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The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the radical concept that people of different backgrounds might have something to contribute.

According to a draft memo obtained by Fox News, the Navy is establishing a “Naval Higher Education Review Board” tasked with removing any materials “deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter progression.” The board will focus particularly on—brace yourself—the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English.

The memo is worth quoting directly, because the language reveals how thoroughly this administration misunderstands both education and military effectiveness. It talks about the necessity of “remov[ing] materials and practices deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter” and says:

A particular emphasis will be applied on the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English. Faculty recruitment and selection processes will be reviewed to ensure merit-based selection that leads to preparing our future officers for leading in Peace Through Strength and then success in combat when the Nation calls.

Notice what’s missing here: any explanation of how studying history or literature could possibly undermine military readiness. The assumption seems to be that learning about the complexities of human society somehow weakens future officers, rather than preparing them for the complex operational environments they’ll actually face.

But here’s the thing about this supposed “warrior ethos”: when you actually look at what the Trump administration considers tough-guy behavior, it’s basically a master class in being scared of literally everything.

A Warrior’s Guide to Being Terrified

Let’s examine what the “warrior ethos” looks like in practice under this administration:

Warrior Move #1: Be So Scared of CBS News That You Extort Them for $16 Million Nothing says “fearless leader” like forcing a news organization to pay what amounts to a protection racket fee because they edited an interview with your opponent—who you beat in the election—in ways you didn’t like. Trump’s demand that CBS pay as part of a settlement shows the true warrior spirit: if you can’t handle a free press, just threaten people until they pay you to go away.

Warrior Move #2: Transportation Secretary Too Frightened of NYC Subways to Ride Them Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, apparently finds the New York City subway system so terrifying that can’t stop talking about how terrifying and scary it is. This is the same subway system used daily by millions of ordinary New Yorkers, including children going to school. But hey, nothing embodies the warrior ethos like being more scared of public transit than a 12-year-old with a MetroCard.

Warrior Move #3: Be So Intimidated by TikTok That You… Wait, Actually, Never Mind That One The administration’s flip-flopping on TikTok—from “existential threat that must be banned immediately” to “actually it’s fine now“—perfectly captures the strategic brilliance of the modern warrior ethos: be inconsistent enough that nobody knows what you actually stand for.

Warrior Move #4: Cower in Fear of Trans People Using Bathrooms Nothing demonstrates battlefield courage quite like being absolutely terrified that someone might use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. The administration has made restricting transgender rights a top priority because apparently, the greatest threat to American military readiness is the possibility that a trans person might pee in peace. Real warriors, as we all know, spend most of their time obsessing over other people’s bathroom choices and genitals.

Think about the operational absurdity here: these are the same people who claim they want military officers, based on “meritocracy,” prepared for complex global conflicts, but they’re prioritizing policies that actively drive qualified personnel out of the service over… bathroom anxiety.

Warrior Move #5: Be So Scared of Accurate Data That You Fire People Who Collect It The administration’s pattern of removing officials who produce economic data they don’t like—like firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief—shows true warrior spirit: if reality doesn’t match your narrative, just eliminate the people whose job it is to document reality. Because nothing says “strong leadership” like being threatened by… math.

Warrior Move #6: Tremble at the Thought of Foreign Students Learning Things The warrior ethos apparently includes being so intimidated by international students that you want to kick them out of American universities. Because clearly, the best way to maintain American dominance is to prevent talented people from other countries from getting educated here, potentially staying here, and contributing to American innovation. Strategic brilliance.

Warrior Move #7: Be Defeated by Windmills (Literally) Trump’s ongoing war against wind energy—claiming windmills cause cancer, kill birds, and are generally terrifying—perfectly encapsulates the warrior mindset. Don Quixote fought windmills as a delusion; Trump fights them as policy. At least Don Quixote had the excuse of being fictional.

Warrior Move #8: Run Away from Public Media The warrior ethos includes being so threatened by NPR and PBS that you need to defund them entirely. Because apparently, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of tough guys quite like… thoughtful journalism and educational programming. Clearly, “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered” represent an existential threat to American military readiness.

Warrior Move #9: Eliminate Books Because Words Are Scary The Naval Academy previously purged nearly 400 books from its library, covering topics like civil rights, the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ issues, and feminism. Because apparently, learning about American history and understanding different perspectives is too dangerous for future military officers. Nothing says “prepared for combat” like being unable to handle a book about the Civil Rights Movement.

Warrior Move #10: Replace Diversity with “Merit” (But Only Our Definition of Merit) The memo calls for “merit-based selection” while simultaneously demanding that military academics be restructured to eliminate civilian influence and focus solely on what they define as appropriate warrior content. Merit, in this context, apparently means “thinks exactly like us and is scared of the same books we are.”

The Real “Corrosive” Problem

Here’s what’s actually happening: the Trump administration is so threatened by the idea that America’s military might benefit from officers who understand the full complexity of American history, society, and the world they’ll be operating in, that they’re willing to gut educational institutions to prevent it.

The memo talks about addressing “imbalances in civilian-dominated governance that weaken the Academy’s military mission”—but civilian oversight of the military is literally a foundational principle of American democracy. The idea that civilian input into military education is somehow corrupting reveals (not for the first time) a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how democratic institutions are supposed to work.

And let’s be clear about what “DEI programs” actually were at the Naval Academy: they were efforts to ensure that the military could draw from the full talent pool of American citizens, rather than limiting themselves to a narrow demographic slice. The idea that this somehow undermines military effectiveness is contradicted by, well, reality. Diverse teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones in complex scenarios—exactly the kind of challenges military leaders face.

The Irony of “Warrior Ethos”

The most ridiculous part of all this is that the people claiming to champion a “warrior ethos” are displaying the exact opposite of what that might actually mean. Real “warriors” aren’t afraid of books. They don’t need to silence critics or eliminate diverse perspectives to feel secure. They don’t demand protection money from news organizations or avoid public transportation out of fear.

Real strength comes from being able to engage with challenging ideas, to learn from different perspectives, and to adapt to complex situations. The Trump administration’s version of strength looks more like fragility dressed up in insecure tough-guy language.

The Naval Academy has produced military leaders who successfully fought fascism, integrated the military, and protected democratic values around the world. They did this not despite understanding the full complexity of American society and history, but because of it.

Now we’re supposed to believe that future officers will be stronger if they’re shielded from learning about civil rights, protected from diverse perspectives, and trained to see civilian oversight as a threat rather than a feature of democratic governance.

That’s not a warrior ethos. That’s authoritarian fragility with a military costume on.

What This Actually Accomplishes

The real goal here isn’t to create better military leaders—it’s to use military institutions as political weapons. By purging educational content and restructuring governance, the Trump administration hopes to ensure that military institutions reflect their political priorities rather than serving the broader American public.

This undermines both military effectiveness and democratic norms. When you politicize military education, you create officers who are loyal to a particular political faction rather than to the Constitution and the American people. When you eliminate diverse perspectives from military leadership development, you create blind spots that enemies can exploit.

This approach makes America less safe, not more. Military leaders who don’t understand the full complexity of the societies they serve and the world they operate in are less effective, not more.

But then again, none of this is actually about military effectiveness. It’s about using the language of “warrior ethos” to justify political purges and authoritarian control.

And if that’s what passes for “strength” in the Trump administration, it explains a lot about why they’re so terrified of everything else—from windmills to bathroom choices to the basic concept of civilian expertise. Real strength doesn’t require purging books or eliminating perspectives. But real authoritarianism absolutely does.

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Section 706 of the Telecom Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”

For decades, the FCC has tap-danced around this mandate. Corruption and regulatory capture has resulted in a U.S. telecom sector that’s barely competitive, highly consolidated, and dominated by a handful of regional telecom monopolies. Those monopolies don’t have to try very hard to expand access, lower prices, or improve speeds. The FCC has been historically feckless about doing anything about it.

Every so often the FCC tries to do the absolute bare minimum to improve on this dynamic. Like during the Biden administration, when the Biden FCC last year boosted the definition of broadband to a still pathetic 100 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream, pledged to hold gigabit access as a future goal, and made a thin pledge to maybe take a closer look at why U.S. broadband is so expensive.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is killing all of that.

In a flimsy explanation, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr claims that having meaningful standards and ensuring that broadband is affordable are “extraneous” matters. To further prop up his agency’s apathy, he points to the recent Loper Bright Supreme Court ruling that curtail the FCC’s authority to do anything that might upset a big U.S. corporation:

“The Carr FCC’s proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, “we believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text,” the proposal said.”

We’ve noted repeatedly how this is the legal and logical incoherence at the heart of Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC. Carr wants to wield FCC authority like a tyrant, leveraging often completely nonexistent agency power to force TikTok to sell itself to Trump’s buddies, bully telecom companies into being more racist, or cajole media companies into softening their journalism of our idiot king.

The problem is, only one side can “win” this standoff, and it’s corporate power. Carr can saber rattle and threaten all he likes, but the primary agenda of Trump 2.0 (outside of the racism) is delivering the final killing blow to federal consumer protection, regulatory autonomy, and corporate oversight.

If you’re an amoral billionaire or corporation with zero interest in a habitable planet, any sort of equality, or functioning democracy, the project is going very well. If you’re an actual resident of the United States, interested in things like labor rights, clean drinking water, or evenly available and affordable broadband access, you are in very, very serious trouble.

Companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon want a federal government that just mindlessly rubber stamps their harmful mergers, then turns a blind eye to all of the harms of consolidation and market failure. And while U.S. regulators were already terrible at taking meaningful action to stop this, Trump 2.0 is making all of our regulatory capture and corruption problems immeasurably worse.

Our broken, consolidated corporate press doesn’t much want to talk about it, but U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight is effectively dead, the impact will reverberate for decades, and a significant portion of the damage of the second Trump Presidency will be permanent.

Even under an ideal situation where Trump authoritarianism is conquered and some sort of sensible alternative takes office, restoring oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T — both bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance networks — is never going to be a priority in a Congress that’s now too corrupt to function, under a broken court system that treats corporate power as an unimpeachable deity.

If the FCC was a serious agency, there’s plenty it could do to improve broadband access. It could take aim at monopoly power. It could encourage municipal broadband and local cooperatives. It could impose real penalties for service quality and privacy violations. It could implement and enforce consistent standards demanding better of our regional monopoly giants.

With only the occasional short-lived exceptions, at every opportunity the U.S. does the exact opposite, in blind service to telecom monopoly power.

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Trump — perhaps more than other presidents — often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God’s personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given him so much and asked for literally nothing in return.

The evangelical crowd cheers Trump on as he sides with Israel’s genocide, something that becomes a bit more conflicted when entities like “Jews for Jesus” mix white evangelical traits with a far older religion that generally tends to reject the supposed existence of Jesus Christ.

While evangelicals do like to throw themselves on the cross on a regular basis, it’s not self-sacrifice. It’s self-service. Christians in America do love to portray themselves as persecuted, as though the mere existence threat of death metal human equality or a swear word within hearing distance is the exact equivalent of being thrown to the lions like they were back in the good old days. (They mostly weren’t, not even then.)

Trump is one of them, at least in terms of converting self-pity to an idiot’s interpretation of selflessness. And he definitely wants those votes. Conveniently, most evangelical Christians absolutely adore periodic ceremonial events, including those overseen by the same government they swear to Gawd might be persecuting them every time their preferred candidate loses an election and/or some minority scores a free lunch at school.

All in all, Christians have it pretty good in the United States. Most people treat them as mildly annoying at worst. And most Americans (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) consider self-proclaimed Christians to be good neighbors, non-molesters of children, and potential sources of unsolicited marital advice.

And, because no one needed this more than Trump — a Christian hero despite his long history of sexual harassment, sexual assault, multiple marriages, sexualization of his own children, cheater at golf, and the proverbial rich man who, as the Bible says, would find it exceedingly difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven — Trump has delivered. We’re getting more religious “freedom” added to our alleged “separation of church and state”, whether we wanted it or not.

The Trump administration released guidance on Monday reminding federal agencies that religious expression in the workplace is protected by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act — guidance that protects employees and supervisors seeking to recruit fellow federal workers to their religion.

Such expressions are protected as long as they do not cross into harassment, the guidance says. Wearing religious symbols and staging them in office cubicles is also protected, the guidance says, as are hosting prayer groups in empty offices and posting about religious events on office bulletin boards.

An agnostic (in the political and religious sense of the word) reaffirmation of religious rights is to be commended. This ain’t that, though. While it might be taken to mean that every other employee can throw down on a rug up to five times a day while facing Mecca without interference from their federal employers, I can absolutely guarantee you this only means anyone mildly criticizing someone for hassling their fellow employees daily about their weekly Bible study will be protected by this new guidance.

The guidance doesn’t seem to add much to what already exists in terms of protection of religious expression in the workplace. But what it does add definitely crosses the line. Listed as examples of protected expression by federal employees are these (and only these) examples:

A park ranger leading a tour through a national park may join her tour group in prayer.

A doctor at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital may pray over his patient for her recovery.

While it does seem weird that a park ranger wouldn’t just hang back a bit and wait for the tour to finish praying (rather than joining them and giving them an implicit governmental blessing of their religious expression), it’s goddamn frightening that this “affirmation” of religious protections gives medical professionals (perhaps due for a scare quote…) permission to pray to their preferred god in hopes of securing a patient’s recovery. Hopefully, this is something a VA doctor might do in addition to providing actual, science-based treatment, rather than in lieu of anything stronger than some empty words hurled in the general direction of a power whose innate “higherness” has yet to be scientifically demonstrated.

That’s the bad news. The good news anyone of any religion can do a bunch of religious stuff at work without violating this guidance. Sure, there’s some vague stuff said about crossing the line into harassment, but the government bears the burden of proving this. And the fact that it’s the government loosening the reins on religious restrictions, that battle is more uphill than it ever was.

So… you know what to do, government drones? Pick literally any religion (if you don’t already have a preference) and litter cubicles, break rooms, and coworkers’ minds with its attendant detritus. I foresee a huge uptake in non-mainstream religions by government workers, who are now free to ask fellow workers if they’ve heard the good news about Satan or perhaps drape a holocaust cloak across their cubicle wall to inform others they’re not only adherents to the power of fire, but possibly willing to bodily wield it if need be.

Maybe you can just ask the names and sexes of fellow coworkers’ firstborn children because, according to your religion, Paimon will always need a willing (or even unwilling) male host. Those of you uncomfortable with small talk may just want to practice Santeria during allotted break times and/or spread salt around the entirety of the agency campus to help limit demon summoning-related chaos. If nothing else, a pithy ode to the greater of all evils is perhaps all that’s needed to brighten up a dull office:

Let’s just hope this Godsucker-pleasing performance results in a melting pot of every religion Trump has never considered real, much less realized actually exists. Christianity is — at best — running neck-and-neck with Islam. Only a white guy with a shit tan would have pushed this thing through without thinking it through. But that’s Trump for you: a guy who shoots first and fires people who ask questions later.

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Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It’s turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted it would be.

Let’s start with the most obvious sign that this law is working exactly as poorly as critics warned: VPN usage in the UK has absolutely exploded. Proton VPN reported an 1,800% spike in UK sign-ups. Five of the top ten free apps on Apple’s App Store in the UK are VPNs. When your “child safety” law’s primary achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you’ve missed the mark just a tad.

But the real kicker is what content is now being gatekept behind invasive age verification systems. Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government ID to access:

Reddit communities about stopping drinking and smoking, periods, craft beers, and sexual assault support, not to mention documentation of warSpotify for music videos tagged as 18+War footage and protest videos on XWikipedia is threatening to limit access in the UK (while actively challenging the law)

Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it.

The Wikipedia situation is particularly telling. When an educational encyclopedia that hosts over seven million articles and sees five edits per second calls your law unworkable, maybe it’s time to reconsider?

And this is all after a bunch of other smaller websites and forums shut down earlier this year when other parts of the law went into effect.

This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.

The only websites with the financial capacity to work around the government’s new regulations are the ones causing the problems in the first place. And now Meta, which already has a monopoly on a number of near-essential online activities (from local sales to university group chats), is reaping the benefits. Thousands of hamster enthusiasts are likely flooding onto Instagram as we speak, ready to be redirected into black holes of miscellaneous “content” they never asked for in the first place. The exact nature of this content is of no corporate concern. The only service rendered is to advertisers, whose pleas are helpfully interspersed between posts and videos. The people running the platform do not care what you logged on for and whether you got it.

Compare this to the beleaguered Hamster Forum. No venture capital is involved – the website was run by passionate hobbyists. They clubbed together with the express purpose of disseminating rodent intel to the people who searched for it. If its users really do move over to Instagram, they’ll find their photos and advice trapped behind a login wall, where they will only benefit other net contributors to Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Their pets will make Meta richer – cute videos are an asset if you’re trying to suck consumers into an infinite behavioural loop that only benefits you. Perhaps most unfairly, the forum’s hamster owners will have to live on the terms of people who are totally indifferent to the value of their time and knowledge.

The age verification process itself is a privacy nightmare wrapped in security theater. Users are being asked to upload selfies that get run through facial recognition algorithms, or hand over copies of their government-issued IDs to third-party companies. The facial recognition systems are so poorly implemented that people are easily fooling them with screenshots from video games—literally using images from the video game Death Stranding. This isn’t just embarrassing, it reveals the fundamental security flaw at the heart of the entire system. If these verification methods can’t distinguish between a real person and a video game character, what confidence should we have in their ability to protect the sensitive biometric data they’re collecting?

But here’s the thing: even when these systems “work,” they’re creating massive honeypots of personal data. As we’ve seen repeatedly, companies collecting biometric data and ID verification inevitably get breached, and suddenly intimate details about people’s online activity become public. Just ask the users of Tea, a women’s dating safety app that recently exposed thousands of users’ verification selfies after requiring facial recognition for “safety.”

The UK government’s response to widespread VPN usage has been predictably authoritarian. First, they insisted nothing would change:

“The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.”

But then, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle deployed the classic authoritarian playbook: dismissing all criticism as support for child predators. This isn’t just intellectually dishonest—it’s a deliberate attempt to shut down legitimate policy debate by smearing critics as complicit in child abuse. It’s particularly galling given that the law Kyle is defending will do absolutely nothing to stop actual predators, who will simply migrate to unregulated platforms or use the same VPNs that law-abiding citizens are now flocking to.

Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activity linked to their real identities. It drives users toward less secure platforms and services. It destroys small online communities that can’t afford compliance costs. And it teaches an entire generation that bypassing government surveillance is a basic life skill.

Meanwhile, the actual harms it purports to address? Those remain entirely unaddressed. Predators will simply move to unregulated platforms, encrypted messaging, or services that don’t comply. Or they’ll just use VPNs. The law creates the illusion of safety while actually making everyone less secure.

This is what happens when politicians decide to regulate technology they don’t understand, targeting problems they can’t define, with solutions that don’t work. The UK has managed to create a law so poorly designed that it simultaneously violates privacy, restricts freedom, harms small businesses, and completely fails at its stated goal of protecting children.

And all of this was predictable. Hell, it was predicted. Civil society groups, activists, legal experts, all warned of these results and were dismissed by the likes of Peter Kyle as supporting child predators.

Yet every criticism, every warning, every prediction about this law’s failures has come to pass within days of implementation. The only question now is how long it will take for the UK government to admit what everyone else already knows: the Online Safety Act is an unmitigated disaster that makes the internet less safe for everyone.

A petition set up on the UK government’s website demanding a repeal of the entire OSA received many hundreds of thousands of signatures within days. The government has already brushed it off with more nonsense, promising that the enforcer of the law, Ofcom, “will take a sensible approach to enforcement with smaller services that present low risk to UK users, only taking action where it is proportionate and appropriate, and will focus on cases where the risk and impact of harm is highest.”

But that’s a bunch of vague nonsense that doesn’t take into account that no platform wants to be on the receiving end of such an investigation, and thus will take these overly aggressive steps to avoid scrutiny.

The whole thing is a mess and yet another embarrassment for the UK. And they were all warned about it, while insisting these concerns were exaggerations.

But this isn’t just about the UK—it’s a cautionary tale for every democracy grappling with how to regulate the internet. The OSA proves that when politicians prioritize looking tough over actually solving problems, the result is legislation that harms everyone it claims to protect while empowering the very forces it claims to constrain.

What makes this particularly tragic is that there were genuine alternatives. Real child safety measures—better funding for mental health support, improved education programs, stronger privacy protections that don’t require mass surveillance—were all on the table. Instead, the UK chose the path that maximizes government control while minimizing actual safety.

The rest of the world should take note.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.

“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.

These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”

Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.

Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.

Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.

Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.

He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.

For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.

“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”

To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.

Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.

To examine those claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 men on the list of detainees first published by CBS. Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, including the fact the Trump administration knew at least 197 of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and at least 166 have tattoos, which experts have told us are not an indicator of gang membership.

When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.

He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.

“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”

The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.

Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.

“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.

Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.

They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”

The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”

Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”

Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.

The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.

Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”

Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”

Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.

About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.

Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.

This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.

Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.

Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”

In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.

The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.

Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”

During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”

That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.

As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.

Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”

But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.

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We’re becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn’t want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder for firing squads.

You’re getting the government you deserve, even if you claim you didn’t vote specifically for whatever new insanity might be hurting you personally at this moment in time. You wanted a demagogue and you got one — a man so incapable of handling the slightest bit of bad news, he feels compelled to go full Stalin the moment a factoid puts a slight dent in his self-perception as the Greatest Human Being Who Has Ever Walked The Face Of The Earth.

His party — and his enablers — spent years screaming into the faces of anyone questioning their mere humanity that “facts” were more important than “feelings.” But that was never true. Only facts that allowed them to be inhumane towards their fellow human beings mattered. All other facts should be ignored, buried, or misrepresented. And their top dude – King Shit himself — feels the same way. When the facts aren’t the facts he likes, they become subservient to his feelings.

So, when Department of Labor employment stats reflected the reality of six months of absolute financial psychopathy from President Trump, Trump decided the best response was to shoot the messenger. We can only take solace in the fact that he didn’t do this literally.

Behold the power of your Golden Calf, “we didn’t vote for this” asshats!

President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.

In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.

This reporting downplays the pure un-hingedness that is Trump’s actual social media post. The obvious outcome of massive tariffs (some threatened, some deployed) and the ejection of thousands of tax-paying, hardworking employees of US companies whose jobs will never be filled by the same white people claiming these jobs were “stolen” from them resulted in an outcome that would have been obvious to anyone who’s ever spent more than 5 minutes paying attention in an Economics class.

Job growth slowed because US manufacturers are finding that everything that isn’t uncertain is now certainly more expensive. And the ejection of more than 100,000 people from the work force via mass deportation efforts has left more holes than natural-born Americans willing to fill them.

Of course, Trump will never take the blame for anything that’s directly his fault. So he went to his own social media service to perform a public execution of the person bearing the inevitable bad news.

I’m going to quote it in full because I’m absolutely daring the Trump supporters who read this site to wade into the comment section with their defense of whatever the fuck this is:

I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This absolute coward and loser thinks job numbers are a political operation meant to make him look bad. But the numbers are what they are. While presidents have always been willing to apply spin to job numbers, no one until Trump has been willing to fire a Labor official simply for reporting facts.

Most GOP members are abject cowards. But at least a couple of them stepped up to criticize (however mildly) this transparently authoritarian action by Donald “My Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts” Trump:

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.

North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”

The biggest problem isn’t that Trump did this, although it is actually a serious problem. The biggest problem is that Trump did this despite it being immediately apparent this was done solely to punish someone for daring to publish facts that undermined the administration’s narrative on tariffs, mass deportation, and the alleged benefits of shitting the international bed on a regular basis.

But all the firings in the world won’t change the facts: the Trump administration is eviscerating everything that makes America great. And while it works towards the goal of creating a perpetual fascist state for Trump and his acolytes, it will steadily destroy everything that makes America operable. Trump will break this country and then declare his love for its corpse while fondling an American flag.

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Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced their reputation as the Nazi bar.

Last week, we got a perfect demonstration of what happens when you build your platform’s reputation around welcoming Nazis: your recommendation algorithms start treating Nazi content as more than worth tolerating, to content worth promoting.

As Taylor Lorenz reported on User Mag’s Patreon account, Substack sent push notifications to users encouraging them to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” a newsletter that “describes itself as ‘a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.'”

As you can see, the notification included the newsletter’s swastika logo, leading confused users to wonder why they were getting Nazi symbols pushed to their phones.

“I had [a swastika] pop up as a notification and I’m like, wtf is this? Why am I getting this?” one user said. “I was quite alarmed and blocked it.” Some users speculated that Substack had issued the push alert intentionally in order to generate engagement or that it was tied to Substack’s recent fundraising round. Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.

“I thought that Substack was just for diaries and things like that,” a user who posted about receiving the alert on his Instagram story told User Mag. “I didn’t realize there was such a prominent presence of the far right on the app.”

Substack’s response was predictable corporate damage control:

“We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused.”

But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.

There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.

As Lorenz notes, the Nazi newsletter that got promoted has “746 subscribers and hundreds of collective likes on Substack Notes.” More troubling, users who clicked through were recommended “related content from another Nazi newsletter called White Rabbit,” which has over 8,600 subscribers and “is also being recommended on the Substack app through its ‘rising’ leaderboard.”

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature working exactly as designed. Substack’s recommendation systems are doing precisely what they’re built to do: identify content that performs well within the platform’s ecosystem and surface it to potentially interested users. The “error” isn’t that the algorithm malfunctioned—it’s that Substack created conditions where Nazi content could thrive well enough to trigger promotional systems in the first place.

When you build a platform that explicitly welcomes Nazi content, don’t act surprised when that content performs well enough to trigger your promotional systems. When you’ve spent years defending your decision to help Nazis monetize their content, you can’t credibly claim to be “disturbed” when your algorithms recognize that Nazi content is succeeding on your platform.

The real tell here isn’t the push notification itself—it’s that Substack’s discovery systems are apparently treating Nazi newsletters as content worth surfacing to new users. That suggests these publications aren’t just surviving on Substack, they’re thriving well enough to register as “rising” content worthy of algorithmic promotion.

This is the inevitable endpoint of Substack’s content moderation philosophy. You can’t spend years positioning yourself as the platform that won’t “censor” Nazi content, actively help those creators monetize, and then act shocked when your systems start treating that content as editorially valuable.

This distinction matters enormously in terms of what sort of speech you are endorsing: there’s a world of difference between passively hosting speech and actively promoting it. When Substack defended hosting Nazi newsletters, they could claim they were simply providing infrastructure for discourse. But push notifications and algorithmic recommendations are something different—they’re editorial decisions about what content deserves amplification and which users might be interested in it.

To be clear, that’s entirely protected speech under the First Amendment as all editorial choices are protected. Substack is allowed to promote Nazis. But they should really stop pretending they don’t mean to. They’ve made it clear that they welcome literal Nazis on their platform and now it’s been made clear that their algorithm recognizes that Nazi content performs well.

This isn’t about Substack “supporting free speech”—it’s about Substack’s own editorial speech and what it’s choosing to say. They’re not just saying “Nazis welcome.” They’re saying “we think other people will like Nazi content too.”

And the public has every right to use their own free speech to call out and condemn such a choice. And use their own free speech rights of association to say “I won’t support Substack” because of this.

All the corporate apologies in the world can’t change what their algorithms revealed: when you welcome Nazis, you become the Nazi bar. And when you become the Nazi bar, your systems start working to bring more customers to the Nazis.

Your reputation remains what you allow. But it’s even more strongly connected to what you actively promote.

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We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.

The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) or G/O Media aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.

This sort of behavior has been particularly problematic at the DC gossip rag Politico, where ownership continues to implement “AI” systems that don’t really work all that well, constantly introduce new errors human editors have to correct, and engage in “behavior” that violates editorial standards. All without the input and knowledge of actual journalists or editors.

This rundown on the Politico AI mess by Brian Merchant is worth a read. He documents how in one instance, Politico Editorial staff were told just an hour before a new AI product was introduced, given zero chance to ask questions about how it would work, why it was there, or why it was being launched. The tech then immediately proceeded to make a bunch of embarrassing, rookie mistakes:

“The AI promptly generated a post that misspelled Kamala Harris’s mother’s name. The entry was taken down without comment or correction from an editor, in apparent violation of Politico’s editorial standards. Weeks later, Politico’s management deployed the AI tool again, this time in an even higher-profile setting: The vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. The feature again trampled editorial guidelines, this time transcribing verbatim Vance’s comments about “illegal immigrants”—a term that Politico writers are not allowed to use, and editors are not supposed to publish.”

Politico management introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers. It’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. Apparently the “AI” sucks at doing that, as well:

“It’s wholly behind the paywall, but when we have asked it things, it’s giving us back some pretty glaring errors,” [Politico journalist Ariel] Wittenberg says. “I asked it about ‘The Impact of President Biden’s Oil Policies,’ and it wrote me a whole page-and-a half thing, and every single policy it mentioned was a policy of Trump’s. And it cited real stories at the very bottom, from our members, the implication being that if someone is reading this, and it’s erroneous, not only does our AI not know the difference between Biden’s policies and Trump’s, but maybe the authors of the cited articles didn’t, either.”

Great stuff! This reflects the same experiences with other major media outlets that expect LLMs to genuinely understand their own outputs. You’ll recall that Apple had to pull its AI news synopses system because the AI routinely introduced glaring mistakes; VC “AI” marketing has many execs believing we’re just a few steps from full sentience, when these systems are still struggling with the very basics.

We’ve seen the same nonsense over at Microsoft, which was so keen to leverage automation to lower labor costs and glom onto ad engagement that they rushed to implement AI across the entirety of their MSN website, never really showing much concern for the fact the automation routinely produced false garbage. Google’s search automation efforts have been just as sloppy and reckless.

Again, the “automation” in this instance is also a direct reflection of the quality of Politico’s ownership, who likes Trump and actively embraces lazy “both sides” journalism that buries the truth in pursuit of fake ideological objectivity. It’s not any sort of coincidence that owners who don’t care about journalism, transparency, labor, or factual reality introduce broken tools that harm all four.

In this case, the introduction of the new automation wasn’t just rushed and lazy, it was in direct violation of the editorial union’s contract struck just last year. So union employees have since been battling with Politico via arbitration:

We’re taking @politico.com to arbitration this week for its unethical use of AI and we’re asking for your support! bit.ly/PENGuild

— PEN Guild (@pen-guild.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T19:29:36.498Z

A lot of affluent media owners have also just completely drunk the marketing Kool-Aid on modern “AI” as just a few skips away from full sentience; they genuinely believe modern LLMs are more capable than they actually are. And they’re soo keen on using this emerging technology to cut corners, “save money” and undermine and replace pesky unionized labor, they’re blind to the fact it often doesn’t work.

The CEO of Politico Owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, recently introduced a company wide mandate that every single employee in the organization has to not only use AI, but consistently file reports justifying why they don’t. This sort of stuff goes way past useful technological adoption and teeters into delusional religion, and the technology becomes a window into very ordinary human failures.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults:

And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn’t find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE’s assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on the failure to push to trial, they note that a lot of the footage contradicted the testimony of the officers. The claims of assault turned out to be descriptions of the officers assaulting the protesters.

Remember this the next time someone comes into the comments clutching their pearls about assaults on our brave dedicated federal officers, bravely dedicated to assaulting people and lying about it.

In second place, it’s a simple anonymous comment about Axios’s approach to covering Trump:

Treating fact and fiction as equal sides is bias favoring fiction.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about copyright and AI:

The message here isn’t so much “support AI everything” as “‘limiting AI-generated free speech’ is a strict subset of ’limit free speech”.

If the AI thing isn’t substantially similar to any extant copyrighted work, or its derivation from copyrighted works is fair use, then it’s usually okay. It might be slop, it might be in poor taste, etc. but we shouldn’t sacrifice free speech on the altar of “but I don’t like that speech”, or you open up the option of censorship for whoever’s in power, which is currently more obviously a bad idea than usual.

Next, it’s iria64 with a comment about the installation of a “Bias Monitor” at CBS:

They should just call it what it is… “Political Officer”

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Strawb with a comment about Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters and his defensive response after broadcasting nudity to a meeting:

Why am I not surprised he doesn’t know what a naked woman looks like?

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about the DHS using the Bible to pretend god hates migrants:

And God better keep pushing that narrative or Trump will sue him.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a reply from settsu to a comment about welfare handouts being popular among people who don’t pay taxes:

9 out of 10 billionaires heartily agree!

Finally, it’s another (this time anonymous) comment about Ryan Walters:

Hoist by his own pornhub.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee spent over five hours asking mostly pointless questions of tech CEOs, and the notion of a TikTok ban rose to prominence then started moving forward quickly. We also saw the Internet Archive’s initial response to the publisher lawsuit against it, while one Canadian publisher decided it would be a good time to go to ward against libraries in general.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we saw some surprising criticism of the FBI’s push for encryption backdoors which then underwent some initially suspicious editorial oddities. The White House finally published an answer to the petition to pardon Edward Snowden, and we flagged a warning from Ron Wyden about the DOJ. Hollywood was ramping up its demands in the wake of the USTR getting fast track authority, a judge was asking questions about Malibu Media’s practices, and Warner Music was trying to muddy the waters around the Happy Birthday copyright. This was also the week that James Woods filed a $10 million lawsuit against a random Twitter user.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the RIAA was defending its very expensive lawsuit tactics, ASCAP’s boss was turning down a debate with Larry Lessig and bizarrely calling it an attempt to silence him, Paramount was sending more bogus DMCA takedowns to fans who caught footage of a film shoot, and US Copyright Group was caught red-handed copying a competitor’s website. We were pleasantly surprised to see jailbreaking smartphones and noncommercial videos among the newly issued DMCA exemptions, then took a look at the things that didn’t make the cut. Also, we saw a grimly funny story of how copyright was finally destroying player piano music a century later.

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This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough when a company goes fully kablooey, has to shut down all their backend servers and gear, and renders their products useless. That sucks, there are ways around it, and it shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s quite different than perfectly healthy companies selling a product that has features and capabilities out of the box, only to claw back those capabilities and either shut them down or stick them behind some subscription paywall.

And that latter of those examples is what is happening again, this time from Futurehome, which makes a series of smarthome IoT products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.

That would be potentially nearly a decade of a bought product working one way, only to have its core functionality tucked behind a subscription paywall on the whim of the company. This is one of those situations that, and I don’t care what country you live in, should elicit the common sense reaction of: this shouldn’t be fucking legal. But, due to the apathy of government and the steady erosion of anything remotely representing true consumer protection, this sort of thing is happening more and more frequently.

And it’s not as though all of this functionality requires support from backend company assets, either. Some do, sure, but some of the features that suddenly don’t work appear to have nothing to do with centralized corporate servers or services.

In response, a Reddit user, according to a Reddit-provided translation of the Norwegian post, said:

I can understand to some extent that they have to do it for services that have ongoing expenses, like servers (even though I actually think it’s their problem, not mine, that they didn’t realize this was a bad idea when they sold me the solution), but a local function that only works internally in the equipment I’ve already paid for shouldn’t be blocked behind a paywall.

So what’s the explanation here? Simple: money! Futurehome recently went through bankruptcy and is blaming that situation for why it needs to suddenly create a cash percolator among the customers that already bought its products with the expectations of the functionality with which they were sold. As always, the company has insisted the subscription fees will allow it to remain solvent and, as the evergreen promise goes, “fund product development, and provide high-quality support.” We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

As you’d expect, some people are attempting to figure out how to make Futurehome products work without the subscription. Perhaps as a result of that, Futurehome shut down its own user forum in June. In addition, the CEO is complaining about how the company now has to invest time and resources to fight its own customers’ attempts to make the products they bought work like they did at the time of purchase.

Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

But is it as regrettable as your own customers suddenly finding out the thing they bought won’t work anymore because your company didn’t business well enough?

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This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society. You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts in the series.

In April 2007, Janez Potočnik, then European Commissioner for Science and Research, introduced the concept of the Fifth Freedom: the “freedom of knowledge.” His vision was simple but ambitious—enhance Europe’s ability to remain competitive through knowledge and innovation, the cornerstones of prosperity. Fast forward to today, the momentum for this Fifth Freedom is building once again, with both the Letta Report and the Mission Letter of the new EU Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation emphasizing its significance.

But how does this freedom of knowledge intersect with creativity and copyright?

AI, Learning, and the Limits of Copyright

Machine learning (ML) systems learn in a way strikingly similar to humans—by observing and copying. This raises an important question: should ML systems be allowed to freely use copyrighted materials as part of their learning process? The answer is not just about technology; it goes to the heart of what copyright law aims to protect.

Traditionally, copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This is an important distinction because it allows others to take inspiration, innovate, and build upon ideas without infringing on someone else’s creative output. When an ML system is trained, it doesn’t care about specific creative choices—like the lighting or composition of a photo. It just wants to learn the underlying pattern, such as recognizing a stop sign. Similarly, a natural language model uses written text not because it appreciates the author’s unique writing style, but because it needs to learn the structure of language.

Humans also do this all the time. We often replicate expressions when learning, but our goal is not to plagiarize someone’s unique creative touch—it’s to grasp the idea behind it. This concept is embedded in many legal precedents. For instance, in the American Geophysical Union v. Texaco case, photocopying was used not for the beauty of the prose, but simply as a convenient way to access scientific ideas. Similar issues arise in cases about software interoperability, functional objects like clothing designs, and even in disputes over yoga routines. Copyright should protect creative expression—not the ideas, facts, or functional elements that underpin them.

Why This Matters for Machine Learning

This distinction is particularly important for ML. If we allow copyright law to get in the way of machines learning from data for purely non-expressive purposes, we’re potentially hampering technological advancement. Allowing ML systems to copy for learning—without trying to replicate the creative aspects of the original work—is essential for innovation. This is not just a matter of advancing technology but also of staying true to the spirit of copyright law, which is meant to balance the interests of creators and the public good.

However, as Professor Lemley has pointed out from a U.S. law perspective, the freedom for ML to learn should have limits. If an ML system is being trained to create a song that mimics the style of Ariana Grande, it’s no longer just about learning—it’s about copying a creative expression. In such cases, the question of whether it qualifies as fair use becomes much tougher. Yet, even here, it’s crucial that copyright doesn’t end up controlling unprotectable elements like a musical genre or a broad artistic style.

Finding the Balance: Innovation and Protection

The concept of the Fifth Freedom—freedom of knowledge—cannot thrive if copyright is used to restrict learning and innovation. We need a balanced approach: one that protects the hard work of creators, while ensuring that copyright doesn’t stifle the fundamental right to learn, innovate, and build upon existing knowledge. This is especially relevant now, as AI and machine learning shape the future of creativity and the knowledge economy in Europe. If we get this balance right, we can ensure that both creativity and innovation continue to flourish in the digital age.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.

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Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct*. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.*

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

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

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

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A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and a half-smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.]

Stolen valor even then.

Let that image burn its way into your psyche as I head off to rant and rail against the irritants in the commentary flow, who not only fuck shit up for the rest of us, but also think (one way or the other) that facts shouldn’t mean as much as their personal feelings.

Those of you who tune in regularly know that I don’t care for Trump. Never have. Never will. And I am not only flabbergasted he’s managed to be elected twice, but consider this unwelcome second coming to be a leading indicator of this nation’s willingness to go fascist on main, rather than just another anomaly we’ll hopefully soon be footnoting in American history.

The weird thing is that my extremely caustic takes on Trump have provoked two equally strident and stupid responses.

On the more persistent end, there’s a commenter out there who seems to believe I’m cutting Trump a blank check on rights violations by referring to his current term as an “administration,” rather than a regime.

Well, if I may be so bold (and who’s going to stop me!), fuck right off. I’ll call it a “regime” on the regular if Trump somehow manages to get the nation’s top court to approve of a third term, which would probably result in Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave, if only he weren’t so incapacitated by his presumably lingering polio.

Speaking of polio, let’s not forget Mr. Measles, the guy currently running the Dept. of Health and Human Services into the deeper, darker parts of worldwide life expectancy charts. Hey, hitting 80 is no longer an expected outcome in the Free World. If you’re lucky, you’ll die of rape-related pregnancy complications in the Federal Republic of Texas as doctors do nothing they can to prevent a child from being born into abject poverty and abuse, even if it means killing the mother to give this kid a shot at shooting up his school.

On the other hand, I have commenters complaining I’m “too biased” when I cover issues related to the hateful ratfucking bigots currently running this country.

Please enjoy my apology to these weirdos, who seem to think encroaching fascism should be covered “fairly” — something composed and performed by punkish victims of every housing crisis over the last 20 years, Japanther:

And that’s the weird thing about this so-called “discourse.” Some people want you to be angrier. Other people want you to be less angry.

But they’re both wrong. You can’t always get what you want, as every cover band has ever said when covering the Rolling Stones past 11 pm. (The “Satisfaction” crowd has already left to drive home the babysitter. The crowd that remains may still want some crowd-pleasers, but just as equally they want the stuff that makes them feel bad.)

You get this instead, sickos:

And that’s how it goes here at Techdirt. You may be pleased by certain posts — or perhaps all posts. But your pleasure isn’t the impetus for the post’s creation. We obviously hope you’ll be pleased by our posts (a hopefulness that covers everyone from the other Tim to Mike to Karl to Glyn to Cathy to every other writer who allows us to publish their stuff under the Techdirt logo), but your personal pleasure is not what drives the creation of content, despite the fervent belief of certain commenters.

What we do is what we want to do. And while I’m always willing to accept criticism over factual and/or legal inaccuracies in my posts (how else would I learn?!), I’m extremely opposed to vibes-based criticism of my work. If you have facts, bring them. But don’t expect any writer here to neuter their posts just because it didn’t appeal to people who think other terms should be used just so they might feel a little more comfortable reading the content.

That’s the way it works here. We don’t write because we want to please everyone. We write because WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. If you want “both sides” writing, you’ve got everything from the NYT editorial board to the back of mayonnaise packets to give you what you want. But if you’re showing up here specifically to bitch about perceived biases, you’re in the wrong place. The bias exists. And it is SPECTACULAR.

Don’t bring vibes to a fact fight. Get in or get out, but don’t expect Techdirt to bend a writer’s will to satisfy particularly lazy and argumentative commenters. We write what WE BELIEVE. For everything else, there’s… I don’t know… most of the rest of internet?

Don’t be these people, whether you’ve bought into the Krassensteins or the weird concept that reporting on events that affect your life should be an affect-less drone you can tune out until you feel like adding your particular bitching to a site’s comment section. Either way, you’re just performative but somehow feel you’re justified in attacking people who have been doing this for real for years before it even mattered to you.

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There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber:

“SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.”

Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale.

Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.

So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused.

The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month.

Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently.

Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee:

“In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.”

Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories.

Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.

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A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media’s idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups bent on censoring any content that doesn’t align with their own viewpoints (which they insist become your viewpoints as well). The point of Karl’s post was to correctly point out that Collective Shout’s decision to go after the payment processors for the major video game marketplaces over their offering NSFW games shouldn’t be hidden from the public in the interest of clickbait non-journalism.

But that whole thing about Collective Shout putting on a pressure campaign on payment processors is in and of itself a big deal, as is the response to it. Both Steam and itch.io recently either removed or de-indexed a ton of games they’re labeling NSFW, chiefly along guidelines clearly provided by the credit card companies themselves. Now, Collective Shout will tell you that it is mostly interested in going after games that depict vile actions in some ways, such as rape, child abuse, and incest.

No Mercy. That’s the name of the incest-and-rape-focused game that was geo-blocked in Australia this April, following a campaign by the local pressure group Collective Shout. The group, which stands against “the increasing pornification of culture”, then set its sights on a broader target – hundreds of other games they identified as featuring rape, incest, or child sexual abuse on Steam and itch.io. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us,” said the group of its latest campaign.

The move was effective. Steam began removing sex-related games it deemed to violate the standards of its payment processors, presenting the choice as a tradeoff in a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun: “We are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.”

Itch.io followed that up shortly afterwards with its de-indexing plan, but went further and did this with all NSFW games offered on the platform. Unlike Steam, itch.io was forthcoming as to their reasoning for its actions. And they were remarkably simple.

“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” Corcoran said. “To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”

Digital marketplaces being unable to collect payment through trusted partners would be, to put it tersely, the end of their business. Those same payment processors can get predictably itchy about partnering with platforms that host content that someone out there, or many someones as part of a coordinated campaign, may not like for fear that will sully their reputation. And because these are private companies we’re talking about, their fear along with any of their own sense of morality are at play here. The end result is a digital world filled with digital marketplaces that all exist under an umbrella of god-like payment processors that can pretty much dictate to those other private entities what can be on offer and what cannot.

And, as an executive from Appcharge chimed in, the processors will hang this all on the amount of fraud and chargebacks that come along with adult content, but that doesn’t change the question about whether payment processors should be neutral on legal but morally questionable content or not. Because, as you would expect, the aims of folks like Collective Shout almost certainly don’t end with things like rape and incest.

It’s possible that Collective Shout’s campaign highlighted a level of operational and reputational risk that payment processors weren’t aware of, and of a severity they didn’t expect. “I’m guessing it’s also the moral element,” Tov-Ly says. “It just makes sense, right? Why would you condone incest or rape promoting games?”

Tov-Ly is of the opinion that payment processors offer a utility, and should have no more role in the moral arbitration of art than your electricity company – meaning, none at all. “Whenever you open that Pandora’s box, you’re not impartial anymore,” he says. “Today it’s rape games and incest, but tomorrow it could be another lobbying group applying pressure on LGBT games in certain countries.”

We’ve already seen this sort of thing when it comes to book and curriculum bans that are currently plaguing far too much of the country. When porn can mean Magic Treehouse, the word loses all meaning.

What is actually happening is that payment processors are feeling what they believe is “public pressure”, but which is actually just a targeted and coordinated campaign from a tiny minority of people who watched V For Vendetta and thought it was an instruction manual. Well, the public has caught wind of this, as have game publishers that might be caught up in this censorship or whatever comes next, and coordinated contact campaigns to payment processors to complain about this new censorship are being conducted.

Gilbert Martinez had just poured himself a glass of water and was pacing his suburban home in San Antonio, Texas while trying to navigate Mastercard’s byzantine customer service hotline. He was calling to complain about recent reports that the company is pressuring online gaming storefrontslike Steam and Itch.io to ban certain adult games. He estimates his first call lasted about 18 minutes and ended with him lodging a formal complaint in the wrong department.

Martinez is part of a growing backlash to Steam and Itch.io purging thousands of games from their databases at the behest of payment processing companies. Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit for the new wave of censorship after inciting a write-in campaign against Visa and Mastercard, which it accused of profiting off “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse game sales.” Some fans of gaming are now mounting reverse campaigns in the hopes of nudging Visa and Mastercard in the opposite directions.

If noise is what is going to make these companies go back to something resembling sanity, this will hopefully do the trick. We’re already seeing examples of games that are being unjustly censored, described as porn when they are very much not. Not to mention instances where nuance is lost and the “porn” content is actually the opposite.

Vile: Exhumed is a textbook example of what critics of the sex game purge always feared: that guidelines aimed at clamping down on pornographic games believed to be encouraging or glorifying sexual violence would inevitably ensnare serious works of art grappling with difficult and uncomfortable subject matter in important ways. Who gets to decide which is which? For a long time, it appeared to be Steam and Itch.io. Last week’s purges revealed it’s actually Visa and Mastercard, and whoever can frighten them the most with bad publicity.

Some industry trade groups have also weighed in. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) released a statement stating that “censorship like this is materially harmful to game developers” and urging a dialogue between “platforms, payment processors, and industry leaders with developers and advocacy groups.” “We welcome collaboration and transparency,” it wrote. “This issue is not just about adult content. It is about developer rights, artistic freedom, and the sustainability of diverse creative work in games.”

This is the result of a meddling minority attempting to foist their desires on everyone else, plain and simple. Choking the money supply is a smart choice, sure, but one that should be recognized in this case for what it is: censorship based on proclivities that are not widely shared. And if there really is material in these games that is illegal, it should obviously be done away with.

But we should not be playing this game of pretending content that is not widely seen as immoral should somehow be choked of its ability to participate in commerce.

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This too will be swept away by this administration’s steady stream of injustices, but it’s still worth highlighting before it’s buried by even worse news later.

The mass deportation program enacted by Trump — one that intends to turn ICE into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has already seen innocent foreigners declared “gang members,” college students arrested for opinion pieces they wrote for the school paper, and streets, businesses, homeless shelters, and courtrooms invaded by people in masks everyone is just supposed to assume work for the US government and have the legal authority to do the things they’re doing.

Due process rights have been universally ignored, along with a whole lot of other constitutional rights, ranging from free speech protections to warrant requirements for ICE officers.

Now, there’s this: another inexplicable — and apparently unending — violation of constitutional rights the US has extended to foreign-born residents and visitors for most of its history as an independent nation.

Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.

“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”

And there it is: Guevara was arrested for reporting on a “No Kings Day” protest — the nationwide protests that pissed in Trump’s birthday Cheerios so hard he immediately walked back earlier comments suggesting he’d no longer target the hardworking migrants employed by so many of his big business supporters.

Everything happening to journalist Mario Guevara right now is extremely vindictive, which is extremely on-brand for the Trump administration and the dozens of local law enforcement agencies willing to be even worse than they are already just to score some brownie points with the current regime.

Guevara was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of “pedestrian in roadway” while documenting a “No Kings” protest in Doraville, Georgia. When he was arrested, he was streaming his coverage to more than 1 million Spanish-speaking followers on Facebook.

Law enforcement officers (after a lot of fucking him around) seized his phone and tossed him into a nearby ICE detention center — one currently “supported” by “mass deportations give us a money boner” private prison firm, GEO Group. This all happened despite the arresting agency dropping the charges against Guevara.

Rather than allow Guevara — who is apparently in this country legally while his green card process continues — to return to the streets, another law enforcement agency stepped in to keep him locked up.

Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.

Given that the charges brought (and dropped) against Guevara by the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office were traffic-related, there cannot possibly be any probable cause to support the seizure of his phone, much less his continued detention at the ICE facility in Folkston, Georgia.

According to Guevara’s lawyer, no agency — federal or local — is capable or willing to explain what happened to his phone, nor whose possession it’s in when (or if) he’s given a chance to retrieve it.

“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.

The rationale for this phone seizure — as well as Guevara’s continued detention (which included a brief stay in general population at an Atlanta federal prison) — appears to be nothing more than “Because fuck you, that’s why.” That’s the standard operating procedure for ICE, something that’s only become more common and more emboldened under Trump and his compliant band of bigots.

All of this will likely stay buried by ICE and its local enablers for as long as possible. And there’s no guarantee anyone involved with this will actually comply with any order from any court involved in the litigation that will inevitably follow Guevara’s release. The administration has made it clear it doesn’t believe courts have the power to stop it from doing whatever it wants. And that attitude is certainly going to spread to every local law enforcement agency that aids and abets the administration’s unconstitutional activities.

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Let’s say you’re a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you’ve got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone’s talking about. Just feed it a prompt like “write me a securities opinion with lots of citations about scienter” and see what happens.

What could go wrong?

Well, you might end up like Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the District of New Jersey, who just had to withdraw his entire opinion after a lawyer politely pointed out that it was riddled with fabricated quotes, nonexistent case citations, and completely backwards case outcomes. The kind of errors that have a very specific signature—the same signature that’s gotten lawyers sanctioned for over a year now.

Now, there are a few possible explanations here. Maybe Judge Neals was having the worst research day in judicial history and just happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence. Maybe there’s some other explanation for why a federal judge would confidently cite cases for propositions they directly contradict.

Or maybe—and this is just a thought—Judge Neals used the same AI tools that have been getting lawyers in trouble for over a year, and somehow expected a different result.

The particularly puzzling part is that courts have been sanctioning lawyers for exactly these AI hallucination mistakes since 2023. If you’re a federal judge, you’ve probably seen some of these cases come across your desk. You know what AI hallucinations look like. You know they’re a problem. So what’s the excuse here?

Let’s catalog the damage, shall we? According to the complaint letter from lawyer Andrew Lichtman, Neals’ opinion included:

Multiple quotes attributed to cases that don’t actually contain those quotesThree cases where he got the outcomes completely backwards (motions that were granted described as denied, and vice versa)A case supposedly from the Southern District of New York that doesn’t exist there (probably confused with a similar case from New Jersey)Quotes attributed to defendants that they never actually made

The fake quotes are particularly telling. They sound perfectly legal-ish: “classic evidence of scienter,” “false statements in their own right,” “the importance of the product to the company’s financial success supports the inference of scienter.” These are exactly the kind of plausible-sounding but ultimately fabricated language that large language models love to generate.

Now, if you’re thinking “this sounds familiar,” you’re right. We’ve been covering lawyers getting hammered for AI-generated fake cases since 2023. Just recently, three lawyers got kicked off a case for citing five hallucinated cases. The pattern is always the same: cases that sound real, citations that kind of make sense, but turn out to be complete fiction when you actually check.

And you’re supposed to check.

The legal profession has been learning this lesson the hard way. Courts have been clear: if you use AI tools, you’d better verify everything. But apparently that memo didn’t make it to the federal bench in New Jersey.

You might recall that Judge Kevin Newsom on the Eleventh Circuit actually wrote a thoughtful opinion about how AI tools could be useful in legal practice. He went into detail on all the ways that using a tool like this only makes sense in a very narrow set of circumstances: not for drafting an opinion, but for trying to query the common understanding of a word or phrase.

It’s almost like Neals read that opinion and thought, “You know what? I bet I can do better.”

But here’s the really concerning part: this stuff doesn’t stay contained. Other lawyers in a separate case had already cited Neals’ now-withdrawn opinion as persuasive authority. Those made-up quotes and backwards case outcomes were starting to burrow their way into the legal record, creating fake precedent that could influence future cases.

Neals’ June 30 opinion has already influenced a parallel case also playing out in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. That case also centers on allegations by shareholders that a biopharma company—in this instance, Outlook Therapeutics Inc.—lied to them about a product.

Citing Neals’ decision as a “supplemental authority,” lawyers for Outlook shareholders argued against the company’s motion for dismissing the class action.

This is the nightmare scenario that legal tech experts have been warning about. When a private lawyer cites fake cases, it gets caught pretty quickly by opposing counsel or judges. But when a federal judge publishes fake legal standards in an official opinion? Other lawyers assume it’s reliable. They cite it. Courts rely on it. The hallucinations metastasize through the system.

In that other case, lawyers for Outlook had to also alert the judge that the CoreMedix decision “contains pervasive and material inaccuracies,” which is a nice term for “judicial AI slop.” But, still, what a world in which you need lawyers to waste time telling judges that the cases opposing counsel are citing may be real cases… but are based on a ruling by a judge who appears to have used AI.

Bloomberg notes that there’s “no mention of AI in the complaints the attorneys have directed at Judge Neals.” Which, sure, maybe the judge was just having a really, really bad day and happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence.

But come on. Everyone in this story—the judge, the lawyers, the reporters—knows exactly what this looks like. They’re just too polite to say it.

Look, we get it. AI tools are tempting. They can draft reasonable-sounding legal language faster than you can type. But as we’ve seen over and over again, they’re also perfectly happy to make stuff up with complete confidence. That’s why verification isn’t optional—it’s literally the bare minimum of professional competence.

This isn’t really a story about one judge making some mistakes. It’s about the broader pattern of people in positions of authority not understanding the tools they’re using.

The technology isn’t going away. AI tools will probably become more sophisticated, and they’ll certainly become more ubiquitous. But that doesn’t change the fundamental responsibility to verify what they produce. Lawyers learned this lesson the expensive way—through sanctions, being kicked-off cases, and professional embarrassment. Apparently, some judges are going to have to learn it too.

The fact that he had to withdraw the entire opinion suggests these weren’t minor errors that could be fixed with a quick correction. According to the lawyers who complained, the opinion contained “pervasive and material inaccuracies.” That’s not a typo—that’s a fundamental breakdown in the basic duty to get the facts right.

So what happens next? Maybe Judge Neals will issue a corrected opinion—one where he actually reads the cases he cites and verifies that the quotes are real. Maybe he’ll quietly implement some verification procedures in his chambers. Or maybe he’ll just hope everyone forgets this happened.

But the broader lesson is pretty clear: if you’re going to use AI tools to help with legal work, you’d better understand their limitations. They’re great at generating plausible-sounding text. They’re terrible at accuracy. And if you’re a federal judge whose opinions carry the weight of law, that’s probably something you should have figured out before hitting “publish.”

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The “worst of the worst” ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry.

The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it’s doing “God’s work” is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance.

Because there simply aren’t enough criminals to satisfy Trump ghoul-in-chief Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, ICE and the DHS are now targeting anyone seeming vaguely foreign, no matter how much reality the Trump administration has to ignore and how many rights it needs to violate to accomplish this.

Rather than find dangerous criminals, Trump’s hate squad is going after taxpayers, productive workers, poor people in need of medical assistance, and literally anyone who looks brown enough to be detained for possible removal.

Migrants are more respectful of US laws than natural-born, whiter citizens. They also do the jobs most people fortunate enough to be born here won’t do. There’s a vacuum being created that will never be filled as long as people like Trump are in charge.

ICE has been behaving like a rogue agency for years now, but has been given explicit permission to go wild now that Trump’s back at the helm. That’s why things like this — incidents that have no (non-World War II) parallel prior to Trump’s second term in office — are making headlines almost daily across the nation:

Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ICE agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.

Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens.

That’s NYC youth baseball coach Youman Wilder relating his recent run-in with ICE officers. I’m sure the officers saw an opportunity to round up a bunch of kids without being subjected to invocations of rights or other objections from their parents. Unfortunately for them, they ran into Wilder, who refused to allow ICE to intimidate these kids into an ICE detention center.

ICE, of course, issued a statement that is just as meaningless as its untargeted operations all across the nation:

(A spokesperson said that ICE had not conducted any recent “enforcement activity” in the vicinity of the park.)

Of course it didn’t. This wasn’t actually “enforcement activity.” This was just some ICE officers hoping to luck into a few detentions. It wasn’t an operation. It was a crime of opportunity. So, it obviously can’t be called “enforcement activity,” especially when the officers decided to back down once they encountered a slight bit of resistance. This is an empty statement, one as hollow as the souls of everyone standing behind it.

That’s why ICE has been spotted roaming around homeless shelters, schools, libraries, and even a Puerto Rican history museum — despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are, in full fact, natural born American citizens!

And the deflection above makes even less sense when you take a look at the directive Trump’s DHS rescinded to make way for the oppression of some of the most powerless people in this nation, especially if they aren’t recognizably white.

Issued January 20, 2025 — literally the same day Trump was sworn in for the second time — this memo rescinds a directive issued by then-DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas less than four years earlier. What got rolled back by Trump’s DHS were blanket protections for areas mostly filled with children or people seeking help from medical providers or other government agencies.

The list of “protected areas” ICE should not be engaging in untargeted enforcement efforts included schools, daycares, healthcare facilities, places of worship, playgrounds, youth centers, day care providers, foster care operations, social service providers, disaster relief centers, funerals, weddings, and people attending/participating in protected First Amendment activity like protests or rallies.

And, of course, this is where the current version of ICE is looking to pick people off. While most of its efforts have focused on places of employment (again, an extremely dubious use of resources), it has expanded to cover a lot of places that might have seemed a bit too close to the lines drawn by this previous guidance to be considered an acceptable risk.

It’s not that ICE is any better or worse in terms of personnel since Trump took office. It’s that those overseeing ICE operations have gotten worse and somehow have found enough people in the ICE ranks willing to send officers into places that previously would have been considered off-limits, if not actually morally repugnant to ICE officers supposedly tasked with finding “the worst of worst” migrants to deport.

And if there are a lot of ICE officers who disagree with the new tactics, it’s on them to exit the department before they become a further part of the problem. Standing by while others engage in evil doesn’t absolve you of their sins. It just makes you complicit in them. And if you’re the sort of thug who actually thinks it’s a good idea to accost kids playing baseball, you’re a terrible human being who should never have been allowed to wield as much power as you do. You’re no soldier in God’s army and you sure as shit aren’t worthy of living in the nation that employs you.

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Here’s the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale.

I spent last week at TrustCon, the premier annual conference for the trust and safety industry (you can see our live podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, here), listening to people trying to square this impossible circle.

The trust & safety space is a strange one in that I think it’s one of the least understood but most important industries that impacts tools most people use every day. So many people misunderstand the role of trust & safety professionals often (falsely) thinking that they are censors (they are not) or that they have some magical ability to stop bad things on the internet (they do not).

As Alex Feerst wrote for us a few years ago, trust and safety is largely made up of caring people who really, really are trying to make the internet a better place, figuring out the best way to create rules for specific platforms that encourage good/helpful/useful behavior and minimize bad/dangerous/risky behavior. Every platform has different rules and incentive structures, but every platform that hosts third party speech needs to have some sort of rules, with some sort of enforcement mechanisms.

This is true elsewhere as well. City council meetings have rules. Your home owners association has processes. The book club you’re in has some guidelines. The idea is that in a society where groups form for common purposes, there always need to be some sort of principles to help people get along without causing damage. And each group can create their own rules and their own enforcement—some may be stricter than others, but people get to decide which sites and which services with which rules and enforcement they feel most comfortable with, and use those.

A ton of trust & safety people legitimately care about making services work better and be safer for everyone. For all the talk of how they’re “censors,” a huge percentage of them come out of human rights and free speech work. For all the talk of how they’re holding back progress, a ton of them are there because they believe in the power of the internet to make the world better and are trying to help.

And yet many people believe that trust & safety people are something they are not. There are those, like Marc Andreessen (who as a board member for Meta and many other internet companies absolutely should know better), who believe that trust & safety is “the enemy of progress.” Or there are those, like Jim Jordan, who falsely believe that those keeping the internet safe are engaged in a vast conspiracy of censorship for merely enforcing the rules on private platforms.

But there are also those who seem to imagine too much power in the hands of trust & safety professionals and expect them to fix the inherent problems of humanity and society, something they could never do in the first place. We see regulators who think that companies need to be forced into doing things because their CEOs don’t care—but all that really tends to do is limit the ability of trust & safety folks to craft better, more creative solutions to the problems that human users bring to any service. Because as more government mandates come down from on high, the more those companies are forced to start checking boxes to show “compliance” rather than letting trust & safety experts actually figure out what works best.

It is a thankless task, but a necessary task. It’s not about censorship or holding back progress. Quite the opposite. It’s about making the wider internet safer for more people so that more people can benefit from the internet.

And my takeaway from TrustCon is that it’s being made much, much harder by those who don’t understand it.

One interesting thing I heard from multiple people was how the success of Jonathan Haidt’s “Anxious Generation” book had been a huge disaster for the entire field of trust & safety on multiple levels. I heard it from a couple different people on the first day and it took me a bit by surprise. After all, the book has been out for over a year, and while I have written about how it’s full of garbage cherry picked and misleading research that has done real damage in terms of the public, the media, and policymakers’ beliefs about child safety online, I had not considered as much the impact on actual online safety.

As I learned from talking to folks in the field, the success of the book harmed safety efforts in multiple ways:

The book has cemented the false narrative that social media is inherently harmful to all kids, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary (the evidence suggests social media is very helpful for some kids, neutral for most, and only harmful for a very small number—and often the harm is because of other, untreated, issues).This means that so much effort has been put towards the backwards, impossible, and harmful goal of blocking kids entirely from social media, which means it has taken away from actual interventions that help. That is, it has resulted in less work on better safety tools for kids and better education of how to use the tools in an age appropriate way, with almost all of the efforts being focused on questionable and privacy-destroying age verification.The narrative also further cements the idea that there is no role for thoughtful trust & safety interventions, assuming that a pure abstinence approach is the only possible approach.

In many ways, it’s an almost exact replica of failed “abstinence only” efforts around drugs, alcohol, and sex. We’re making the same damn mistake all over again, and so many people are willing to trust it because it’s in a best-selling book.

But there was a larger through-line in some of the discussions, which revolved around how the general “worldview” has changed on trust and safety, with attacks coming from across the broad political spectrum. You have some places, including the EU, the UK, and Australia, where governments haven’t bothered to understand the natural trade-offs of trust & safety and seem to think they can regulate the internet to safety. Meanwhile, books like Haidt’s have convinced policymakers that the solution to online harms is keeping kids off platforms entirely, rather than building better safety tools and better educating kids how to use services appropriately.

That’s a fool’s errand.

At the other extreme, you have the MAGA VC world who falsely believe that trust & safety is about censorship and is evil and shouldn’t exist at all. And, in the US, those people currently have tremendous power, leading to nonsense from companies like Meta and X to falsely imply that they can remove safeguards and guardrails and nothing will go wrong. So far, that hasn’t worked out too well, mainly because it’s based on a totally faulty understanding of how all this works.

The end result is… not great.

Trust & safety professionals I spoke to at TrustCon kept talking about how this environment has done tremendous damage to their ability to actually keep things safe. I heard Daphne Keller’s piece about how regulators were turning trust & safety into a compliance function so many times at TrustCon, I think it was the unofficial article of the conference.

This gets to the heart of what I heard over and over: trust & safety professionals want to create better, safer services online, but feel trapped between impossible demands. Regulators want them to solve problems that can’t be solved through content moderation. Politicians attack them as censors. Best-selling authors like Jonathan Haidt blame them for harming children when they’re desperately trying to help, pushing everyone toward the failed “abstinence-only” approach of blocking kids from platforms entirely rather than building age-appropriate safety tools.

It’s an impossible situation to deal with, especially for a bunch of people who mostly, legitimately, are just trying to get people to play nice online in order to enjoy the wonder that is a global communication network.

Making this worse, some commentators are drawing exactly the wrong lessons from this crisis. Dean Jackson’s “realist’s perspective” on trust & safety concludes that only “state power” can realistically fix things—missing that regulations are already making trust & safety harder by forcing compliance theater over actual safety work.

A realist assessment of the current moment suggests that one force capable of moving tech titans in a better direction—perhaps the only force short of a mass consumer movement—is state power.

This echoes what I heard about Haidt’s influence: his book’s success has convinced everyone that social media is inherently harmful to all kids, sucking resources away from nuanced interventions that might actually help. Instead of building better safety tools and a better overall ecosystem, everyone’s fixated on impossible age verification schemes. It’s abstinence-only education for the internet age. It’s creating “trust and safety theater” rather than actually building up either trust or safety.

We talked about this on the podcast, where I noted I find Dean one of the more thoughtful journalists on this beat, but I felt this piece missed the mark. The piece is nuanced and certainly discusses the tradeoffs here, but seems to view the current state—where trust & safety is viewed so negatively across the board—as a kind of permanent state, and concludes that the only real way to deal with this is via state power telling the companies what to do.

It strikes me as an odd conclusion that we need “state power” to make a better internet, when one of the big takeaways from the conference was how regulations are consistently making it more difficult for trust & safety folks to do their job well, and are instead focused on regulatory compliance—checking boxes to keep regulators happy, rather than implementing systems and policies that actually keep people safer online.

This impossible situation helps explain why Casey Newton’s similar critique of the industry—that trust & safety leaders are, effectively, cowering and unwilling to speak up—also misses the mark. Newton wants them to quit their jobs and write op-eds defending their work. But why would they?

Look what happened to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust & safety, when he spoke truthfully about his work: he was lied about, doxxed, and driven from his home. That’s the reward you get for public honesty in this space.

Newton’s frustration is understandable, but his solution—public martyrdom—ignores the basic risk assessment these professionals do for a living. When regulators, politicians, and pundits are all attacking you from different angles, going public just paints a bigger target on your back. And for what benefit? Better to keep your head down, check whatever boxes keep the wolves at bay, and try to actually make things better from within the constraints you’re given.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the kind of thing that people who care will do in these wild and ridiculous times.

I will note that many of the sessions at TrustCon this year (way more than in the past) were off-limits to the media. TrustCon lanyard badges indicate if you’re in the media or not (every year they accidentally give me a different lanyard, and I remind them that I’m press and should be given the press lanyard). It sucks a bit for me, because it means I don’t get to go to those sessions, but given the state of everything, it’s totally understandable.

Trust & safety folks are legitimately working to make the services you and I rely on better. It’s an impossible task. You and I will disagree with decisions made on every platform. I guarantee you that people who work at these platforms will also disagree with some of the decisions made because there are no right answers. There are, as one friend in trust & safety likes to say, “only least bad options.” All options are bad.

But making the “least bad” decision still involves careful thought, deliberation, and understanding of tradeoffs. TrustCon is an opportunity to share those difficult discussions and to think through the tradeoffs and considerations. And given how the press so frequently misrepresents those tradeoffs, it’s not the least bit surprising to me that many sessions decided to keep them out.

So what’s the solution? Stop expecting magic from people doing impossible work.

Trust & safety professionals aren’t going to solve humanity’s problems. They can’t make perfect content moderation decisions at the scale of billions. They can’t eliminate all harmful content without also eliminating lots of legitimate speech. These are not bugs in the system—they’re features of trying to moderate human behavior at internet scale.

Instead of attacking them from all sides, we need to create space for them to make the least bad choices available. That means regulators who understand the natural tradeoffs involved rather than demanding impossible outcomes. It means politicians who don’t scapegoat them for broader social problems. And it means recognizing that while their work is imperfect, the alternative—no moderation at all—is far worse.

The internet isn’t broken because trust & safety is doing a bad job. It’s strained because we’ve asked them to solve problems that can’t be solved through content moderation alone. Until we acknowledge that basic reality, we’ll keep making their impossible job even harder.

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A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars.

The researchers found that given the limited nature of satellite physics, the more people that use Starlink, the slower the network is going to get. That’s not a surprise to users who have increasingly seen slowdowns on the network over the last four years, resulting in speeds that often don’t even meet the FCC’s fairly weak definition for broadband (100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up).

The researchers estimated that pushing the network past any more than 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile results in significant slowdowns that will get worse. That’s why, they note, it’s a terrible idea for the Trump administration to redirect infrastructure bill grant money from more reliable (often fiber-based and locally owned) ISPs and instead give it to Elon Musk:

“Many State Offices are concerned that Starlink proposals may be the lowest bid and alternative proposals may not be within the 15% window for consideration. What this analysis presents is that across many geographic areas Starlink may not be a qualified bidder as it may be unable to attain the required 100/20 Mbps service level (and, in deploying Starlink services, may actually degrade pre-existing users’ services to the point that they no longer receive minimal broadband speeds).”

Techdirt has been noting for years how Starlink is a niche service. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand will be challenging if not impossible.

Some Wall Street analysts have been talking about the Starlink capacity crunch since at least 2001 (and mostly getting ignored). Those same analysts have raised questions about whether Starlink can meet its satellite launch goals in order to meet projected targets (spoiler: no).

But Starlink has also been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. And the service is also too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. It’s getting even more expensive as Starlink applies up to $750 “congestion charges” in areas where it knows it can’t meet demand.

This is all before you get to the fact the company’s CEO is an overt white supremacist who basically purchased his own authoritarian U.S. government before his ego ruined the fun.

So yeah, Starlink is a good option if you’re in the middle of nowhere with no other access, can afford it, and have no qualms about doing business with a white supremacist.

It’s not so great if you care about the environment, like to shop ethically, are on a fixed budget, or want to use taxpayer money to ensure widespread broadband availability. Still, because many Republicans still worship at the feet of Elon Musk, they tend to view Starlink as almost akin to magic, helping them justify throwing billions in undeserved subsidies at their billionaire benefactor.

The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars in subsidies to deliver Starlink to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC reversed the funding, stating (correctly) that Starlink’s bid gamed the system and they weren’t sure that Starlink could consistently meet program speed requirements.

That rollback by the Biden FCC resulted in no limit of crying and teeth-gnashing by Elon Musk and Republicans, who have since dedicated themselves to throwing billions more at the billionaire.

There’s always waste in these programs. But some of the money being directed toward Elon Musk’s congested and expensive satellite service is money directed away from popular community-owned and operated fiber providers, or many local small businesses with a genuine, vested interest in bettering the local communities they serve. In short, it has the very real potential to actually make U.S. broadband worse. Under the pretense that we’re fixing the problem for good.

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Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we’ve bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game console space, it’s also reared its ugly, anti-consumer head in the realm of everything from smart home devices, emotional support robots (yes, seriously), and even exercise equipment.

It seems like a simple concept that everyone should be able to agree to: if I buy a product from you that does x, y, and z, you don’t get to remove x, y, or z remotely after I’ve made that purchase. How we’ve gotten to a place where companies can simply remove, or paywall, product features without recourse for the customer they essentially bait and switched is beyond me.

But it keeps happening. The most recent example of this is with Echelon exercise bikes. Those bikes previously shipped to paying customers with all kinds of features for ride metrics and connections to third-party apps and services without anything further needed from the user. That all changed recently when a firmware update suddenly forced an internet connection and a subscription to a paid app to make any of that work.

As explained in a Tuesday blog post by Roberto Viola, who develops the “QZ (qdomyos-zwift)” appthat connects Echelon machines to third-party fitness platforms, like Peloton, Strava, and Apple HealthKit, the firmware update forces Echelon machines to connect to Echelon’s servers in order to work properly. A user online reported that as a result of updating his machine, it is no longer syncing with apps like QZ, and he is unable to view his machine’s exercise metrics in the Echelon app without an Internet connection.

Affected Echelon machines reportedly only have full functionality, including the ability to share real-time metrics, if a user has the Echelon app active and if the machine is able to reach Echelon’s servers.

Want to know how fast you’re going on the bike you’re sitting upon? That requires an internet connection. Want to get a sense of how you performed on your ride on the bike? That requires an internet connection. And if Echelon were to go out of business? Then your bike just no longer works beyond the basic function of pedaling it.

And the ability to use third-party apps is reportedly just, well, gone.

For some owners of Echelon equipment, QZ, which is currently rated as the No. 9 sports app on Apple’s App Store, has been central to their workouts. QZ connects the equipment to platforms like Zwift, which shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising. It has also enabled new features for some machines, like automatic resistance adjustments. Because of this, Viola argued in his blog that QZ has “helped companies grow.”

“A large reason I got the [E]chelon was because of your app and I have put thousands of miles on the bike since 2021,” a Reddit user told the developer on the social media platform on Wednesday.

Instead of happily accepting that someone out there is making its product more attractive and valuable, Echelon is instead going for some combination of overt control and the desire for customer data. Data which will be used, of course, for marketing purposes.

There’s also value in customer data. Getting more customers to exercise with its app means Echelon may gather more data for things like feature development and marketing.

What you won’t hear anywhere, at least that I can find, is any discussion of the ability to return or get refunds for customers who bought these bikes when they did things that they no longer will do after the fact. That’s about as clear a bait and switch type of a scenario as you’re likely to find.

Unfortunately, with the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection being run by just another Federalist Society imp, it’s unlikely that anything material will be done to stop this sort of thing.

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For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer was perhaps the most dangerous job in America.

Unbelievably, it was Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin that finally revealed the actual numbers behind the panicky percentage claims. A 690% increase in assaults meant nothing more than this: ICE officers had been “assaulted” 69 more times since the beginning of this year as compared to the same six-month period last year.

Now, there’s even more bullshit to unpack. “Assault” means something else to law enforcement officers who want to claim they’ve been assaulted than it means to them when they’re filling out paperwork for assaults reported by citizens. According to ICE and other law enforcement officers, “assault” means anything from getting handed a beating to simply being inadvertently bumped when “interacting” with regular people while performing their public duties.

That’s exactly what happened in Ontario, California, when a masked officer claiming to be an ICE officer attempted to enter a private area of a private building — namely, the inner rooms of a surgery center. Employees of the surgery center demanded identification and a warrant — something well within their rights. In response, they got refusals and one employee got an ICE forearm to their throat.

Supposedly, there’s an assault in here but all I see is someone instinctively reacting to an assault by an ICE officer — one in which the employee did nothing more than place a hand on the officer’s arm in hopes of dissuading the officer from further assaulting their coworker:

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another…. wait for it… ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T13:55:16.100Z

While the officer was probably salty that the staff managed to separate him from the person he had illegally entered private property to pursue, having someone stand between you and your illegal acts is not engaging in assault. Instead, it’s you — the federal officer — who is both ignoring the constitutional limits on your power as well as refusing to respect the protections extended to the people you actually serve: the general public.

Once this recording began circulating on social media, the Trump administration reacted like it always does: by piling lies on top of lies before scattering some criminal charges on top of its mountain of bullshit. David Bier’s thread on Bluesky unpacks all of it extremely well, but let’s hit some of the high points.

First, there’s the government’s bullshit, which was, of course, delivered by DHS head Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, Tricia McLaughlin:

In a statement to KTLA about Tuesday’s incident at the surgery center, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said:

“ICE officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation to arrest two illegal aliens. Officers in clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests approached the illegal alien targets as they exited a vehicle. One of the illegal aliens, Denis Guillen-Solis who is from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement. He ended up near the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center where hospital staff assaulted law enforcement and drug the officer and illegal alien into the facility. Then, the staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’”

First off, it’s not “obstruction” to prevent someone from engaging in an illegal act, even if that person claims to be a federal officer. Even federal officers are not allowed to engage in warrantless searches of private areas not open to the general public.

As for “clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests,” don’t make me choke on my own bitter laughter. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars of equipment can crank out an embroidered patch at home that contains the same letter and then attach it to anything they’ve picked up from the local military surplus outlet. ID cards, badges, and warrants might be just as easy to fake, but that still doesn’t explain why this alleged officer refused to provide any of those things when asked to, as though all that was needed was an embroidered patch and the willingness to violate the Constitution.

There’s even more bullshit in this response, but those are the things that can be immediately gleaned from the officer’s actions, the surgical center employees’ response, and the DHS’s belated attempt to paper over a clearly illegal act one of its employees attempted to carry out.

The government is now pressing assault charges against two of the surgical center employees. That affidavit [PDF] directly contradicts the claims made by the soulless cretin currently employed as the assistant secretary of the DHS.

McLaughlin claimed this was a “targeted enforcement operation” seeking a known criminal. The charging documents say otherwise, as KTLA points out in its follow-up reporting:

According to an affidavit filed in the case, the confrontation began after two immigration officers conducting roving immigration enforcement operations in Ontario followed a truck carrying three adult men. The vehicle pulled into the parking lot of a local surgery center, and two of the men fled on foot when approached by agents.

There it is: ICE was just driving around looking for people who looked foreign and then sprung into action when the officers came across a few Hispanic-looking men. There’s nothing illegal about fleeing a non-consensual stop, but the ICE officer who followed the man into the surgical center apparently thought otherwise.

And that’s where the affidavit begins to fall apart. The government claims “exigent circumstances” (namely “hot pursuit”) completely nullified the Fourth Amendment. But the government is wrong. It doesn’t do that automatically in all cases and it especially doesn’t do it when the only suspected crime isn’t a violent offense. Fleeing from an officer isn’t always probable cause for further pursuit and/or arrest. Neither does looking sorta Mexican while doing it, as a federal court in California forcefully pointed out recently.

Even if you ignore those two factors, you’re left with the suspected “crime” of being in the country illegally, which is actually a civil law violation. And civil law violations don’t justify the abuse of warrant exceptions like “hot pursuit.”

The government probably won’t drop these charges because it’s too invested in pushing the narrative that ICE is beset on all sides by assailants. But it would be the smart thing to do because it’s going to have to explain why these officers chose to ignore the Constitution en route to being “assaulted” by people unwilling to be pushed around by thugs pretending to be interested in anything resembling actual law and order. And for the rest of us, we have another data point indicating that the exponential increase in “assaults” on ICE officers is likely just a whole lot of stuff like this where people are reacting normally to masked officers who choose to behave like rogue agents.

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The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians’ digital lives—to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies.

Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill with multiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it’s a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands.

It’s also a giveaway of Canadian constitutional rights in the name of “border security.” If passed, it will shatter privacy protections that Canadians have spent decades building. This will affect anyone using Canadian internet services, including email, cloud storage, VPNs, and messaging apps.

A joint letter, signed by dozens of Canadian civil liberties groups and more than a hundred Canadian legal experts and academics, puts it clearly: Bill C-2 is “a multi-pronged assault on the basic human rights and freedoms Canada holds dear,” and “an enormous and unjustified expansion of power for police and CSIS to access the data, mail, and communication patterns of people across Canada.”

Setting The Stage For Cross-Border Surveillance

Bill C-2 isn’t just a domestic surveillance bill. It’s a Trojan horse for U.S. law enforcement—quietly building the pipes to ship Canadians’ private data straight to Washington.

If Bill C-2 passes, Canadian police and spy agencies will be able to demand information about peoples’ online activities based on the low threshold of “reasonable suspicion.” Companies holding such information would have only five days to challenge an order, and blanket immunity from lawsuits if they hand over data.

Police and CSIS, the Canadian intelligence service, will be able to find out whether you have an online account with any organization or service in Canada. They can demand to know how long you’ve had it, where you’ve logged in from, and which other services you’ve interacted with, with no warrant required.

The bill will also allow for the introduction of encryption backdoors. Forcing companies to surveil their customers is allowed under the law (see part 15), as long as these mandates don’t introduce a “systemic vulnerability”—a term the bill doesn’t even bother to define.

The information gathered under these new powers is likely to be shared with the United States. Canada and the U.S. are currently negotiating a misguided agreement to share law enforcement information under the US CLOUD Act.

The U.S. and U.K. put a CLOUD Act deal in place in 2020, and it hasn’t been good for users. Earlier this year, the U.K. home office ordered Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts. That security risk caused Apple to stop offering U.K. users certain advanced encryption features, , and lawmakers and officials in the United States have raised concerns that the UK’s demands might have been designed to leverage its expanded CLOUD Act powers.

If Canada moves forward with Bill C-2 and a CLOUD Act deal, American law enforcement could demand data from Canadian tech companies in secrecy—no notice to users would be required. Companies could also expect gag orders preventing them from even mentioning they have been forced to share information with US agencies.

This isn’t speculation. Earlier this month, a Canadian government official told Politico that this surveillance regime would give Canadian police “the same kind of toolkit” that their U.S. counterparts have under the PATRIOT Act and FISA. The bill allows for “technical capability orders.” Those orders mean the government can force Canadian tech companies, VPNs, cloud providers, and app developers—regardless of where in the world they are based—to build surveillance tools into their products.

Under U.S. law, non-U.S. persons have little protection from foreign surveillance. If U.S. cops want information on abortion access, gender-affirming care, or political protests happening in Canada—they’re going to get it. The data-sharing won’t necessarily be limited to the U.S., either. There’s nothing to stop authoritarian states from demanding this new trove of Canadians’ private data that will be secretly doled out by its law enforcement agencies.

EFF joins the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, OpenMedia, researchers at Citizen Lab, and dozens of other Canadian organizations and experts in asking the Canadian federal government to withdraw Bill C-2.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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