Techdirt

You know, there’s stupid, and then there’s stupid on a level that is unbelievably dangerous. While RFK Jr. is very busy attempting to ensure that America loses its measles elimination status through a combination of vaccine skepticism, pushing alternative treatments, and generally being unable to present a solid message around the current outbreak, you will recall that he also recently traveled to Texas to visit the family of a child that recently died from measles. In turning that visit into a grotesque photo opp for his social media account, Kennedy also lauded the work of what he called two “extraordinary healers” that had “treated and healed” hundreds of children infected with measles.

At the same time, he continued to promote medically unsound treatments for the viral disease. In a separate post, he stated that he met with two doctors, Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards, and claimed that they had “treated and healed” some 300 Mennonite children using a combination of aerosolized budesonide (a steroid) and clarithromycin (an antibiotic).

One of those doctors, Ben Edwards, is back in the news. Not because his so-called treatments healed even more children, mind you, but rather because he managed to get a breakthrough case of the measles himself. And, because these are deeply unserious, wildly dangerous people, Edwards kept showing up to work at health facilities and continued to treat measles cases while he was infected.

The doctor’s infection was revealed ina video posted online by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the rabid anti-vaccine advocacy organization founded and previously run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaccine advocate who is now the US secretary of health. Kennedy headed CHD until January, when he stepped down in anticipation of his Senate confirmation.

In the video, the doctor, Ben Edwards, can be seen with mild spots on his face. Someone asks him if he caught measles himself, and he responds, “Yeah,” saying he was “pretty achy yesterday.” He went on to say that he had developed the rash the day before but woke up that day feeling “pretty good.” The video was posted by CHD on March 31, and the Associated Press was the first to report it.

It’s hard to overstate just how insidiously ignorant this is. Edwards told the AP that he only worked with patients already infected with measles, apparently attempting to suggest that he wasn’t putting anyone at danger with his own infection. Unfortunately for that claim of his, the video he appeared in showed him in rooms with groups of people who don’t appear to have been patients, all while he conversed with them unmasked.

He shouldn’t even have been there. Walking into a healthcare facility while infected with measles carries all kinds of risk and is the exact type action that prolongs or furthers an outbreak of an infectious disease. In this case, one of the most infectious diseases.

And, of course, Kennedy’s advocacy for this kind of quackery from the seat of federal healthcare oversight is absolutely bonkers.

Edwards and his unproven treatments have garnered direct praise from Kennedy, who in a social media post called Edwards and another controversial doctor working in the area, Richard Bartlett, “extraordinary healers.” In 2003, Bartlett was disciplined by the Texas Medical Board for “unusual use of risk-filled medications” in multiple patients, including children. The risky treatments included intravenous antibiotics and hefty doses of glucocorticoids.

Edwards will be fine, most likely. He got the MMR vaccine as a child, though he cannot recall whether he received one shot or the recommended two shots. That may explain the breakthrough infection, as a single shot only offers something like 93% lifetime protection.

But the people in the facility he waltzed into may not be so lucky.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).

At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.

In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.

After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.

Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.

ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”

Ed Martin exchanged emails with Priscilla Gray, who had worked in various roles for Phyllis Schlafly, about how to attack Judge John Barberis. Credit:Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica

“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”

“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.

Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”

Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.

Gray told Martin she would direct message Barberis after she was blocked from commenting on his Facebook page. Credit:Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica

Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.

Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”

Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.

His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.

Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.

Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves.

Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer’s career. Not so for Martin.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms.

As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.

A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.

Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.

Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government “discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”

Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.

Already, Martin has been the subject of at least four disciplinary complaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump’s pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin’s actions so far “threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.” If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public.

Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin’s confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump’s most controversial nominees.

Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city’s top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper’s leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews.

Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired.

“He was attacking her,” said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. “He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn’t get traction, it was more like ‘this isn’t a story.’ It wasn’t that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.”

Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed “Memogate” that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt’s staff, the governor’s office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes.

An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt’s office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails.

In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley’s lawsuit as a “desperate attempt” to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley’s own testimony that not all emails are public records.

The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin’s efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. “His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,” she told ProPublica. “I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.”

When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. “He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,” she said.

Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit.

As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a “conscientious and dedicated professional.”

But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed “not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.” The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had.

Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his “obstinacy.”

Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly’s right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him “Ed Martin Schlafly.”

As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an “egomaniacal dictator.” (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side.

A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum’s board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as “deplorable.” Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly’s “hand-picked successor” and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover.

“Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,” he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016.

Cori and the board’s lawsuit sought to enforce Martin’s removal and demand an accounting of the forum’s assets. That’s the case that wound up before Barberis.

On top of his efforts to direct Gray’s posts on Barberis’ Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis’ ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president “judicial activism at its worst” that “shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.”

Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from “Bruce Schlafly, M.D.” — the name of one of Schlafly’s sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a “declaration of war” and urged the Schlaflys to “put something like this out to our biggest list.” (It’s unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment.

In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori’s lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis’ Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings.

Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said “no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy” and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she “speaks for herself” and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin’s style — then and now — to Trump’s. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles.

“What would Trump do in that position?” Andy Schlafly said of Martin’s current role in Washington. “I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed’s doing. Elections do have consequences.”

Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit.

When Cori’s lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for “an underhanded scheme” to “attack the integrity and authority” of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records.

Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear if Martin appealed.

Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint.

In 2022, when part of Cori’s lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother’s death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member.

Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn’t write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else.

In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it’s not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn’t prove it.

But while he’s wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he’s taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration.

For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a “dick” and urged Democrats to “bring weapons” to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation.

With the start of Trump’s first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president’s most prolific and unfiltered surrogates.

CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”

Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents.

Martin’s flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled “America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.” He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going “soft” on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was “an op” orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to “damage Trump and Trumpism.”

During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “weaponized” Congress’ response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. “Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,” he said.

As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held “long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,” wore a “Hitler mustache” and allegedly told his co-workers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” (In court, Hale’s attorney said his client “makes no excuses for his derogatory language,” but the government’s description of him was “simply misleading.”)

After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was “to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he’s extraordinary.”

In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He’s vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith’s lawyers to “[s]ave your receipts.” And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk’s deputy, Martin wrote that “if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

More often than not, Martin’s threats have gone nowhere.

A month into the job, he announced “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative to “hold accountable those who threaten” public officials, whether they’re DOGE workers or judges. One of the “most abhorrent examples” of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they weakened abortion rights.

Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer’s nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin’s bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer’s remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct.

In another instance, when one of Martin’s top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy’s resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin’s was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica.

Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of “such extraordinary sensitivity” that the office’s leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena “out of concern that it wasn’t legally or ethically appropriate.”

And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration’s actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” Chutkan said. “There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.”

Martin’s tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin’s nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin’s case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin “a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.”

Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements.

“I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don’t quite say “we want to censor speech” (after all, they pretend to be the party that “brought free speech back.”) Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it’s got nothing to do with the content, even as they can’t hide their true intentions and motives. And so we have DC US Attorney Ed Martin, who has decided that the real problem with Wikipedia isn’t its content — it’s its tax status… based on its content.

This latest move follows Martin’s established pattern of constitutional violations, including investigating protected speech by Congress members, attacking the Associated Press, and probing medical journals over their editorial policies.

But his attack on Wikipedia represents something even more dangerous: a federal prosecutor attempting to control how the internet’s largest collaborative knowledge platform manages its content.

The way this works is pretty straightforward: First, you find some pretext to investigate. Then you write a threatening letter. Then you leak that letter to a friendly media outlet. In this case, Martin sent his letter to The Free Press, a publication that has spent years warning about government censorship — at least when they pretend Democrats do it. The letter reads in part:

It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers. Again, educational content is directionally neutral; but information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers

There’s more in there, including complaints about how AI tools train on Wikipedia, suggesting (ridiculously) that this might implicate Wikipedia if “foreign actors” are able to “launder information” into AI systems. And the letter threatens to revoke Wikpedia’s non-profit status (something the IRS would normally investigate, not the US Attorney for DC).

There are also demands to know details about Wikpedia’s editorial processes and how it handles trust & safety. Just imagine the freakout that would occur (probably led by The Free Press) if a US Attorney during the Biden admin had demanded to know Fox News’ editorial policies and standards and practices, while claiming that they were letting too much propaganda online. The screaming would never stop.

Indeed, what Martin is doing here represents exactly the kind of government interference in editorial decisions that free speech advocates have been warning about. But where are those voices now?

During the Biden administration, we were told over and over again by the MAGA faithful that literally any communication between an internet platform and federal law enforcement, especially regarding trust & safety practices, was the biggest threat to free speech ever.

To understand why this matters, we need to talk about Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit that made it all the way to the Supreme Court (as Murthy v. Missouri). The case was basically about whether government officials could talk to social media companies about content moderation without violating the First Amendment. The summary, as the Supreme Court noted, affirming earlier cases, is that the government can absolutely talk to social media companies to share information. What it cannot do is threaten or coerce the platforms for their editorial decisions.

Which is exactly what Martin is doing here.

Even though the Supreme Court debunked all the lies in its ruling in the case, the MAGA universe (along with hangers-on like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) insisted that they were evidence of a huge attack on free speech: the Biden administration sometimes talking to social media companies about their content moderation practices.

The original district court ruling in the case, by (Trump-appointed) Judge Terry Doughty, had soaring language like the following:

Plaintiffs have put forth ample evidence regarding extensive federal censorship that restricts the free flow of information on social-media platforms used by millions of Missourians and Louisianians, and very substantial segments of the populations of Missouri, Louisiana, and every other State

That “extensive federal censorship” was based off of very weak claims of federal officials sometimes reaching out to social media platforms to highlight certain content or to ask if certain things violated their policies. And it was treated as a five-alarm fire. As the Supreme Court noted, the actions of the Biden White House did not appear at all coercive or threatening.

That’s very, very different from what’s happening here. Here we have the top DC prosecutor clearly threatening Wikipedia over editorial decisions — and, not even editorial decisions of its employees, but the site’s volunteer editors. In other words, Wikipedia is clearly protected under Section 230 for such edits.

It seems likely that Martin (or someone in his office) then leaked the letter to The Free Press, a publication that has built its brand on warning about government censorship. The same publication that ran breathless stories about the Biden administration’s supposedly coercive communications with social media platforms. The same outlet whose writer, Rupa Subramanya, dramatically testified to Congress’ subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the government, about the horrors of government censorship… in Canada.

Let’s look at her testimony, which Republican Jim Jordan gleefully presented as a warning about Democratic censorship:

I’d like all of you to think of me as a time traveler from the not too distant future coming back to the present to offer you a glimpse of what could lie ahead for America.

I live in a time in which, in the name of fairness, you can’t share the stories you write for my news publication on social media.

[….]

I live in a time in which, in the name of safety, you can be arrested for exercising your right to peaceful protest if you happen to be protesting the wrong thing.

That dystopian future she warned about? It’s here. People are not just being arrested but actually deported for peaceful protests. And The Free Press’s response to this actual censorship? Crickets.

This fits a pattern that Peter Shamshiri recently documented in his analysis of The Free Press’s selective outrage. When it comes to actual censorship from the Trump administration, The Free Press has developed a curious case of writer’s block:

The problem they face is that their brand is predicated on directing overwrought skepticism toward the left and childlike credulousness toward the right. That may have worked in 2021, when it could be pitched as a sort of half-baked contrarianism. But now, with the Trump administration embracing overt authoritarianism, it’s a little embarrassing.

He notes that while they have a “Free Speech” section, almost none of it is covering the attacks on free speech from the Trump administration. Yes, The Free Press published this story, but it didn’t put it in the “Free Speech” section and doesn’t treat it as the massive First Amendment violation it absolutely is. It quotes a “person close to Martin” multiple times, suggesting that Martin’s office leaked this directly to Weiss, knowing The Free Press wouldn’t call out what bullshit it is.

Want to see this double standard in action? Let’s play a quick game of “spot the difference” between how The Free Press covers different types of government intervention. Here’s their headline for Martin’s Wikipedia threat:

Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

And here’s how they covered various aspects of the Murthy case:

Free Speech on TrialHow Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

And right before the election, the Free Press published a story about “Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Our Government Censors” about the case, claiming that Kamala Harris would definitely abuse her powers as President to censor people online and holding up Musk as an example of someone who would fight for free speech.

What are the chances that a President Kamala Harris would resist pressuring social media companies into censorship? Based on her record: Not great.

Looking over that author’s writings since Trump took office, she’s written excitedly and supportively about Trump trying to harm transgender youth and the movie When Harry Met Sally. The fact that the Trump administration has been issuing censorship decrees from almost all corners of the executive branch is apparently not worth mentioning.

So here’s where we are: A federal prosecutor is directly threatening Wikipedia’s editorial independence. This is not the information sharing found in the details of the Twitter Files and the Murthy case (which the Supreme Court just said was fine), but explicit threats about their tax status and demands about their editorial policies.

This is, quite literally, the exact kind of government censorship that The Free Press had been warning about. The kind they said would inevitably come from a Democratic administration. The kind they said justified extraordinary measures to “protect free speech.”

Yet their coverage reads like a press release from Martin’s office, repeatedly citing “a person close to Martin” (which is often how media will represent the person themselves, who asks the journalist not to quote them directly):

“Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” Martin wrote in the letter, claiming his office received information showing that Wikipedia’s “policies benefit foreign powers.” ….

The letter did not specify which foreign actors were manipulating information on Wikipedia and did not cite examples of alleged propaganda. However, a person close to Martin said he is concerned about “edits on Wikipedia as they relate to the Israel-Hamas conflict that are clearly targeted against Israel to benefit other countries.”

They even helpfully note that Wikipedia “fundraises in the district” — as if that somehow justifies a US Attorney threatening their First Amendment rights.

But what’s clear is that this is about one thing only: Wikipedia allowing content Martin doesn’t like.

Even if Wikipedia’s content was biased (it isn’t), even if every editor was actively trying to push an anti-Israel narrative (they aren’t), that would still be protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to threaten organizations over their editorial choices, no matter how much certain prosecutors or publications might dislike those choices.

The Free Press spent years insisting that mundane communications between the Biden administration and social media companies represented an existential threat to free speech. Now faced with actual government censorship — explicit threats from a federal prosecutor over editorial decisions — they’re treating it as just another political story.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

Oh hooray. Another part of our new normal under Trump 2.0. Here’s the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details:

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.

According toa 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused of obstructing a U.S. agency and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. The two charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine, but sentences in cases involving nonviolent offenses typically are much shorter.

Arresting a judge is an extremely rare occurrence. If it does happen, it usually follows months of investigation and massive amounts of evidence of criminal activity. In this case, it took less than a week and mostly hinges on the statements of a single court deputy and the allegations of federal officers who were free to assume the worst about the few things they did manage to witness first-hand. On top of that, the arrest was made at the courthouse, as though the judge posed some sort of a flight risk if she wasn’t apprehended in public at her place of government employment.

All very shitty. And all too familiar. There’s some precedent for this. Guess when that happened.

A Massachusetts judge who allegedly gave a “reasonable impression” that she was allowing an immigrant to evade federal custody was “less than fully candid” when asked about the incident, according to an ethics complaint filed Monday.

The judge, Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph of Massachusetts, is accused of willful misconduct in the ethics complaint.

[…]

Joseph had once faced federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice over the April 2018 incident in the Newton, Massachusetts, courthouse.

Prosecutors had alleged that Joseph allowed Medina-Perez to go downstairs to the lockup, supposedly to retrieve property. The immigrant was then allowed to leave through a back door by a court officer. The charges were dropped in September 2022 after Joseph agreed to report herself to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct.

[Strokes chin thoughtfully] What could be the details that connect these two anomalies? What indeed. Allegedly helping an immigrant avoid interloping federal officers looking to make their jobs easier by poaching people outside courtrooms following court appearances? Check. President Trump in office? Check.

As noted in the above report, the felony obstruction charges were dropped and replaced with an ethics complaint. We’ll have to wait and see how this one goes, but so far, Trump Administration officials are treating it like a law and order win. The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, tweeted, de-tweeted, and tweeted again about how proud he was his agency was right there to bring an obstructionist judge to heel. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed this report on xTwitter, pretending this was just good government business, rather than the KGB-esque removal of, shall we say, a competing viewpoint in the marketplace of mass deportation ideas.

There’s a 13-page charging document [PDF] written by FBI Special Agent Lindsay Schloemer that portrays this as some sort of criminal conspiracy, rather than just a sympathetic judge being unwilling to let federal agents use her court as some sort of temporary holding cell for immigration arrests. It’s all written in accordance with the FBI Charging Document Style Guide — something capable of portraying someone pointing someone to an alternate exit as the equivalent to being the driver in a bank robbery getaway car.

But before we dip into that a bit, I must highlight one of most hilarious “training and experience” assertions I’ve ever seen in a warrant affidavit:

I am a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed since 2014. I am currently assigned to the Milwaukee Field Office. As such, I am an investigative or law enforcement agent of the United States authorized under Title 18, United States Code, Section 3052, that is, an officer of the United States who is empowered by law to conduct investigations, to make arrests, and to collect evidence for various violations of federal law. I am also a Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) and worked as a CPA for seven years before my employment with the FBI.

Nice. Useless in this specific situation, but one should always have a fall-back career. Apparently, arresting judges is the agent’s fall-back career, because Schloemer goes on to point out their white collar crime bona fides before getting around to justifying the arrest of a county judge just because federal agents (including a DEA agent because that’s what we’re doing these days) were forced to run an extra 50-100 feet to apprehend Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, whose main evasive effort was (and this is all in the charging document!) using an elevator that was further away than the one federal agents assumed made more sense to use. I am not kidding.

After leaving the Chief Judge’s vestibule and returning to the public hallway, DEA Agent A reported that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were in the public hallway. DEA Agent B also observed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney in the hallway near Courtroom 615 and noted that Flores. Ruiz was looking around the hallway. From different vantage points, both agents observed Flores- Ruiz and his counsel walk briskly towards the elevator bank on the south end of the sixth floor. | am familiar with the layout of the sixth floor of the courthouse and know that the south elevators are not the closest elevators to Courtroom 615, and therefore it appears that Flores-Ruiz and his counsel elected not to use the closest elevator bank to Courtroom 615.

Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The allegations claim the judge diverted officers, ushered Flores-Ruiz out through the jury exit, and otherwise tried to impede this arrest. The chief judge also seemed a little concerned about the swarm of federal officers trying to poach exiting court attendees and expressed a desire to formalize where in the courthouse it was appropriate to make these arrests. In the end, the agents were momentarily inconvenienced.

Even if all of claims are factual, the FBI had several options to use, including the one that left it up to the DOJ to file an ethics complaint, rather than expedite a felony complaint against a judge — an action that’s just as inexcusable as it was back in 2018. But this administration is dead set on proving to everyone it will go after anyone and anything that even momentarily halts the progress of its fascist designs. And in doing so, it’s adding yet another black eye to US history, one it can only hope it remains in power long enough to retcon.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act.

The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong. Instead of building on existing successful systems, or within the parameters of the First Amendment, Congress decided to create a new framework combining vague “duty of care” requirements with harsh criminal penalties — a combination that, as we’ve previously detailed, practically begs to be weaponized for censorship.

Most tellingly, Donald Trump — in endorsing the bill during his address to Congress — openly bragged about how he plans to abuse its provisions to censor content he personally dislikes. When the person championing your anti-abuse legislation is promising to use it for abuse, you might have a problem.

The bill is so bad that even the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of NCII and passing bills similar to the Take It Down Act, has come out with a statement saying that, while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems.

While supportive of the bill’s criminal provision relating to authentic nonconsensual intimate images, which closely resembles CCRI’s model federal law and state laws that have survived constitutional challenge, CCRI has serious reservations about S. 146’s reporting and removal requirements. Encouraging speedy removal of nonconsensual intimate imagery from platforms is laudable, but the provision as written is unconstitutionally vague, making it difficult for individuals and platforms to understand what conduct is prohibited or required. The provision is also unconstitutionally overbroad, extending well beyond unlawful imagery. Finally, the provision lacks adequate safeguards against abuse, increasing the likelihood of bad faith reports and chilling protected expression. Such flaws would be alarming under any circumstances; in light of the current administration’s explicit commitment to selectively enforcing laws for political purposes, they are fatal. CCRI cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.

These warnings echo what digital rights groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology and EFF have been shouting for months — only to be completely ignored by Congress. The concerns are not theoretical: the bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.

Yet despite these clear red flags, Ted Cruz announced that the House will take up the Senate’s fatally flawed version of the bill. This comes after leadership dismissed substantive criticisms during markup, including explicit warnings from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the bill’s potential for abuse.

That’s Cruz saying:

I am thrilled that the TAKE IT DOWN Act will be getting a vote on the House Floor early next week.

Thank you to [Speaker Johnson, Steve Scalise, and Brett Gurthrie] for their leadership and action to protect victims of revenge and deepfake pornography and give them the power to reclaim their privacy and dignity.

When this bill is signed into law, those who knowingly spread this vile material will face criminal charges, and Big Tech companies must remove exploitative content without delay.

The weird thing about this bill is that we already have systems to handle non-consensual intimate imagery online. There’s NCMEC’s “Take It Down” system, which helps platforms identify and remove this content. There’s StopNCII.org, a non-profit effort that’s gotten virtually every major platform — from Meta to TikTok to Pornhub — to participate in coordinated removal efforts. These systems work because they’re precise, transparent, and focused on the actual problem.

But apparently working solutions aren’t exciting enough for Congress. Instead of building on these proven approaches, they’ve decided to create an entirely new system that somehow manages to be both weaker at addressing the real problem and more dangerous for everyone else.

The problem here is pretty simple: If you give people a way to demand content be taken down, they will abuse it. We already have a perfect case study in the DMCA. Even with built-in safeguards like counternotices and (theoretical) penalties for false claims, the DMCA sees thousands of bogus takedown notices used to censor legitimate speech.

The Take It Down Act looks at this evidence of widespread abuse and says “hold my beer.” Not only does it strip away the DMCA’s already-inadequate protections, it adds criminal penalties that make false claims even more attractive as a censorship weapon. After all, if people are willing to file bogus copyright claims just to temporarily inconvenience their opponents, imagine what they’ll do when they can threaten prison time.

And imagine what the current Trump administration would do with those threats of criminal charges over content removals.

CDT’s Beeca Branum put out a statement this morning about how stupid all of this is:

“The TAKE IT DOWN Act is a missed opportunity for Congress to meaningfully help victims of nonconsensual intimate imagery. The best of intentions can’t make up for the bill’s dangerous implications for constitutional speech and privacy online. Empowering a partisan FTC to enforce ambiguous legislation is a recipe for weaponized enforcement that risks durable progress in the fight against image-based sexual abuse.”

“The TAKE IT DOWN Act, while well-intentioned, was written without appropriate safeguards to prevent the mandated removal of content that is not nonconsensual intimate imagery, making it vulnerable to constitutional challenge and abusive takedown requests. Moreover, its ambiguous text can be read to create an impossible requirement for end-to-end encrypted platforms to remove content to which they have no access.”

The most baffling aspect of this debacle is watching self-proclaimed progressive voices like Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout champion a bill that hands unprecedented censorship power to an administration they claim to oppose. This morning, both of them appeared at a weird press conference in support of the bill. While their recent embrace of various unconstitutional and censorial internet regulations is disappointing, their willingness to hand Donald Trump a censorship weapon he’s openly bragging about abusing is genuinely shocking.

The Take It Down Act will likely become law, and then we’ll get to watch as the Trump administration — which has already announced its plans to abuse it — gets handed a shiny new censorship weapon with “totally not for political persecution” written on the side in extremely small print. The courts might save us, but they’re already drowning in unconstitutional nonsense from this administration. Perhaps not the best time to add “government-enabled censorship framework” to their to-do list.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn’t want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? Is it time to cut Lady Liberty off at the knees and shove her hulking metal carcass into the bay?

Fortunately, a judge — a conservative one at that — is asking at least one question about this turn of events, even if it isn’t any of the questions listed above.

A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.

The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

I don’t know, judge. Your interest may be well-placed but it’s getting pretty fucking difficult to “dispel strong suspicions” that the government is just deporting people — citizens or not — with no meaningful due process. That’s why this administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act. That law all but eliminates due process from the equation so long as federal agents can boilerplate together stuff about tattoos and gang affiliations to pile on top of the utter bullshit that supposedly necessitates the revival of long-dormant law.

The government was no more inclined to give the US-born child due process rights than it was to extend them to her undocumented parents. Instead, ICE simply grabbed the child’s mother, along with her older sibling, during a routine compliance check-in, threw them on a jet, and sent them back to Honduras. Well, “back” except for the two-year-old, who was born in the United States.

The government hasn’t offered much in response to US resident/apparent designated legal caretaker for the 2-year-old US citizen motion for a restraining order blocking the child’s deportation. And why should it? It’s already a done deal.

What it has offered is a hand-written note allegedly written by the child’s mother declaring her intent to have her youngest child deported with her. It also claims most parents want their US-born children deported with him, an assertion that can’t possibly be true if these parents migrated to the United States to give themselves and their offspring a better life.

The child’s father (also an undocumented immigrant) clearly felt the two-year-old would be better off staying in the US with an appointed guardian. That’s why he appointed one as soon as he found out ICE had detained his child. Fearing deportation of his own if he went to claim his child, he signed paperwork making another US resident the child’s legal guardian.

ICE promised to put the guardian in touch with the child’s mother to see if she really wanted to take the child to Honduras with her. Then it blew the guardian (and the court) off until the child was already out of the US and en route to Honduras.

That’s where Terry Doughty comes in. He’s apparently a big fan of Trump and his policies, which makes him a prime landing spot for cases the administration (and other Republican legislators) want to win. But that doesn’t work here.

The short order [PDF] makes it clear this isn’t something the government is just going to be able to ignore. There’s no unsettled question of legality that requires in-depth discussion.

Of course, “It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommenddeportation of a U.S. citizen.” See Lyttle v. United States, 2012

Open. Shut. On top of that, a handwritten note and some generalizations about deported parents aren’t the smoking guns the government seems to think they are. (Emphasis in the original.)

The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that.

Precisely. Then there’s the fact that the government moved as quickly as it could to carry out this miscarriage of justice before the court could tell it to stop.

Seeking the path of least resistance, the Court called counsel for the Government at 12:19 p.m. CST, so that we could speak with VML’s mother and survey her consent and custodial rights. The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with VML’s mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras.

Well, I guess he’s still a bit Trumpian. But the deliberate misgendering (or whatever) of the Gulf of Mexico aside, this chain of events doesn’t make the government look any less shady. Dispelling the “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process” is all but impossible at this point. Of course, even if it’s shown the child was supposed to remain in the United States, it’s all but guaranteed it will take a heated, protracted legal battle to force the Trump Administration to do something it hasn’t done yet: press the undo button on an illegal deportation.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRG note that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills.

But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually passed laws. Ohio could be the latest, thanks to the support of “free market Republicans” (remember those?) who don’t like the idea of big companies monopolizing repair:

“Blessing is a Republican state senator representing Ohio’s 8th Senate district, which includes much of the area surrounding Cincinnati. In April, Blessing introduced a “right-to-repair” bill that grants consumers legal access to the parts, tools, and documents they need to fix a wide range of devices while banning restrictive practices like parts pairing. If Blessing’s bill succeeds, the Buckeye State will become the latest to enshrine the right to repair into law, after similar legislative victories in Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, and New York.”

The passage of a right to repair reform in Ohio would be an ideological win for the movement given the state’s highly conservative bent. It illustrates once again that support for these reforms is hugely bipartisan. Often corporate policy guys find a way to generate partisan animus around issues (see: privacy, net neutrality), but so far they’ve yet to have that kind of success in “right to repair.”

In large part because a cornerstone of consumer annoyance at these practices have involved John Deere screwing over rural farmers with cumbersome restrictions that dramatically drive up the cost of servicing agricultural equipment.

The problem: while a lot is made of states passing right to repair laws, the press, public, and activists tend to ignore or downplay the fact that no state has actually enforced these laws yet. Most companies in most states are still just happily monopolizing repair with clunky DRM, “parts pairing,” consolidation of repair options, and making manuals and parts hard to get a hold of — with no penalties.

At some point, some of the amazing energy being put into passing these laws needs to be redirected to demanding states actually enforce them. Unfortunately during Trump’s second term, when states face unprecedented and costly legal fights on absolutely everything, I suspect that this sort of consumer protection will likely be the first to fall through the cracks among cash-strapped states without states being pressured on the daily to make it a priority.

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a failed “fact check” by another commenter:

Hey twinkle farts, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to authorize the government to detain enemy aliens. Further, the executive order didn’t need to receive the law. And the law was used to justify the detainment in Federal Court.

Dumb as a box of rocks.

In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about Gavin Newsom calling the Abrego Garcia case a “distraction”:

Remember this when Newsom is the next Democratic candidate for president hailed as the only hope against Trump. I’m not telling you not to vote for him because any Democrat or even a fucking doorstop will be a more moral choice than Trump’s 3rd term or whoever the GOP trots out to replace him (it won’t be Vance).

But remember this that Newsom might possibly be marginally better than Biden, but will largely be a return to the same old thing instead of a shift in a positive direction towards actual progress. We’ve lost so much ground of late on civil liberties and human rights that people will be grateful for anything less than the cruelty-backed machinations of authoritarians, but we deserve more.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Thad about Elon Musk supposedly stepping way from DOGE:

The news media credulously reporting Musk’s announcement that he’s stepping back from DOGE seem to have forgotten that sixteen months ago they credulously reported his announcement that he was stepping back from Twitter.

Next, it’s Arianity with a reminder about all the other things supposedly on his plate:

Don’t forget his “third job” (SpaceX), “fourth job” (Boring Co), “fifth job” (Twitter), or “sixth job” (xAI), or “seventh job” (Starlink), all while having time to pretend to be good at video games and shitpost/harassing women on Twitter all day.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:

DEI hires? [ x ]DUI hires? [✓]

In second place, it’s David with a comment about the federal prosecutor who started demanding explanations of editorial policy from medical journals:

The GOP is not to blame for everything

Prosecutors are not political employees but career personnel. Their job is to advance justice on behalf of the American people independent of party affiliation; so blaming a political party for a potentially rogue prosecutor’s behavior is out of line.

Wait, is it 2025 already? My, how the time flies. Forget what I just said, I was lost in the past for a moment.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with That One Guy and another comment about “balance” in medical journals:

Down with ‘Just because you have a lab coat doesn’t mean you’re doing science’ dogma!

I for one look forward to the new Golden Age of American Science, where competing viewpoints like the size and age of the earth, whether it really is possible to make gold out of lead through a complex application of exotic chemicals, and the involvement of storks in childbirth are given equal weight and time with more ‘traditional’ entrench beliefs.

Finally, it’s another anonymous comment about Pete Hegseth:

You know, it’s not really fair to blame alcohol. I’m guessing Hegseth is also mightily incompetent when sober.

That’s all for this week, folks!

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

It’s time for the second in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix and Best Deep Cut, and today we’re looking at the winner of the Best Visuals category: A Warning by DigNZ.

One of the requirements for digital entries in these game jams is that they be playable in the browser, which puts a limit on just how graphically ambitious they can get. But A Warning pushes that limit to its breaking point, in service of a striking aesthetic built around a selection of Disney animated shorts from 1929 combined with lighting effects and a 3D-rendered interface.

Screenshots really don’t do it justice; you need to see it in action. The game is a simple but tantalizing video puzzle, in which you are tasked by President Herbert Hoover (by way of a fully-voiced briefing video) with uncovering secret messages that Walt Disney has hidden in the films. You’re then tossed into the main interface with minimal instruction, and must experiment with the rotating slices of animation and the various buttons that swap out the soundtrack and apply color filters to the visuals, possibly revealing hidden elements. Piece by piece, you must reconstruct the cartoons and their secret layers, all while they continue to play before your eyes. Uncover all the secret messages and you’ll make it to the ending (but no spoilers: you’ll have to get there for yourself!)

Last year was the year that Mickey Mouse’s new public domain status made waves and headlines, but while that was certainly an important milestone, we can’t forget that it just marks the beginning of what we now get to celebrate for years to come: masterpieces from the golden age of American animation entering the public domain. These are historic works that pioneered styles and techniques which continue to define animation today, and the visual feast they provide deserves to be celebrated. A Warning does just that, and does it with flare, while also being a very fun little puzzle game to boot. For all that, it’s this year’s winner of Best Visuals.

Congratulations to [DigNZ](https://yizazy.itch.io/)** for the win! You can play A Warning in your browser, or download the PC version, from its page on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.**

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

What could possibly go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies and gentlemen, the President’s star witnesses!

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will all be dumber because of this nonsense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

---

From Techdirt via this RSS feed