The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming—again—that the latest version won’t censor online content. It isn’t true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a “duty of care,” and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech online, especially for young people.

KOSA Still Forces Platforms to Police Legal Speech

At the center of the bill is a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.” The bill claims to bar lawsuits over “the viewpoint of users,” but that’s a smokescreen. Its core function is to let government agencies sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content someone later claims contributed to one of these harms.

This bill won’t bother big tech. Large companies will be able to manage this regulation, which is why Apple and X have agreed to support it. In fact, X helped negotiate the text of the last version of this bill we saw. Meanwhile, those companies’ smaller competitors will be left scrambling to comply. Under KOSA, a small platform hosting mental health discussion boards will be just as vulnerable as Meta or TikTok—but much less able to defend itself.

To avoid liability, platforms will over-censor. It’s not merely hypothetical. It’s what happens when speech becomes a legal risk. The list of harms in KOSA’s “duty of care” provision is so broad and vague that no platform will know what to do regarding any given piece of content. Forums won’t be able to host posts with messages like “love your body,” “please don’t do drugs,” or “here’s how I got through depression” without fearing that an attorney general or FTC lawyer might later decide the content was harmful. Support groups and anti-harm communities, which can’t do their work without talking about difficult subjects like eating disorders, mental health, and drug abuse, will get caught in the dragnet.

When the safest legal option is to delete a forum, platforms will delete the forum.

There’s Still No Science Behind KOSA’s Core Claims

KOSA relies heavily on vague, subjective harms like “compulsive usage.” The bill defines it as repetitive online behavior that disrupts life activities like eating, sleeping, or socializing. But here’s the problem: there is no accepted clinical definition of “compulsive usage” of online services.

There’s no scientific consensus that online platforms cause mental health disorders, nor agreement on how to measure so-called “addictive” behavior online. The term sounds like settled medical science, but it’s legislative sleight-of-hand: an undefined concept given legal teeth, with major consequences for speech and access to information.

Carveouts Don’t Fix the First Amendment Problem

The bill says it can’t be enforced based on a user’s “viewpoint.” But the text of the bill itself preferences certain viewpoints over others. Plus, liability in KOSA attaches to the platform, not the user. The only way for platforms to reduce risk in the world of KOSA is to monitor, filter, and restrict what users say.

If the FTC can sue a platform because minors saw a medical forum discussing anorexia, or posts about LGBTQ identity, or posts discussing how to help a friend who’s depressed, then that’s censorship. The bill’s stock language that “viewpoints are protected” won’t matter. The legal incentives guarantee that platforms will silence even remotely controversial speech to stay safe.

Lawmakers who support KOSA today are choosing to trust the current administration, and future administrations, to define what youth—and to some degree, all of us—should be allowed to read online.

KOSA will not make kids safer. It will make the internet more dangerous for anyone who relies on it to learn, connect, or speak freely. Lawmakers should reject it, and fast.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it’s not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is, government agencies (along with retailers, sports arenas, and bored billionaires) seem to believe the real problem is that there just hasn’t been enough failure.

In 2021, facial recognition tech used by the DHS and its components scanned more than 23 million people. While the number of inputs was depressingly impressive, the end result of all this biometric gathering was merely disappointing:

The report indicates that the system caught no imposters traveling through airports last year and fewer than 100 new pedestrian imposters.

The CBP’s numbers were even worse. More than 50 million face scans between 2018 and 2021, with only a total of 292 imposters caught by the always-on surveillance.

Apparently, the problem is that there isn’t enough of the stuff that already proven itself mostly useless. As Caroline Haskins reports for Wired, the CBP is asking tech firms to whip up facial recognition tech capable of scanning every face in every car crossing the border.

CBP says that its facial recognition tool “is currently operating in the air, sea, and land pedestrian environments.” The agency’s goal is to bring it to “the land vehicle environment.” According to a page on CBP’s website updated last week, the agency is currently “testing” how to do so. The RIF says that these tests demonstrate that while this facial recognition tool has “improved,” it isn’t always able to get photos of every vehicle passenger, especially if they’re in the second or third row.

“Human behavior, multiple passenger vehicle rows, and environmental obstacles all present challenges unique to the vehicle environment,” the document says. CBP says it wants a private vendor to provide it with a tool that would “augment the passenger images” and “capture 100% of vehicle passengers.”

Obviously, this is hardly the ideal environment to produce usable facial recognition images. No matter where the cameras are placed, some passengers’ faces will be obscured in some way, whether it’s by shadows, other people/objects in the vehicle, or simply facing the “wrong” direction.

The thing is, the CBP already knows this isn’t a winning strategy. Haskins’ Wired article quotes the EFF’s Dave Maass, who obtained CBP documents detailing a trial run of this tech from 2021 to 2022. The results of this first deployment were far from impressive.

Maas said that what stood out to him was the error rates. Cameras at the Anzalduas border crossing at Mexico’s border with McAllen, Texas captured photos of everyone in the car just 76 percent of the time, and of those people, just 81 percent met the “validation requirements” for matching their face with their identification documents.

That’s an incredibly high failure rate for tech that was only asked to do “one-to-one” matching — that is, matching a person’s facial recognition scan to identification documents presented to border control officers. With these numbers, you’re better off just relying on the humans staffing border entries to make judgment calls on travel documents.

If this new system is expected to do more than this — like perform one-to-many matches — the error rate will be compounded exponentially. Even if the tech continues to improve, there’s actual life and liberty on the line here. Without rigorous guidelines and lots of human backstops, this tech will just make rights violations more efficient.

It’s not just those coming into the country who will be subjected to this, either. The DHS ultimately wants these camera facing both ways to better capture the faces of everyone in a vehicle leaving the country.

CBP exclusively tells WIRED, in response to an inquiry to the agency, that it plans to mirror the current program it’s developing—photographing every person entering the US and match their faces with their travel documents—to the outbound lanes going to Canada and Mexico. The agency currently does not have a system that monitors people leaving the country by vehicle.

“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner tells WIRED.

So, even if you’re cool with south-facing cameras scanning every foreigner trying to enter the US, you’re going to have to accept the trade-off no one bothered asking your opinion about. You’re going to be subject to just as much always-on surveillance as people you think aren’t worthy of living in the United States. The Constitution-free zone has never been less free, and it’s only going to get worse, no matter who’s in the White House.

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We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC Commissioners) has started calling out FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s attacks on free speech. In a speech yesterday, she went even further: calling out the administration’s bullshit attacks on free speech, Section 230, DEI… and closing on a remark regarding the likelihood of her getting fire. Given that the entire thing is relevant to Techdirt’s usual content, we’re running the published transcript of her speech. Please read the entire thing.

REMARKS OF FCC COMMISSIONER ANNA M. GOMEZ****2025 MEDIA INSTITUTE COMMUNICATIONS FORUMMay 15, 2025

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be back at the Media Institute.  When I spoke here last year, I mused about how much had changed since I spoke at a Media Institute lunch in 2009.  I think it’s safe to say that the rate of change has accelerated over the past year.

Our current political moment poses challenges unlike anything I thought I would face as an FCC Commissioner.  This Administration has been on a campaign to censor and control since, well, before day one.  And since day one the FCC has been implementing the will of this Administration and undermining the First Amendment at every turn.

The First Amendment has protected our fundamental right to speak freely and to hold power to account since 1791. It is foundational to our democracy.  Today, the greatest threat to that freedom is coming from our own government.

Silencing dissenting voices is not a show of strength—it’s a sign of weakness.  It comes from a place of fear.  Fear that opposing views, rather than presidential decrees, will win out in the public debate of ideas.

And that is why I am here today and have been speaking out broadly.

I realize that, in this space, I am preaching to the proverbial choir.  But it is worth noting that never in my career have I received as much support as I have for speaking out about the importance of the First Amendment and the dangers the current FCC’s actions pose to democracy.

And, over the last few months, I’ve found myself aligned with voices with which I never imagined I’d agree.  Why?  Because across the ideological spectrum there remains a shared belief that the First Amendment is fundamental to democracy and is worth fighting for, even—and especially—when it’s politically inconvenient.

The Administration’s coordinated efforts to censor and control are manifesting in a multitude of ways.

In the Tech Media Telecom ecosystem, they have initiated investigations and floated debilitating rate regulation schemes that target national network broadcasters for their newsrooms’ editorial decisions, harassed private companies for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts and threatened tech companies that respond to consumer demands for content moderation and fact-checking.  Separately, they have attempted to shutter Voice of America and sought retribution against lawful residents that protest Administration policies.

They are banning books and seeking to erase history from the public record and from our national museums.  And they are targeting law firms, unions, and all those that have the skills and the will to stand up for the victims of this campaign of censorship and control.  And, of course, I cannot leave out the fact that they have been firing presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Commissioners of multimember independent agencies who dare to speak the truth.

Broadly speaking, these efforts are unprecedented and indefensible.

Today I want to talk about the FCC actions that are antithetical to the goals of the Communications Act, the remit of the agency, and the guarantees of the First Amendment.

Broadcasting

Let’s start with broadcasting.

Last year at this luncheon I made what I thought was an obvious statement: “our country needs a press free from interference from regulators like me.”  Yet here we are.

The FCC’s licensing authority is being weaponized to chill speech and to punish the press.  We are witnessing a dangerous precedent: the transformation of an independent regulator into an instrument of political censorship.  This FCC has made clear that it will go after any news outlet that dares to report the truth if that truth is unfavorable to this Administration.

This isn’t the first time that the FCC has faced Administration pressure to weaponize its broadcast licensing authority.  In 1939, FDR named Larry Fly chairman of the FCC.  Chairman Fly, best known for his focus on addressing monopolization of the airwaves, called attention to the fact that NBC and CBS could “say what more than half of the people may or may not hear,” and he underscored that “Democracy [could not] rest upon so frail a reed.”

During this time, FDR was convinced that newspaper publishers were biased against him, and he saw radio as the next avenue through which the press would provide unfavorable coverage of him.  So, FDR asked Fly to ban newspapers from getting FM licenses.  Rather than capitulating to Administration pressure, Fly refused to take punitive, politically motivated action against the press.  Instead, he underscored that the FCC would not ban radio licenses for newspapers, and he reaffirmed the agency’s commitment to diversity in media control.

Again, during the Kennedy administration, the FCC faced pressure from the White House.  Reacting to an unfavorable NBC news report, President Kennedy called on Chairman Newton Minnow to withdraw NBC’s licenses.  And the next day, Minnow told a Kennedy aide, “tell the President he is lucky to have an FCC Chairman who does not always do what he is told.”  Minnow stood up against the weaponization of the agency’s licensing authority, an action for which President Kennedy later thanked him.

This is what courage looks like—FCC Chairs refusing to wield the agency’s licensing authority as a weapon in contravention of the First Amendment and the Communications Act, even in the face of political pressure.

I want to be clear.  In addition to undermining informed civic engagement, there are serious health and safety consequences to silencing broadcasters.  Imagine your local TV or radio station goes dark because the FCC doesn’t like something an anchor said.  That’s not just a media story.  That’s a threat to public safety.

I’ve visited local TV and radio stations across the country and in a variety of communities.  Local news provides lifesaving information during storms, wildfires, and other emergencies.  It serves veterans, seniors, and rural communities.  But partisan politics is now putting these resources at risk.  The FCC should not be in the business of controlling access to vital local information.  We should be promoting free and open access to the news.

Unfortunately, the Administration efforts to censor and control appear to be working, at least for now.  Some media outlets are finding it is easier to retreat in the face of government threats, veiled or otherwise, than to be responsive to their audiences.

As I’m sure you’re all aware, last month Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 minutes resigned.  He started at CBS News as an intern in 1988 and was only the third executive producer to run 60 minutes in its 57-year history.  He resigned because he no longer felt he had the “independence that honest journalism requires.”  Pardon my language, but that is a B.F.D.

Speaking as a government regulator, we need journalists to report the truth even when it cuts against our arguments or our political biases.  And corporate parents should give journalists the independence they need. A free press requires free journalists.

On the international front, Voice of America and Radio Marti were once models of press freedom in contrast to propaganda regimes like those in Russia and China.  Efforts to shutter these institutions or to undermine their independence sends a global message: America no longer practices what it preaches.  This is extremely concerning.

The press is the fourth estate.  The delicate system of checks and balances upon which American democracy is built does not function without a free press.  To the journalists out there, do not capitulate, continue to speak up and hold power to account.

Section 230

A conversation about freedom of the press and censorship should include speech online, so I am going to turn to online speech and the growing government effort to undermine Section 230.

Just as the Administration is attacking journalists that hold it to account, it is attacking digital media platforms that provide fact-checking and moderation of content its users do not want.  Claiming such user-supported moderation constitutes censorship, the Administration has pressured social media companies to stop these practices.  One tool it is using in this effort is the threat that the Commission may reinterpret or adopt rules regarding Section 230.

As the Supreme Court has held, moderation by private companies is itself a form of speech that is protected by the First Amendment.  When online platforms respond to their users’ demands by moderating content in specific ways, they’re not censoring—they’re exercising their right to speech.  Fact-checking, filtering, and moderation are all legitimate responses to user demand. The government’s duty under the First Amendment isn’t to second-guess these market offerings.  It’s to stay out of the way.

I acknowledge that there are many valid concerns about how we engage in the proverbial digital town square and Congress may well determine Section 230 needs reform.  Until that happens, however, Section 230 plays a critical role by providing digital platforms with the ability to establish rules of behavior in their own little corners of the Internet.  By permitting digital platforms to set up rules to moderate the content users post, they are able to offer unique features and experiences that attract customers.

If a digital platform has a specific vision for social discourse that it wants to make available to consumers, including allowing users to deploy their own choice of content moderation tools, Section 230 and the First Amendment allow it to create that world and to offer it as a service to the public.

FCC proposals to weaponize Section 230, however, are not efforts to solve the widely-recognized problems with online platforms.  They are attempts to increase government control of online speech by exposing platforms that want to facilitate user-supported fact-checking or create welcoming online environments to debilitating lawsuits.  This is not about reining in Big Tech. This is about censorship.

Let’s review: the Administration’s ongoing campaign of censorship and control is not only chilling speech but it is also attempting to control who gets to speak.  Another example of this attempt to control is punishing private companies for their fair hiring practices.

DEI

I have always believed that your first action in any role reveals your priorities.  This FCC’s first action was not about closing the digital divide or protecting network security.  No, its first move was to eliminate anything that even resembled Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion.

We’ve seen attempts to micromanage employment practices within private media companies, including threatening to impose heavy regulatory burdens on companies that require the FCC’s approval of their transactions.  These actions are not only wrong, but they also jeopardize economic growth in the name of ideological purity.

Perhaps more alarmingly, these steps have been disguised as an effort to protect the “public interest” and produce proof of “invidious” discrimination.  What this comes down to is that the FCC is asserting that fairness for all requires discrimination against some.  And that’s just not right. These are not good-faith regulatory efforts.  These are intimidation tactics meant to control who gets to speak. And they are antithetical to our core mission.

The Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission for the purpose of [quote] ‘regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service.’ [unquote]

Efforts from the private sector, to support diversity of voices in media, support the foundational mission of the FCC.

Agency Independence

And finally, in the vein of government control run amok, I want to talk about one more critical topic.  Here’s something I never thought I’d have to say in a speech: we must protect the independence of independent agencies.

The FCC is supposed to make decisions based on law, facts, and technical expertise—not politics.  We take our direction from the Constitution, the law, and the public.

That is what Congress intended.  When Congress considered the establishment of a Federal Radio Commission in the late 1920s, it considered the possibility of vesting the power in the Secretary of Commerce alone.  This idea, however, was struck down.   And it was struck down specifically because Congress feared that a single individual, subject to political will, would possess too much control over who could operate the cutting-edge communications technology of the time, radio.

Ultimately, after deliberation, Congress concluded that a multi-member Commission was the best choice.  As Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover testified to Congress, “we cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in a position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcast.”  The relationship between the power vested in the FCC and the duty to uphold First Amendment rights was unambiguous from the inception of the agency.

When Congress later amended the Federal Radio Commission to create the Federal Communications Commission, it once again chose to vest authority in a multi-member independent agency.  Congress’s message to us could not be clearer.  The FCC was designed to be an independent expert agency led by a multi-member, multi-party Commission.

While FCC Commissioners have had policy disagreements across the agency’s history, by and large we’ve understood the responsibility of ensuring that those on the “outside” looked to us as a stable, independent, expert-driven regulatory body.  Problematically, as we’ve seen at other independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, today, when minority Commissioners dissent, they are marginalized—or worse, fired.

It is vividly illustrative that even when this Administration holds so much power, it cannot tolerate disagreement or dissent.  And that is why it continues to chip away at First Amendment rights.

To address this issue, I have launched a First Amendment Tour to Challenge Government Censorship and Control.  In partnership with consumer and civil society organizations across the ideological spectrum, I am hosting and participating in speaking engagements and listening sessions focused on protecting the rights and freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment.

I refuse to stay quiet while the government weaponizes its regulatory tools to undermine the First Amendment. This is how I’m using my voice. I encourage you to use yours too.

And if I’m removed from my seat on the Commission, let it be said plainly: It wasn’t because I failed to do my job. It’s because I insisted on doing it.

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Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump’s mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist enough, or harass media giants that report candidly on Trump’s grotesque corruption.

Carr’s obviously not alone. Fellow Trump-selected FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington and his Chief of Staff Gavin Wax wrote an op-ed this week calling for whatever’s left of the FCC to be DOGE’d by Elon Musk and his cabal of tween authoritarian simpletons. As usual the goal is to demolish oversight of corporate power, but dress it up as some kind of serious, good faith efficiency reform:

“The FCC is a prime candidate for DOGE-style reform. From redundant enforcement structures to legacy programs that drain resources with little oversight, the Commission is entangled by outdated practices that burden consumers, broadcasters, and taxpayers alike.”

Among Simington and Wax’s “fixes” for the FCC are (further) gutting programs that help the poor, firing a bunch of FCC officials they deem redundant (namely those working on consumer protection), obliterating whatever’s left of media oversight and media consolidation limits, and shuffling some remaining staffers over to the country’s fledgling space agency.

But they also make it clear that one of their key goals here is to throw billions in new subsidies at their billionaire godking Elon Musk:

“Wired internet subsidies are increasingly unnecessary and cost-inefficient. The rise of satellite broadband, such as Starlink, and fixed wireless alternatives offer a more scalable, less expensive solution.”

This is part of a broader GOP effort to steal billions of taxpayer dollars included in the infrastructure bill that should be going to local, future-proof fiber and wireless solutions (including popular community-owned broadband networks), and instead give it to Elon Musk’s congested, expensive, ozone-layer killing Starlink satellite service. That’s not “populism” or “reform,” it’s just sleazy cronyism.

These are not serious people. They’re dressing up FCC corruption and mindless destruction as some sort of serious adult policymaking. Simington was never qualified for his role. Wax in particular is a radical right wing zealot with a long history of dodgy bedfellows (including white supremacists), who has less-than-zero qualifications to be making important choices about absolutely any of this.

They’re just mindlessly taking a hatchet to government based on vibes and ideological bullshit picked up during half-completed readings of Ayn Rand novels. At the same time, Carr wants everybody to believe his lobotomized FCC has the authority to bully companies into bending the knee to authoritarianism.

But they’re going to struggle to have their cake and eat it too.

As we’ve well documented, Trumpism is completely demolishing consumer protection and corporate oversight with the help of the Supreme Court and numerous problematic rulings by the Trump-heavy 5th and 6th Circuits. We’re genuinely talking about permanent, likely-irreversible harms to corporate oversight, consumer protection, public safety, and national security. Malformed, ignorant extremism.

So you’ve got this tension here between a generational, cross-industry corporatist quest to finally destroy the entirety of consumer protection and regulatory autonomy — and this weird smattering of far right wing authoritarian zealots who still think they can bully companies after their agencies have been lobotomized by the increasingly radical, right wing courts.

Neither option ends well for healthy markets or the public. There’s genuinely nobody left at these agencies who seriously cares about the public interest one way or the other. But if you had to make a wager on which side survives this legal standoff, you’d likely have to chose the one with the deeper bank accounts and better lawyers; the side not peppered with weird tween trolls with bad haircuts who get overheated because the most recent Star Wars movie had a few more black people than usual.

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Fresh off of his Mother’s Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are being saved while others are being cut. In his testimony, Kennedy advocated for the Republican budget, including those major cuts to his own ability to deliver on HHS’ mission.

Straight from the HHS website, here is its mission statement.

The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.

That mission statement is obviously no longer valid. Like, at all. HHS certainly isn’t enhancing health anywhere at all compared to a couple of months ago. Social services and public health facilities are being cut back, not advanced. And the “sound science” bit? Miss me with that bullshit while RFK Jr. is leading the charge on American medicine and healthcare.

And it seems RFK Jr. agrees on that last point as well. Kennedy not only currently heads up HHS, but he has written several books on the topics of health, medicine, and healthcare over the years. They include titles like The Real Anthony Fauci, The Wuhan Cover-Up, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, and Profiles of the Vaccine Injured, among others. These all touch heavily upon medicine and healthcare, advising the reader as to the truth within medicine or advocating for one health policy or another.

Which makes it pretty fucking rich when Kennedy said this in response to a question about whether he would advocate for the public to get certain vaccinations in these same hearings.

“If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?” began the Democratic congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin at the House appropriations committee hearing.

“For measles? Um, probably for measles,” said Kennedy, in one of the few hesitations of the hearing. “What I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant … I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking advice, medical advice, from me.”

On the one hand, hey, he finally said something medically sensible: don’t take advice from him. That’s, well, good advice. On the other hand, maybe it would be better if we had someone leading HHS who’s advice we could listen to? I know, crazy idea, but it just might work.

And given the volume of medical advice Kennedy has dispensed over the years, it’s both remarkable that he would make that statement and equally remarkable that he can’t manage to take any sort of stance on several medical questions in front of Congress.

Pocan went on to ask about chickenpox.

“Um, again, I don’t want to give advice,” Kennedy said, before commenting on shingles.

Pocan continued: “Polio?”

“Polio?” Kennedy said. “Again, I don’t want to be giving advice.”

The issued re-emerged in his afternoon testimony before the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, where the Democrat Chris Murphy asked Kennedy if he would recommend the measles vaccine. The secretary demurred, prompting Murphy to say: “I think that’s really dangerous for the American public and for families.

“The secretary of health and human services is no longer recommending the measles vaccines,” Murphy said.

Again, we’re in the middle of a ballooning measles outbreak in America and the Secretary of HHS can’t figure out a way to tell the public to get an MMR vaccine that is safe and effective. Good times.

There’s a long tail aspect to all of this. Even were Kennedy to be removed from his post today — a move that is so overly justified as to be laughable — the effects of his holding the position even these few months are going to be felt for decades, if not longer. There are already deaths at least partially on his hands. How long is the current administration really going to let this go on?

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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 roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by guest host Cathy Gellis, an internet and First Amendment lawyer. Together, they cover:

The Copyright Office Issues A Largely Disappointing Report On AI Training, And Once Again A Major Fair Use Analysis Inexplicably Ignores The First Amendment (Techdirt)Trump fires Copyright Office director after report raises questions about AI training (TechCrunch)Elon Musk’s X caves to ‘censorship’ demand from India as tensions build with Pakistan (AFP)In the government’s war on ‘disinformation’, facts are collateral damage (The Hindu)Elon Musk’s Twitter: Indian government has asked us to block 8,000 accounts, however, we disagree as (Times of India)Elon Musk’s Grok AI Can’t Stop Talking About ‘White Genocide’ (Wired)White Afrikaner brought to US by Trump administration has history of antisemitic posts (The Guardian)U.S. says it is now monitoring immigrants’ social media for antisemitism (NPR)Kanye’s Nazi Song Is All Over Instagram (404 Media)Instagram and Facebook Blocked and Hid Abortion Pill Providers’ Posts (NY Times)Wikipedia fights the UK’s ‘flawed’ and ‘burdensome’ online safety rules (The Verge)What Attacks on Wikipedia Reveal about Free Expression (Tech Policy Press)Missouri AG Thinks Supreme Court Ruling Lets Him Control Social Media Moderation (It Doesn’t) (Techdirt)

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

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For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Despite that fact, recent attempts to halt the constant expansion and strengthening of copyright have all foundered. Part of the problem is that there has never been a constituency with enough political clout to counter the huge power of the copyright industry and its lobbyists.

Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress, and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential. For example, here is what OpenAI’s proposals for the US AI Action Plan, which is currently being drawn up, say about copyright:

America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security. The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.

In its own suggestions for the AI Action Plan, Google spells out what this means:

Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Balanced copyright laws that ensure access to publicly available scientific papers, for example, are essential for accelerating AI in science, particularly for applications that sift through scientific literature for insights or new hypotheses.

Although developments in the world of AI are giving companies like OpenAI and Google an opportunity to call into question the latest attempts to strengthen copyright’s intellectual monopoly, they are not the only voices here. For example, some of the biggest personalities in the tech world have gone even further, reported here by TechCrunch:

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”

X’s current owner, Elon Musk, quickly replied, “I agree.”

It’s not clear what exactly brought these comments on, but they come at a time when AI companies, including OpenAI (which Musk co-founded, competes with, and is challenging in court), are facing numerous lawsuits alleging that they’ve violated copyright to train their models.

Unsurprisingly, that bold suggestion provoked howls of outrage from various players in the copyright world. That was to be expected. But the fact that big names like Musk and Dorsey were happy to cause such a storm is indicative of the changed atmosphere in the world of copyright and beyond. Indeed, there are signs that the other main intellectual monopolies – patents and trademarks – are also under pressure. Calling into question the old ways of doing things in these fields will also weaken the presumption that copyright must be preserved in its current state.

There’s another important way in which copyright is losing its relevance. It involves AI once more, but not because of how today’s AI systems are trained, but as a result of their output. The ease with which generative AI can turn out material has had a number of important knock-on consequences. For example, as a post on the Creative Bloq site explained:

Some designers who use stock image libraries to source photos, illustrations and vectors for their projects are finding that they have to wade through more unusable [AI-generated] content to find an image that suits their needs, adding more time to their workflows.

The same is happening in other fields. An article on the NPR site last year explored the growing problem of “AI-generated scam books”:

“Scam books on Amazon have been a problem for years,” says Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, a group that advocates for writers. But she says the problem has multiplied in recent months. “Every new book seems to have some kind of companion book, some book that’s trying to steal sales.”

It’s also becoming a serious issue for music streaming services:

Deezer, the global music streaming platform, is receiving over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks on a daily basis. It equals over 18% of all uploaded content, an increase from the previously reported 10% in January, 2025, when Deezer launched its cutting edge AI-music detection tool.

These AI-generated images, books and music tracks have one thing in common: they are probably not protected by copyright in any way. This is an evolving area of law, but a recent report by the US Copyright Office seems to confirm that material generated purely by AI, with minimal human input — for example, in the form of prompts — is not eligible for copyright protection:

Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.

Assuming this approach is confirmed both in the US and elsewhere, the net effect is likely to be that vast swathes of AI-generated text, images and sounds found online today are in the public domain, and can be used by anyone for any purpose. Once people understand this, and start using AI-generated outputs that they find online freely, without any fear of legal action being taken against them, there will be important knock-on effects. First, people may well seek out such AI-generated material, since it is legally unproblematic compared to complicated licensing schemes for copyright material, assuming the latter are even available. And secondly, people will as a result grow increasingly accustomed to re-using anything they find online, to the point that they simply ignore copyright niceties altogether.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published at Walled Culture.

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You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d help Dish Network create a new 5G network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was doomed to failure for a long list of reasons.

As we predicted it’s… none of this is going well. All of the problems critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted (layoffs, price hikes, less competition, worse service) have come true. Meanwhile Dish has been bleeding satellite TV, wireless, and streaming TV subscribers for a while, and Dish’s new 5G network has generally been received as a sort of half-hearted joke.

So it’s important to keep in mind the first Trump administration created this whole dumb mess during Trump’s first term after his “antitrust enforcers” spent their personal free time helping these companies get bigger (which is not how “antitrust enforcement” is supposed to work, of course).

Now Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr says he’s launching a new “investigation” into the Dish 5G Network and Echostar (which recently acquired Dish). Carr, claims in a letter to Echostar Chairman Charlie Ergen, that he’s simply trying to “ensure that the companies we regulate comply with the terms oftheir federal spectrum licenses” and is meeting mandated FCC build out requirements:

“As you know, buildout obligations are one way that the FCC can ensure that Americans,including those living in rural communities, have a fair shot at next-generation connectivity.After all, failure to meet buildout obligations leaves these communities behind.”

But of course this is Brendan Carr — a guy who doesn’t actually believe in any sort of coherent oversight of corporate power. Unless it involves bullying companies for not being racist enough, or harassing media companies that engage in journalism critical of King Trump.

So why is Carr stepping in now? AT&T, Verizon, and Elon Musk all want the spectrum the Dish 5G network is using:

“Carr’s EchoStar investigation also reflects the long shadow that Musk casts over the US economy. Carr said he will look into “the scope and scale of MSS utilization in the 2GHz band that is currently licensed to EchoStar or its affiliates.” That’s the exact spectrum band that Musk’s SpaceX has signaled that it wants to take away from EchoStar for its own usage.”

If you’re say an ordinary person reading general news coverage of Carr’s “investigation,” you’ll never really get a real sense of how wildly corrupt this all is.

Again, the first administration created the Dish 5G network to create flimsy cover for the harmful consolidation caused by approving the Sprint T-Mobile merger. Now that that shitty deal is in the rear view mirror and everybody made their money, they want to strip the Dish 5G network for parts and force a sale Ergen’s valuable spectrum holdings to Elon Musk. Or AT&T and Verizon. Whoever has the best lawyers.

Carr is pretending to engage in serious adult policymaking, when they’re really just trying to offload valuable spectrum to Trump’s rich buddies. If you squint real hard it kind of looks like a real government doing serious policy (and outlets like the Wall Street Journal will certainly portray it as such), but in reality it’s a corrupt, ever-evolving joke.

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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a “first-in-the-nation rule” that would force social media companies to let users choose third-party content moderators rather than using the platforms’ own moderation systems.

There’s just one tiny problem: this completely ignores what the Supreme Court explicitly said about government control of content moderation just months ago in Moody v. NetChoice. Even crazier, Bailey claims that his new rule is based on the ruling in Moody.

As a reminder, the Supreme Court’s ruling in last year’s Moody v. NetChoice case, the Justices made it quite clear that the First Amendment protects social media content moderation decisions, and that the state has no business telling companies how to moderate. Justice Kagan, in the majority opinion, signed onto by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett, made it clear that what social media companies do in content moderation is quintessential protected First Amendment activity no different than editors of a newspaper choosing what to publish:

To the extent that social media platforms create expressive products, they receive the First Amendment’s protection. And although these cases are here in a preliminary posture, the current record suggests that some platforms, in at least some functions, are indeed engaged in expression. In constructing certain feeds, those platforms make choices about what third-party speech to display and how to display it. They include and exclude, organize and prioritize—and in making millions of those decisions each day, produce their own distinctive compilations of expression. And while much about social media is new, the essence of that project is something this Court has seen before*. Traditional publishers and editors also select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products. And we have repeatedly held that laws curtailing their editorial choices must meet the First Amendment’s requirements. The principle does not change because the curated compilation has gone from the physical to the virtual world. In the latter, as in the former,* government efforts to alter an edited compilation of third-party expression are subject to judicial review for compliance with the First Amendment*.*

In short, content moderation is protected by the First Amendment, and states are not able to simply ignore that. Indeed, the ruling had even more explicit words for the Fifth Circuit, which had ruled earlier (in an absolutely nutty ruling) that states could easily pass laws that told websites how to moderate. The Supreme Court made it clear that such a claim was utter nonsense:

But it is necessary to say more about how the First Amendment relates to the laws’ content-moderation provisions, to ensure that the facial analysis proceeds on the right path in the courts below. That need is especially stark for the Fifth Circuit*. Recall that it held that the content choices the major platforms make for their main feeds are “not speech” at all, so States may regulate them free of the First Amendment’s restraints. 49 F. 4th, at 494; see supra, at 8. And even if those activities were expressive, the court held, Texas’s interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas would satisfy First Amendment scrutiny. See 49 F. 4th, at 482.* If we said nothing about those views, the court presumably would repeat them when it next considers NetChoice’s challenge. It would thus find that significant applications of the Texas law—and so significant inputs into the appropriate facial analysis—raise no First Amendment difficulties. But that conclusion would rest on a serious misunderstanding of First Amendment precedent and principle. The Fifth Circuit was wrong in concluding that Texas’s restrictions on the platforms’ selection, ordering, and labeling of third-party posts do not interfere with expression*. And the court was wrong to treat as valid Texas’s interest in changing the content of the platforms’ feeds. Explaining why that is so will prevent the Fifth Circuit from repeating its errors as to Facebook’s and YouTube’s main feeds. (And our analysis of Texas’s law may also aid the Eleventh Circuit, which saw the First Amendment issues much as we do, when next considering NetChoice’s facial challenge.) But a caveat: Nothing said here addresses any of the laws’ other applications, which may or may not share the First Amendment problems described below*

Indeed, the Supreme Court said that the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to block social media companies from moderating in a particular way directly would violate the First Amendment:

Contrary to what the Fifth Circuit thought, the current record indicates that the Texas law does regulate speech when applied in the way the parties focused on below—when applied, that is, to prevent Facebook (or YouTube) from using its content-moderation standards to remove, alter, organize, prioritize, or disclaim posts in its News Feed (or homepage). The law then prevents exactly the kind of editorial judgments this Court has previously held to receive First Amendment protection*. It prevents a platform from compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants, and thus from offering the expressive product that most reflects its own views and priorities. Still more,* the law—again, in that specific application—is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny*. Texas has thus far justified the law as necessary to balance the mix of speech on Facebook’s News Feed and similar platforms; and the record reflects that Texas officials passed it because they thought those feeds skewed against politically conservative voices. But this Court has many times held, in many contexts, that* it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to “un-bias” what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.

So, you’d have to be pretty fucking bad at reading to think that this case somehow blesses the idea that the government can decide how social media companies can moderate.

Enter Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. Bailey is no stranger to attacking the free speech rights of those he disagrees with.

Last week, Bailey announced a new rule, based on his reading of the Moody decision, that would effectively make him Missouri’s Chief Content Moderation Officer. Under the guise of “protecting free speech,” Bailey is attempting to use Missouri’s consumer protection laws to force social media companies to let users bypass their moderation systems entirely:

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey today announced the filing of a first-in-the-nation rule under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act that targets corporate censorship and secures freedom of expression for social media users. The rule requires Big Tech platforms to allow Missouri users to choose their own content moderators rather than being forced to rely on the biased algorithms of monopolistic tech giants.

“Big Tech oligarchs have manipulated the content Missourians see online and silenced voices they don’t like. That ends now,” said Attorney General Bailey. “With this rule, Missouri becomes the first state in America to take real, enforceable action against corporate censorship. I’m using every tool to ensure Missourians—not Silicon Valley—control what they see on social media.”

The rule—codified as 15 CSR 60-19—clarifies that it is an unfair, deceptive, or otherwise unlawful practice for social media platforms to deny users the ability to choose an independent content moderator. Platforms must now provide a choice screen upon account activation and at regular intervals, must not favor their own moderation tools, and must allow full interoperability for outside moderators chosen by users.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s exactly the kind of government interference in content moderation that the Supreme Court just said states can’t do.

Here’s the truly ironic part: third-party content moderation is actually a great idea. I should know — I wrote a pretty well-known paper advocating for exactly that approach, and I now serve on the board of Bluesky, currently the only major social platform embracing this model.

But there’s a world of difference between believing companies should adopt better moderation practices and claiming they’re breaking the law by not doing so. Bailey’s attempt to force this change through government mandate is not just legally backwards — it’s exactly the kind of state interference in editorial decisions that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.

Bailey’s claim that Moody somehow supports his position is particularly brazen. He specifically cites the Court’s mention of “competition laws” as justification:

This regulation is grounded in the Supreme Court’s guidance from Moody v. NetChoice, which recognized the authority of state governments to enforce competition laws in the interest of free expression.

But Bailey either didn’t read or deliberately ignored the actual context. The Court only mentioned competition laws to explicitly contrast them with content moderation mandates. Here’s what they actually said:

… the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in improving, or better balancing, the marketplace of ideas*. Of course, it is critically important to have a well-functioning sphere of expression, in which citizens have access to information from many sources. That is the whole project of the First Amendment.* And the government can take varied measures, like enforcing competition laws, to protect that access. Cf., e.g., Turner I, 512 U. S., at 647 (protecting local broadcasting); Hurley, 515 U. S., at 577 (discussing Turner I ). But in case after case, the Court has barred the government from forcing a private speaker to present views it wished to spurn in order to rejigger the expressive realm. The regulations in Tornillo, PG&E, and Hurley all were thought to promote greater diversity of expression. See supra, at 14–16. They also were thought to counteract advantages some private parties possessed in controlling “enviable vehicle[s]” for speech. Hurley, 515 U. S., at 577. Indeed, the Tornillo Court devoted six pages of its opinion to recounting a critique of the thencurrent media environment—in particular, the disproportionate “influen[ce]” of a few speakers—similar to one heard today (except about different entities). 418 U. S., at 249; see id., at 248–254; supra, at 14–15. It made no difference. However imperfect the private marketplace of ideas, here was a worse proposal—the government itself deciding when speech was imbalanced, and then coercing speakers to provide more of some views or less of others.

The Court couldn’t be more clear: while states can enforce genuine competition laws, they absolutely cannot use that power as a backdoor to control content moderation decisions. They even added a footnote specifically addressing attempts to twist competition law precedent (like Turner, which conservatives have long despised) to justify content moderation mandates:

Texas claims Turner as a counter-example, but that decision offers no help to speak of. Turner did indeed hold that the FCC’s must-carry provisions, requiring cable operators to give some of their channel space to local broadcast stations, passed First Amendment muster. See supra, at 15. But the interest there advanced was not to balance expressive content; rather, the interest was to save the local-broadcast industry, so that it could continue to serve households without cable. That interest, the Court explained, was “unrelated to the content of expression” disseminated by either cable or broadcast speakers. Turner I, 512 U. S. 622, 647 (1994). And later, the Hurley Court again noted the difference. It understood the Government interest in Turner as one relating to competition policy: The FCC needed to limit the cable operators’ “monopolistic,” gatekeeping position “in order to allow for the survival of broadcasters.” 515 U. S., at 577. Unlike in regulating the parade—or here in regulating Facebook’s News Feed or YouTube’s homepage—the Government’s interest was “not the alteration of speech.” Ibid. And when that is so, the prospects of permissible regulation are entirely different.

So either Missouri AG Andrew Bailey cannot read a basic Supreme Court decision, or he assumes no one else can.

Perhaps the most telling irony in all of this? If Bailey succeeds, his rule would force his good friend Elon Musk — for whom Bailey has enthusiastically conducted censorial investigations designed to chill speech — to allow third-party moderation on ExTwitter. Something tells me neither Bailey nor Musk have thought through the implications of trying to become Missouri’s content moderation czar.

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Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview’s tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn’t seem that its multitudinous contracts with government agencies will keep it in the black for years to come.

Other companies dealing in what used to be cop tech (that was war tech before it was cop tech) are making in-roads with private citizens before asking cops to come along for the ride. Since the early adopters are homeowners associations and gated communities, it’s only natural that these public-private partnerships have developed because law enforcement has historically been more inclined to protect the white and rich, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

But this is a new twist: here’s a government agency seeking to leverage its stash of photos to obtain questionable tech for free.

Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.

Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access.

“We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community,” Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.

This is a really strange trade. Mugshots have generally been considered to be public domain, accessible even without the hassle of public records requests. While it’s obviously more convenient for Biometrica to get all of these at one time, it never really needed the MPD’s help to add these photos to its facial recognition database.

Chief Hough’s statement doesn’t really help. While Hough isn’t her predecessors, the PD already has a history of being dishonest about its surveillance tech acquisitions. And if her department were truly interested in respecting the rights of a diverse community, it would have disbanded. Show me a cop shop that respects rights regularly and I’ll show you my Blue Bloods fanfic.

To be completely fair, no such deal has taken place yet. And the PD is actually presenting it to the public for comment before moving forward. However, no promises have been made, which means the PD might do this anyway, even if most commenters are against it.

And its assurances that it really desires input from the public are undercut by the fact that it’s already using facial recognition tech, albeit one it’s paying for, rather than the one it can get for free by feeding faces to Biometrica’s database.

At the meeting, officials shared how the technology had been used in recent cases — a homicide and a sexual assault — to assist in identifying suspects. In both cases, police ran photos of men ultimately charged in the crimes through facial recognition technology to help identify them. Those identifications were then confirmed during the investigation, police said.

So, what do 2.5 million mugshots (and their accompanying arrest records) buy you in the facial recognition market? Not a lot, it turns out. Biometrica will give the PD two free search licenses. If the PD wants more, the price is $12,000 per license after that.

Even if the little people end up not mattering, at least voices with some power are expressing their concerns. One Fire and Police commissioner, Krissie Fung, said she was “unconvinced” this trade was necessary and that city residents should have the final say.

Another commissioner has already been a victim of the tech’s innate fallibility, which is the result of bias present in the inputs, as well as the bias of those making decisions based on search results.

During the April 17 meeting, Fire and Police commissioner Ramon Evans said he had been subject to bias by facial recognition while at Potawatomi Casino.

“I got called over and I wasn’t the guy,” he said. “I was a victim of error.”

The government should not be trading public records for discounts on surveillance tech. If the PD truly has a need for this, it should be able to demonstrate that with enough clarity that it would have no problem securing the funding. This looks like nothing more than the PD trying to do something just because it can, rather than because it actually thinks the tech will be a net gain for the city and its residents. For that reason alone, this proposal should be rejected. And the city government should take steps going forward to ensure agencies can’t use forcibly obtained data to horse-trade for private sector goods.

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