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We’ve now arrived at 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, the honorable mentions, and the Best Digital Game. Today, we wrap things up with a look at the Best Analog Game: This Is Not A Game About A Pipe by Mac McAnally.

Probably the most iconic painting to enter the public domain this year is René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, best known to many as the “this is not a pipe” painting. We knew it would almost certainly yield a few entries in the jam, and one of these stood out strongly. This Is Not A Game About A Pipe is the type of game we don’t see too often in these jams: a full-fledged original card game with novel mechanics that both honor the source material and make for a truly fun and endlessly replayable experience.

The basic idea is a standard trick-taking game. The rules are then filled with comedic surrealist energy, best exemplified by the four suits that exist in the game’s custom deck of cards: Pipes, Cards, Tricks, and Winning. Yes, “Cards” is a suit. So is “Tricks”. And yet the game itself has you using cards (only some of which are Cards) to win tricks. You might win a trick with a Trick card, or lose a trick with a Winning card, or the opposite, or… this is sounding confusing isn’t it? Well that’s kind of the point — and yet the rules themselves are not actually confusing at all, and it’s quite an easy game to learn! In addition to having its own bizarre suit, each card is also capable of either affirming or negating the suit of another card: declaring that it “is” or “is not” what it purports to be. Players must manipulate these mind-bending mechanics to find valid plays and attempt to win tricks.

Our judges were blown away by just how cool and original the game is, emerging from only three short pages of rules. It feels like the sort of game that could become a genuine classic. And it is so firmly rooted in the painting it’s based on, and the concepts and questions that the artist loved to explore, that you can’t help but feel like Magritte would thoroughly approve. For all that, it’s a worthy winner of this year’s Best Analog Game.

Congratulations to Mac McAnally for the win! You can get everything you need to play This Is Not A Game About A Pipe from its page on Itch. That’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights, but 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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We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded into a Hollywood court case with competing lawsuits from both parties. While I tend to shy away from the idea of parties purposefully employing the Streisand Effect for wanted attention, as opposed to inadvertently generating unwanted visibility, that sure looks like this is a case of the former. Baldoni and his legal team have taken every step possible to make every bit of this as public as possible, while Lively has done the opposite.

Now, I want to make clear that I don’t really have much of a take as to the merits of the case on either side. I just don’t know enough to have an opinion on the legal drama itself. That is what trials are for, after all.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some silliness to talk about as an update here. And when it comes to the status of the trial and what’s happening within it, there are several things going on.

First, like the New York Times before him, Ryan Reynolds has been attempting to exit this whole thing. Lively’s husband was sued alongside his wife for defamation and for interfering in Baldoni’s business relationships. Unfortunately, it appears that Baldoni’s suit may not have met some pretty basic threshholds for making such claims.

“The entirety of Mr. Baldoni’s case appears to be based on Mr. Reynolds allegedly privately calling Mr. Baldoni a ‘predator,’ but here is the problem, that is not defamation unless they can show that Mr. Reynolds did not believe that statement to be true,” Reynolds’ attorneys Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson told Us in a statement. “The complaint doesn’t allege that, and just the opposite, the allegations in the complaint suggest that Mr. Reynolds genuinely believes Mr. Baldoni is a predator.”

The statement continued: “Mr. Reynolds’ wife has accused Mr. Baldoni — privately and in multiple complaints — of sexual harassment and retaliation, and as pointed out by Mr. Reynolds’ motion, Mr. Baldoni has also openly spoken about his past of mistreating women and pushing the boundaries of consent. Mr. Reynolds has a First Amendment right to express his opinion of Mr. Baldoni, which should be comforting to a group of people who have repeatedly called Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds ‘bullies’ and other names over the past year.”

This is the “actual malice” requirement for defamation at work. Baldoni’s lawyers would need to prove not that Reynolds made the statements they claim he made about Baldoni, but rather that he made them knowing they were false in order to prove defamation. And that is notoriously difficult to prove. Save any smoking gun evidence of Reynolds openly admitting he was spreading lies, it’s very unlikely the defamation claims are going anywhere.

And, to that effect, Reynolds’ lawyers are going after legal fees as a result.

“Earlier today we moved for sanctions against the lawyers and parties responsible for the utterly frivolous claims brought against Ryan Reynolds,” Reynolds’ legal team said in a statement to Us Weekly on Tuesday, May 20. “Justin Baldoni’s lawyer and his clients filed a preposterous lawsuit falsely claiming that Ryan Reynolds extorted people he had never met, that he allegedly interfered with business relationships that do not exist, and somehow defamed people he never said a word about based on unspecified statements that do not appear anywhere in their 391-paragraph complaint. These are not serious claims—they are a desperate ploy for clickbait headlines that have no place in federal court.”

“Mr. Reynolds provided the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel an opportunity to save face, explaining these claims’ glaring and fundamental defects and urging that they be withdrawn more than 21 days ago,” the docs read. “Unfortunately, the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel unequivocally refused to do so, offering no response on these defects except to argue that these issues are appropriately resolved by motion to dismiss and may later be supported by discovery. But these claims’ fundamental failings are not about the parties’ dispute as to the legal arguments relating to their claims, or the facts, or even that all of their claims are weak and meritless (which, they are).”

If Baldoni’s real aim in all of this was to make all of this as public and publicity-driven as possible, well, it all kind of tracks from there.

And that’s further backed up by some truly absurd claims that Baldoni’s legal team have made about how to conduct Lively’s deposition. One lawyer said, I suppose perhaps in jest, that Lively’s deposition should be an event the public can attend or see for a fee.

“Since Ms. Lively is open to testifying, let’s make it count,” Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman tells PEOPLE. “Hold the deposition at MSG, sell tickets or stream it, and donate every dollar to organizations helping victims of domestic abuse.”

Here again we see the legal team from one side behaving in a serious way, while the other is not. Whatever the truth of their competing claims against the other, it is certainly not a good look for one side coming off as professional and the other, well, not.

And, frankly, recent news about how Baldoni is stressed over the public legal drama seems quite odd coming from the person who made this very, very public in a way it hadn’t been previously. As entertaining as this all might be, there must certainly be a better way this all could have been handled than whatever this fiasco has turned into.

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Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan — a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump administration shipped them there anyway, in direct violation of a federal court order.

This week, lawyers filed an emergency motion revealing that Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security was simply ignoring court orders and trafficking people to dangerous third countries they have no connection to. When a federal judge stepped in to stop the plane, the government’s response was basically: “but they’re criminals, so due process doesn’t matter.”

Plaintiffs seek an emergency order enjoining Defendants from effectuating the removal of class members N.M. and T.T.P., and any other class member, to South Sudan because, prior to making them board a plane for removal to that country, Defendants failed to comply with this Court’s Preliminary Injunction (PI), Dkts. 64, 86, 91. Specifically, with respect to class member N.M., Defendants failed to provide an opportunity for him to apply for protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) as to South Sudan. On information and belief, class member T.T.P. was denied the same opportunity. Although it should not be necessary, in light of Defendants’ continued intransigence, see Dkt. 89, Plaintiffs seek also an emergency order reaffirming that Defendants may not remove N.M., T.T.P., or any other class member to a third country unless they comply with this Court’s PI.

The plane made it as far as Djibouti — after a stop in Ireland — before Judge Brian Murphy stepped in and ordered the government to keep these men in US custody while he figured out what the hell was going on.

Here’s the core legal issue: before shipping people off to third countries, the government is required to give them “reasonable fear screenings” — basically, a chance to explain why they might face torture or persecution if sent to that specific country. It’s a basic due process requirement that Homeland Security just… ignored. They skipped the screening and put people on a plane to a country the State Department says is too dangerous for Americans to visit.

That’s why they’re currently stuck in Djibouti — the DOJ promised to keep them in US custody while the judge sorts this out. And Judge Murphy was not happy about having to deal with this at all. The Justice Department has also been arguing in this very case, though over different plaintiffs, that once they get people out of the country, courts lose all jurisdiction — a position that contradicts the Supreme Court from just earlier this year.

At the emergency hearing, Murphy made it clear that the government was blatantly defying his orders:

A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object.

The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda.

In his written order, Judge Murphy was even more blunt about what had happened. The government tried to argue that the court’s earlier order about giving people a “meaningful opportunity” to object was somehow ambiguous. Murphy wasn’t buying it:

Defendants maintain that ambiguity in the phrase “meaningful opportunity” precipitated this controversy. Indeed, when the Court issued the Preliminary Injunction, it declined to elaborate on what constitutes a “meaningful opportunity,” preferring instead to let experience show through hard cases the finer points of what is required under the Due Process Clause.

To be clear, this is not one of those hard cases. Giving every credit to Defendants’ account, the non-citizens at issue had fewer than 24 hours’ notice, and zero business hours’ notice, before being put on a plane and sent to a country as to which the U.S. Department of State issues the following warning: “Do not travel to South Sudan due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” …. As detailed on the record during today’s hearing, further facts regarding the unavailability of information, the hurried and confused notice that the individuals received, language barriers, and attorney access compound and confirm this Court’s finding that no reasonable interpretation of the Court’s Preliminary Injunction could endorse yesterday’s events*.*

In other words: you can’t claim confusion about due process when you’re giving people less than a day’s notice before shipping them to a war zone.

Murphy then did what pissed-off federal judges do: he ordered the DOJ to explain “under the pains and penalties of perjury” how they fucked up so badly. He specifically wanted to know why one person — N.M. — was being sent to South Sudan instead of his actual home country of Myanmar.

And here’s where things get revealing. When the DOJ filed their response, they completely ignored the judge’s actual question. Instead of explaining why someone from Myanmar was being sent to South Sudan, they just listed everyone’s criminal records — sexual assault, arson, drug trafficking. Classic authoritarian deflection: wave around criminal records and hope people forget that due process still applies to people with criminal convictions.

For N.M. specifically, they spent four paragraphs on his attempted sexual assault conviction but didn’t even mention why he was headed to South Sudan instead of Myanmar.

Then, after missing the court’s deadline, they filed another declaration with a half-assed explanation: Myanmar “has historically been recalcitrant” about taking people back. But here’s the kicker — once N.M. got a lawyer, they suddenly decided he should go to Myanmar after all. So why the hell was he on a plane to South Sudan?

Upon further investigation after contact from [REDACTED] counsel, it was realized that [REDACTED] was in fact in possession of a travel document to Burma. Thereafter, it was decided that he would instead be removed to Burma.

The DOJ’s own filing reveals the absurdity: they only “realized” N.M. had proper travel documents to Myanmar after his lawyer called them. Which raises the obvious question: why the fuck was he on a plane to South Sudan if they hadn’t even checked whether he could go to his home country?

This case perfectly captures the Trump administration’s approach: when caught violating court orders and basic due process, just shout “but they’re criminals!” and hope everyone forgets that the law applies to everyone. It doesn’t matter if these people have rap sheets longer than a CVS receipt. Having a criminal conviction doesn’t strip you of your constitutional rights or give the government permission to ship you to whatever dangerous country is convenient.

Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump might think that declaring someone “bad” gives them a free pass to ignore due process, but federal judges disagree. Judge Murphy has already suggested he may pursue criminal contempt charges against government officials for this stunt.

And that’s exactly what should happen. When government officials openly defy court orders and ship people to war zones without basic due process protections, the only appropriate response is to hold them criminally accountable. Otherwise, what’s to stop them from doing it again tomorrow?

Indeed, just as all this was going down, Noem was posting on her ExTwitter account “Suck it” in response to a court dismissing a different case regarding renditioning people to Guantanamo, specifically highlighting that the ACLU was among the lawyers trying to give these people due process. The case was dismissed because many of the plaintiffs had already been sent to Gitmo, making it “moot.”

She’s openly celebrating this kind of lawless human trafficking. Courts need to step up their game to stop it.

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The timing here is incredible. The very same day that the FTC’s “public inquiry” into “big tech censorship” closes, that very same FTC opens an investigation not into “big tech,” but rather Media Matters. Yes, the very same Media Matters that Elon Musk has been trying to silence through the censorial abuse of the court systems in multiple countries because the non-profit dared to… write an article showing ads from big companies appearing next to neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday opened an investigation into Media Matters, a liberal advocacy organization that has published research on hateful and antisemitic content on X, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.

The regulator said in a letter sent to the organization that it was investigating the group, which is aligned with Democrats, over whether it illegally colluded with advertisers, according to the people. The letter, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times, required the organization to share copies of its budgets, documents showing the effects of “harmful” online content on advertisers, and communications with other watchdog groups.

So let me get this straight: the FTC just spent months soliciting comments about “big tech censorship,” and its immediate follow-up is to… investigate the speech of a nonprofit that criticized big tech, and is being punished already through a series of civil SLAPP suits in multiple countries designed to chill its speech? Nothing says “fighting censorship” like launching a federal investigation into a nonprofit’s journalism.

This isn’t speculation or hyperbole — courts have already called this exact playbook against the same organization over the identical issue exactly what it is: censorial retaliation. After Elon got mad, the suck-up attorneys general of Texas and Missouri both tried to launch fishing expedition investigations into Media Matters, but a court shut that shit down. And the judge didn’t mince many words in calling out what abusive nonsense this was:

Defendant’s investigation of Media Matters is “retaliatory action sufficient to deter a person of ordinary firmness in plaintiff’s position from speaking again[.]” … “[T]he threat of invoking legal sanctions” is sufficient to deter protected speech. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 67 (1963). So, too, is the “threat of administrative and judicial intrusion into newsgathering and editorial process” that arises from official process and its possible enforcement. … These potential punitive consequences, as well as possible judicial intervention to enforce the CID, make Plaintiffs’ claim of chilled expression objectively reasonable.

There is more. “The compelled production of a reporter’s resource materials can constitute a significant intrusion . . . [that] may substantially undercut the public policy in favor of the free flow of information to the public[.]”

Ferguson apparently read this judicial smackdown and thought, “hold my beer.”

To be fair, Ferguson did telegraph this move. When he was auditioning for the FTC chair job, he specifically promised to “investigate and prosecute collusion on… advertiser boycotts.” The irony is that this promise appears directly above his pledge to end “politically motivated investigations.”

You almost have to admire the efficiency here. Ferguson manages to launch a politically motivated investigation while simultaneously promising to end politically motivated investigations. He’s using government power to silence criticism while pretending to be crusading against censorship.

It is, of course, the way of MAGA, where every false accusation is actually a confession of what they intend to do.

Anyway, where are all those people who claimed that an angry email from a Biden administration official was the greatest censorship threat ever? You’d think an actual government investigation targeting a nonprofit’s journalism might merit at least a tweet. But apparently, censorship is only bad when it happens to people you like.

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This is exactly what it looks like: the actions of an administration infested by vindictive thugs.

Former South Dakota governor and current DHS boss Kristi Noem returned to South Dakota to get her ego stroked a bit by Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. While Noem was picking up a fake degree and presumably passing on the virtues of bootlicking and fascism to graduates, more than 200 protesters were gathered outside, expressing their displeasure with Noem and the Trump Administration generally.

Even better, a few hundred miles away, a student Noem’s agency is desperately trying to deport took home two real degrees from South Dakota Mines while Noem was being gifted with an honorary degree by the university in Madison.

[Priya] Saxena and her attorney, Jim Leach, of Rapid City, sued and won a temporary restraining order that assured Saxena’s graduation and will halt the government’s action against her until at least next week, when she has a hearing on her request for a court order to stop her deportation while the lawsuit proceeds. Saxena and her attorney have said in court filings that she has not committed a deportable offense, and have called the government’s actions “lawless.”

Saxena’s graduation went smoothly Saturday as she crossed the stage and received applause from the audience at Summit Arena in Rapid City.

All things considered, the protest was pretty mild and just the sort of thing politicians should expect when they appear anywhere. Of course, Noem isn’t a regular politician. She’s a die-hard member of the Trump team. And when things happen to people in Trump’s orbit, people get punished. What followed Noem’s return to South Dakota was pure vindictiveness.

U.S. immigration officials conducted a “worksite enforcement action” that resulted in eight arrests Tuesday in Madison, three days after their boss, Kristi Noem, was subjected to a protest in the same South Dakota city.

At least one of the two targeted businesses, Manitou Equipment, was awarded financial support from the state while Noem was governor.

The media office for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a written statement that the agency’s action was at Manitou and also at Global Polymer Industries “in response to information or allegations received by ICE Homeland Security Investigations.”

In total, eight people were detained by ICE and slated for deportation. Neither of these businesses were ever raided during Noem’s six years as governor or during her previous 12 years as a state representative. In fact, there have been zero raids of businesses by ICE since Trump took office and appointed Noem as head of the DHS. Two raids within three days of Noem’s visit doesn’t look like an “enforcement action.” It looks like the end result of someone so thin-skinned their first urge was to lash out because the reaction to their visit was limited to fawning adulation.

We have thugs running the country who are more than willing to use government force to mete out punishment for the mildest of slights, something the guy at the top has made clear is his preferred course of action in situations like these.

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Lawmakers continue to propose new bills that would require social media companies and app stores to segment users by age and obtain parental consent for minors. Laws like Utah’s new App Store Accountability Act and an identically named piece of federal legislation are being pushed across the country. Other bills, such as the Rhode Island Social Media Regulation Act, would require specific social media sites to verify user age.

The goal of these bills is to restrict minors’ use of social media and other apps by enabling parents to either consent to or revoke their child’s use of these services. Unfortunately, these proposals fail to account for the difficulty of verifying—or even estimating—a child’s age online.

No effective age-verification solutions for younger users currently exist, and there are real barriers to verifying parental consent. As in past posts from this series, we will examine these issues briefly and explain the main problems with each proposed solution.

Many children don’t have (and can’t get) government identification

The first issue is that many proposals attempt to age-gate social media by requiring users to upload government documents to prove their age. The laws themselves (or the accompanying regulations) often specify the need for a government ID card, and therein lies the first problem: Children generally don’t have government IDs and often can’t obtain them to begin with. For example, in Washington, D.C. only those aged 15 or older can acquire a limited purpose non-driver identification card; in New Jersey and Massachusetts, the minimum age is 14.

Additionally, fewer teens are choosing to get driver’s licenses. A study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that just over 1 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds, 2 percent of 16-year-olds, 43 percent of 17-year-olds, and 60 percent of 18-year-olds have a driver’s license. The CRS was unable to find similar data for non-driver ID cards. This suggests that a significant number of young legal adults would be unable to access social media under these bills. And this is no small First Amendment problem—if the bills go into effect, millions of adults could be denied access to a popular medium for sharing and receiving speech.

Existing age-estimation technology is inaccurate

The second issue is that some proposals allow for age-estimation technology, which uses biometric means (e.g., face scans) to estimate user age. Unfortunately, these methods are plagued with inaccuracies, often failing particularly badly where it matters most: along the margins of age and age categories. Authors of an ongoing National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study evaluating existing age-estimation algorithms go so far as to say, “[W]e do not have any evidence (yet) that an age-verification classifier can outperform a regression-like estimator on the same task.” (Regression-like estimators estimate user age broadly, whereas classifiers attempt to pinpoint an exact age—a key distinction between the two.)

Notably, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted unanimously to deny applications by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, Yoti, and SuperAwesome for use of a new verifiable parental consent mechanism under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. The FTC’s rejection letter specifically cites comments in the Federal Register that “raised concerns about privacy protections, accuracy, and deepfakes.”

Various legislation attempts to treat minors differently according to age—an approach that presents particular problems when it comes to age-estimation technology. While it’s important to recognize developmental differences between 10-year-olds and 17-year-olds, the algorithms will fail significantly when attempting to differentiate minors aged 18 and over from those aged 16 to 17, 13 to 15, and under 13. According to the NIST study, even Yoti—the best age-estimation software currently available—has an average error of 1.0 years, while other software options err by 3.1 years on average. Yoti demonstrates a true positive rate of 0.57 for children aged 13 to 16, which means it can correctly place someone in that age range slightly more than half the time—only somewhat better odds than flipping a coin.

This error is understandable in that the task isn’t an easy one—after all, we’re talking about differentiating between months (or even days) of life. But if age verification were required by law, 19- and 20-year-olds would routinely be classified as underage, requiring parental consent to use social media and/or other apps. Even as the technology evolves, a fraction of a percent of error can still amount to millions of people needing to use a different verification method.

Other proposed documents can’t accurately convey age, identity, or familial relationships

Legislators have also suggested using Social Security numbers (SSNs) to establish age and identity under these bills; however, SSNs can’t confirm identity, age, or familial relationships. The absence of photographs on Social Security cards means minors can easily use someone else’s SSN to access apps. Additionally, although SSNs are commonly used as identifiers absent the physical cards, they don’t actually convey identity—which is why synthetic identity fraud is not only possible, but extremely common.

None of these methods can effectively establish parental consent

Every one of these methods fails at providing parental consent for children to access social media or other apps. As already explored in this series, ensuring guardians and their children share last names is insufficient, as they may be different due to divorce, foster care, care by a non-parent family member, or something else. Four percent of children don’t even live with their parents. Because most children don’t have government photo IDs, age-estimation technology is flawed, and SSNs can be used fraudulently (and because none of these methods establish familial relationships), all are useless for the purpose of verifying parental consent.

Establishing familial relationships is important to verifying proper parental consent; in fact, the CRS explored the use of birth certificates for this purpose. However, there are two major issues with this method. First, several million Americans lack access to their birth certificate; second, birth certificates alone can’t prove identity because they don’t include a photograph. Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to combine birth certificates and face scans for children without a photo ID. This is a problem because verifying identity is crucial to determining the status of a child’s parent or guardian and ensuring minors can’t use other people’s identities to overcome age-gating.

Some bills, including the federal App Store Accountability Act, simply require that the parental account holder is at least 18 years of age and “affiliated with one or more account of a user or prospective user who is a minor.” While this approach would reduce burdens on everyone involved, it would also allow non-guardian adults to approve a child’s online behavior.

Conclusion

Much of the age verification and estimation debate fails to account for two simple truths: 1) children don’t have government identification; and 2) estimation tools are not quite where they need to be. Lawmakers must grapple with these realities in order to implement sound policy.

Republished with permission from R-Street. You can read the original here.

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DHS announced yesterday that Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, stripping the university of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. The timing is particularly brazen: around the same time, a federal judge in California had blocked DHS from a separate scheme to mass-revoke thousands of student visas based on fifteen minutes of review.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s blatant, authoritarian retaliation. Harvard stood up to the Trump administration’s demands, so now every foreign student there gets punished.

Let’s start with the California ruling, which exposes the breathtaking scope of DHS’s lawlessness. The agency decided to mass-expel thousands of foreign students based on fifteen minutes of review.

Here’s what happened: DHS ran 1.3 million student visa holders through a crime database, found 16,000 with any law enforcement contact whatsoever, narrowed it to 6,400 names, and then:

According to the email from the Patel Administrative Record, after the State Department received these lists, it took approximately fifteen minutes to decide that all records in SEVIS relating to those names should be terminated.

Fifteen minutes. To destroy thousands of lives and academic careers.

This from an agency run by someone who thinks “habeas corpus” means the power to deport people without due process.

For what it’s worth, the DOJ claimed that terminating SEVIS records doesn’t actually change a student’s immigration status, but the judge points out that he wasn’t born yesterday. This is the latest in a series of rulings against the Trump administration from courts that now know that the government is not acting in good faith:

Defendants’ arguments on each of the Winter factors hinges on their position that a SEVIS record is not linked to immigration status. The Court joins the growing number of courts around the United States who have rejected this position…. Like other courts that have considered Defendants’ position, “[t]he Court cannot blindly accept Defendants’ current characterization of SEVIS termination and ignore the evidence before it.”

Even worse, the court notes that US immigration officials sent notices to students saying that with their SEVIS record terminated, their visa was revoked.

And thus, the revocation of their immigration status is a violation of their due process rights. In particular here, though, Judge White points out that even without getting to the constitutional due process rights, the revocation clearly violates the Administrative Procedure Act which bars moves like this that are “arbitrary and capricious.” It’s hard to get more arbitrary and capricious than Kristi Noem:

Based on Mr. Watson’s representations, the only individualized assessment made was whether an individual identified who had a positive result in the NCIC database was an individual listed within the SEVIS database. Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their claim that the decision to terminate their SEVIS records was arbitrary and capricious because the decision was not based on a “rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.” … Because the record also shows that Defendants did not rely on one of the three circumstances set forth in in 8 C.F.R. section 214.1(d) to terminate the SEVIS records, the Court also concludes Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Defendants’ actions are contrary to law.

The government also tries to claim that the court has no jurisdiction, and if DHS decides to arrest, incarcerate, or transfer any of these students, it can’t stop them. Once again, the court calls bullshit on this nonsense:

Defendants argue the Court has no authority to prevent Defendants from arresting, incarcerating, or transferring the Plaintiffs outside the District pending resolution of the proceedings, citing 8 U.S.C. sections 1252(g) and 1226(e). The Court keeps its analysis to a minimum because this too is an argument that has been consistently rejected by courts around the country. … Because there are no material differences between the facts considered by those courts and the facts here, the Court follows and adopts their reasoning

Finally, the plaintiffs in this case asked for a nationwide injunction, and again the Trump admin’s bad faith actions in this and other courts helped convince the judge such an injunction is necessary:

To the best of this Court’s knowledge, this is the only case in which Plaintiffs have requested nationwide relief. The overwhelming majority of courts considering these cases have determined the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of the same claims presented here, even when they have concluded the plaintiffs were unlikely to show irreparable harm. The Court has determined Plaintiffs have met their burden to show a likelihood of irreparable harm and sees no rational distinction between the harms inflicted on the Plaintiffs before it and the harms inflicted on similarly situated individuals across the United States.

Finally, Defendants’ actions since these cases were filed raise the concern that they may be trying to place any future SEVIS terminations beyond judicial review*. At each turn in this and similar litigation across the nation, Defendants have abruptly changed course to satisfy courts’ expressed concerns.* It is unclear how this game of whack-a-mole will end unless Defendants are enjoined from skirting their own mandatory regulations.

For these reasons, the Court GRANTS Plaintiffs request for nationwide relief.

Of course, the game of whac-a-mole (the judge gets the trademarked name wrong) continues. While Judge White was blocking one scheme to mass-expel students, DHS was already launching another: punishing Harvard by banning all foreign student enrollment. This is bonkers. It’s clearly retaliatory in response to Harvard pushing back on nonsense Trump admin demands and suing to block some of the other punishment directed their way.

Noem, ridiculously, tries to paint this as a punishment for antisemitism on campus and some made-up nonsense about Harvard “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party.” And then, directly admits that they’re doing this because they know foreign students usually pay full tuition, which is important to the bottom lines of many universities:

It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law. Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”

Except, no. If Harvard failed to “adhere to the law,” you fucking take them to court and prove it. That’s due process. Which is not happening here. There’s a lot more conspiracy theory craziness in the announcement, including highlighting an increase in crime on campus.

The whole thing is just blatant fascism in action: Harvard stood up to the administration, so the administration will punish them every way possible. Of course, Harvard has access to a few lawyers, so it’s quite likely that this will be blocked by a lawsuit in short order. Literally as I was finishing up the writing of this piece, Harvard sued (turns out they know lawyers who are willing to work overnight). Then, as I was finishing up the editing of this piece, the judge already granted a temporary restraining order. Things happen at quite a fast pace when fascism is on the march.

Either way, yesterday after the announcement, Noem went on Fox News and said the quiet part out loud. This punishment of Harvard “should be a warning to every other university to get your act together,” she declared, before claiming with a straight face that arbitrarily expelling foreign students teaches kids about “freedom and liberty” and how it was important for them to “learn what this country is about.”

after announcing that foreign students are being banned from Havard, Noem warns "this should be a warning to every other university to get your act together."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-05-22T19:59:16.061Z

Yeah, they’re really learning exactly what this country is about.

The mask is completely off now. This isn’t about protecting students or enforcing laws — it’s about terrorizing universities into compliance through collective punishment of innocent foreign students.

What we’re witnessing is fascism in real time: an administration using the power of the state to punish institutions that dare to resist. First, they came for the foreign students who had any contact with law enforcement. Then they came for Harvard because it wouldn’t bend the knee.

The pattern is clear, and it’s accelerating. But that’s exactly why more institutions need to follow Harvard’s lead and resist rather than capitulate. The administration is betting that the threat of collective punishment will cow universities into submission. The only way to stop that is to refuse to bend the knee — and to force them into court every single time. As the case in California (and so many other cases) has shown, the judiciary is getting sick of the administration’s games and lies.

But, still, it’s important to understand that this is what authoritarianism looks like: yes, there are also the traditional jackbooted thugs in the streets snatching people, but there are also bureaucrats with fifteen minutes and a database, wielding immigration law as a weapon against anyone who dares to push back.

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Back in March, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he was “investigating” Verizon because the company hadn’t scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts quickly enough for the bigots in the Trump administration. Despite the investigation being completely baseless, Verizon was quick to comply, yanking materials related to its fleeting efforts to diversify its workforce offline.

Right around the same time, Elon Musk began trying to elbow Verizon out of its $2 billion contract with the FAA to help “improve” the nation’s air traffic control services. Verizon executives said nothing as the contract was stolen right out under its feet. In a recent Verge interview, Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath was a spineless coward, downplaying the Trump administration’s radical and illegal behaviors.

Now Verizon executives have been properly rewarded for their abject fecklessness. The Trump FCC has approved Verizon’s $20 billion merger with Frontier, yet another telecom sector megadeal. In approval documents, the Trump FCC is quick to single out Verizon’s willingness to “end DEI initiatives” (read: be less inclusive, and more racist and sexist):

“Verizon has also committed to ending DEI-related practices as specified in the FCC’s record and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination.”

This is part of the administration’s ongoing (and quite insane) claim that efforts to embrace diversity and end discrimination are somehow discriminatory to white people. It’s the same argument they’ve been using to flimsily justify efforts to role back federal efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment.

It’s documented that big telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have discriminated against minority and poor people when determining which areas to upgrade to fiber. It’s also been proven that U.S. telecoms often charge low-income and minority neighborhoods more money for slower broadband. The FCC under Biden had only just started to even acknowledge this was happening.

Both Verizon and the FCC have claimed that Verizon’s $20 billion (including debt) merger with Frontier will help improve fiber access. That is, however, unlikely; these two companies have been swapping assets in complicated transactions for years to nab huge tax cuts and drive temporary stock boosts; the end result so far has, fairly uniformly, been broad disappointment, a big mess, and a lot of empty promises.

The two companies don’t directly compete so this isn’t the worst merger imaginable. But in a functional country with operational antitrust enforcement we’d at least have a conversation about whether letting Verizon — a company with a generational history of anti-competitive behavior — get even larger serves the public interest. Especially given these two companies’ history of harmful asset swaps.

Instead we’re stuck in this weird performance art by authoritarian bigots; zealots and assholes keen on launching fake inquiries into companies for doing the bare minimum on gender and racial equality. We’re plumbing new depths of pathetic “governance” on the daily. And Verizon executives are fully committed to the authoritarian mission.

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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 Hank Green, popular YouTube creator and educator. After spending some time talking about being a creator at the whims of platforms, they cover:

Crash Course Coin (Complexly)Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NY Mag)The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It (NY Times)How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future (NY Times)We Shouldn’t Have To Explain To The FTC Why Content Moderation Is So Crucial To Free Speech, But We Did (Techdirt)

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

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I really used to love our series of posts on how companies and content creators can build more revenue and loyalty with their customers through what we called the “Connect with Fans and a Reason to Buy” philosophy. Shortened to “Cwf+RtB,” the idea is that by treating fans in an awesome and human way, concerns about things like piracy and positive fan feedback could be melted away by building a loyal fanbase through a human connection such that people simply wanted to hand over their hard-earned money to support content creators. By dropping the corporate sheen just a bit and connecting with people on their level, so many creators and companies have built a rabid fanbase that has no interest in taking actions that would prevent these creators from making money at their craft.

But the opposite also applies in reverse. Treat your fans poorly, or fail to connect with them on a human level, and you’re bound to get yourself into trouble. In a world of rising prices within the various entertainment mediums, this becomes all the more dangerous. Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, is learning this lesson right now after responding to concerns about the new Borderlands game being priced at $80 by essentially employing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

Believe it or not, there’s a lot to unpack here. The most important aspect of this is that this is the sort of response that indicates both a severe lack of judgment in communicating with customers combined with a disconnect with the reality of how most people live. We’ll get into the latter part of that further down. The judgment miss is this: even if everything Pitchford wrote above were true, and it very much is not, you don’t say this sort of thing out loud. Put another way, the message above accomplishes absolutely nothing productive for either fans of the Borderlands series nor Gearbox. Anyone who was going to pay $80 for the new game last week likely still will after this comment was made, save those pissed enough about the messaging to change their mind. Those who were hesitant to spend that much on the new game certainly aren’t going to be swayed by a “you will if you’re a true fan” message. And those who have never played the series will be put off by this message. Again, nothing positive accomplished.

It’s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy at work, but with the Scotsman being a gamer, apparently. “$80 is too much for the game,” goes some of the gaming public, with the response being “Not if you’re a real fan.” So those who bought the previous games for less and loved them aren’t truly fans in the eyes of Gearbox? Cool.

And the game of implications Pitchford is attempting to play here probably isn’t valid either.

Randy Pitchford grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, then California. His father worked in U.S. intelligence in the 1970s, and his house was filled with all manner of technology throughout his childhood. While I cannot say for sure (although I have emailed to find out), it seems vanishingly unlikely that Pitchford was living off of his minimum wage ice cream job after he’d graduated high school, as his tweet seems to want to heavily imply. Pitchford soon after went to UCLA, so we can quite safely guess that this was a short-term job, one for earning a bit of extra spending money while still living at home with his parents.

I would suggest that to use this anecdote to explain to all living humans that if they really want a copy of Borderlands 4, they can easily find eighty bucks to spare is grotesque. It kind of makes me sick.

I’m very much a fan of Maseratis. They’re slick, awesome cars. I have, on occasion, gone to dealerships just to look at them. I also am not in a position to buy one, for any number of reasons. But Maserati doesn’t look me in the eye and tell me if I were really a fan of their products then I would find some magical way to afford them. That would be stupid, as it is when Pritchard says it about his video game. And, as Kotaku helpfully details out through income statistics among Americans, some of this seems to stem from the disconnect Pitchford has with how the average person lives.

Hopefully, this context suggests why it’s just so revolting for a man who sold his company for a potential $1.3 billion in 2021 to tell someone on X that “if you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.” Because, you know, when he was doing a summer job at the beach in California, he somehow pulled enough cash together for that game he wanted.

There are some who think it’s a crime to be wealthy. I am very much not one of those people. I begrudge not at all Pitchford having amassed millions of dollars. I do take issue with someone with that kind of generational wealth attempting to gatekeep fandom while condescendingly telling fans if they were only true enough fans, they would find a way to give him more money.

As do those responding to his message, it seems. Here is but a sampling.

I imagine many people are now “out” as well. And if Pitchford’s company sales decline as a result and he makes less money than he would have otherwise, well, I suppose I’ll let him eat cake.

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You can’t say that Elon Musk hasn’t gotten his money’s worth after spending $277 million to help buy Donald Trump an election victory (that’s not including the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter into a right wing propaganda mill). The end of the numerous investigations into labor, environmental, and consumer fraud abuses alone have already more than paid for themselves:

“In more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies.”

That’s before you even get to the billions in additional subsidies Musk is poised to receive. Musk has particularly benefited the Trump administration’s relentless promotion of Starlink, Musk’s expensive, congestion-plagued, ozone layer destroying, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network.

ProPublica notes how the Trump administration has been pressuring African countries to use Starlink if they know what’s good for them. In many instances they’re tethering continued lifesaving aid efforts to paying Musk for connectivity and easing any regulatory burdens Musk is facing in developing nations:

“In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.”

This comes on the heels of Musk’s DOGE attacks on organizations like USAID, which are estimated to have a fairly massive body count under the pretense of “progress” and “reform.” Even Bush administration officials, certainly no strangers to corruption, express alarm to ProPublica at the level of corruption:

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

To justify the corruption, Republicans have convinced themselves that Musk’s Starlink is some sort of magic that you can sprinkle on any problem with miraculous results. They don’t care that the service is generally too expensive for those who need it most. Or is harming astronomical research. Or harming the ozone layer. Or is increasingly becoming more and more congested due to oversubscription and physics.

Or may not even exist five years from now if the company can’t make continued launches viable.

Starlink is sometimes a useful niche option if you can afford it and live in a remote area without access. Or want to spend thousands of dollars a month to get broadband on your yacht. Or are fighting a war in territories where traditional telecom infrastructure has been decimated and have no choice but to rely on the whims of a zealot. But, contrary to the Trump cult’s beliefs, the technology is not fucking magic.

Yet Trump’s FCC boss, Brendan Carr, has been running around falsely telling countries that if they refuse to use Musk’s Starlink, they’re basically communist. Elon Musk’s been trying to steal Verizon’s $2 billion contract with the FAA to implement Starlink. They’ve taken to duct-taping potentially unencrypted Starlink terminals to the White House roof to, apparently, try and hide their comms from public scrutiny.

Republicans are also rewriting big swaths of the infrastructure bill to redirect billions in taxpayer broadband subsidies away from better, cheaper, fiber options and toward Elon Musk’s Starlink platform. That means less money for future-proof, more reliable, locally-owned options (including cheap community owned fiber and less congested wireless), and more money for one of the nation’s most erratic and unhinged racist billionaires.

It’s grotesque new levels of American corruption and cronyism dressed up as fake populist reform, and if you’re still one of these people who think these two billionaires care about anything beyond their own wealth and power, we have some sawdust and duck shit-filled supplements to sell you.

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

One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.

Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’

Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.

Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.

The world’s richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

“Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse,” said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musk’s personal interests, should not be working for DOGE.”

Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musk’s political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump.

Before joining Musk’s payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industry’s interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported.

Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musk’s Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to “advise political and public policy.”

Beyond that description, it’s not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the company’s activities are.

It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musk’s children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.

As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.

Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGE’s activities, said that Young’s government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.

“Which hat are you wearing while you’re serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job?” she asked.

In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musk’s private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will “continue to participate” in a “defined contribution plan” sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a “vice president” of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on “political and public policy,” the records show. While he lists the latter among “sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year,” the exact figure is not disclosed.

Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didn’t return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasn’t responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

The revelation of Young’s apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administration’s attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning — actions one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isn’t clear whether he did and the White House hasn’t answered questions about that. “These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission,” the White House said. Following ProPublica’s reporting, the aide’s work at the CFPB ended.

Last Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublica’s coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to “swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest.”

ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though it’s unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGE’s efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.

“It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios,” she said.

Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureau’s staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported.

The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administration’s first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February.

He was dispatched to the CFPB’s headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agency’s acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including “all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response.” Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.

In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musk’s Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the “present.”

Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administration’s cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPB’s chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a “reduction in force,” or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were “prepared to implement the RIF” if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administration’s proposed cuts.

In addition to his employment, Young’s disclosure presents another potential conflict.

He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureau’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stock’s value — such as stripping the CFPB of its staff — constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Young hasn’t responded to questions about that either.

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FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson begged Donald Trump for his job by promising he would “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations.” And, yet, one of his first orders of business upon getting the job was to… kick off a politically motivated investigation regarding “big tech censorship,” which he (falsely) claimed was potentially illegally targeting conservative speech and violating the policies and promises of these platforms.

It was an odd decision for many reasons, not the least of which is that it seemed to be discussing not just a fantasy world scenario that never existed, but even if it had ever existed, it certainly no longer did. The biggest social media platforms of the day are now all controlled by the ultra-rich who lined up (literally) behind Donald Trump and have agreed to do his bidding. ExTwitter is owned by Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s largest donor and his right-hand man in destroying the government. Mark Zuckerberg is now running content policy changes by Trump’s top advisor Stephen Miller.

If there is any “bias” in content moderation, it is very much in favor of MAGA Trump views. Which, to be clear, is their right to do under the First Amendment.

But the entire premise of the inquiry seemed to simply misunderstand nearly everything about content moderation. So, yesterday, the Copia Institute filed our comment with the FTC highlighting the myriad problems and misunderstandings that the FTC seemed to embrace with this inquiry.

The crux of our argument:

The FTC’s inquiry into “platform censorship” fundamentally misunderstands three critical realities about online expression:

First, as the Supreme Court recently affirmed in Moody v. NetChoice, government scrutiny of platform moderation decisions directly violates First Amendment protections of private editorial discretion. It would violate it even if any platform were a legitimate chokepoint for information, but such is far from the case.  We live in an era of unprecedented speech abundance, where anyone can reach global audiences through countless online channels, and anyone can consume information through countless online channels. The premise of investigating “censorship” ignores this surfeit of options in how we communicate, where we’ve moved away from a world of gatekeepers who limit speech to one of intermediaries who enable it, and indeed threatens to reverse that important, speech-fostering progress.

Second, content moderation ultimately enables, rather than constrains, more speech. For all the talk of certain websites being “the modern public square,” it is the wider open internet itself that should be seen as that public square. The metaphor only works in so much as the internet can facilitate such a wide variety of online expression through differentiated and competing offerings and communities. The multitude of platforms built upon that open internet make all that possible, so long as they are free to serve as private venues that cultivate distinct communities through their editorial choices. These choices are constitutionally protected editorial judgments that allow different platforms to serve different needs and communities.

Which is why, third, government interference with platform moderation would paradoxically reduce speech opportunities by threatening the entire ecosystem of services that make online expression possible. From content hosts to payment processors to infrastructure providers, countless specialized intermediaries enable platforms like ours to serve an ever growing and changing set of communities. Regulatory scrutiny of editorial decisions would force many of these services to refuse to facilitate all sorts of lawful speech, if not shut down or stop supporting user content entirely.

As both a content creator and platform operator who relies on this complex web of intermediary services to advance our own speech interests, we see this inquiry as a threat to our own expressive freedom as well as that of countless others.  It is fundamentally misguided and we urge the FTC to terminate it immediately before damaging the very same speech interests it ostensibly claims to protect.

We then go into much greater detail on all three points. You can read the whole thing if you want, but I wanted to call out a few key things. Lots of comments address — as we did — the obvious First Amendment problems, but there were a few points we thought were unique.

For example, the entire premise that there’s a “censorship” problem is bizarre, given just how much the internet — through its variety of private platforms — now enables and encourages speech. We’re in a golden age of speech, not some censorial hellhole:

Historically, if you wanted to express yourself beyond those in the narrow geographical vicinity around you, you were dependent on gatekeepers and had to hope that some publisher, printer, editor, record label, studio, or other media middleman would be willing to distribute your expression, promote it, and help you monetize it. Those gatekeepers ultimately allowed only a minuscule percentage of expression to reach public audiences, and an even smaller percentage of that content was successfully promoted and monetized.

The rise of the internet changed the role of intermediaries from being mostly about gatekeeping expression to being mostly about enabling it, and as a result expression has on the whole proliferated, even though the intermediaries still have the right and ability to filter what messages they facilitate. As the Supreme Court noted in the Moody majority, the fact that the new platforms “convey the lion’s share of posts” does not change their rights under the First Amendment.

It remains bizarre to me that, in this much more expansive speech universe, so many people act as though their speech is restricted. To highlight this absurdity, we point to how ridiculous it would be if this same inquiry were directed at traditional media:

This notion misunderstands the nature of content moderation and how it is no different than editorial discretion, which is constitutionally incapable of being policed, no matter how it is marketed. For instance, when Fox News used to claim that its coverage is “Fair & Balanced” everyone recognized that it would be an absurd abuse of the First Amendment for the FTC to investigate whether or not that coverage is either “fair” or “balanced” as a potential “unfair practice” because of how inherently subjective such editorial discretion is.

Consider a more direct parallel: if the New York Times decides to reject an op-ed submission, it would be constitutionally farcical for the FTC to investigate whether their editorial decisions properly align with their stated mission of “all the news that’s fit to print.”  These decisions are inherently subjective editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment and not for the government to interfere with.

Also, we highlight that content moderation rules are inherently subjective and can’t be any other way. Ask multiple people how to deal with specific content moderation decisions and they will all give you different answers. So much of the misunderstandings around content moderation are based on the myth that there is a single right answer to questions regarding moderation.

The same is true of content moderation. It is no different than the practices of any news media organization, in which editorial policies may be put in place, but where subjective editorial judgment calls are made every day. Online platforms must make these decisions on a scale far beyond what any traditional media outlet experiences. We have coined the eponymous “Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem” in recognition that there is never going to be an objectively “correct” way to moderate content.  No matter how moderation may be intended, it simply cannot translate to perfect practice, let alone one all would agree is “perfect,” which is why the freedom to decide needs to be out of the government’s hands entirely.

We have empirically demonstrated the inherent subjectivity that inevitably informs moderation decisions through our “You Make the Call” event, where we challenged policy experts, regulators, and industry professionals to apply the same content moderation policy to multiple examples. The results of the exercise were telling: even with clearly articulated policies, experienced professionals consistently reached different conclusions about appropriate moderation actions. In every single case we presented, participants split their votes across all available options, highlighting the impossibility of “objective” content moderation.

Every person may also evaluate content against a policy differently. We have further demonstrated this tendency with two interactive online games the Copia Institute has created, allowing people to test their own abilities to do content moderation, both at the moderator level and at the level of running a trust & safety team.

We probably should have pointed out that even the FTC inherently recognizes this. After all, it was moderating and restricting access to many of the comments that came in, claiming they were “inappropriate.”

And finally, as a service that regularly relies on a large number of third-party intermediaries to host, distribute, promote, and monetize our speech, we wanted to make clear that these efforts would inevitably limit ours (and others’) ability to speak, by destroying the intermediary services we rely on.

As both a content creator and platform operator, we rely on dozens of specialized intermediary services to reach our audience: social media for community engagement, podcast and video hosts for content distribution, chat services for communication, crowdfunding for monetization, and cloud services for infrastructure. Each of these services maintains their own editorial policies that align with their unique communities and business goals.

If government agencies could second-guess these editorial decisions, the impact would be severe and immediate:

*Service differentiation would become impossible. Communities focused on specific interests — from knitting to weightlifting — could no longer maintain their distinct character through specialized content policies.**Compliance costs would force smaller platforms to shut down. Even basic content hosting would require extensive legal review and documentation of every moderation decision. Not only would the direct compliance costs be ruinous for many smaller services, the uncertainty and risk of liability would lead many to decide it would not be worth the hassle to facilitate anyone’s online speech at all.*Innovation would stagnate. Entrepreneurs who might launch new specialized platforms would be deterred by the inability to shape their services around their communities’, and customers’, needs.

The result? A dramatic reduction in online speech options. Content creators like us would face fewer channels for distribution and engagement. Communities would lose their specialized spaces. And the vibrant ecosystem of online expression would collapse into a handful of generic, risk-averse platforms.

In short, it would be a disaster for speech, and lead to an information environment significantly more censorial than the world we currently live in where a private company can freely choose to enforce its own rules as makes the most sense for it.

Thousands of comments were submitted to the FTC (though, admittedly, many of them are angry screeds from people about how their conspiracy theories and threats of violence were moderated and just how unfair it all is). I have little faith that anyone at the FTC will take our comment seriously.

But they should. What they are looking to do would be an outright disaster for free speech. And, yes, that might be Ferguson’s real goal. Just like FCC Chair Brendan Carr, he may wish to use the language and trappings of “free speech advocacy” to make himself a government censor. But, we should use the tools at our disposal today to call that out, and try to prevent that kind of actual censorship from being allowed.

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Last week we noted how Trump illegally declared he was killing the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act. The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools to Americans of all kinds long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The bill helped everybody (including Trump-supporting rural veterans), but because Trump’s team assumed that the word equity meant “exclusively help minorities,” the program has become the latest victim of our mad, incoherent, con man king and his army of mindless earlobe nibblers.

It hasn’t taken long for the decision to have ripple effects in the real world. South Dakota, for example, says it’s cancelling $5 million in broadband investment because of the uncertain future of the grants that were going to be funding the plan:

“In South Dakota, the funds would have helped bring accessible and affordable internet access and technology to rural, aging and low-income South Dakotans, as well as tribal communities. Infrastructure like 5G towers and fiber-optic lines needs to be added to neighborhoods.”

Uniformly helping people access the internet: how utterly, diabolically woke! And how “populist” of King Trump to illegally end a beneficial law passed by Congress.

South Dakota Rep. Erik Muckey doesn’t mince words in explaining how the Trump administration has no idea what they’re destroying:

“This crusade to eliminate any funding that has anything to do with even the word equity, even if the word equity has nothing to do with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, that it’s purely about actually helping basic infrastructure get to rural communities and native nations, it’s just a farce.”

This will be repeated across numerous states like Vermont, which is also cancelling planned broadband investment. Thanks to Trump’s incoherent zealotry, dozens of states are having to cancel plans to expand fiber access to rural communities, or kill off digital literacy programs designed to help rural locals get online in order to access employment, education, and health care opportunities.

This isn’t about “saving money,” especially coming from a country whose new king is throwing $45 million ego parades. It’s not about serving any constituents (these programs were broadly popular). It’s about a pathological need to be cruel.

It’s quite a policy coup from Republicans and Libertarian “free market” think tank guys, who repeatedly threw a hissy fit for years, falsely claiming that some modest net neutrality rules would “stifle broadband investment” (but are now quiet as little church mice for some reason).

If you read the actual Digital Equity Act, race is barely mentioned. It’s basically just a bare bones effort to try and ensure that everybody has access to decent broadband. That’s important in a country where congressional corruption has resulted in telecom market failure at the hands of shitty regional monopolies, whose lack of competition and oversight results in expensive, spotty, slow, and low-quality access.

Making U.S. broadband shittier and more expensive is a central policy platform of a Republican party that has, over the last few years, obliterated all telecom oversight, dismantled efforts to protect broadband consumer privacy, destroyed popular programs helping low-income Americans afford broadband, and even recently made it harder for poor kids to do their homework online.

When people complain about substandard access, the follow up Republican policy is to shovel them toward Elon Musk’s Starlink, ignoring that the increasingly congested satellite service lacks the capacity to scale to handle U.S. coverage gaps, is too expensive for the rural Americans who need it most, harms scientific research and the ozone layer, and is run by an erratic, conspiratorial bigot.

Democrats certainly have their failures on telecom policy (see: their corrupt inability to support the Gigi Sohn FCC nomination), but a lot of the legislation passed in 2021 (specifically ARPA) was primarily the result of Democratic initiatives, and is genuinely helping to drive affordable, super fast fiber into areas that have never seen access before.

But when the corporate U.S. press writes about broadband policy and market failures, the fact that unpopular Republican policies are specifically and cruelly designed to stall progress and make our digital divide worse (especially for their own constituents) is either downplayed or not mentioned at all.

Great stuff! Very innovative!

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I would love to say that it feels like the era of RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary is starting to come to an end, but that would be optimistic in the extreme. Still, I think we’re starting to see the edges fray a bit and it’s no surprise as to why. Kennedy has overseen budget, grant, and staffing cuts at HHS in the midst of a measles outbreak that is threatening America’s elimination status for the disease, has prattled on about having the source of autism identified by late summer and solving America’s chemtrail problem, and managed to document himself on social media spending his downtime taking his grandchildren to bodysurf in a stream of sewage.

In the days following the shitwater incident, Kennedy has appeared several times before Congress. Notably, he informed Congress last week, all while being incapable of advocating for vaccination against all kinds of diseases including measles, that nobody should be taking medical advice from him. It’s an interesting position to take as the person in charge of America’s healthcare system, frankly, but points to House Slytherin for being correct, I suppose.

But it’s also a strange stance to take only to then turn around and berate a sitting senior Senator for not fixing all of America’s healthcare concerns in answer to a question about the recent budget cuts at HHS.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started an angry rant during a hearing Tuesday, prompting a Republican senator to urge him to “hold back.”

Kennedy’s outburst came after Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) slammed drastic staffing and funding cuts at his department, and asked whose decision it was to withhold certain childcare and development funds.

Kennedy began by criticizing former President Joe Biden’s administration, and when Murray tried to get him back on track, he snapped back: “You know what, you’ve made an accusation and I’m going to answer it.”

He got to the answer to Senator Murray’s actual question after being admonished by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito to calm the hell down and answer Senator Murray’s question. Here’s how the whole thing went down.

This, I would argue, is the behavior of a man feeling the pressure. Whether any of that pressure is being generated internally from the administration is, unfortunately, an open question, but Kennedy is clearly rattled. When the question was initially posed, prior to Kennedy’s accusations about a single Senator being to blame for chronic disease and whatever else in America’s healthcare system, Kennedy launched into a screed about what the Biden administration did or did not do for healthcare. As a reminder, the question posed was who ordered the budget and staffing cuts at HHS. The non-answer pivot to talking about Biden instead is a familiar playbook to anyone who has watched the Trump administration operate.

In other words, it seems Kennedy really is all MAGA now, if there was any question of that previously.

And, may wonders never cease, it seems the concerns about the HHS cuts are bipartisan.

Capito herself addressed recent cuts at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees workplace safety, saying: “I support the President’s vision to right-size our government, but as you and I have discussed, I don’t think eliminating NIOSH programs will accomplish that goal.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said that cutting mining research programs hosted by NIOSH, “undermines our ability to meet national security goals tied to mineral independence and supply chain resilience.”

It would be charitable at this point to suggest that the man is simply unwell. Anything else is a remark purely on his competance. Either way, this isn’t the person to lead HHS.

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Every so often, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court will surprise you with a well-reasoned decision that cuts against the grain of its usual pro-cop, pro-censorship, pro-“conservative values” output. This one, brought to us by Raffi Melkonian, unfortunately isn’t one of those exceptions. This one is more aligned with the rule.

This potential class-action lawsuit, brought by parolees represented by the Institute of Justice, alleged a Louisiana judge was making a mockery of due process by forcing defendants to use his preferred ankle monitoring contractor, which coincidentally had been formed by the judge’s former law partner and run by donors to his judicial election campaigns.

There’s an appearance of judicial impropriety here and you don’t even have to squint to see it. Christian Helmke and Leonard Levenson formed ETOH Monitoring in 2006. Here’s a little more on the judge and his connections to the founders of ETOH Monitoring, taken from the Fifth Circuit opinion [PDF]:

In 2016, Paul Bonin was elected as a judge on the OPCDC. During his campaign, Bonin accepted donations totaling $3,550 and a loan of $1,000 from Helmke and Levenson through their law firms. Levenson is Judge Bonin’s former law partner. Before serving on the district court, Judge Bonin had been a state appellate judge for eight years. Levenson and Helmke had donated $5,100 to his election campaigns for that position.

Maybe none of that would have mattered. But Judge Paul Bonin made sure it mattered. ETOH is one of three ankle monitoring options provided to defendants in Orleans Parish District Court. However, in Judge Bonin’s court, there was always only one option.

When ordering ankle monitoring, Judge Bonin regularly directed defendants to make arrangements with ETOH. He did not disclose the availability of other providers. After defendants obtained monitors, ETOH sent monthly reports to Judge Bonin about their payment status. Judge Bonin warned some defendants that nonpayment could result in their jailing. He conditioned some defendants’ release from their ankle monitors on their completing payments to ETOH. In one case, Judge Bonin conditioned a defendant’s release on completing payment to ETOH even though Judge Bonin considered waiving other costs the defendant was obligated to pay.

That certainly looks a bit corruption-y. Ankle monitoring isn’t cheap. ETOH charges defendants $10/day for the privilege of being monitored. And Bonin not only funneled defendants to a business run by his former law partner, but actually deprived them of their freedom until they threw some money in the direction of two of his campaign donors.

The lower court dismissed the lawsuit, saying nothing here added up to a due process violation. The Fifth Circuit — in this unpublished decision — says the same thing. Sure, it may look a little crooked, but it’s not enough to get the Constitution involved.

Our decision does not address the general legality or propriety of Judge Bonin’s conduct. We rule only on the question this case presents: whether ETOH had ties with Judge Bonin that created an unconstitutional risk of bias. Unexceptional campaign contributions and past business relations do not present an “extraordinary situation” in which due process is implicated. Individually and in their totality, the ties between ETOH and Judge Bonin do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that Bonin did not seek re-election in 2020, so he’s no longer in the position to force defendants to patronize his preferred ankle monitoring service. Add that to judicial immunity, and the sad fact is that even if the Fifth Circuit had recognized this seemingly obvious constitutional violation, the lawsuit would have been dismissed for those reasons. And while that loss would still have been a loss, it might have been more meaningful than the shrug the plaintiffs received here that basically says it’s ok to generate a constant appearance of impropriety so long as those you’re favoring haven’t spent too much money keeping you in office.

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Within the next decade, generative AI could join computers and electricity as one of the most transformational technologies in history, with all of the promise and peril that implies. Governments’ responses to GenAI—including new legal precedents—need to thoughtfully address real-world harms without destroying the public benefits GenAI can offer. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office’s rushed draft report on AI training misses the mark.

The Report Bungles Fair Use

Released amidst a set of controversial job terminations, the Copyright Office’s report covers a wide range of issues with varying degrees of nuance. But on the core legal question—whether using copyrighted works to train GenAI is a fair use—it stumbles badly. The report misapplies long-settled fair use principles and ultimately puts a thumb on the scale in favor of copyright owners at the expense of creativity and innovation.

To work effectively, today’s GenAI systems need to be trained on very large collections of human-created works—probably millions of them. At this scale, locating copyright holders and getting their permission is daunting for even the biggest and wealthiest AI companies, and impossible for smaller competitors. If training makes fair use of copyrighted works, however, then no permission is needed.

Right now, courts are considering dozens of lawsuits that raise the question of fair use for GenAI training. Federal District Judge Vince Chhabria is poised to rule on this question, after hearing oral arguments in *Kadrey v. Meta Platforms.*The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to consider a similar fair use issue in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence. Courts are well-equipped to resolve this pivotal issue by applying existing law to specific uses and AI technologies.

Courts Should Reject the Copyright Office’s Fair Use Analysis

The report’s fair use discussion contains some fundamental errors that place a thumb on the scale in favor of rightsholders. Though the report is non-binding, it could influence courts, including in cases like Kadrey, where plaintiffs have already filed a copy of the report and urged the court to defer to its analysis.

Courts need only accept the Copyright Office’s draft conclusions, however, if they are persuasive. They are not.

The Office’s fair use analysis is not one the courts should follow. It repeatedly conflates the use of works for training models—a necessary step in the process of building a GenAI model—with the use of the model to create substantially similar works. It also misapplies basic fair use principles and embraces a novel theory of market harm that has never been endorsed by any court.

The first problem is the Copyright Office’s transformative use analysis. Highly transformative uses—those that serve a different purpose than that of the original work—are very likely to be fair. Courts routinely hold that using copyrighted works to build new software and technology—including search engines, video games, and mobile apps—is a highly transformative use because it serves a new and distinct purpose. Here, the original works were created for various purposes and using them to train large language models is surely very different.

The report attempts to sidestep that conclusion by repeatedly ignoring the actual use in question—training —and focusing instead on how the model may be ultimately used. If the model is ultimately used primarily to create a class of works that are similar to the original works on which it was trained, the Office argues, then the intermediate copying can’t be considered transformative. This fundamentally misunderstands transformative use, which should turn on whether a model itself is a new creation with its own distinct purpose, not whether any of its potential uses might affect demand for a work on which it was trained—a dubious standard that runs contrary to decades of precedent.

The Copyright Office’s transformative use analysis also suggests that the fair use analysis should consider whether works were obtained in “bad faith,” and whether developers respected the right “to control” the use of copyrighted works.  But the Supreme Court is skeptical that bad faith has any role to play in the fair use analysis and has made clear that fair use is not a privilege reserved for the well-behaved. And rightsholders don’t have the right to control fair uses—that’s kind of the point.

Finally, the Office adopts a novel and badly misguided theory of “market harm.” Traditionally, the fair use analysis requires courts to consider the effects of the use on the market for the work in question. The Copyright Office suggests instead that courts should consider overall effects of the use of the models to produce generally similar works. By this logic, if a model was trained on a Bridgerton novel—among millions of other works—and was later used by a third party to produce romance novels, that might harm series author Julia Quinn’s bottom line.

This market dilution theory has four fundamental problems. First, like the transformative use analysis, it conflates training with outputs. Second, it’s not supported by any relevant precedent. Third, it’s based entirely on speculation that Bridgerton fans will buy random “romance novels” instead of works produced by a bestselling author they know and love.  This relies on breathtaking assumptions that lack evidence, including that all works in the same genre are good substitutes for each other—regardless of their quality, originality, or acclaim. Lastly, even if competition from other, unique works might reduce sales, it isn’t the type of market harm that weighs against fair use.

Nor is lost revenue from licenses for fair uses a type of market harm that the law should recognize. Prioritizing private licensing market “solutions” over user rights would dramatically expand the market power of major media companies and chill the creativity and innovation that copyright is intended to promote. Indeed, the fair use doctrine exists in part to create breathing room for technological innovation, from the phonograph record to the videocassette recorder to the internet itself. Without fair use, crushing copyright liability could stunt the development of AI technology.

We’re still digesting this report, but our initial review suggests that, on balance, the Copyright Office’s approach to fair use for GenAI training isn’t a dispassionate report on how existing copyright law applies to this new and revolutionary technology. It’s a policy judgment about the value of GenAI technology for future creativity, by an office that has no business making new, free-floating policy decisions.

The courts should not follow the Copyright Office’s speculations about GenAI. They should follow precedent.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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The rushed adoption of half-cooked automation in America’s already broadly broken media and journalism industry continues to go smashingly, thanks for asking.

U.S. media companies have long been at the forefront of managerial dysfunction. More recently, that mismanagement has taken the form of wave after wave of “AI” scandals, ranging from getting busted for using AI to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait (often without informing employees or readers), to using AI prone to plagiarism or outright falsehoods.

The latest scandal comes courtesy of the Chicago Sun Times, which was busted this week for running a “summer reading list” advertorial section filled with books that simply… don’t exist. As our friends at 404 Media note, the company somehow missed the fact that the AI synopsis was churning out titles (sometimes by real authors) that were never actually written.

Such as the nonexistent Tidewaterby Isabel Allende, described by the AI as a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism.” Or the nonexistent The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian, which readers were (falsely) informed follows “a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”

Unlike some past scandals, one (human) Sun-Times employee was at least quick to take ownership of the fuck up:

“The article is not bylined but was written by Marco Buscaglia, whose name is on most of the other articles in the 64-page section. Buscaglia told 404 Media via email and on the phone that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he said. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

Buscaglia added “it’s a complete mistake on my part.”

“I assume I’ll be getting calls all day. I already am,” he said. “This is just idiotic of me, really embarrassed. When I found it [online], it was almost surreal to see.”

Initially, the paper told Bluesky users it wasn’t really sure how any of this happened, which isn’t a great look any way you slice it:

We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.

— Chicago Sun-Times (@chicago.suntimes.com) 2025-05-20T14:19:10.366Z

Later on, the paper issued an apology that was a notable improvement over past scandals. Usually, when media outlets are caught using half-cooked AI to generate engagement garbage, they throw a third party vendor under the bus, take a short hiatus to whatever dodgy implementation they were doing, then in about three to six months just return to doing the same sort of thing.

The Sun Times sort of takes proper blame for the oversight:

“King Features worked with a freelancer who used an AI agent to help build out this special section. It was inserted into our paper without review from our editorial team, and we presented the section without any acknowledgement that it was from a third-party organization.”

They also take the time to thank actual human beings, which was nice:

“We are in a moment of great transformation in journalism and technology, and at the same time our industry continues to be besieged by business challenges. This should be a learning moment for all journalism organizations: Our work is valued — and valuable — because of the humanity behind it.“

The paper is promising to do better. Still, the oversight reflects poorly on the industry at large.

The entire 4-page, ad-supported “Heat Index” published by the Sun-Times is the sort of fairly inane, marketing heavy gack common in a stagnant newspaper industry. It’s fairly homogenized and not at all actually local; the kind of stuff that’s just lazily serialized and published in papers around the country with a priority of selling ads — not actually informing anybody.

Other segments of the paper’s silly Heat Index appear to feature experts that don’t actually exist, according to 404 Media’s Jason Koebler:

“For example, in an article called “Hanging Out: Inside America’s growing hammock culture,” Buscaglia quotes “Dr. Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.” A search for Campos in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography does not return any results.”

In many ways these “AI” scandals are just badly automated extensions of existing human ethical and competency failures. Like the U.S. journalism industry’s ongoing obliteration of any sort of firewall between advertorial sponsorship and actual, useful reporting (see: the entire tech news industry’s love of turning themselves into a glorified Amazon blogspam affiliate several times every year).

But it’s also broadly reflective of a trust fund, fail-upward sort of modern media management that sees AI as less of a way to actually help the newsroom, and more of a way to lazily cut corners and further undermine already underpaid and overworked staffers (the ones that haven’t been mercilessly fired yet).

Some of these managers, like LA Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, genuinely believe (or would like you to believe because they also sell AI products) that half-cooked automation is akin to some kind of magic. As a result, they’re rushing toward using it in a wide variety of entirely new problematic ways without thinking anything through, including putting LLMs that can’t even generate accurate summer reading lists in charge of systems (badly) designed to monitor “media bias.”

There’s also a growing tide of aggregated automated clickbait mills hoovering up dwindling ad revenue, leeching money and attention from already struggling real journalists. Thanks to the fusion of automation and dodgy ethics, all the real money in modern media is in badly automated engagement bait and bullshit. Truth, accuracy, nuance, or quality is a very distant afterthought, if it’s thought about at all.

It’s all a hot mess, and you get the sense this is still somehow just the orchestra getting warmed up. I’d like to believe things could improve as AI evolves and media organizations build ethical frameworks to account for automation (clearly cogent U.S. regulation or oversight is coming no time soon), but based on the industry’s mad dash toward dysfunction so far, things aren’t looking great.

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So powerful. And yet, sooooo sensitive. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump asked a simple question: why are so many ICE agents covering their faces when disappearing people from US city streets? Pointing to the extremely disturbing arrest of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk over her criticism of her university for its Israel-Palestine conflict stance, Bump went on to ask experts in the law enforcement field why federal officers had decided it was ok to carry out enforcement actions in plainclothes and masks.

Ozturk was arrested in Somerville, Massachusetts, after walking down a public street into a web of waiting plainclothes federal agents. At least one agent produced a badge only once she was detained; several were shown on video wearing or pulling up face coverings with the effect of concealing their identities.

In the weeks since her arrest, similar scenes have become commonplace. Reports and social media posts from across the country document federal agents seizing targeted individuals (and likely some number of non-targeted ones) while wearing plainclothes and face coverings.

The conclusion was obvious: this isn’t about officer safety. This is about shielding themselves from accountability.

Why would federal law enforcement need to take steps to muddy accountability or mask their identities?

As in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, the answer is obvious: if there is reason their actions would need to be held to account.

That assertion was apparently so unacceptable that acting ICE head Todd Lyons asked for (and received) op-ed space in the same paper that employs Bump. His response is as idiotic as it is useless.

It’s unfortunate that Post columnist Philip Bump published his online op-ed “Is that guy with a gun an ICE officer — or just a guy with a gun?” during National Police Week, which honors the heroes who keep America safe in our communities and homes.

The use of plainclothes officers is a long-standing law enforcement practice. And while one of Bump’s sources acknowledges in passing that “officers are worried about being targeted,” Bump himself moved quickly past this concern to assert that police officers wearing face coverings choose to do so only to avoid accountability.

First, the fact that it was National Police Week probably went unnoticed by Bump just as surely as it went unnoticed by 95% of Americans. I’m sure Lyons would have felt just as compelled to complain if this had been published during Black History Month. Or on the Cinco de Mayo.

Second, the use of plainclothes officers is a thing. We get that. What we’re having trouble comprehending is why ICE and co-opted forces feel compelled to completely hide their identities, along with the identity of the agency they work for. This isn’t about officer safety. It’s about shielding officers from the consequences of their own actions — actions, it must be pointed out, that look an awful lot like regular-ass unlawful kidnappings performed by armed men driving similarly unmarked vehicles.

Avoiding accountability may not be the only reason these officers are doing these things dressed this way. But it’s incredibly asinine to pretend that it’s not an important part of the equation.

Lyons tries to buttress his laughable claims with this supposedly horrifying statistic:

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.

Wow. That’s a lot. I mean… it’s a lot of percents. There’s no denying that. The link provided by Lyons directs readers wondering about this stat to… a social media post by the DHS similarly decrying criticism of ICE and its tactics.

Searching the internet for the source of this stat keeps leading back to the same place: the DHS and its press office. Here it is again, dropped into a long post… complaining about criticism from political leaders, journalists, and rights advocates. Bonus: this post also thinks it’s wrong to complain about law enforcement during Cop Week.

“Even during National Police Week, the media, members of Congress, and sanctuary politicians have demonized ICE and CBP officers who bravely serve their country,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Attacks and smears against ICE have resulted in officers facing a 413% increase in assaults. We are setting the facts straight and reassuring America that President Trump and Secretary Noem will continue to support ICE and CBP in their efforts to make America safe again.

The number is meaningless. There’s no link to any supporting study or stat or oversight report or anything. It’s just a number that sounds big but doesn’t have any relation to anything. 413% since when? Last week? Last month? The past decade? Since the formation of the agency?

Who knows? Definitely not ICE and its PR front-runners. No one has any context to add, presumably because doing so would either show the number is just made up or that any increase in assaults isn’t linked to recent criticism of the agency. It’s just noise — the sort of thing that rouses the rabble but fails to impress anyone but those already inclined to be impressed.

To sum up: fuck ICE and Todd Lyons. Do your job honestly or get whatever’s coming to you. If you’re seeing an increase in assaults, it’s probably because people are fighting back against masked assailants who are attempting to kidnap them. And they’re not wrong to believe it. Just because you’ve got a badge in the drawer back at the office doesn’t mean you should be given a free pass for engaging in acts that look unlawful to everyone but the people perpetrating them.

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At a time when mainstream media continues to struggle with calling out Trump’s censorial power grabs for what they are, John Oliver just devoted an entire segment to exposing what Techdirt readers already know: Donald Trump’s administration has been waging a direct and sustained assault on free speech and the First Amendment, with FCC chairman Brendan Carr serving as his lead enforcer.

His latest episode not only provides much-needed mainstream coverage of this issue, but does so with the kind of detailed receipts that make the hypocrisy impossible to ignore — well, impossible unless you’re a mainstream news outlet that apparently needs a British comedian with a giant rat costume budget to explain what’s happening right in front of your face.

The segment packs an impressive amount of evidence into less than 30 minutes, with Oliver managing to explain Trump’s entire censorship strategy faster than some rando MAGA account can scream “But what about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” The most damning portion comes when he breaks down the administration’s two-pronged strategy to pressure media companies:

And Carr does seem deep in the tank for the president. Trump supporters have celebrated this image of him wearing a gold Trump pin. And after the Hollywood Reporter published an article titled, “Trump’s media pitbull is off the leash.” That included this horrifying picture of car as a pitbull, he tweeted it saying, “Woof woof.”

One past FCC commissioner said, “I’m about as worried as I can be about the future of the FCC. I would say Carr is the most ideological chairman we’ve ever had and the most political.”

And he’s wasted no time pursuing Trump’s agenda. His FCC is now investigating all the major broadcast outlets except for Fox*.*

And Carr’s stewardship of the FCC has also been part of a new squeeze Trump’s been putting on the networks with the FCC on one side and lawsuits on the other.

Here is how it works. The FCC has the ability to regulate the broadcast licenses of local TV and radio stations. The big networks each own a bunch of those. CBS, for instance, owns all of these [Shows image of owned/operated CBS affiliates]. And while the FCC revoking a license is incredibly hard, what it can do is make it very hard for networks to sell those stations, which given the frequency of media mergers and acquisitions can be a real problem.

So networks now have that threat hanging over them while at the same time Trump is applying legal pressure by filing lawsuits to put them on the defensive. It is pretty flagrant: Trump files a lawsuit demanding money. At the same time, his FCC starts making noises about plans to make that company’s life unpleasant. So, the networks settle in the hopes it’ll keep Trump happy and get everyone off their back. And maybe they think twice about the tone of their coverage in the future.

Right now, CBS is caught in this exact squeeze, largely arising from a 60 Minutes segment that aired just before the election featuring an interview with Kamala Harris, which Trump maintains was misleadingly edited. He has sued the network in a lawsuit First Amendment lawyers have called “frivolous and dangerous” and “ridiculous junk.”

He then goes through and details how absolutely bullshit the claims about 60 Minutes’ supposed “edits” are and even compares them to how Fox News deceptively edited an interview with Trump himself.

What Oliver lays out here isn’t just run-of-the-mill media criticism — it’s a coordinated strategy using government abuse of power to create a chilling effect on speech. The FCC, under Carr, becomes the enforcement arm while Trump’s personal lawsuits provide the second front of attack. This pincer movement creates enormous pressure on media outlets that might otherwise stand firm against either threat alone.

Of course, the fact that many media orgs don’t really seem all that interested in standing up for free speech at all is another issue, which maybe Oliver can talk about later this season.

What makes Oliver’s segment particularly valuable is that he doesn’t just preach to the choir. He provides detailed evidence that exposes the cynical strategy at work. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, Trump and Carr repeatedly wrap themselves in the language of free speech while actively working to suppress it. This rhetorical sleight-of-hand has proven remarkably effective with many mainstream outlets who seem unable to deal with bad faith liars. They continue to frame Trump as a “free speech champion” even as his administration uses governmental power to silence critics.

The segment shows (for not the first time) how comedy is doing the accountability job that traditional news outlets have largely abandoned. Documenting both the tactics and the hypocrisy with actual receipts allows Oliver to present the simple reality: we’re living in an era where censorship by the GOP is being masqueraded as free speech advocacy.

This matters because the “free speech warrior” branding has been remarkably resistant to factual evidence. When someone with Oliver’s platform and reach breaks through that messaging armor, it creates an opportunity for people to realize just how ridiculous this argument is, and to understand that “free speech” is more than just a slogan to be weaponized against political enemies — it’s an actual principle that requires defending even when it’s inconvenient to your political goals.

And maybe, just maybe, if enough people start to understand that, we can finally move past this exhausting era where “defending free speech” apparently means “fighting for your god-given right to post slurs on Twitter without consequences” while actual government censorship gets a pass because it claims to be fighting “wokeness” — as if the First Amendment has a “but not if it’s too woke” exception clause that we all somehow missed.

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We’ve talked about how, in the digital space at least, the concept of “ownership” has undergone a massive philisophical shift. It used to be that you would go out somewhere, buy a thing, and own that thing. When the product is digital, however, or if it is connected to the internet and subject to firmware and software updates that change the product post purchase, you never really own the product. In fact, according to most EULAs and the like, you merely “license” the product. That means the thing you bought on Monday may not be the product or service you actually get on Friday, if the manufacturer or maker decides to make a change. And the response you get from industry is a reminder that you didn’t buy a thing; you bought a limited license to a thing that can be altered, rescinded, or bricked at the maker’s whim.

It’s a dystopia that we’ve come to accept, unfortunately. But you get to a whole new level of absurd when you don’t actually own the license you bought, either. More specifically, when you buy a “lifetime license” to a VPN service, only to have the company be sold and the new owners yank that lifetime subcription from you without prior notice.

The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. The owners told customers that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.

A copy of the email from “The VPN Secure Team” and posted on Reddit notes that VPNSecure had previously deactivated accounts with lifetime subscriptions that it said hadn’t been used in “over 6 months.” The message noted that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023, “including the technology, domain, and customer database—but not the liabilities.”

It gets worse. According to the new owners, they claim the sellers didn’t even tell them about these lifetime subscriptions and that usage and support requests for them were saturating the service, all sans any income for the new ownership. How true any of that is would be completely unknown to this writer, obviously, but it’s also besides the point. If the seller obfuscated usership in the sale, that should be taken up with the seller. The current owners claim they can’t do that because the costs of a lawsuit would outpace what they spent on the purchase to begin with. Which, hey, that sucks pretty hard if all of this is true, but I’m failing to see why that should keep in purchases made in good faith from being honored.

Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial.

We discovered this only months later—when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service.

We actually offered VPNSecure lifetime subscriptions in one of our own “Daily Deal” posts. There is a lot of disbelief floating out there about just what these new owners knew about these subscriptions and when they knew it. It’s important to note that checking the history of the VPNSecure website doesn’t reveal that lifetime subs were ever offered there. Instead, they appear to have been offered through third parties like StackCommerce, which is who Techdirt partners with. When we asked StackCommerce directly about this whole fiasco, we were provided with this statement.

“As a marketplace, StackCommerce connects consumers with exclusive digital deals offered by third-party providers. While we strive to curate high-quality, long-term offers, we do not own or operate the products sold through our platform. In rare cases where a provider is acquired or discontinues operations, we unfortunately have no control over how those new entities choose to honor existing agreements. We understand the frustration this can cause and are actively working with impacted customers to offer support and explore possible solutions.”

Any real due diligence by the new owners should have uncovered all of this. If they didn’t do their jobs as part of the acquisition, well, sucks for them.

Again, how that translates into ripping away a subscription from a customer who bought them in good faith is beyond me. How those subs were discontinued without notice, with emails going out to those affected only after the complaints started rolling in, is also a valid question and a method for assuredly pissing people off.

VPNSecure could’ve potentially mitigated backlash by giving users more advanced warning of the changes and a longer opportunity to select a new subscription before deactivating their accounts. We can’t confirm if InfiniteQuant Ltd. knew about the lifetime subscriptions before making its purchase. However, the firm claims to have known about the subscriptions a few months after taking ownership, so it had ample time to warn customers before abruptly deactivating “dormant” accounts and killing the subscriptions of thousands of customers.

So if we don’t own what we’ve bought, and we don’t even own the licenses under the terms we bought them either, then what exactly are we getting whenever we hand over the money we’ve earned?

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Afew weeks ago, the UK’s regional and national daily news titles ran similar front covers, exhorting the government there to “Make it Fair.” The campaign Web site explained:

Tech companies use creative content, such as news articles, books, music, film, photography, visual art, and all kinds of creative work, to train their generative AI models.

Publishers and creators say that doing this without proper controls, transparency or fair payment is unfair and threatens their livelihoods.

Under new UK proposals, creators will be able to opt out of their works being used for training purposes, but the current campaign wants more than that:

Creators argue this [opt-out] puts the burden on them to police their work and that tech companies should pay for using their content.

The campaign Web site then uses a familiar trope:

Tech giants should not profit from stolen content, or use it for free.

But the material is not stolen, it is simply analyzed as part of the AI training. Analyzing texts or images is about knowledge acquisition, not copyright infringement. Once again, the copyright industries are trying to place a (further) tax on knowledge. Moreover, levying that tax is completely impractical. Since there is no way to determine which works were used during training to produce any given output, the payments would have to be according to their contribution to the training material that went into creating the generative AI system itself. A Walled Culture post back in October 2023 noted that the amounts would be extremely small, because of the sheer quantity of training data that is used. Any monies collected from AI companies would therefore have to be handed over in aggregate, either to yet another inefficient collection society, or to the corporate intermediaries. For this reason, there is no chance that creators would benefit significantly from any AI tax.

We’ve been here before. Five years ago, I wrote a post about the EU Copyright Directive’s plans for an ancillary copyright, also known as the snippet or link tax. One of the key arguments by the newspaper publishers was that this new tax was needed so that journalists were compensated when their writing appeared in search results and elsewhere. As I showed back then, the amounts involved would be negligible. In fact, few EU countries have even bothered to implement the provision on allocating a share to journalists, underlining how pointless it all was. At the time, the European Commission insisted on behalf of its publishing friends that ancillary copyright was absolutely necessary because:

The organisational and financial contribution of publishers in producing press publications needs to be recognised and further encouraged to ensure the sustainability of the publishing industry.

Now, on the new Make it Fair Web site we find a similar claim about sustainability:

We’re calling on the government to ensure creatives are rewarded properly so as to ensure a sustainable future for AI and the creative industries.

As with the snippet tax, an AI tax is not going to do that, since the sums involved as so small. A post on the News Media Association reveals what is the real issue here:

The UK’s creative industries have today launched a bold campaign to highlight how their content is at risk of being given away for free to AI firms as the government proposes weakening copyright law.

Walled Culture has noted many times it is a matter of dogma for the industries involved that copyright must only ever get stronger, as if they were a copyright ratchet. The fear is evidently that once it has been “weakened” in some way, a precedent would be set, and other changes might be made to give more rights to ordinary people (perish the thought) rather than to companies. It’s worth pointing out that the copyright world is deploying its usual sleight of hand here, writing:

The government must stand with the creative industries that make Britain great and enforce our copyright laws to allow creatives to assert their rights in the age of AI.

A fair deal for artists and writers isn’t just about making things right, it is essential for the future of creativity and AI.

Who could be against this call for the UK government to defend the poor artists and writers? No one, surely? But the way to do that, according to Make it Fair, is to “stand with the creative industries”. In other words, give the big copyright companies more power to act as gatekeepers, on the assumption that their interests are perfectly aligned with those of the struggling creators.

They are not. As Walled Culture the book explores in some detail (free digital versions available), the vast majority of those “artists and writers” invoked by the “Make it Fair” campaign are unable to make a decent living from their work under copyright. Meanwhile, huge global corporations enjoy fat profits as a result of that same creativity, but give very little back to the people who did all the work.

There are serious problems with the new AI offerings, and big tech companies definitely need to be reined in for many things, but not for their basic analysis of text and images. If publishers really want to “Make it Fair,” they should start by rewarding their own authors fairly, with more than the current pittance. And if they won’t do that, as seems likely given their history of exploitation, creators should explore some of the ways they can make a decent living without them. Notably, many of these have no need for a copyright system that is the epitome of unfairness, which is precisely why publishers are so desperate to defend it in this latest coordinated campaign.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to WalledCulture.

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Our Secretary of Homeland Security, tasked with overseeing the detention of thousands of people, doesn’t understand one of the most fundamental protections against unlawful imprisonment in our legal system. And we’re not talking about some obscure technical detail — we’re talking about habeas corpus, a basic right that’s been around since the Magna Carta.

Kristi Noem — who recently made headlines by taking glamor selfies in El Salvador’s concentration camps — apparently has no fucking clue how habeas corpus works, as demonstrated during a Senate hearing when she was asked to define this cornerstone of civil liberty.

When quizzed about the definition of habeas corpus by Senator Maggie Hassan, Noem stumbled and then claimed it meant the literal opposite of what it means:

HASSAN: What is habeas corpus?NOEM: Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country HASSAN: That's incorrect

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-05-20T14:16:31.383Z

A quick transcript:

Hassan: Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus?

Noem: Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country….

Hassan: No, let me stop you

Noem [crosstalk]… and suspend their right to… that’s what suspend their right to…

Hassan: Excuse me, that’s incorrect.

Noem: Lincoln used it…

Hassan: Excuse me, habeas corpus…

Noem: [condescendingly] uh huh

Hassan: … is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simple arrest people, including American citizens and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea. As a Senator from the “Live free or die” state, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans. So, Secretary Noem, do you support the core protections that habeas corpus provides that the government must provide a public reason in order to detain and imprison someone?

Noem: I support habeas corpus, I also recognize that the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not.

There’s a lot of nonsense to unpack here. Noem’s response wasn’t just wrong — it was revealing. The only thing that seemed to be floating around her MAGA-pickled brain regarding habeas corpus was apparently Stephen Miller’s recent call to suspend habeas corpus entirely. When asked to define this foundational protection against government overreach, she instead described its complete elimination.

But beyond exposing her ignorance, Noem’s answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of constitutional power. The Constitution’s habeas corpus provision isn’t some presidential superpower — it’s actually a strict limitation on government authority:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended*, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.*

This isn’t about presidential authority — it’s about strictly limiting when the government can suspend this fundamental right. And even then, it’s Congress’s power, not the president’s. When Noem smugly referenced Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, she apparently missed that the courts explicitly rejected his authority to do so.

This isn’t some obscure constitutional detail — it’s basic structure-of-government stuff. The habeas clause appears in Article I (Congress) not Article II (Executive) for a reason. The fact that our Homeland Security Secretary doesn’t grasp this is more than just embarrassing — it’s dangerous.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening here: the person in charge of the department that detains more people than any other federal agency fundamentally misunderstands — or deliberately misrepresents — the constitutional right that protects against unlawful detention. She swore an oath to defend a Constitution she apparently hasn’t read, thinking it grants presidents (and, via appointment power, herself) the power to detain and deport at will, when it actually does the opposite.

This isn’t just about constitutional ignorance. Coming right after her El Salvador prison tourism and Miller’s calls to suspend habeas corpus, it reveals a broader authoritarian vision: one where fundamental rights are seen as inconvenient obstacles to be removed, rather than essential protections to be preserved. In normal times, this level of constitutional illiteracy would be disqualifying for any government role. But these aren’t normal times — and that’s precisely why defending these basic principles matters more than ever.

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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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