Crooked Bough News Round-up

— RFK Jr.’s FDA Removed A Webpage Of Warnings About Bogus Autism Treatments

 

at 1/15/26 9:01pm

Welcome to year two of the unmitigated disaster that is RFK Jr. being in charge of Health and Human Services and its child agencies. To call Kennedy an anti-vaxxer is not remotely controversial any longer, and probably never was. To state that hes a corrupt peddler of misinformation from which he has, likely still is, and will in the future profit should be equally uncontroversial. And if there is a single health issue on which Kennedy has staked his dubious claims more than any other, it certainly must be autism spectrum disorder. Kennedy, and Trump right alongside him, have been all over the map when it comes to his claims about autism. Kennedy was one of those leading the charge for decades in claiming that thimerosal in childhood vaccines was responsible for rising rates in autism diagnoses. When thimerosal was removed from most childhood vaccines over two decades ago and autism rates didnt decrease, rather than admitting they were wrong, Kennedy and his cadre of hapless buffoons simply pivoted to another vaccine ingredient: aluminum. That ingredient has also been deemed safe by countless studies and experts. You know, people who actually know what the hell theyre talking about. Since then, Kennedy has discovered all sorts of other causes of the disorder. Male circumcision? Autism! Make American girthy again, I suppose. Use of Tylenol by pregnant women and/or for young children? Autism! Fevers are super hot these days, yall. And, of course, he is still claiming it might be vaccines too, because why the hell not? Its not like measles is everywhere or anything. Kennedys alteration of the CDC page on vaccines and autism to suggest that there just might be a link between the two is particularly appropriate, as the FDA just also disappeared a webpage informing the public on the various snake oil style scams that are out there purporting to treat autism as well. under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has numerous ties to the wellness industry—that FDA information webpage is now gone. It was quietly deleted at the end of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to Ars Technica. The defunct webpage, titled “Be Aware of Potentially Dangerous Products and Therapies that Claim to Treat Autism,” provided parents and other consumers with an overview of the problem. It began with a short description of autism and some evidence-based, FDA-approved medications that can help manage autism symptoms. Then, the regulatory agency provided a list of some false claims and unproven, potentially dangerous treatments it had been working to combat. “Some of these so-called therapies carry significant health risks,” the FDA wrote. The list included chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, treatments that those in the anti-vaccine and wellness spheres have championed. It should be obvious already that there is no evidence to suggest that these so-called autism therapies work in any way, shape, or form. Thats why the FDA had a page up warning against their use. In some cases, the danger in using them is no joke either. Hyperbaric oxygen chamber use is probably the lesser of the two concerns. They wont do anything for your autism, but they are typically found in facilities with staff who arent medical professionals and arent always trained well in their use generally. Thats how one five year old (!!!) that visited a wellness center that claimed to treat autism with hyperbaric chambers was incinerated inside it when a spark went off and all of that concentrated oxygen ignited. On the one hand, this person certainly doesnt have autism any longer, though I dont think thats how the result is supposed to be achieved. Then theres chelation therapy, a process by which chemical injections into the body are performed, so that these chemicals can bind to metals within a persons bloodstream, allowing them to be excreted through waste. Chelation actually does have legitimate uses, such as when someone has heavy metal poisoning, typically from mercury, lead, or arsenic. Using chelation therarpy to remove non-approved minerals, however, can have negative health outcomes, including death. And, of course, one of Kennedys minions is David Geier. Geier is an anti-vaxxer who joined HHS to find the cause of autism and has long been advocate for chelation therapy. To address this nonexistent problem, anti-vaccine activists have touted chelation as a way to remove metals delivered via vaccines and treat autism. One of the most notorious of these activists is David Geier, whom Kennedy hired to the US health department last year to study the debunked connection between vaccines and autism. David Geier, along with his late father, Mark Geier, faced discipline from the Maryland State Board of Physicians in 2011 for, among other things, putting the health of autistic children at risk by treating them with unproven and dangerous hormone and chelation therapies. Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license. David Geier, who is not a scientist or doctor, was issued a civil fine for practicing medicine without a license. So why is all of this being done? Money, of course! Kennedy has surrounded himself with these health guru snakeoil salesmen, both in government and out, and the lot of them have made buckets and buckets of money doing this sort of thing. In July, KFF Health News reported that Kennedy and his wellness allies have made millions promoting unproven wellness products and treatments. Likewise, a story last week from The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy has surrounded himself with wellness moguls, including Brecka, who are profiting from the administration’s unambiguous embrace of unproven treatments. Generally, my experience is that people think RFK Jr. is one of two things. One common belief is that hes a health savior, finally sticking it to a corrupt medical industry and telling the truth about the real causes of real disorders like autism. Thats incredibly wrong for a million different reasons. The other common belief is that Kennedys views on vaccines and health are super wrong, and that hes very dumb, but also that hes a true believer. Thats wrong, too. This is a grift and always has been. A money-making scheme built on the backs of illness and death for those who listen to him, all while he collects a government paycheck. That he was confirmed as Secretary of HHS at all was profane. That our government has allowed all of his bullshit to go unchecked and unaddressed, however, is perverse.

[Category: 1, anti-vaxxers, autism, cdc, fda, health and human services, rfk jr., vaccines]

— Ctrl-Alt-Speech: We’ve Hit Grok Bottom

 

at 1/15/26 4:45pm

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this weeks round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover: UK, Canadian watchdogs press on with probes into Elon Musks Grok chatbot (Reuters) Musk’s xAI limits Grok’s ability to create sexualized images of real people on X after backlash (CNBC) X claims it has stopped Grok from undressing people, but of course it hasn’t (The Verge) State Department Threatens UK Over Grok Investigation, Because Only The US Is Allowed To Ban Foreign Apps (Techdirt) Keir Starmer tells MPs he is open to social media ban for young people (The Guardian) Statement from the Molly Rose Foundation (LinkedIn) Wes Streeting asks US expert Jonathan Haidt to address officials on social media ban for under-16s (The Guardian) Some social media use can benefit teen mental health (AAP) Arlington-focused Facebook group with 25,000 members is removed, angering moderators (ARLnow) Bandcamp becomes the first major music platform to ban AI content (The Verge)

[Category: 1, bandcamp, facebook, meta, twitter, x, xai, content moderation, grok, jonathan haidt, social media, state department, uk]

— Justice Gorsuch Reminds: The Fourth Amendment Isn’t Dead Yet

 

at 1/15/26 2:26pm

The Supreme Court released a few decisions this week. All of them are important for the parties involved, and ultimately for everyone, but not to the immediate degree that some of the other pending cases are (like the tariffs case). But one of the decisions is worth calling out, not for the decision itself, but for what Justice Gorsuch said in his concurrence and how it bears on electronic surveillance and the crisis we find ourselves in where the Fourth Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution) is providing none of its promised protection. The decision at issue is Case v. Montana where a unanimous Court agreed that the Fourth Amendment did not actually apply.  The justices agreed that earlier precedent still held: it will not violate the Fourth Amendment for police officers to enter a home without a warrant if they have an “objectively reasonable basis for believing” that someone inside needs emergency assistance. It is a rule that on its face does not necessarily look unreasonable.  The problem, though, is that, over time, courts have found more and more rules describing circumstances when it is ok to supersede the Fourth Amendments own clear rule that the people should be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects from warrantless searches and seizures. As a result, over time the public has gotten less and less secure as fewer and fewer warrants have been needed by the government. In his concurrence Justice Gorsuch agreed with the specific holding—that this sort of emergency rule exists, even in the shadow of the Fourth Amendment, and that it applied in this case—but he took some time ruminate on why it is a reasonable exception to the Fourth Amendments usual warrant requirement. Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH , J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter. The reason it is tied to the law, he explains, is because such an emergency rule would have been recognized in common law, and that rule would forgive anyones trespass for the purpose of giving aid, including the polices: Today’s decision echoes both the common-law emergency aid rule and its limitations. It does so, to be sure, in the context of a law enforcement officer, not a private citizen, who sought to enter another’s home. But on this point as well the common law has spoken, long providing that officers generally enjoy the same legal privileges as private citizens. See, e.g., Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1066 (C. P. 1765); 1 J. Chitty, Criminal Law 36 (1819); 2 M. Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae 91 (1736). And, reflecting the common law here again, this Court has held that the Fourth Amendment usually permits officers lacking a valid warrant to “take actions that any private citizen might do without fear of liability.” Caniglia v. Strom, 593 U. S. 194, 198 (2021) (internal quotation marks omitted). The emergency of course does not give them carte blanche, however.  Police excused from needing a warrant to respond to an emergency normally may do no more than that. Contrary to Mr. Case’s argument, King v. Coate, Lofft. 73, 98 Eng. Rep. 539 (K. B. 1772), does not establish that the common law demanded an exacting showing of actual necessity to defeat a claim for trespass. True, Lord Mansfield explained that any necessity defense in that case would need to “stand the strictest test,” with the “necessity manifestly proved.” Id., at 75, 98 Eng. Rep., at 540. But Coate involved an effort to involuntarily “confin[e] a person in a madhouse” for two months, not a claim over a home entry. Id., at 74, 98 Eng. Rep., at 539. And it is hardly surprising that the common law would demand a good deal more to justify a serious deprivation of liberty than to excuse an invasion of property rights aimed at protecting human safety. But what is most interesting about Gorsuchs analysis is not how he applied the common law rule here but his larger argument that it is common law rules that should be applied to the Fourth Amendment analysis generally and not the line of precedent that has resulted since the Court decided Katz v. US in 1967.  Those subsequent decisions have instead emphasized that whether there was a reasonable expectation of privacy is key to determining whether the Fourth Amendment has been violated. So while Katz itself had the immediate effect of expanding the protective reach of the Fourth Amendment, as Gorsuch had earlier complained in his dissent in the Carpenter v. US case, it set subsequent precedent down a path that largely narrowed it.  As he wrote then: Katz has yielded an often unpredictable—and sometimes unbelievable—jurisprudence. Smith and Miller are only two examples; there are many others. Take Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445, 109 S.Ct. 693, 102 L.Ed.2d 835 (1989), which says that a police helicopter hovering 400 feet above a persons property invades no reasonable expectation of privacy. Try that one out on your neighbors. Or California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988), which holds that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the garbage he puts out for collection. In that case, the Court said that the homeowners forfeited their privacy interests because [i]t is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public. Id., at 40, 108 S.Ct. 1625 (footnotes omitted). But the habits of raccoons dont prove much about the habits of the country. I doubt, too, that most people spotting a neighbor rummaging through their garbage would think they lacked reasonable grounds to confront the rummager. Making the decision all the stranger, California state law expressly protected a homeowners property rights in discarded trash. Id., at 43, 108 S.Ct. 1625. Yet rather than defer to that as evidence of the peoples habits and reasonable expectations of privacy, the Court substituted its own curious judgment. Even in a case like Carpenter, which the government basically lost, Gorsuch still had dissented from the decision apparently because he felt the rationale was so poisoned by the post-Katz reasoning that had subsequently emerged in so many cases since. As he wrote then: In the end, what do Smith and Miller add up to? A doubtful application of Katz that lets the government search almost whatever it wants whenever it wants. The Sixth Circuit had to follow that rule and faithfully did just that, but its not clear why we should. One unfortunate way that Fourth Amendment protection has been narrowed since Katz is in the context of electronic surveillance. In case after case it has been an uphill battle to challenge programs that give the government so much information about peoples lives. Indeed, as Gorsuch had earlier worried in Carpenter, as long as the rule excusing an intrusion into what the Fourth Amendment would protect hinges on whether it invades a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there is effectively no protection to be had, because it simply isnt a durable standard.  As his comment in this recent case about the five or more Justices of this Court harkened back to, it is subjectively dependent on the whims of the judges hearing the case.  As he also wrote then: Maybe, then, the Katz test should be conceived as a normative question. But if thats the case, why (again) do judges, rather than legislators, get to determine whether society should be prepared to recognize an expectation of privacy as legitimate? Deciding what privacy interests should be recognized often calls for a pure policy choice, many times between incommensurable goods—between the value of privacy in a particular setting and societys interest in combating crime. Answering questions like that calls for the exercise of raw political will belonging to legislatures, not the legal judgment proper to courts. See The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). When judges abandon legal judgment for political will we not only risk decisions where reasonable expectations of privacy come to bear an uncanny resemblance to those expectations of privacy shared by Members of this Court. Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 97, 119 S.Ct. 469, 142 L.Ed.2d 373 (1998) (Scalia, J., concurring). The case this week was not an electronic surveillance case. But it is worth noting that Gorsuch is still holding fast to his insistence that the common law is still the correct lens to use to evaluate potential Fourth Amendment violations, and not the reasonable expectation of privacy lens that has emerged since Katz. It should come as no surprise that our decision today might accord with the accumulated learning of the common law—just as it should come as no surprise that our application of the Fourth Amendment ought to be informed by the common law’s lessons rather than mere intuition. Because even if building off of Katz can sometimes result in even more protection, too often it has resulted in less, despite the Fourth Amendments articulated protection and history. For a period, to be sure, the miasma created by this Court’s Katz era led some to think the scope of the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment depend on nothing more than current judicial instincts about “reasonable expectations of privacy.” See Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 394–395, 405–406 (GORSUCH , J., dissenting). But that confusion cannot last forever, for no one should think the rights of Americans hang on so thin a thread. Instead, and as Justice Story recognized, the Fourth Amendment is made of sturdier stuff, representing “the affirmance of a great constitutional doctrine of the common law.” 3 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 748 (1833). But his concurrence here may be more than just academic; it seems like it could be read to suggest that it may be time for litigants to take another swing at challenging the governments warrantless electronic surveillance, especially given his callback to Carpenter, a case that implicated it. Because this time, he is intimating, the Court should get the analysis right, to find such surveillance anathema under the Fourth Amendment, by using more timeless common law principles than the courts since Katz have been free to use.  Because even if the lower courts have been stuck with the reasonable expectation of privacy framework, the Supreme Court is not.  And this concurrence reads as a clear call for the Court to revisit it. Such challenges would also come not a moment too soon (assuming they are not already too late) given how the governments data collection practices are now having immediate, direct, and horrific effect on peoples liberty writ large. It is not just personal information currently being seized but actual people, aided by the warrantless collection of their data. Or, in other words, and as it seems Gorsuch understands, what is happening is exactly what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to forestall. Thus it seems time for litigants to try again, to tee up before the Supreme Court the Fourth Amendment question that electronic surveillance implicates so that the Court can back up and try again, this time directing our subsequent Fourth Amendment jurisprudence down a different path from where it strayed post-Katz, and instead lead to one where the rights of Americans, particularly with respect to their electronic data, no longer hang on so thin a thread. It seems theres already at least one justice on board with finding that the Fourth Amendment precludes what the government has been doing of late, and probably more. Postscript: It is not the point of this post, but it is worth spending a moment to also digest Justice Sotomayors concurrence. In it she cautions that this decision should not be taken as a blanket rule that a police officer can always rush in without a warrant when they anticipate an emergency situation. Indeed, she notes, rushing in has the tendency to create the emergency, especially given the proliferation of firearms, and that danger should count heavily on the side of the ledger against the warrantless intrusion. Nevertheless, she continued, as in this case there can be factors counterbalancing those concerns and nevertheless justify the intrusion, which is why she joined the decision. But she was careful to emphasize in her concurrence that the rule here is not that all warrantless entrances in case of emergency are allowed; rather, the rule is that an assessment of whether there is an objectively reasonable basis for entering needs to always be made before such a warrantless intrusion can potentially be excused. That conclusion, on the facts of this case, does not mean it will always be objectively reasonable for officers responding to a mental-health crisis to make a warrantless entry. A different mix of information [in this case here] might have led to the conclusion that the officers’ entry itself would put the occupant (and officers) at a greater risk of escalation and serious injury. Because the “objectively reasonable basis” test, as reaffirmed by the Court today, demands careful attention to the case-specific risks that attend mental-health crises, and requires officers to act reasonably in response, I join the Court’s opinion in full.

[Category: 1, 4th amendment, common law, electronic surveillance, emergency, neil gorsuch, privacy, reasonable expectation of privacy, sonia sotomayor, warrants]

— DHS Expands Immigration Ban, Ensuring The Only Way An African Can Come To The US Is If We Bring Slavery Back

 

at 1/15/26 12:07pm

Ever since Trump took office and turned over immigration enforcement to someone who killed pets more often than shes experienced moments of joy, the world has been shrinking. It America vs. everyone else at this point, with the Trump administration adding hefty amounts of imperialism to its heady blend of white Christian fascism. To be non-white is to be less than 2/3rds of a human, which is something I thought we might have moved past during the last 100 years or so. But everything old is new again, especially the stuff that should just be the relics of a shameful history, rather than the latest thing getting gilded by the administrations ex-Fox News turd polishers. After an Afghan refugee shot some National Guard troops, Trump and his DHS placed an indefinite pause on immigration applications from a total of 19 countries, including (of course) Afghanistan, a country we hastily exited and turned over to the Taliban. For no discernible reason, another 20 countries have been added to the immigration ban. Unsurprisingly, none of these countries are mostly white. Heres NPR with the details on the administrations latest burst of xenophobia: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, in a memo released Thursday, said it would pause the review of all pending applications for visas, green cards, citizenship or asylum from immigrants from the additional countries. The memo also outlines plans to re-review applications of immigrants from these countries as far back as 2021. The list, which is composed mostly of countries in Africa, includes Angola, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Wow. Imagine that. Theres a pattern developing here, and its exactly what you think it is. Heres the full list of countries whose residents are subject to an indefinite ban on immigration applications: Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, Laos, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe Heres what that looks like: So, weve got more than half of Africa on the blocklist. It will never reach 100% because South Africa is home to some pretty feisty white colonials the president seems to personally appreciate despite (or because of) their white nationalist leanings. Give it a few more months and the rest of that continent should be colored in. And while this government will pretend this is about national security and/or thwarting the international drug trade, its safe to assume any national security threat posed by autocrats Trump likes (Putin, Bukele, Orban, Erdogan) will be ignored to keep them, um, whitelisted. And any other nation that poses no threat one way or another but happens to be heavily populated by people with more skin pigmentation will find their immigration privileges suspended until at least January 2029. Were no longer part of the free world. Were a nation thats hastily and deliberately backsliding into the worst version of itself, thanks to the irrational hatred of those in power. We may not have forgotten our history, but were being ruled by people who want to doom us to repeat it.

[Category: 1, bigotry, dhs, kristi noem, mass deportation, trump administration]

— Daily Deal: The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows License + Windows 11 Pro Bundle

 

at 1/15/26 12:02pm

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is exactly that. This operating system is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows + Windows 11 Pro Bundle is on sale for $39.97 for a very limited time. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

— State Department Threatens UK Over Grok Investigation, Because Only The US Is Allowed To Ban Foreign Apps

 

at 1/15/26 10:25am

So let me get this straight. The United States government spent years championing a ban on TikTok, rushed it through the Supreme Court with claims of grave national security threats, got a 9-0 ruling blessing government censorship of an entire platform used by 170 million Americans… and now it’s the US State Department thinking that it’s all cool to threaten the United Kingdom for considering similar action against Xs Grok chatbot over its generation of sexualized deepfake images, including those of children? We all know that the US can be hypocritical, but this all seems a bit over the top. Heres what actually happened: the UKs communications regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into whether X violated the countrys Online Safety Act by allowing Grok to create and distribute non-consensual intimate images (NCII). This isnt some theoretical concern—as I detailed last week, Grok has been churning out sexualized images at an alarming rate, with users publicly generating undressing content and worse, in many cases targeting real women and girls. UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told Parliament that Ofcom could impose fines up to £18 million or seek a court order to block X entirely if violations are found. Enter Sarah B. Rogers, the Trump-appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who decided this was the perfect moment to threaten a close US ally. In an interview with GB News, Rogers declared: I would say from Americas perspective … nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech. Lets wait and see what Ofcom does and well see what America does in response. She went further, accusing the British government of wanting the ability to curate a public square, to suppress political viewpoints it dislikes and claiming that X has a political valence that the British government is antagonistic to. This is weapons-grade nonsense, and Rogers knows it. The UK isnt investigating X because they dont like Elon Musks politics. Theyre investigating because Grok is being used to create sexualized deepfakes of real people without consent, including minors. Unless Rogers is prepared to stand up and argue that generating non-consensual sexualized imagery of real people—including children—is somehow quintessential “conservative speech” that the US must defend, shes deliberately mischaracterizing whats happening here. Is that really the hill the State Department wants to die on? That deepfake NCII is conservative speech? As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmers spokesperson put it: Its about the generation of criminal imagery of children and women and girls that is not acceptable. We cannot stand by and let that continue. And that is why weve taken the action we have. But heres where the hypocrisy becomes truly spectacular: just this week, the Republican-led Senate unanimously passed the DEFIANCE Act for the second time. This legislation would create a federal civil cause of action allowing victims of non-consensual deepfake intimate imagery to sue the producers of such content. No matter what you think of that particular bill (I have my concerns about the specifics of how the bill works), it’s quite something when you have the State Department’s mafioso-like threat being issued to the UK if they take any action to respond to what’s happening on X at the same time the MAGA-led US Senate is voting unanimously to move forward on a bill that could have a similar impact. So lets review the US governments position: Banning an entire social media platform because China might access data (that they can already buy from data brokers anyway)? Perfectly fine, rush it through SCOTUS. Allowing victims to sue over non-consensual sexualized deepfakes? Great idea, unanimous Senate support. Another country investigating whether a platform violated laws against generating sexualized deepfakes of minors? UNACCEPTABLE CENSORSHIP, NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE. The MAGA mindset in a nutshell: performative nonsense when it fits within a certain bucket (in this case the “OMG Europeans censoring Elon”) no matter that it conflicts with stated beliefs elsewhere. It’s important to consider all of this in light of the whole TikTok ban fiasco. When the Supreme Court blessed Congresss decision to ban an app based on vague national security concerns—concerns so urgent that the Biden administration immediately decided not to enforce the ban after winning in court and which Trump has continued to not enforce for an entire year—America effectively torched its moral authority to criticize other countries for restricting platforms. As I wrote when that ruling came down, we essentially said its okay to create a Great Firewall of America. We told the world that if you claim national security loudly enough, with sufficient bipartisan support, you can ban whatever app you want, First Amendment concerns be damned. Chinese officials have pointed to the US’s TikTok ban to justify their own internet restrictions, and now were handing authoritarian regimes another gift: the US will threaten retaliation if you try to enforce laws against platforms generating sexualized imagery of children. When you blow up the principle that countries shouldnt ban apps based on content concerns, you dont get to suddenly rediscover those principles when its your billionaires app on the chopping block. And make no mistake about what Rogers is really defending here. Grok continues to generate sexualized content at scale. Elon Musk continues running X like an edgelord teenager who knows hes rich enough to avoid consequences, and women—especially young women—continue facing harassment and abuse via these tools. The State Departments threats arent about defending free speech. Theyre about protecting Musks business interests. Its about maintaining the double standard that got us here: American companies can do whatever they want globally, but foreign companies operating in America face existential threats for far less. The UK is investigating potential violations of laws against generating sexualized imagery of minors and non-consenting adults. If the State Department thinks thats censorship, they should explain why the Senate just voted unanimously to let victims sue over exactly that conduct. Look, the UKs investigation may or may not lead anywhere. Ofcom may find violations, or it may not. They may impose fines, or they may not. They may seek to block X, or they may not. But the one thing the US government absolutely cannot do with a straight face is threaten them for even considering it. You dont get to ban TikTok and then act outraged when other countries contemplate similar actions against American companies. You dont get to pass unanimous legislation allowing lawsuits over deepfake NCII while your State Department calls investigations into that same deepfake NCII censorship. You dont get to spend years claiming that national security justifies any restriction on platforms and then suddenly discover that free speech means other countries cant enforce their laws. There are no principles here, only sheer abuse of power. And Sarah Rogerss threat to the UK makes that abundantly clear: the rules we claimed justified banning TikTok apparently only apply when were the ones doing the banning.

[Category: tiktok, twitter, x, defiance act, elon musk, grok, ncii, online safety act, sarah rogers, state department, tiktok ban, uk]

— Trump, Ellison Wage War On ‘Woke Netflix’ In Effort To Scuttle Warner Brothers Deal, Dominate U.S. Media

 

at 1/15/26 6:26am

The Trump empire is nothing if not predictable. Last year we noted repeatedly how the Trump administration and Larry Ellison (owner of CBS) would be joining forces to try and stop Netflixs $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry, if youre not aware, is attempting to buy up whats left of Americas soggy-ass corporate media (and TikTok) to create a propaganda safe space for Americas increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class. Warner Brothers rejected Ellisons higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the presidents son in law and the Saudis. When that didnt work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that going nowhere, Ellison has clearly turned to right wing propaganda to help portray the Netflix acquisition as somehow woke and dangerous: The President has also taken to his personal right wing propaganda social media company to cry about woke Netflix (which had the audacity to air a military TV show featuring gay people that made right wing zealots cry not that long ago): While Netflixs acquisition of Warner Brothers likely wont be great for labor, creatives, or consumers (and Netflix will be eager to debase itself further to get regulatory approval), letting Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son turn the remnants of U.S. corporate media into yet another right wing propaganda empire is arguably a far worse outcome for a country already on the brink of collapse. When this lazy woke Netflix campaign fails, I suspect the Trump DOJ will ultimately launch a bogus antitrust inquiry into the Netflix Warner Brothers merger. This campaign will highlight all manner of real and manufactured horrible impacts of the Netflix deal, ignoring the fact that letting one of the nations richest right wing extremists own most of U.S. media would be decidedly worse. Something of note: Netflix has made it clear it only wants the Warner Brothers studio assets. It doesnt want the sagging-ratings albatrosses that are CNN or the Discovery TV networks. So even if the Netflix deal somehow survives DOJ challenge, its still likely those spun-off assets are acquired by Ellison anyway, at which point hell be sure to do the same thing to them hes currently doing to CBS. Just without the money making IP (DC Comics, Harry Potter, etc.) Warner Brothers owns as a backstop. Which would still result in a more powerful Larry Ellison agitprop empire, but one slightly more likely to collapse from mismanagement. These are all bad outcomes, but some (authoritarian dominance of the entirety of media of the kind weve seen in Orbans Hungary) are decidedly worse than others. Competent Dem strategists or fans of Democracy looking to help need to make stopping that the top priority, since the ideal outcome (blocking all of these deals) simply isnt realistically on the table.

[Category: 1, netflix, oan, paramount, skydance, warner bros. discovery, agitprop, authoritarian, consolidation, david ellison, disinformation, donald trump, journalism, larry ellison, media, propaganda, woke]

— New Year, But The Same Measles Crises Rages On

 

at 1/14/26 8:53pm

Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as Americas measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.s first year as Secretary of DHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of the anti-vaxxer bullshit Kennedy and his followers have been pushing for years, America collected 2,144 confirmed cases of measles in 2025. That number is certainly an under-count, with who knows how many undiagnosed cases existing out there. Three people, including two otherwise healthy children, died. America is all but certain to have lost its elimination status of the disease. Of all the gravel-mouthed words that spilled out of Kennedys mouth in 2025, there were relatively few of them reserved for this highly contagious and deadly disease that is now circulating via various outbreaks in the country whos health hes in charge of managing. The start of 2026 is likely to set us up for an even worse year for measles than the last. Over 5% of the total infections of measles in 2025 were reported in the last week of the year or so. Its not slowing down. This disaster of a train may be still pulling out of the station, but its picking up speed. And while the CDCs measles website, linked above, isnt updated more than once a week at most, health officials are reporting a ton of infections in the ongoing South Carolina outbreak alone. In a regularly scheduled update this afternoon, the health department said 99 cases were identified since Tuesday, bringing the outbreak total to 310 cases. There are currently 200 people in quarantine and nine in isolation. However, the outbreak is expanding so quickly and with so many exposure sites that health officials are struggling to trace cases and identify people at risk. “An increasing number of public exposure sites are being identified with likely hundreds more people exposed who are not aware they should be in quarantine if they are not immune to measles,” Linda Bell, state epidemiologist and the health department’s incident commander for the measles outbreak, said in the announcement. “Previous measles transmission studies have shown that one measles case can result in up to 20 new infections among unvaccinated contacts.” Its not just the unvaccinated any longer. As 2025 went on, we began to see an uptick in what are called breakthrough cases. Health professionals who know what theyre talking about will tell you that 2 doses of the MMR vaccine are roughly 97% effective in preventing a measles infection. That leaves 3% of people exposed at a minimum and thats before we get into the discussion of how that number is impacted the lower we get from the 95% immunization target to achieve true herd immunity. And if you followed the reported infection statistics throughout last year as I did, you saw the percentage of infections occurring among those that had gotten either 1 or 2 doses of the MMR vaccine increase. At the end of the year, 3% of the infected had had one dose of the MMR vaccine, and 4% had two doses. Early in the year, those were hovering between 1% and 2% and then grew. Responsible people who protected not only themselves but their fellow citizens by doing the right thing and getting their shots were put at risk and infected by those who didnt. This failure of civil responsibility once again went largely unchallenged by RFK Jr. because of some combination of lunacy and his own financial interests. And the real fun hasnt even begun yet. Measles is crazy infectious and likes to hide its contagious nature early in the infection, not to mention that the disease causes immunity amnesia for all kinds of other diseases, making those infected susceptible to all kinds of diseases despite inoculation, such as chickenpox and COVID19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only has data as of January 6, has tallied three confirmed cases for this year (two in South Carolina and one in North Carolina, linked to the South Carolina outbreak). Since then, South Carolina reported 26 cases on Tuesday and 99 today, totaling 125. North Carolina also reported three additional cases Tuesday, again linked to the South Carolina outbreak. In all, that brings the US tally to at least 131 just nine days into the year. Do the math. Even if we pretend for a moment that infectious diseases like measles dont work on an exponential schedule, were already on pace for well over 5,000 measles infections this year. Unless something is done, it will be many, many more cases than that. And a possible resurgence of COVID19, something to which I really did think Trump would be particularly allergic. Unfortunately, rationality appears to have gone out of style. Replaced, I suppose, by a facial rash that then descends into further complications.

[Category: 1, cdc, health and human services, measles, rfk jr., south carolina, vaccines]

— We Found More Than 40 Cases Of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds And Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing

 

at 1/14/26 4:46pm

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The original version has even more horrifying photographs and videos of agents engaging in this kind of behavior. Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing. After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow. But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished. In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.” About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation. We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled. This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk. “I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.” “If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police. Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot. Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.” Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents. Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish. Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods. But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm. That norm has now been broken. One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old. Tenth grader Arnoldo Bazan and his father were getting McDonald’s before school when their car was pulled over by unmarked vehicles. Masked immigration agents started banging on their windows. As Arnoldo’s undocumented father, Arnulfo Bazan Carrillo, drove off, the terrified teenager began filming on his phone. The video shows the agents repeatedly ramming the Bazans’ car during a slow chase through the city. Bazan Carrillo eventually parked and ran into a restaurant supply store. When Arnoldo saw agents taking his father violently to the ground, Arnoldo went inside too, yelling at the agents to stop. One agent put Arnoldo in a chokehold while another pressed a knee into his father’s neck. “I was going to school!” the boy pleaded. He said later that when he told the agent he was a citizen and a minor, the agent didn’t stop. “I started screaming with everything I had, because I couldn’t even breathe,” Arnoldo told ProPublica, showing where the agent’s hands had closed around his throat. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die.” DHS’ McLaughlin accused Arnoldo’s dad of ramming his car “into a federal law enforcement vehicle,” but he was never charged for that, and the videos we reviewed do not support this claim. Our examination of his criminal history — separate from any immigration violations — found only that Bazan Carrillo pleaded guilty a decade ago to misdemeanor driving while intoxicated. McLaughlin also said the younger Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. She said that Arnoldo was taken into custody to confirm his identity and make sure he didn’t have any weapons. McLaughlin did not answer whether the agent’s conduct was justified. Experts who reviewed video of the Bazans’ arrests could make no sense of the agents’ actions. “Why are you in the middle of a store trying to grab somebody?” said Marc Brown, a former police officer turned instructor who taught ICE and Border Patrol officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. “Your arm underneath the neck, like a choking motion? No! The knee on the neck? Absolutely not.” DHS revamped its training curriculum after George Floyd’s murder to underscore those tactics were out of bounds, Brown said. “DHS specifically was very big on no choking,” he said. “We don’t teach that. They were, like, hardcore against it. They didn’t want to see anything with the word ‘choke.’” After agents used another banned neck restraint — a carotid hold — a man started convulsing and passed out. In early November, ICE agents in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stopped a young father, Carlos Sebastian Zapata Rivera, as he drove with his family. They had come for his undocumented wife, whom they targeted after she was charged with assault for allegedly stabbing a co-worker in the hand with scissors. Body camera footage from the local police, obtained by ProPublica, captured much of what happened. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter began crying. Agents surrounded the car, looking in through open doors. According to the footage, an agent told Zapata Rivera that if his wife wouldn’t come out, they would have to arrest him, too — and their daughter would be sent into the foster system. The agent recounted the conversation to a local cop: “Technically, I can arrest both of you,” he said. “If you no longer have a child, because the child is now in state custody, you’re both gonna be arrested. Do you want to give your child to the state?” Zapata Rivera, who has a pending asylum claim, clung to his family. His wife kept saying she wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter, whom she said was still breastfeeding. Zapata Rivera wouldn’t let go of either of them. Federal agents seemed conflicted on how to proceed. “I refuse to have us videotaped throwing someone to the ground while they have a child in their hands,” one ICE agent told a police officer at the scene. But after more than an hour, agents held down Zapata Rivera’s arms. One, who Zapata Rivera’s lawyer says wore a baseball cap reading “Ne Quis Effugiat” — Latin for “So That None Will Escape” — pressed his thumbs into the arteries on Zapata Rivera’s neck. The young man then appeared to pass out as bystanders screamed. The technique is known as a carotid restraint. The two carotid arteries carry 70% of the brain’s blood flow; block them, and a person can quickly lose consciousness. The tactic can cause strokes, seizures, brain damage — and death. “Even milliseconds or seconds of interrupted blood flow to the brain can have serious consequences,” Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told us. Saadi said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, “but there is no amount of training or method of applying pressure on the neck that is foolproof in terms of avoiding neurologic damage.” In a bystander video of Zapata Rivera’s arrest, his eyes roll back in his head and he suffers an apparent seizure, convulsing so violently that his daughter, seated in his lap, shakes with him. “Carotid restraints are prohibited unless deadly force is authorized,” DHS’ use-of-force policy states. Deadly force is authorized only when an officer believes there’s an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury” and there is “no alternative.” In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said. “These statements were lies,” Zapata Rivera alleges in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he filed against the ICE agent who used the carotid restraint. His lawyer told ProPublica that Zapata Rivera was disoriented after regaining consciousness; the lawsuit says he was denied medical attention. (Representatives for Zapata Rivera declined our requests for an interview with him. His wife has been released on bond, and her assault case awaits trial.) A police report and bodycam footage from Fitchburg officers at the scene, obtained via a public records request, back up Zapata Rivera’s account of being denied assistance. “He’s fine,” an agent told paramedics, according to footage. The police report says Zapata Rivera wanted medical attention but “agents continued without stopping.” Saadi, the Harvard neurologist, said that as a general matter, determining whether someone had a seizure is “not something even neurologists can do accurately just by looking at it.” DHS policy bars using chokeholds and carotid restraints just because someone is resisting arrest. Agents are doing it anyway. When DHS issued restrictions on chokeholds and carotid restraints, it stated that the moves “must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest.” Deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.” But videos reviewed by ProPublica show that agents have been using these restraints to do just that. In Los Angeles in June, masked officers from ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agencies pepper-sprayed and then tackled another citizen, Luis Hipolito. As Hipolito struggled to get away, one of the agents put him in a chokehold. Another pointed a Taser at bystanders filming. Then Hipolito’s body began to convulse — a possible seizure. An onlooker warned the agents, “You gonna let him die.” When officers make a mistake in the heat of the moment, said Danny Murphy, a former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, they need to “correct it as quickly as possible.” That didn’t happen in Hipolito’s case. The footage shows the immigration agent not only wrapping his arm around Hipolito’s neck as he takes him down but also sticking with the chokehold after Hipolito is pinned on the ground. The agent’s actions are “dangerous and unreasonable,” Murphy said. Asked about the case, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Hipolito was arrested for assaulting an ICE officer. Hipolito’s lawyers did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hipolito limped into court days after the incident. Another citizen who was with him the day of the incident was also charged, but her case was dropped. Hipolito pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in February. Some of the conduct in the footage isn’t banned — but it’s discouraged and dangerous. A video from Los Angeles shows a Colombian-born TikTokker who often filmed ICE apparently passed out after officers pulled her from her Tesla and knelt on her neck. Another video shows a DoorDash driver in Portland, Oregon, screaming for air as four officers pin him face down in the street. “Aire, aire, aire,” he says. “No puedo respirar” — I can’t breathe. Then: “Estoy muriendo” — I’m dying. A third video, from Chicago, shows an agent straddling a citizen and repeatedly pressing his face into the asphalt. Onlookers yell that the man can’t breathe. Placing a knee on a prone subject’s neck or weight on their back isn’t banned under DHS’ use-of-force policy, but it can be dangerous — and the longer it goes on, the higher the risk that the person won’t be able to breathe. “You really don’t want to spend that amount of time just trying to get somebody handcuffed,” said Kerlikowske, the former CPB commissioner, of the video of the arrest in Portland. Brown, the former federal instructor and now a lead police trainer at the University of South Carolina, echoed that. “Once you get them handcuffed, you get them up, get them out of there,” he said. “If they’re saying they can’t breathe, hurry up.” Taking a person down to the ground and restraining them there can be an appropriate way to get them in handcuffs, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professor who also works at the University of South Carolina. But officers have long known to make it quick. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was advising officers against keeping people prolongedly in a prone position. When a federal agent kneeled on the neck of an intensive care nurse in August, she said she understood the danger she was in and tried to scream. “I knew that the amount of pressure being placed on the back of my neck could definitely hurt me,” said Amanda Trebach, a citizen and activist who was arrested in Los Angeles while monitoring immigration agents. “I was having a hard time breathing because my chest was on the ground.” McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Trebach impeded agents’ vehicles and struck them with her signs and fists. Trebach denies this. She was released without any charges. Protesters have also been choked and strangled. In the fall, a protester in Chicago refused to stand back after a federal agent told him to do so. Suddenly, the agent grabbed the man by the throat and slammed him to the ground. “No, no!” one bystander exclaims. “He’s not doing anything!” DHS’ McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the incident. Along with two similar choking incidents at protests outside of ICE facilities, this is one of the few videos in which the run-up to the violence is clear. And the experts were aghast. “Without anything I could see as even remotely a deadly force threat, he immediately goes for the throat,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who frequently testifies in use-of-force cases. Balliet, the former immigration official, said the agent turned the scene into a “pissing contest” that was “explicitly out of control.” “It’s so clearly excessive and ridiculous,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of action which should get you fired.” “How big a threat did you think he was?” Brown said, noting that the officer slung his rifle around his back before grabbing and body-slamming the protester. “You can’t go grab someone just because they say, ‘F the police.’” Roving patrols + unplanned arrests = unsafe tactics. In November, Border Patrol agents rushed into the construction site of a future Panda Express in Charlotte, North Carolina, to check workers’ papers. When one man tried to run, an officer put him in a chokehold and later marched him out, bloodied, to a waiting SUV. The Charlotte operation was one of Border Patrol’s many forays into American cities, as agents led by commander-at-large Gregory Bovino claimed to target “criminal illegal aliens” but frequently chased down landscapers, construction workers and U.S. citizens in roving patrols through predominantly immigrant or Latino communities. Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy, who had been following Border Patrol’s convoys around Charlotte, documented the Panda Express arrest. “Their tactics are less sophisticated than you would think,” he told ProPublica. “They sort of drive along the streets, and if they see somebody who looks to them like they could potentially be undocumented, they pull over.” Experts told ProPublica that if officers are targeting a specific individual, they can minimize risks by deciding when, where and how to take them into custody. But when they don’t know their target in advance, chaos — and abuse — can follow. “They are encountering people they don’t know anything about,” said Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director at ICE. “The stuff that I’ve been seeing in the videos,” Kerlikowske said, “has been just ragtag, random.” There may be other factors, too, our experts said, including quotas and a lack of consequences amid gutted oversight. With officers wearing masks, Shuchart said, “even if they punch grandma in the face, they won’t be identified.” As they sweep into American cities, immigration officers are unconstrained — and, the experts said, unprepared. Even well-trained officers may not be trained for the environments where they now operate. Patrolling a little-populated border region takes one set of skills. Working in urban areas, where citizens — and protesters — abound, takes another. DHS and Bovino did not respond to questions about their agents’ preparation or about the chokehold in Charlotte. Experts may think there’s abuse. But holding officers to account? That’s another matter. Back in Houston, immigration officers dropped 16-year-old Arnoldo off at the doorstep of his family home a few hours after the arrest. His neck was bruised, and his new shirt was shredded. Videos taken by his older sisters show the soccer star struggling to speak through sobs. Uncertain what exactly had happened to him, his sister Maria Bazan took him to Texas Children’s Hospital, where staff identified signs of the chokehold and moved him to the trauma unit. Hospital records show he was given morphine for pain and that doctors ordered a dozen CT scans and X-rays, including of his neck, spine and head. From the hospital, Maria called the Houston Police Department and tried to file a report, the family said. After several unsuccessful attempts, she took Arnoldo to the department in person, where she says officers were skeptical of the account and their own ability to investigate federal agents. Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. The footage, which ProPublica has reviewed, backed the family’s account of the chase. The family says Houston police still haven’t interviewed them. A department spokesperson told ProPublica it was not investigating the case, referring questions to DHS. But the police have also not released bodycam footage and case files aside from a top sheet, citing an open investigation. “We can’t do anything,” Maria said one officer told her. “What can HPD do to federal agents?” Elsewhere in the country, some officials are trying to hold federal immigration officers to account. In California, the state Legislature passed bills prohibiting immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to display identification during operations. In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows residents to sue any officer who violates state or federal constitutional rights. (The Trump administration quickly filed legal challenges against California and Illinois, claiming their new laws are unconstitutional.) In Colorado, Durango’s police chief saw a recent video of an immigration officer using a chokehold on a protester and reported it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which announced it was looking into the incident. In Minnesota, state and local leaders are collecting evidence in Renee Good’s killing even as the federal government cut the state out of its investigation. Arnoldo is still waiting for Houston authorities to help him, still terrified that a masked agent will come first. Amid soccer practice and making up schoolwork he missed while recovering, he watches and rewatches the videos from that day. The car chase, the chokehold, his own screams at the officers to leave his dad alone. His father in the driver’s seat, calmly handing Arnoldo his wallet and phone while stopping mid-chase for red lights. The Bazan family said agents threatened to charge Arnoldo if his dad didn’t agree to be deported. DHS spokesperson McLaughlin did not respond when asked about the alleged threat. Arnoldo’s dad is now in Mexico.  Asked why an officer choked Arnoldo, McLaughlin pointed to the boy’s alleged assault with his elbow, adding, “The federal law enforcement officer graciously chose not to press charges.” How We Did It ProPublica journalists Nicole Foy, McKenzie Funk, Joanna Shan, Haley Clark and Cengiz Yar gathered videos via Spanish and English social media posts, local press reports and court records. We then sent a selection of these videos to eight police experts and former immigration officials, along with as much information as we could gather about the lead-up to and context of each incident. The experts analyzed the videos with us, explaining when and how officers used dangerous tactics that appeared to go against their training or that have been banned under the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy. We also tried to contact every person we could identify being choked or kneeled on. In some cases, we also reached out to bystanders. Research reporter Mariam Elba conducted criminal record searches of every person we featured in this story. She also attempted to fact-check the allegations that DHS made about the civilians and their arrests. Our findings are not comprehensive because there is no universal criminal record database. We also sent every video cited in this story to the White House, DHS, CBP, ICE, border czar Tom Homan and Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin provided a statement responding to some of the incidents we found but she did not explain why agents used banned tactics or whether any of the agents have been disciplined for doing so.

[Category: 1, cbp, chokeholds, deadly force, dhs, donald trump, ice, immigration, tricia mclaughlin] [Link to media]

— ICE Is Going On A Surveillance Shopping Spree

 

at 1/14/26 2:08pm

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICEs budget would be the envy of many national militaries around the world. Indeed, this budget would put ICE as the 14th most well-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel.   There are many different agencies under U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that deal with immigration, as well as non-immigration related agencies such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus. Their stated mission is to “[p]rotect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”  Of course, ICE doesn’t just end up targeting, surveilling, harassing, assaulting, detaining, and torturing people who are undocumented immigrants. They have targeted people on work permits, asylum seekers, permanent residents (people holding “green cards”), naturalized citizens, and even citizens by birth.  While the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted. ICE has always engaged in surveillance and intelligence-gathering as part of their mission. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology found the following: ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults. ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults. ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults. ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records. ​​ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies. ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.  With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.  How We Got Here The entire surveillance industry has been allowed to grow and flourish under both Democratic and Republican regimes. For example, President Obama dramatically expanded ICE from its more limited origins, while at the same time narrowing its focus to undocumented people accused of crimes. Under the first and second Trump administrations, ICE ramped up its operations significantly, increasing raids in major cities far from the southern border and casting a much wider net on potential targets. ICE has most recently expanded its partnerships with sheriffs across the U.S., and deported more than 1.5 million people cumulatively under the Trump administrations (600,000 of those were just during the first year of Trump’s second term according to DHS statistics), not including the 1.6 million people DHS claims have “self-deported.” More horrifying is that in just the last year of the current administration, 4,250 people detained by ICE have gone missing, and 31 have died in custody or while being detained. In contrast, 24 people died in ICE custody during the entirety of the Biden administration. ICE also has openly stated that they plan to spy on the American public, looking for any signs of left-wing dissent against their domestic military-like presence. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a recent interview that his agency “was dedicated to the mission of going after” Antifa and left-wing gun clubs.  On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party.  EFF recently published a guide to using government databases to dig up homeland security spending and compiled our own dataset of companies selling tech to DHS components. In 2025, ICE entered new contracts with several private companies for location surveillance, social media surveillance, face surveillance, spyware, and phone surveillance. Let’s dig into each. Phone Surveillance Tools  One common surveillance tactic of immigration officials is to get physical access to a person’s phone, either while the person is detained at a border crossing, or while they are under arrest. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with a company called Cellebrite, which helps ICE unlock phones and then can take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages. ICE also signed a $3 million contract with Cellebrite’s main competitor Magnet Forensics, makers of the Graykey device for unlocking phones. DHS has had contracts with Cellebrite since 2008, but the number of phones they search has risen dramatically each year, reaching a new high of 14,899 devices searched by ICE’s sister agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between April and June of 2025.  If ICE can’t get physical access to your phone, that won’t stop them from trying to gain access to your data. They have also resumed a $2 million contract with the spyware manufacturer, Paragon. Paragon makes the Graphite spyware, which made headlines in 2025 for being found on the phones of several dozen members of Italian civil society. Graphite is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing.  Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities. Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you.  How to Protect Yourself  The most effective way to protect yourself from smartphone surveillance would be to not have a phone. But that’s not realistic advice in modern society. Fortunately, for most people there are other ways you can make it harder for ICE to spy on your digital life.  The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date. Installing security updates makes it harder to use malware against you and makes it less likely for Cellebrite to break into your phone. Likewise, both iPhone (Lockdown Mode) and Android (Advanced Protection) offer special modes that lock your phone down and can help protect against some malware. Having your phone’s software up to date and locked with a strong alphanumeric password will offer some protection against Cellebrite, depending on your model of phone. However, the strongest protection is simply to keep your phone turned off, which puts it in “before first unlock” mode and has been typically harder for law enforcement to bypass. This is good to do if you are at a protest and expect to be arrested, if you are crossing a border, or if you are expecting to encounter ICE. Keeping your phone on airplane mode should be enough to protect against cell-site simulators, but turning your phone off will offer extra protection against cell-site simulators and Cellebrite devices. If you aren’t able to turn your phone off, it’s a good idea to at least turn off face/fingerprint unlock to make it harder for police to force you to unlock your phone. While EFF continues to fight to strengthen our legal protections against compelling people to decrypt their devices, there is currently less protection against compelled face and fingerprint unlocking than there is against compelled password disclosure. Internet Surveillance  ICE has also spent $5 million to acquire at least two location and social media surveillance tools: Webloc and Tangles, from a company called Pen Link, an established player in the open source intelligence space. Webloc gathers the locations of millions of phones by gathering data from mobile data brokers and linking it together with other information about users. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces. These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account. Tangles is able to link together a person’s posting history, posts, and comments containing keywords, location history, tags, social graph, and photos with those of their friends and family. Penlink then sells this information to law enforcement, allowing law enforcement to avoid the need for a warrant. This means ICE can look up historic and current locations of many people all across the U.S. without ever having to get a warrant. ICE also has established contracts with other social media scanning and AI analysis companies, such as a $4.2 million contract with a company called Fivecast for the social media surveillance and AI analysis tool ONYX. According to Fivecast, ONYX can conduct “automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data” from all major “news streams, search engines, social media, marketplaces, the dark web, etc.” ONYX can build what it calls “digital footprints” from biographical data and curated datasets spanning numerous platforms, and “track shifts in sentiment and emotion” and identify the level of risk associated with an individual.  Another contract is with ShadowDragon for their product Social Net, which is able to monitor publicly available data from over 200 websites. In an acquisition document from 2022, ICE confirmed that ShadowDragon allowed the agency to search “100+ social networking sites,” noting that “[p]ersistent access to Facebook and Twitter provided by ShadowDragon SocialNet is of the utmost importance as they are the most prominent social media platforms.” ICE has also indicated that they intend to spend between 20 and 50 million dollars on building and staffing a 24/7 social media monitoring office with at least 30 full time agents to comb every major social media website for leads that could generate enforcement raids.  How to protect yourself  For U.S. citizens, making your account private on social media is a good place to start. You might also consider having accounts under a pseudonym, or deleting your social media accounts altogether. For more information, check out our guide to protecting yourself on social media. Unfortunately, people immigrating to the U.S. might be subject to greater scrutiny, including mandatory social media checks, and should consult with an immigration attorney before taking any action. For people traveling to the U.S., new rules will soon likely require them to reveal five years of social media history and 10 years of past email addresses to immigration officials.  Street-Level Surveillance  But it’s not just your digital habits ICE wants to surveil; they also want to spy on you in the physical world. ICE has contracts with multiple automated license plate reader (ALPR) companies and is able to follow the driving habits of a large percentage of Americans. ICE uses this data to track down specific people anywhere in the country. ICE has a $6 million contract through a Thomson Reuters subsidiary to access ALPR data from Motorola Solutions. ICE has also persuaded local law enforcement officers to run searches on their behalf through Flock Safetys massive network of ALPR data. CBP, including Border Patrol, also operates a network of covert ALPR systems in many areas.  ICE has also invested in biometric surveillance tools, such as face recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of people they stop to determine if they are here legally. Mobile Fortify checks the pictures it takes against a database of 200 million photos for a match (the source of the photos is unknown). Additionally, ICE has a $10 million contract with Clearview AI for face recognition. ICE has also contracted with iris scanning company BI2 technologies for even more invasive biometric surveillance. ICE agents have also been spotted wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban video recording sunglasses.  ICE has acquired trucks equipped with cell-site simulators (AKA Stingrays) from a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (likely the cell-site simulators were manufactured by another company). This is not the first time ICE has bought this technology. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, and ICE more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Cell-site simulators can be used to track down a specific person in real time, with more granularity than a phone company or tools like Webloc can provide, though Webloc has the distinct advantage of being used without a warrant and not requiring agents to be in the vicinity of the person being tracked.  How to protect yourself  Taking public transit or bicycling is a great way to keep yourself off ALPR databases, but an even better way is to go to your local city council meetings and demand the city cancels contracts with ALPR companies, like people have done in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado, among others.  If you are at a protest, putting your phone on airplane mode could help protect you from cell-site simulators and from apps on your phone disclosing your location, but might leave you vulnerable to advanced targeted attacks. For more advanced protection, turning your phone completely off protects against all radio based attacks, and also makes it harder for tools like Cellebrite to break into your phone as discussed above. But each individual will need to weigh their need for security from advanced radio based attacks against their need to document potential abuses through photo or video. For more information about protecting yourself at a protest, head over to SSD. There is nothing you can do to change your face, which is why we need more stringent privacy laws such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. Tying All the Data Together  Last but not least, ICE uses tools to combine and search all this data along with the data on Americans they have acquired from private companies, the IRS, TSA, and other government databases.  To search all this data, ICE uses ImmigrationOS, a system that came from a $30-million contract with Palantir. What Palantir does is hard to explain, even for people who work there, but essentially they are plumbers. Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through. Palantir links data from different databases, like IRS data, immigration records, and private databases, and enables ICE to view all of this data about a specific person in one place.  The true civil liberties nightmare of Palantir is that they enable governments to link data that should have never been linked. There are good civil liberties reasons why IRS data was never linked with immigration data and was never linked with social media data, but Palantir breaks those firewalls. Palantir has labeled themselves as a progressive, human rights centric company historically, but their recent actions have given them away as just another tech company enabling surveillance nightmares. Threat Modeling When ICE Is Your Adversary   Understanding the capabilities and limits of ICE and how to threat model helps you and your community fight back, remain powerful, and protect yourself. One of the most important things you can do is to not spread rumors and misinformation. Rumors like “ICE has malware so now everyones phones are compromised” or “Palantir knows what you are doing all the time” or “Signal is broken” don’t help your community. It’s more useful to spread facts, ways to protect yourself, and ways to fight back. For information about how to create a security plan for yourself or your community, and other tips to protect yourself, read our Surveillance Self-Defense guides. How EFF Is Fighting Back One way to fight back against ICE is in the courts. EFF currently has a lawsuit against ICE over their pressure on Apple and Google to take down ICE spotting apps, like ICEBlock. We also represent multiple labor unions suing ICE over their social media surveillance practices.  We have also demanded the San Francisco Police Department stop sharing data illegally with ICE, and issued a statement condemning the collaboration between ICE and the malware provider Paragon. We also continue to maintain our Rayhunter project for detecting cell-site simulators.  Other civil liberties organizations are also suing ICE. ACLU has sued ICE over a subpoena to Meta attempting to identify the owner of an account providing advice to protestors, and another coalition of groups has thus far successfully sued the IRS to stop sharing taxpayer data with ICE.  We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces. Republished from the EFFs Deeplinks blog.

[Category: clearview, clearview ai, fivecast, motorola, palantir, paragon, pen link, shadowdragon, techops specialty vehicles, dhs, ice, surveillance]

— Bari Weiss Is Sad That People Aren’t Enjoying Her Clumsy Destruction Of CBS News

 

at 1/14/26 12:01pm

If you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS News. And by run CBS news, I mean destroying what little journalism was left at the media giant and creating an alternate-reality safe space for right wing billionaires and their increasingly radical ideologies. While pretending to be restoring trust in journalism. Its not going well. Weiss inaugural town hall with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, Weiss new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps continues to plague the network and cause a continued revolt among remaining journalists. Meanwhile, the new CBS is now the butt of jokes at the Golden Globes. Weiss is, according to a new New York Times article, not enjoying all the criticism and, like any good leader, blaming her subordinates for the problems shes causing: Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said. Its always important to reiterate that CBS wasnt doing all that well when Weiss got there. The networks previous owners very first response to surging U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more on-air authoritarians. The last act of the outgoing CBS leadership was to bribe our authoritarian president to get a terrible new merger approved. Its only gone downhill since then. The entertaining bit is that Weiss doesnt appear to be good at either journalism (because shes barely done any) or agitprop (arguably the whole reason the Ellison family hired her). Thats causing some weird frictions, including this bit in the Times article where Weiss insists she doesnt want CBS to report the news, she wants it to be the news: The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.” That is an intentional misrepresentation of journalisms function by somebody who wants to be an effective engagement troll that chases virality, but clearly doesnt really know how to go about it at this sort of scale. Weiss built a weird little contrarian trolling blog, but thats a completely different animal from creating a mass media propaganda machine. Just ask Roger Aisles. I think, like many in the extraction-class funded engagement trolling industry, Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing shes helping fix journalism. But again, thats not what the weird mishmash of 80s ski comedy villains at Ellisons Paramount want. And I suspect that if Weiss doesnt start doing a better job of lying to the electorate in a more exciting and ratings-grabbing way pretty soon, shell be replaced by a much bigger asshole (and more effective culture war troll) before the summer arrives.

[Category: 1, cbs, agitprop, bari weiss, journalism, larry ellison, media, propaganda, trolling]

— Daily Deal: The Complete CompTIA And IT Exam Prep Bundle

 

at 1/14/26 11:55am

The Complete CompTIA and IT Exam Prep Bundle has a variety of courses, labs, and exam simulators to help you prepare for certification courses. Youll have access to Cramwise (an exam simulator), DojoLab (labs, practice exams, and PBQs), CodeDirect (beginner Python courses), ExamsDigest (labs and PBQs focusing on CompTIA, Cisco, and AWS), and LinuxPath. Its on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

— Prosecutors Flee DOJ After Being Told To Investigate The Murdered Woman, Not The Murderer

 

at 1/14/26 10:27am

Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder a dispute. This week, were writing about how career Justice Department prosecutors—people whove spent their careers putting away fraudsters, drug dealers, and actual criminals—looked at how the administration is handling this case and said: we want no part of this. Because apparently the DOJs response to an ICE agent murdering an unarmed American citizen wasnt to investigate the agent who pulled the trigger. It was to investigate the victim and her widow. A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head at close range. Video evidence directly contradicts every administration claim about what happened. And the Justice Departments priority is figuring out what activist groups the dead woman might have been associated with? Really? According to reporting from the New York Times, at least six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorneys Office resigned on Tuesday over this approach: Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday. Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said. Read that again. Senior DOJ officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the widow. The woman whose wife was just murdered by a federal agent. Thats what prompted career prosecutors to walk out the door. And Thompson wasnt alone. The Times reports that Harry Jacobs (Thompsons deputy on the fraud cases), Melinda Williams (who ran the criminal division and successfully prosecuted sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers), and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez (chief of violent and major crimes) all quit as well. The Minnesota U.S. Attorneys Office wasnt the only place seeing an exodus. According to MS Now, at least six leaders of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division—the unit thats supposed to investigate police killings—also resigned in protest: Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer’s fatal shooting of Renee Good last week. The criminal section of the division would normally investigate any fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer and specializes in probing potential or alleged abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement.  The departures – including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief – represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February. So we potentially have twelve or more DOJ officials walking out the door because of how this administration is handling a single case. Career prosecutors who spent years working for the DOJ and at least a year under this administration. People who had no apparent problem with everything else this DOJ has been doing. But investigating a murder victim while protecting her killer was apparently the line they couldnt cross. Let me say it plainly: when career prosecutors whove stuck around through a year of this administrations chaos decide this is the moment to quit, it tells you something important about just how far outside normal law enforcement practice this has gone. Also, remember why ICE supposedly flooded Minneapolis in the first place? Daycare fraud. A viral video from a small-time MAGA grifter claiming day cares were running scams, which the administration used to justify what it called the largest immigration enforcement operation in history. And who was the lead prosecutor on those fraud cases? Joe Thompson. The same guy who just quit because the DOJ would rather investigate a murder victims activist connections than the agent who killed her. As Minneapolis Police Chief Brian OHara put it to the NY Times: “When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” No shit. If you want evidence of just how upside-down the Justice Departments priorities have become, look no further than what theyre actually investigating. A separate Times report from Sunday laid out how the FBIs inquiry into the shooting is focused not on the agents actions, but on Goods possible connections to activist groups: The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence. Let’s summarize again: an ICE agent murders a woman in broad daylight. The division specifically designed to investigate when cops kill people has decided not to investigate the murderer. Instead, the DOJ is being told to investigate the dead woman and her widow’s social media connections. And long term DOJ officials are rushing out the door, wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of this nonsense. Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was busy on social media retweeting posts warning people not to ram ICE officers because theyll use deadly force—you know, completely prejudging the case shes supposed to be overseeing. As former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Thomas Brzozowski put it to the NY Times: “It’s not appropriate for officials to characterize this incident as domestic terrorism before the investigation is complete,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism in the Justice Department’s national security division. “There used to be a process, deliberate and considered, to figure out if behavior could be legitimately described as domestic terrorism.” “And when it’s not followed,” Mr. Brzozowski said, “then the term becomes little more than a political cudgel to bash one’s enemies.” There used to be a process. Past tense. Thats where we are now. The administrations approach makes sense only if you understand that the goal was never justice—it was narrative control. The White House needs Good to be a terrorist, not a victim, because acknowledging that an ICE agent murdered an unarmed American citizen for no reason undermines everything theyve been saying about their immigration crackdown. So they investigate the victim. They investigate the widow. They investigate the activist groups. Anything but investigate the guy who actually pulled the trigger. Former Trump attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanches statement was revealing: there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation into the ICE agent. No basis. A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head. Video shows her trying to drive away, not toward officers. And theres no basis for investigation. There’s a reason why every time a Trump legal move is flailing around, Blanche seems to show up and wave his arms theatrically yelling “nothing to see here folks.” What would constitute a basis, exactly? Does the agent need to announce I am now violating this persons civil rights before pulling the trigger? Minnesota officials arent buying it. Governor Tim Walz called Thompson a principled public servant and added that his resignation is the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the resigned prosecutors heroes and the people pushing to prosecute Goods widow monsters. Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state agency that normally investigates police shootings and which the DOJ has deliberately excluded from this investigation—put it simply: “We’re losing a true public servant,” said Mr. Evans. “We really need professional prosecutors.” The absence of a credible and comprehensive investigation into Ms. Good’s killing stands to “undermine trust in our public safety agencies,” Mr. Evans added. Were well past that point. When the Justice Department investigates murder victims while shielding their killers, trust has already been destroyed. The mass resignations tell us something crucial: there are still at least a few people inside the system who know the difference between law enforcement and state-sanctioned murder. Though, it raises the question of whether there’s anyone left who knows that distinction. Thompson and his colleagues apparently decided theyd rather walk away from careers they spent decades building than participate in the investigation of a grieving widow while her wifes killer walks free. But their departures also mean the fraud cases—the ones the administration claimed justified this whole Minneapolis operation—are now in serious jeopardy. The prosecutor who knew every defendant, every transaction, whod built those cases from the ground up over years, just walked out the door. If the administration actually cared about prosecuting fraud in Minnesota, theyd be begging Thompson to stay. Instead, they drove him out because protecting an ICE agent from accountability matters more to them than the stated reason they sent ICE to Minneapolis in the first place. Renee Nicole Good was murdered by her own government. And the Justice Departments response was to investigate her. Thats the country we live in now.

[Category: 1, civil rights division, doj, harmeet dhillon, investigations, joe thompson, jonathan ross, minneapolis, prosecutors, renee nicole good]

— DHS Wants To Harvest Biometric Data From Anyone Helping A Foreigner Stay In This Country Legally

 

at 1/14/26 6:26am

Weve always known the ultimate goal was to subject everyone to biometric collections, whether its at border crossings or international airports. At some point, the tech will move inland and become an annoying part of traveling from Point A to B because national security or whatever the fuck. The acceleration was a bit more limited during the Biden years, but the desire to turn everyone into data points for government exploitation remained. Now that Trump is back in office, what was previously used to track inherently suspicious foreigners (that would be all the ones that arent white) will soon be used to track everyone. This was first pitched by the DHS back in November, as Papers Please reports. Public comments are being accepted, but probably not being welcomed unless theyre sufficiently congratulatory of this expansion of surveillance power. Heres what Papers Please has to say about it in its recent post: As part of an array of proposals and rules issued by components of the US Department of Homeland Security to collect a widening array of biometric information and systems from widening categories of individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services  (USCIS) is proposing a new rule that would authorize collection of any form of biometric information or samples from anyone, including US citizens, “encountered” by USCIS or “associated with” any applicant for admission to the US, US residency, or US citizenship. The proposed rule would give USCIS blanket authority, at its discretion, to order any such individual to report to any location worldwide specified by USCIS, and to submit to collection of facial images (“digital image, specifically for facial recognition”), fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, retinal scans, voice prints, and/or DNA samples. Associated with is a pretty broad term one that could cover any business employing foreigners or any school accepting applicants with student visas. And thats not Papers Please editorializing the DHS/USCIS proposal. Thats a direct quote of its Federal Register posting: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposes to amend its regulations governingbiometrics use and collection. DHS proposes to require submission of biometrics by any individual, regardless of age, filing or associated with an immigration benefit request, other request, or collection of information, unless exempted; expand biometrics collection authority upon alien arrest; define ‘‘biometrics;’’ codify reuse requirements; codify and expand DNA testing, use and storage; establish an ‘‘extraordinary circumstances’’ standard to excuse a failure to appear at a biometric services appointment; modify how VAWA self-petitioners and T nonimmigrant status applicants demonstrate good moral character; and clarify biometrics collection purposes. This means family members, friends, immigration lawyers, and the above-mentioned schools and businesses could all be expected to submit their biometric information to the DHS. Theres also the weird thing about good moral character, which presumably means someones character aligns with the current MAGA leadership, no matter its evident lack of good moral character. It also seeks to codify stuff its already doing and expand its power to do more of that same stuff elsewhere for other reasons and under other conditions. The laundry list of people expected to bring their eyeballs, faces, and fingerprints to the DHS is described in a bit more detail later in the DHS proposal: Using biometrics for identity verification and management will assist DHS’s efforts to combat trafficking, confirm the results of biographical criminal history checks, and deter fraud. Therefore, DHS proposes in this rule that any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, supporter, derivative, dependent, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with a benefit request or other request or collection of information, including U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents, and without regard to age, must submit biometrics unless DHS otherwise exempts the requirement. If you ask me, this is less about a hunger for data than an attempt to dissuade people from assisting migrants, students, or temporary laborers from seeking a path to permanent residence. Our immigration processes have left us largely unaffected by terrorists or international criminal cartels, despite the governments persistent (and consistently louder) claims otherwise. A vast majority of immigrants are hardworking, tax-paying people who commit fewer crimes than US citizens. Then theres this, which says the DHS will now be allowed to track/reject/kick out applicants based on their sexual identity: Similarly, under this rule, DHS may expressly require, request, or accept raw DNA or DNA test results (which include a partial DNA profile) as evidence to determine eligibility for immigration and naturalization benefits or to perform any other functions necessary for administering and enforcing immigration and naturalization laws. For example, DHS may request DNA evidence to prove or disprove an individual’s biological sex in instances where that determination will impact benefit eligibility. Neat. As if this whole shit show needed any more Nazi added to it. As was noted above, the public has been invited to comment on this proposal. But I can almost guarantee you the opposition will be ignored in favor of ensuring the GOP has a Fatherland to rule for the foreseeable future.

[Category: 1, biometric collection, biometrics, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, mass surveillance, mission creep, privacy, surveillance, trump administration, uscis]

— Trump Tries To Disappear Impeachment References At Smithsonian

 

at 1/13/26 9:02pm

Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history. I can imagine its a fact that Donald Trump doesnt like very much. He might even be embarrassed over it. But its a fact that remains no matter what the fragile ego in chief desires. But with this administration on a blitz to erase all kinds of American history, largely over concerns about so-called DEI and woke content, it seems that Dear Leader has a couple of personal asks to add to this Orwellian project. President Donald Trump’s photo portrait display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has had references to his two impeachments removed, the latest apparent change at the collection of museums he has accused of bias as he asserts his influence over how official presentations document U.S. history. The wall text, which summarized Trump’s first presidency and noted his 2024 comeback victory, was part of the museum’s “American Presidents” exhibition. The description had been placed alongside a photograph of Trump taken during his first term. Now, a different photo appears without any accompanying text block, though the text was available online. Trump was the only president whose display in the gallery, as seen Sunday, did not include any extended text. Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history. Now, I wouldnt have thought it possible to Streisand Effect something so monumental in our shared history, given its high profile nature, but here we are anyway. Trumps exact impeachment from his first term is now back in the news, fodder for active discussion purely because his shakey psyche needed to remove references to it in Americas museum. And, hey, I suppose its worth remembering that those impeachments happened over half a decade ago. There are some number of people who have no doubt had a political awakening between then and now. People who paid very little to politics due to their age. Children who are now at an age to actually understand how our government works and what mechanisms like impeachment votes mean. Youngsters who perhaps didnt grasp the gravity of events such as January 6th, or who didnt understand the importance of a president attempting to have another sovereign nation perform political dirty tricks in exchange for military assistance. “The museum is beginning its planned update of the America’s Presidents gallery which will undergo a larger refresh this Spring,” the gallery statement said. “For some new exhibitions and displays, the museum has been exploring quotes or tombstone labels, which provide only general information, such as the artist’s name.” For now, references to Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton being impeached in 1868 and 1998, respectively, remain as part of their portrait labels, as does President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation as a result of the Watergate scandal. And, the gallery statement noted, “The history of Presidential impeachments continues to be represented in our museums, including the National Museum of American History.” Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history. The museum can try to explain this away as normal maintenance all they like. Nobody is buying it. The AP post notes that they reached out to the Trump administration asking if they had requested this change, but did not receive a response. A response is plainly not needed. Of course they did. Its not as though Trump himself has shied away from authoring plaques for presidential portraits in the past. At the White House, Trump has designed a notably partisan and subjective “Presidential Walk of Fame” featuring gilded photographs of himself and his predecessors — with the exception of Biden, who is represented by an autopen — along with plaques describing their presidencies. The White House said at the time that Trump himself was a primary author of the plaques. Notably, Trump’s two plaques praise the 45th and 47th president as a historically successful figure while those under Biden’s autopen stand-in describe the 46th executive as “by far, the worst President in American History” who “brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.” And so the president is all too happy behave as the shit-poster in chief. Hes cruel. Hes an egomaniac. Hes in charge. But none of that changes the following: Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.

[Category: 1, smithsonian, donald trump, history, impeachment, rewriting history]

— Online Gaming’s Final Boss: The Copyright Bully

 

at 1/13/26 4:24pm

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture. For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way. Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity. They are using copyright claims to threaten modders who wanted to customize the EverQuest experience to suit a different playstyle, running their own servers where things worked the way they wanted.  One project in particular is in Daybreak’s crosshairs: “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ). Daybreak claims THJ has infringed its copyrights in Everquest visuals and character, cutting into its bottom line. Ordinarily, when a company wants to remedy some actual harm, its lawyers will start with a cease-and-desist letter and potentially pursue a settlement. But if the goal is intimidation, a rightsholder is free to go directly to federal court and file a complaint. That’s exactly what Daybreak did, using that shock-and-awe approach to cow not only The Hero’s Journey team, but unrelated modders as well. Daybreak’s complaint seems to have dazzled the judge in the case by presenting side-by-side images of dragons and characters that look identical in the base game and when using the mod, without explaining that these images are the ones provided by EverQuest’s official client, which players have lawfully downloaded from the official source. The judge wound up short-cutting the copyright analysis and issuing a ruling that has proven devastating to the thousands of players who are part of EverQuest modding communities. Daybreak and the developers of The Hero’s Journey are now in private arbitration, and Daybreak has wasted no time in sending that initial ruling to other modders. The order doesn’t bind anyone who’s unaffiliated with The Hero’s Journey, but it’s understandable that modders who are in it for fun and community would cave to the implied threat that they could be next. As a result, dozens of fan servers have stopped operating. Daybreak has also persuaded the maintainers of the shared server emulation software that most fan servers rely upon, EQEmulator, to adopt terms of service that essentially ban any but the most negligible modding. The terms also provide that “your operation of an EQEmulator server is subject to Daybreak’s permission, which it may revoke for any reason or no reason at any time, without any liability to you or any other person or entity. You agree to fully and immediately comply with any demand from Daybreak to modify, restrict, or shut down any EQEmulator server.”  This is sadly not even an uncommon story in fanspaces—from the dustup over changes to the Dungeons and Dragons open gaming license to the “guidelines” issued by CBS for Star Trek fan films, we see new generations of owners deciding to alienate their most avid fans in exchange for more control over their new property. It often seems counterintuitive—fans are creating new experiences, for free, that encourage others to get interested in the original work. Daybreak can claim a shameful victory: it has imposed unilateral terms on the modding community that are far more restrictive than what fair use and other user rights would allow. In the process, it is alienating the very people it should want to cultivate as customers: hardcore Everquest fans. If it wants fans to continue to invest in making its games appeal to broader audiences and serve as testbeds for game development and sources of goodwill, it needs to give the game’s fans room to breathe and to play. If you’ve been a target of Daybreak’s legal bullying, we’d love to hear from you; email us at info@eff.org. Republished from EFFs Deeplinks blog.

[Category: daybreak, copyright, copyright bullies, everquest, fans, modders, the hero's journey, video games]

— Elon Musk Plays Disinfo Telephone: How Oregon’s Mundane Voter Roll Cleanup Is Turned Into False Claim Of ‘Fake Voters’

 

at 1/13/26 2:07pm

I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and the very first post that appeared in my feed was a perfect, almost pedagogical example of how the game of “disinformation telephone” gets played. Lets walk through it, because understanding how this works is important. The game works like this: Someone takes a factual but largely unremarkable story, gives it a slight spin, and passes it along. The next person picks it up, adds another layer of spin, and passes that along. By the time it reaches someone with a massive audience—say, the richest man in the world—the original mundane fact has been transformed into a full-blown conspiracy theory. And that final, mangled version is what millions of people see and believe. So lets trace this particular game of telephone from start to finish. Oregons Secretary of State, Tobias Read, recently announced that the state would be purging inactive voters from its rolls. This is routine voter roll maintenance that happens in every state. In Oregon’s case, “inactive voters” are generally voters whose mail-in ballots were returned as undeliverable—in other words, people who moved and didnt update their registration. This is important: these people did not vote. They could not vote. Oregon is a mail-in ballot state. If youre marked inactive, you dont get a ballot. No ballot, no vote. The system worked exactly as designed. The state identified people who had moved, marked them inactive so they couldnt accidentally vote from an old address, and is now cleaning up the rolls by removing those inactive entries: About 800,000 more voters’ registration status is inactive because their mail, including ballots or official notices, from county elections offices has been returned undelivered. Active voters get ballots; inactive voters, Read emphasizes, do not. All of this is actually a sign of how well the system works. If you mail-in ballot bounces back, Oregon makes you ineligible to vote until you re-register with a valid address. It’s evidence not of “fake voters,” but rather a system that makes sure only valid voters are active on the voter rolls. The reason there are so many—reportedly around 800,000—is because Oregon stopped doing this routine maintenance about a decade ago and is only now getting back to it. So you have a decade or so of accumulated returned ballots marked as inactive. You can complain that they should have been on top of this earlier, but theres nothing nefarious here. Its bureaucratic backlog, not fraud. And there are reasons to keep inactive voters (marked as inactive) on the rolls: mainly for if they ever get around to reregistering to vote so they can vote in future elections. Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, saw an opportunity. His organization had filed a lawsuit against Oregon over voter roll maintenance back in the fall of 2024, so he quickly claimed credit for the purge. But heres the thing: that lawsuit is still ongoing and has nothing to do with this routine removal of inactive voters. Also, that lawsuit isn’t going very well as the judge dismissed most of the key claims, leaving just one left and only for one party (not Judicial Watch, who was found not to have standing). But, nonetheless, Fitton, who loves attention, took credit for Read’s announcement: His tweet: HUGE: After @JudicialWatch lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State announces he will now clean 800,000 names from voter rolls. Notice his careful wording in his post. He doesnt actually say his lawsuit caused the change. He just notes, temporally, that Oregon announced the cleanup after his lawsuit was filed. Its a classic correlation implies causation move, designed to let his followers draw the conclusion he wants without him having to actually claim something false. Sneaky, but still within the bounds of technically not lying. The story at this point is still basically accurate, just with some self-serving framing. Then some rando X account called Upstate Federalist quote-tweeted Fittons post. And heres where the telephone game really kicks in. This account claimed that the purge of these inactive voters meant 20% of Oregons registered voters were fake. Hold on. Oregons population is only 4.25M…. 20% of their registered voters were fake? This is wrong on multiple levels. First, these werent fake voters. They were real people who had previously registered to vote, then moved, and whose registration information became outdated. Thats not fake. Thats just… people moving. Second, they werent voters at all in any meaningful sense. They were marked inactive precisely because the system identified that they had moved. Their unfilled out ballots had been returned to the state. They werent sent future ballots. They couldnt vote. The system prevented them from voting. Third, the 20% framing is designed to make it sound like Oregons elections were riddled with fraud. But again: these people did not vote. The number of inactive registrations on a voter roll has nothing to do with the integrity of actual votes cast and its only that high because Oregon neglected to clean up the inactive list for a decade. (For what it’s worth, some people tried to point this out to “Upstate Federalist” and he mocked them as “leftists.”) And then Elon Musk, with his hundreds of millions of followers, saw the quote tweet of the quote tweet and amplified it, claiming “That’s a lot of fake voters…” Except it’s not. It’s the opposite of “fake” voters. It’s Oregon’s safeguards working. Did he click through to understand the original story? No. Did he ask any of the countless experts who would take his call? No. Did he ask experts on his own platform, X, to explain what was happening in Oregon? No. Did he even ask his own AI, Grok, which actually would have told him the truth? No. (Incredibly, despite on tons of posts it being common to see someone somewhere reply to any claim with “@grok is this true?” either those are being hidden under Elon’s posts, or none of his rabid followers care. It took many, many, many scrolls before I found one person not asking if it was true, but to explain it, and Grok, properly told him that it was about accounts that had their addresses changed, not fraud. At the time I looked at that Grok post, it had… 16 total views, including mine): Either way, Elon just saw something that fit the narrative hes been pushing about election fraud, and he amplified it to his massive audience as if it had to be true. The original mundane story about routine voter roll maintenance had now become, through the magic of disinfo telephone, evidence that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters, that they had to be forced to purge from the voter rolls. Heres the thing: I guarantee well be hearing from MAGA folks for years that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters on the rolls. This fact will get cited in arguments about election integrity. It will show up in lawsuits. It will be used to justify restrictive voting laws. It will absolutely be a talking point on podcasts and Fox News. And never, not once, will anyone confront Elon over spreading this bullshit. Nor will he admit he passed along blatant misinformation that was trivially easy to debunk if hed spent thirty seconds checking, as I did. This is how the information environment gets polluted. Not through some grand conspiracy, but through a series of small distortions, each building on the last, until a mundane truth becomes an inflammatory lie. And when the person at the end of the telephone chain has the largest megaphone on the planet and zero interest in accuracy, that lie reaches millions of people who will never see any correction. The richest man in the world, with effectively unlimited resources to verify information, chose instead to just… not. Because the lie was more useful to him than the truth. And thats how disinfo telephone works.

[Category: judicial watch, twitter, x, disinfo telephone, elon musk, oregon, tobias read, tom fitton, voter rolls]

— Trump’s Loyalist Prosecutors Continue To Get Kicked Off Cases Because They’re Not Legally Appointed

 

at 1/13/26 12:06pm

Trumps binge-and-purge approach to handling the DOJ definitely isnt working out for him. The administration has been steadily pushing prosecutors out for failing to be MAGA enough, especially when it comes to Trumps steady stream of vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions. Not only are prosecutors finding themselves trumped (pun intended) by grand juries when trying to lock up people for exercising their First Amendment right to protest anti-immigration efforts, but career DOJ prosecutors are quitting (or getting fired) for refusing to be part of Trumps lawfare. This leaves the DOJ with a lot of openings it cant easily fill. And the openings at the top US attorneys and assistant US attorneys cant just be filled by anyone Trump happens to like. These are appointed positions that must be approved by the legislative branch. Trump has constantly ignored this co-equal branch of the government in order to stock his cabinet with loyalists, like Trumps former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, who was apparently qualified to be a US attorney thanks to her several years of experience as [squints at bio] an insurance lawyer. Halligan has already seen high-profile prosecutions set aside by courts because she doesnt legally hold this position. Now, theres another Trump toady going through the same thing Halligan experienced for the same reason: he doesnt have any legal claim to the position hes currently in. A federal judge on Thursday disqualified the Trump loyalist top prosecutor in upstate New York and tossed subpoenas his office has issued to state Attorney General Letitia James. [] U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield, appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote in a 24-page opinion that John Sarcone III has been unlawfully serving as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. Heres how the administration attempted to keep John Scarone operative long enough to pursue its vindictive prosecution of Letitia James, taken from the 24-page decision [PDF]: Mr. Sarcone’s service was and is unlawful because it bypassed the statutory requirements that govern who may exercise the powers of a U.S. Attorney. U.S. Attorneys must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. When a vacancy arises, federal law provides limited alternatives to fill the position temporarily. None authorized Mr. Sarcone to serve as Acting U.S. Attorney on August 5, 2025, when he relied on the authority of the office to request the subpoenas. The U.S. Attorney General initially appointed Mr. Sarcone as Interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. When that term expired, this District’s judges declined to use their statutory authority to extend his tenure. Federal law then required the use of other statutory procedures to fill the position. The Department of Justice did not follow those procedures. Instead, on the same day that the judges declined to extend Mr. Sarcone’s appointment, the Department took coordinated steps through personnel moves and shifting titles to install Mr. Sarcone as Acting U.S. Attorney. Federal law does not permit such a workaround. Not all that clever. But no one expects anything more (or is it anything less?) from this administration. Well have to wait and see if Sarcone will respect this ruling and relegate himself to a lower position. I mean, its not impossible to think this might happen. After all, others in his same (ill-gotten) position have taken themselves out of the equation, rather than create further legal problems for Trumps vindictive prosecutions. In early December, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba resigned following an appeals court ruling upholding her disqualification. Shortly thereafter, Delaware U.S. Attorney Julianne Murray also left her post, citing the Habba ruling. Then again, Sarcone might decide hes just another Lindsey Halligan. Halligan has also been told by the court that she cannot legally hold the US Attorney title due to the same sort of Trump shenanigans. And those rulings have seen the indictments she managed to secure against former FBI director James Comey and NY Attorney General Letitia James thrown out by a federal judge. And yet, she refuses to learn anything from this experience. Worse, shes apparently so enthralled with her position of power she cant even be bothered to pretend someone else in the DOJ (who has secured their position legally) is handling the cases shes no longer allowed to lead. A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Lindsey Halligan to explain why she continues to identify herself as a U.S. attorney despite a different judge finding her appointment as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia was invalid. U.S. District Judge David Novak, who sits in Richmond, gave Halligan seven days to provide the basis for her use of the title and ordered her to explain why her identification as U.S. attorney does not constitute a false or misleading statement. Novak also instructed Halligan to lay out the reasons why the court should not strike Ms. Halligans identification as United States attorney from an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in early December. Halligans name is listed on the indictment and her title as United States attorney and special attorney. This order [PDF] is much shorter, probably because this federal district has already said the same thing to Halligan previously in longer opinions and orders. But those didnt change anything about how Halligan refers to herself in court filings. According to the CBS News report, the DOJ itself sent out a memo instructing everyone to refer to Halligan by the title she legally doesnt have. But as the court has already noted, Pam Bondis attempt to retcon Halligan into legality on September 22, 2025 didnt actually make that happen. All it did was provide more evidence showing the administration knew Halligan had bypassed the required appointment process and hoped it could just slip her through the door without anyone noticing. All of this just goes to show were dealing with a bunch of people who have decided they dont serve their country or their offices. They only serve their chosen king. And thats something even Trump voters didnt vote for, because you dont elect a king. Halligan is, of course, welcome to continue to ignore these court orders. But all that means for Trumps DOJ is that every case it brings in the Eastern District of Virginia will be tossed as soon as it hits the docket.

[Category: 1, alina habba, doj, john sarcone, letitia james, lindsey halligan, trump administration, vindictive prosecution]

— Daily Deal: Headway Premium

 

at 1/13/26 12:01pm

Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headways massive library of 1500+ book summaries, with 30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health and wellness. Its on sale for $60 for new users only. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

— The EU Fired Their Censor. Ours Kept His Job

 

at 1/13/26 10:32am

The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU censorship while actively censoring people themselves. While Ive long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans—particularly MAGA officials—keep crying wolf over the DSAs non-censorial aspects, then turn around and abuse their own power to silence speech they dislike. They seem to get a thrill out of the hypocrisy. Want to see how differently the US and EU actually handle government overreach on speech? Look at what happened to two would-be censors: Thierry Breton and Brendan Carr. If you dont recall, Thierry Breton is the former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, which made him the lead enforcer of the DSA, a role he took to gleefully, regularly threatening tech companies if their actions didnt comply with what Breton wanted them to do. He got so drunk on his own power that he demanded Elon Musk not platform Donald Trump. Clear attack on basic free speech principles, exactly the kind of censorial overreach that validates MAGA complaints about the DSA. Heres what happened next: EU politicians collectively called bullshit on Breton, told him he was abusing the law, and kicked him out weeks later. The system worked. Someone abused their power, the system caught it, corrected it, removed him. Thats how institutions are supposed to respond to overreach. Now, lets come over to this side of the Atlantic. Remember Brendan Carr? The same FCC chair who threatened to abuse the power of the FCC to punish Disney for not kicking Jimmy Kimmel off the air? That temporarily worked. Disney pulled Kimmel off the air that very day and only brought him back the next week after they saw millions of cancellations of Disney+ as the public protested. Unlike Breton, Carr actually succeeded. He used his government position to censor speech he didnt like, and it worked. And what happened to him? Nothing. Hes still there, still threatening TV and radio stations whenever they say things that upset Trump or MAGA. No consequences, no correction, just more threats. Now, with the US government banning Breton from getting a visa to ever come to the US again as punishment for his censorship effort that failed and got him fired, it seems like maybe people should be asking why Trump and Rubio are punishing Breton and not Carr. Carr succeeded where Breton failed. Carr is still in power and still threatening. Breton got fired and now banned from the US. Of course, we all know how this double standard works. Carr is allowed to do this because hes abusing his powers to stifle speech Donald Trump doesnt like. Breton must be punished because he tried to stifle speech Trump does like. Theres nothing more sophisticated to it than that, but the similar nature of both politicians attempts to abuse the law to silence speech they didnt like is notable. Frankly, I dont think either the US or the EU should have anyone who has the power to abuse laws to enable censorship. But only one system actually responded to the abuse of power by removing the abuser. And it wasnt ours. The contrast here reveals something more troubling than simple hypocrisy. When Breton overstepped, EU institutions checked him immediately. When Carr overstepped, US institutions… did nothing. No real pushback from Congress (Ted Cruz whining doesn’t count), no internal accountability, no consequences whatsoever. The system thats supposed to prevent government censorship just sat there and watched it happen. So when you hear the next MAGA official shrieking about EU censorship, remember: the EUs institutions worked. They caught the abuse, stopped it, and removed the abuser. Our institutions failed. They enabled the abuse, rewarded it with continued power, and are now punishing the guy from the system that actually worked. Thats not a story about two bad actors. Thats a story about which democratic system still has functioning antibodies against authoritarian overreach—and which one doesnt.

[Category: disney, twitter, x, 1st amendment, brendan carr, censorship, consequences, donald trump, dsa, eu, fcc, free speech, marco rubio, thierry breton]

— DHS Tells Reporter That Filming ICE Officers ‘Sounds Like Obstruction Of Justice’

 

at 1/13/26 6:25am

ICE activity has increased exponentially since Trumps return to office, bringing with it an exponential increase in rights violations committed by federal officers. Multiple lawsuits have been filed and, without exception, courts have safeguarded the rights of people to peacefully protest and document federal officers as they perform their duties. Meanwhile, the people running DHS and its components continue to claim that merely recording officers is a criminal act. But its not. Its protected by the Constitution whether ICE likes it or not. Under Trump, ICE and DHS are taking a bold new stance against recording officers, telling those with boots on the ground deliberately false things, like this: [T]he guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear—like masks, flashlights, and cameras—as potential precursors to violence, telling officers to prepare “from the point of view of an adversary.” Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.” That guidance was released to federal officers back in July. The rhetoric has only ramped up since then, with DHS officials publicly stating that theyre going to treat protected First Amendment activity as a crime. The responses delivered by these officials following this July reporting was indicative of their mindset: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in July that it was “violence” to be “doxing” and “videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations.” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin reiterated the point in August that “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents.… And we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents.” A memorandum issued at the beginning of December provided guidance for DOJ prosecutors seeking to punish people for utilizing their constitutional rights. According to the memo, people who follow officers to observe, record, or protest their actions are to be treated as criminal obstructionists, if not as actual domestic terrorists. When reached for comment on this memo by CJ Ciaramella of Reason, the DHS doubled down on its decision to treat this right as a crime: In response to a question from Reason asking if the department considered following or recording a federal law enforcement officer to be obstruction of justice, the DHS Office of Public Affairs said in an emailed statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson: That sure sounds like obstruction of justice. Our brave ICE law enforcement face a more than 1150% increase in assaults against them. If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, we will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Filming or even being in the general area of federal officers engaged in their public duties isnt obstruction. Neither is identifying officers officers who, by the way, should be wearing stuff that makes them identifiable, rather than the blend of army surplus and balaclavas that further separates them from accountability. And, of course, the DHS refers to that especially meaningless stat (1150% increase in assaults), as though that somehow justifies its decision to use the Constitution as a door mat. All that actually means is that there have been 115 more assaults as compared to 2024. Back when the DHS was touting its 690% increase in assaults as an argument against preventing ICE officers from wearing masks, it was comparing 79 alleged assaults through the first six months of this year against the 10 that had been committed from January-June 2024. Thats just an empty stat that allows DHS spokespeople to trot out a gaudy number that will grab eyeballs but otherwise just allows the MAGA-cooked to continue to pretend Democrat cities are being destroyed by violent anti-ICE protests. Even if it were true that its exceptionally dangerous to be an ICE officer at this point in time, that doesnt justify pretending the First Amendment simply doesnt exist. Actual assaults are criminal acts. Filming federal officers who dont want to be filmed definitely isnt.

[Category: 1, 1st amendment, dhs, ice, kristi noem, mass deportation, rights violations, tricia mclaughlin, trump administration]

As of 1/15/26 11:51pm. Last new 1/15/26 10:38pm.