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

When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

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This is a cross post from Prof. Eric Goldman’s blog, mostly written by Prof. Jess Miers, with additional commentary at the end from Eric.

Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the ‘Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,’’ a/k/a the TAKE IT DOWN Act, is a weapon of mass censorship.

Background

In October 2023, two high school students became the victims of AI-generated NCII. Classmates had used “nudify” tools to create fake explicit images using public photos pulled from their social media profiles. The incident sparked outrage, culminating in a hearing last June where the students’ families called for federal action.

Congress responded with the TAKE IT DOWN Act, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz and quickly co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers. On its face, the law targets non-consensual intimate imagery, including synthetic content. In practice, it creates a sweeping speech-removal regime with few safeguards.

Keep in mind, the law was passed under an administration that has shown little regard for civil liberties or dissenting speech. It gives the government broad power to remove online content of which it disapproves and opens the door to selective enforcement. Trump made his intentions clear during his March State of the Union:

And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind—because nobody gets treated worse than I do online.

Some interpreted this as a reference to a viral AI-generated video of Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet—precisely the kind of political satire that could be subject to removal under the Act’s broad definitions.

The bill moved unusually fast compared to previous attempts at online speech regulation. It passed both chambers without a single amendment, despite raising serious First Amendment and due process concerns. Following the TikTok ban, it marks another example of Congress enacting sweeping online speech restrictions with minimal debate and virtually no public process.

Senator Booker briefly held up the bill in mid-2024, citing concerns about vague language and overbroad criminal penalties. After public backlash, including pressure from victims’ families, Senator Booker negotiated a few modest changes. The revised bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent in February 2025. The House advanced it in April, ignoring objections from civil liberties groups and skipping any real markup.

President Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act into law in May. The signing ceremony made it seem even more like a thinly veiled threat toward online services that facilitate expression, rather than a legitimate effort to curb NCII. At the ceremony, First Lady Melania Trump remarked:

Artificial Intelligence and social media are the digital candy of the next generation—sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the cognitive development of our children. But unlike sugar, these new technologies can be weaponized, shape beliefs, and sadly, affect emotions and even be deadly.

And just recently, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson—handpicked by Trump and openly aligned with his online censorship agenda—tweeted his enthusiasm about enforcing the TAKE IT DOWN Act in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, the same agency that has been implicated in surveilling protestors and disappearing U.S. citizens off the streets during civil unrest.

Statutory Analysis

Despite overwhelming (and shortsighted) support from the tech industry, the TAKE IT DOWN Act spells trouble for any online service that hosts third-party content.

The law contains two main provisions: one criminalizing the creation, publication, and distribution of authentic, manipulated, and synthetic NCII, and another establishing a notice-and-takedown system for online services hosting NCII that extends to a potentially broader range of online content.

Section 2: Criminal Prohibition on Intentional Disclosure of Nonconsensual Intimate Visual Depictions

Section 2 of the Act creates new federal criminal penalties for the publication of non-consensual “intimate visual depictions,” including both real (“authentic”) and technologically manipulated or AI-generated imagery (“digital forgeries”). These provisions are implemented via amendments to Section 223 of the Communications Act and took effect immediately upon enactment.

Depictions of Adults

The statute applies differently depending on whether the depiction involves an adult or a minor. With respect to depicting adults, it is a federal crime to knowingly publish an intimate visual depiction via an interactive computer service (as defined under Section 230) if the following are met: (1) the image was created or obtained under circumstances where the subject had a reasonable expectation of privacy; (2) the content was not voluntarily exposed in a public or commercial setting; (3) the image is not of public concern; and (4) the publication either was intended to cause harm or actually caused harm (defined to include psychological, financial, or reputational injury).

The statute defines “intimate visual depictions” via 15 U.S.C. § 6851. The definition includes images showing uncovered genitals, pubic areas, anuses, or post-pubescent female nipples, as well as depictions involving the display or transfer of sexual fluids. Images taken in public may still qualify as “intimate” if the individual did not voluntarily expose themselves or did not consent to the sexual conduct depicted.

In theory, the statute exempts pornography that was consensually produced and distributed online. In practice, the scope of that exception is far from clear. One key requirement for triggering criminal liability in cases involving adults is that “what is depicted was not voluntarily exposed by the identifiable individual in a public or commercial setting.” The intent seems to be to exclude lawful adult content from the law’s reach.

But the language is ambiguous. The statute refers to what is depicted—potentially meaning the body parts or sexual activity shown—rather than to the image itself. Under this reading, anyone who has ever publicly or commercially shared intimate content generally could be categorically excluded from protection under the law, even if a particular image was created or distributed without their consent. That interpretation would effectively deny coverage to adult content creators and sex workers, the very individuals who are often most vulnerable to nonconsensual republishing and exploitation of their content.

Depictions of Children

With respect to depictions of minors, the TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes the distribution of any image showing uncovered genitals, pubic area, anus, or female-presenting nipple—or any depiction of sexual activity—if shared with the intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or sexually gratify.

Although the Act overlaps with existing federal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) statutes, it discards the constitutional boundaries that have kept those laws from being struck down as unconstitutional. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2256(8), criminal liability attaches only to depictions of “sexually explicit conduct,” a term courts have narrowly defined to include things like intercourse, masturbation, or lascivious exhibition of genitals. Mere nudity doesn’t typically qualify, at least not without contextual cues. Even then, prosecutors must work to show that the image crosses a clear, judicially established threshold.

TAKE IT DOWN skips the traditional safeguards that typically constrain speech-related criminal laws. It authorizes felony charges for publishing depictions of minors that include certain body parts if done with the intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, arouse, or sexually gratify. But these intent standards are left entirely undefined. A family bathtub photo shared with a mocking or off-color caption could be framed as intended to humiliate or, in the worst-case reading, arouse. A public beach photo of a teen, reposted with sarcastic commentary, might be interpreted as degrading. Of course, these edge cases should be shielded by traditional First Amendment defenses.

We’ve seen this before. Courts have repeatedly struck down or narrowed CSAM laws that overreach, particularly when they criminalize nudity or suggestive content that falls short of actual sexual conduct, such as family photos, journalism, documentary film, and educational content.

TAKE IT DOWN also revives the vagueness issues that have plagued earlier efforts to curb child exploitation online. Terms like “harass,” “humiliate,” or “gratify” are inherently subjective and undefined, which invites arbitrary enforcement. In effect, the law punishes speakers based on perceived motive rather than the objective content itself.

Yes, the goal of protecting minors is laudable. But noble intentions don’t save poorly drafted laws. Courts don’t look the other way when speech restrictions are vague or overbroad just because the policy behind them sounds good. If a statute invites constitutional failure, it doesn’t end up protecting anyone. In short, the TAKE IT DOWN Act replicates the very defects that have led courts to limit or strike down earlier child-protection laws.

Digital Forgeries

The statute also criminalizes the publication of “digital forgeries” without the depicted person’s consent, which differs from the “reasonable expectation of privacy” element for authentic imagery. A digital forgery is defined as any intimate depiction created or altered using AI, software, or other technological means such that it is, in the eyes of a reasonable person, indistinguishable from an authentic image. This standard potentially sweeps in a wide range of synthetic and altered content, regardless of whether a viewer actually believed the image was real or whether the underlying components were independently lawful.

Compared to existing CSAM laws, the TAKE IT DOWN Act also uses a more flexible visual standard when it comes to “digital forgeries.” Under CSAM law, synthetic or computer-generated depictions are only criminalized if they are “indistinguishable from that of a real minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” That standard makes it difficult to prosecute deepfakes or AI nudes unless they are photorealistic and sexually explicit. But under TAKE IT DOWN, a digital forgery is covered if it “when viewed as a whole by a reasonable person, is indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction of the individual.” The focus isn’t on whether the depiction looks like a real child in general, but whether it looks like a real, identifiable person. This makes the law far more likely to apply to a broader range of AI-generated depictions involving minors, even if the underlying content wouldn’t meet the CSAM threshold. As discussed in the implications section, this too invites First Amendment scrutiny.

There are several exceptions. The statute does not apply to disclosures made as part of law enforcement or intelligence activity, nor to individuals acting reasonably and in good faith when sharing content for legitimate legal, medical, educational, or professional purposes. The law also exempts people sharing intimate content of themselves (as long as it contains nudity or is sexual in nature) and content already covered by federal CSAM laws.

Penalties include fines and up to two years’ imprisonment for adult-related violations, and up to three years for violations involving minors. Threats to publish such material can also trigger criminal liability.

Finally, the Act leaves unanswered whether online services could face criminal liability for failing to remove known instances of authentic or AI-generated NCII. Because Section 230 never applies to federal criminal prosecutions, intermediaries cannot rely on it as a defense against prosecution. If a service knowingly hosts unlawful material, including not just NCII itself, but threats to publish it, such as those made in private messages, the government may claim the service is “publishing” illegal content in violation of the statute.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Taamnehprovides some insulation. It held that general awareness of harmful conduct on a service does not amount to the kind of specific knowledge required to establish aiding-and-abetting liability. But the TAKE IT DOWN Act complicates that picture. Once a service receives a takedown request for a particular image, it arguably acquires actual knowledge of illegal content. If the service fails to act within the Act’s 48-hour deadline, it’s not clear whether that inaction could form the basis for a criminal charge under the statute’s separate enforcement provisions.

As Eric discusses below, there’s also no clear answer to what happens when someone re-uploads content that had previously been removed (or even new violating content). Does prior notice of a particular individual’s bad acts create the kind of ongoing knowledge that turns continued hosting into criminal publication? That scenario falls into a legal gap narrower than Taamneh might account for, but the statute doesn’t clarify how courts should treat repeat violations.

Section 3: Notice and Removal of Nonconsensual Intimate Visual Depictions

Alongside its criminal provisions, the Act imposes new civil compliance obligations on online services that host user-generated content. Covered services must implement a notice-and-takedown process to remove intimate visual depictions (real or fake) within one year of the law’s enactment. The process must allow “identifiable individuals” or their authorized agents to request removal of non-consensual intimate images. Once a valid request is received, the service has 48 hours to remove the requested content. Failure to comply subjects the service to enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission under its unfair or deceptive practices authority.

The law applies to any public-facing website, app, or online service that primarily hosts user-generated content—or, more vaguely, services that “publish, curate, host, or make available” non-consensual intimate imagery as part of their business. This presumably includes social media services, online pornography services, file-sharing tools, image boards, and arguably even private messaging apps. It likely includes search engines as well, and the “make available” standard could apply to user-supplied links to other sites. Notably, the law excludes Internet access providers, email services, and services where user-submitted content is “incidental” to the service’s primary function. This carveout appears designed to protect online retailers, streaming services like Netflix, and news media sites with comment sections. However, the ambiguity around what qualifies as “incidental” will likely push services operating in the gray zone toward over-removal or disabling functionality altogether.

Generative AI tools likely fall within the scope of the law. If a system generates and displays intimate imagery, whether real or synthetic, at a user’s direction, it could trigger takedown obligations. However, the statute is silent on how these duties apply to services that don’t “host” content in the traditional sense. In theory, providers could remove specific outputs if stored, or even retrain the model to exclude certain images from its dataset. But this becomes far more complicated when the model has already “memorized” the data and internalized it into its parameters. As with many recent attempts to regulate AI, the hard operational questions—like how to unwind learned content—are left unanswered, effectively outsourced to developers to figure out later.

Though perhaps inspired by the structure of existing notice-and-takedown regimes, such as the DMCA’s copyright takedown framework, the implementation here veers sharply from existing content moderation norms. A “valid” TAKE IT DOWN request requires four components: a signature, a description of the content, a good faith statement of non-consent, and contact information. But that’s where the rigor ends.

There is no requirement to certify a takedown request under penalty of perjury, nor any legal consequence for impersonating someone or falsely claiming to act on their behalf. The online services, not the requester, bear the burden of verifying the identity of both the requester and the depicted individual, all within a 48-hour window. In practice, most services will have no realistic option other than to take the request at face value and remove the content, regardless of whether it’s actually intimate or non-consensual. This lack of verification opens the door to abuse, not just by individuals but by third-party services. There is already a cottage industry emerging around paid takedown services, where companies are hired to scrub the Internet of unwanted images by submitting removal requests on behalf of clients, whether authorized or not. This law will only bolster that industry.

The law also only requires a “reasonably sufficient” identification of the content. There’s no obligation to include URLs, filenames, or specific asset identifiers. It’s unclear whether vague descriptions like “nudes of me from college” are sufficient to trigger a takedown obligation. Under the DMCA, this level of ambiguity would likely invalidate a request. Here, it might not only be acceptable, it could be legally actionable to ignore.

The statute’s treatment of consent is equally problematic. A requester must assert that the content was published without consent but need not provide any evidence to support the claim, other than a statement of good faith belief. There is no adversarial process, no opportunity for the original uploader to dispute the request, and no mechanism to resolve conflicts where the depicted person may have, in fact, consented. In cases where an authorized agent submits a removal request on someone’s behalf (say, a family member or advocacy group), it’s unclear what happens if the depicted individual disagrees. The law contemplates no process for sorting this out. Services are expected to remove first and ask questions never.

Complicating matters further, the law imposes an obligation to remove not only the reported content but also any “identical copies.” While framed as a measure to prevent whack-a-mole reposting, this provision effectively creates a soft monitoring mandate. Even when the original takedown request is vague or incomplete—which the statute permits—services are still required to scan their systems for duplicates. This must be done despite often having little to no verification of the requester’s identity, authority, or the factual basis for the alleged lack of consent. Worse, online services must defer to the requester’s characterization of the content, even if the material in question may not actually qualify as an “intimate visual depiction” under the statutory definition.

Lastly, the law grants immunity to online services that remove content in good faith, even if the material doesn’t meet the definition of an intimate visual depiction. This creates a strong incentive to over-remove rather than assess borderline cases, especially when the legal risk for keeping content up outweighs any penalty for taking it down.

(Notably, neither the criminal nor civil provisions of the law expressly carve out satirical, parody, or protest imagery that happens to involve nudity or sexual references.)

* * *

Some implications of the law:

Over-Criminalization of Legal Speech

The law creates a sweeping new category of criminalized speech without the narrow tailoring typically required for content-based criminal statutes. Language surrounding “harm,” “public concern,” and “reasonable expectation of privacy” invite prosecutorial overreach and post-hoc judgments about whether a given depiction implicates privacy interests and consent, even when the speaker may have believed the content was lawful, newsworthy, or satirical.

The statute allows prosecution not only where the speaker knew the depiction was private, but also where they merely should have known. This is a sharp departure from established First Amendment doctrine, which requires at least actual knowledge or reckless disregard for truth in civil defamation cases, let alone criminal ones.

The law’s treatment of consent raises unresolved questions. It separates consent to create a depiction from consent to publish it, but says nothing about what happens when consent to publish is later withdrawn. A person might initially agree to share a depiction with a journalist, filmmaker, or content partner, only to later revoke that permission. The statute offers no clarity on how that revocation must be communicated and whether it must identify specific content versus a general objection.

To be clear, the statute requires that the speaker “knowingly” publish intimate imagery without consent. So absent notice of revocation, criminal liability likely wouldn’t attach. But what counts as sufficient notice? Can a subject revoke consent to a particular use or depiction? Can they revoke consent across the board? If a journalist reuses a previously approved depiction in a new story, or a filmmaker continues distributing a documentary after one subject expresses discomfort, are those “new” publications requiring fresh consent? The law provides no mechanism for resolving these questions.

Further, for adult depictions, the statute permits prosecution where the publication either causes harm or was intended to cause harm. This opens the door to criminal liability based not on the content itself, but on its downstream effects, regardless of whether the speaker acted in good faith. The statute includes no explicit exception for newsworthiness, artistic value, or other good-faith purposes, nor does it provide any formal opportunity for a speaker to demonstrate the absence of malicious intent. In theory, the First Amendment (and Taamneh) should cabin the reach, but the text itself leaves too much room for prosecutorial discretion.

The law also does not specify whether the harm must be to the depicted individual or to someone else, leaving open the possibility that prosecutors could treat general moral offense, such as that invoked by anti-pornography advocates, as sufficient. The inclusion of “reputational harm” as a basis for criminal liability is especially troubling. The statute makes no distinction between public and private figures and requires neither actual malice nor reckless disregard, setting a lower bar than what’s required even for civil defamation.

Further, because the law criminalizes “digital forgeries,” and defines them broadly to include any synthetic content indistinguishable, to a reasonable person, from reality, political deepfakes are vulnerable to prosecution. A video of a public official in a compromising scenario, even if obviously satirical or critical, could be treated as a criminal act if the depiction is deemed sufficiently intimate and the official claims reputational harm. [FN] The “not a matter of public concern” carveout is meant to prevent this, but it’s undefined and thus subject to prosecutorial discretion. Courts have repeatedly struggled to draw the line between private and public concern, and the statute offers no guidance.

[FN: Eric’s addition: I call this the Anthony Weiner problem, where his sexting recipients’ inability to prove their claims by showing the receipts would have allowed Weiner to lie without accountability.]

This creates a meaningful risk that prosecutors, particularly those aligned with Trump, could weaponize the law against protest art, memes, or critical commentary. Meta’s prior policy, for example, permitted images of a visible anus or close-up nudity if photoshopped onto a public figure for commentary or satire. Under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, similar visual content could become a target for prosecution or removal, especially when it involves politically powerful individuals. The statute provides plenty of wiggle room for selective enforcement, producing a chilling effect for creators, journalists, documentarians, and artists who work with visual media that is constitutionally protected but suddenly carries legal risk under this law.

With respect to depictions of minors, the law goes further: a person can be prosecuted for publishing an intimate depiction if they did so with the intent to harass or humiliate the minor or arouse another individual. As discussed, the definition of intimate imagery covers non-sexually explicit content, which covers content that is likely broader than existing CSAM or obscenity laws.  This means that the law creates a lower-tier criminal offense for visual content involving minors, even if the images are not illegal under current federal law.

For “authentic” images, the law could easily reach innocent but revealing photos of minors shared online. As discussed, if a popular family content creator posts a photo of their child in the bathtub (content that arguably shouldn’t be online in the first place) and the government concludes the poster intended to arouse someone else, that could trigger criminal liability under the TAKE IT DOWN Act. Indeed, family vloggers have repeatedly been accused of curating “innocent” content to appeal to their adult male followers as a means of increasing engagement and revenue, despite pushback from parents and viewers. (Parents may be part of the problem). While the underlying content itself is likely legal speech to the extent it doesn’t fall within CSAM or obscenity laws, it could still qualify as illegal content, subject to criminal prosecution, under the Act.

For AI-generated images, the law takes an even more aggressive approach for minors. Unlike federal CSAM laws, which only cover synthetic images that are “indistinguishable” from a real minor, the TAKE IT DOWN Act applies to any digital forgery that, in the eyes of a reasonable person, appears to depict a specific, identifiable child. That’s a significant shift. The higher standard in CSAM law was crafted to comply with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, where the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on virtual CSAM that wasn’t tied to real individuals. The Court’s rationale protected fictional content, including cartoon imagery (think a nude depiction of South Park’s Eric Cartman) as constitutionally protected speech. By contrast, the TAKE IT DOWN Act abandons that distinction and criminalizes synthetic content based on how it appears to a reasonable viewer, not whether it reflects reality or actual harm. That standard is unlikely to survive Ashcroft-level scrutiny and leaves the law open to serious constitutional challenge.

Disproportionate Protections & Penalties For Vulnerable Groups

The TAKE IT DOWN Act is framed as a measure to protect vulnerable individuals, such as the high school students victimized by deepfake NCII. Yet its ambiguities risk leaving some vulnerable groups unprotected, or worse, exposing them to prosecution.

The statute raises the real possibility of criminalizing large numbers of minors. Anytime we’re talking about high schoolers and sharing of NCII, we have to ask whether the law applies to teens who forward nudes—behavior that is unquestionably harmful and invasive, but also alarmingly common (see, e.g., 1, 2, 3). While the statute is framed as a tool to punish adults who exploit minors, its broad language easily sweeps in teenagers navigating digital spaces they may not fully understand. Yes, teens should be more careful with what they share, but that expectation doesn’t account for the impulsiveness, peer pressure, and viral dynamics that often define adolescent behavior online. A nude or semi-nude image shared consensually between peers can rapidly spread beyond its intended audience. Some teens may forward it not to harass or humiliate, but out of curiosity or simply because “everyone else already saw it.” Under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, that alone could trigger federal criminal liability.

With respect to depictions of adults, the risks are narrower but still present. The statute specifies that consent to create a depiction does not equate to consent to publish it, and that sharing a depiction with someone else does not authorize them—or anyone else—to republish it. These provisions are intended to close familiar NCII loopholes, but they also raise questions about how the law applies when individuals post or re-share depictions of themselves. There is no broad exemption for self-publication by adults, only the same limited carveout for depictions involving nudity or sexual conduct. That may cover much of what adult content creators publish, but it leaves unclear how the law treats suggestive or partial depictions that fall short of statutory thresholds. In edge cases, a prosecutor could argue that a self-published image lacks context-specific consent or causes general harm, especially if the prosecutor is inclined to target adult content as a matter of policy.

At the same time, the law seems to also treat adult content creators and sex workers as effectively ineligible for protection. As discussed, prior public or commercial self-disclosure potentially disqualifies someone from being a victim of non-consensual redistribution. Instead of accounting for the specific risks these communities face, the law appears to treat them as discardable (as is typical for these communities).

This structural asymmetry is made worse by the statute’s sweeping exemption for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite their well-documented misuse of intimate imagery. Police have used real sex workers’ photos in sting operations without consent, exposing individuals to reputational harm, harassment, and even false suspicion. A 2021 DOJ Inspector General report found that FBI agents, while posing as minors online, uploaded non-consensual images to illicit websites. This is conduct that violated agency policy but seems to be fully exempt under Take It Down. This creates a feedback loop: the state appropriates private images, recirculates them, and then uses the fallout as investigative justification.

Over-Removal of Political Speech, Commentary, and Adult Content

Trump and his allies have a long track record of attempting to suppress unflattering or politically inconvenient content. Under the civil takedown provisions of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, they no longer need to go through the courts to do it. All it takes is an allegation that a depiction violates the statute. Because the civil standard is more permissive, that allegation doesn’t have to be well-founded, it just has to allege that the content is an “intimate visual depiction.” A private photo from a political fundraiser, a photoshopped meme using a real image, or an AI-generated video of Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet could all be flagged under the law, even if they don’t meet the statute’s actual definition. But here’s the catch: services have just 48 hours to take the content down. That’s not 48 hours to investigate, evaluate, or push back, it’s 48 hours to comply or risk FTC enforcement. In practice, that means the content is far more likely to be removed than challenged, especially when the requester claims the material is intimate. Services will default to caution, pulling content that may not meet the statutory threshold just to avoid regulatory risk. As we saw after FOSTA-SESTA, that kind of liability pressure drives entire categories of speech offline.

Moreover, the provision requiring online services to remove identical copies of the reported content, in practice, might encourage online services to take a scorched-earth approach to removals: deleting entire folders, wiping user accounts, pulling down all images linked to a given name or metadata tag, or even removing the contents of an entire website. It’s easy to see how this could be  especially weaponized against adult content sites, where third-party uploads often blur the line between lawful adult material and illicit content.

Further, automated content moderation tools that are designed to efficiently remove content while shielding human workers from exposure harms may exacerbate the issue. Many online services use automated classifiers, blurred previews, and image hashing systems to minimize human exposure to disturbing content. But the TAKE IT DOWN Act requires subjective judgment calls that automation may not be equipped to make. Moderators must decide whether a depiction is truly intimate, whether it falls under an exception, whether the depicted individual voluntarily exposed themselves, and whether the requester is legitimate. These are subjective, context-heavy determinations that require viewing the content directly. In effect, moderators are now pushed back into front line exposure just to determine if a depiction meets the statute’s definition.

The enforcement provisions of the TAKE IT DOWN Act give the federal government—particularly a politicized FTC delighting in its newfound identity as a censorship board—broad discretion to target disfavored online services. A single flagged depiction labeled a digital forgery can trigger invasive investigations, fines, or even site shutdowns. Recall that The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mandate explicitly calls for the elimination of online pornography. This law offers a ready-made mechanism to advance that agenda, not only for government officials but also for aligned anti-pornography groups like NCOSE. Once the state can reframe consensual adult content as non-consensual or synthetic, regardless of whether that claim holds, it can begin purging lawful material from the Internet under the banner of victim protection.

This enforcement model will also disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ content, which is already subject to heightened scrutiny and over-removal. Queer creators routinely report that their educational, artistic, or personal content is flagged as adult or explicit, even when it complies with existing community guidelines. Under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, content depicting queer intimacy, gender nonconformity, or bodies outside heteronormative standards could be more easily labeled as “intimate visual depictions,” especially when framed by complainants as inappropriate or harmful. For example, a shirtless trans-identifying person discussing top surgery could plausibly be flagged for removal. Project 2025 and its enforcers have already sought to collapse LGBTQ+ expression into a broader campaign against “pornography.” The TAKE IT DOWN Act gives that campaign a fast-track enforcement mechanism, with no real procedural safeguards to prevent abuse.

Selective Enforcement By Trump’s FTC

The Act’s notice-and-takedown regime is enforced by the FTC, an agency with no meaningful experience or credibility in content moderation. That’s especially clear from its attention economy workshop, which appear stacked with ideologically driven participants and conspicuously devoid of legitimate experts in Internet law, trust and safety, or technology policy.

The Trump administration’s recent purge and re-staffing of the agency only underscores the point. With internal dissenters removed and partisan loyalists installed, the FTC now functions less as an independent regulator and more as an enforcement tool aligned with the White House’s speech agenda. The agency is fully positioned to implement the law exactly as Trump intends: by punishing political enemies.

We should expect enforcement will not be applied evenly. X (formerly Twitter), under Elon Musk, continues to host large volumes of NCII with little visible oversight. There is no reason to believe a Trump-controlled FTC will target Musk’s services. Meanwhile, smaller, less-connected sites, particularly those serving LGBTQ+ users and marginalized creators, will remain far more exposed to aggressive, selective enforcement.

Undermining Encryption

The Act does not exempt private messaging services, encrypted communication tools, or electronic storage providers. That omission raises significant concerns. Services that offer end-to-end encrypted messaging simply cannot access the content of user communications, making compliance with takedown notices functionally impossible. These services cannot evaluate whether a reported depiction is intimate, harmful, or duplicative because, by design, they cannot see it. See the Doe v. Apple case.

Faced with this dilemma, providers may feel pressure to weaken or abandon encryption entirely in order to demonstrate “reasonable efforts” to detect and remove reported content. This effectively converts private, secure services into surveillance systems, compromising the privacy of all users, including the very individuals the law claims to protect.

The statute’s silence on what constitutes a “reasonable effort” to identify and remove copies of reported imagery only increases compliance uncertainty. In the absence of clear standards, services may over-correct by deploying invasive scanning technologies or abandoning encryption altogether to minimize legal risk. Weakening encryption in this way introduces systemic security vulnerabilities, exposing user data to unauthorized access, interception, and exploitation. This is particularly concerning as AI-driven cyberattacks become more sophisticated, and as the federal government is actively undermining our nation’s cybersecurity infrastructure.

Conclusion

Trump’s public support for the TAKE IT DOWN Act should have been disqualifying on its own. But even setting that aside, the law’s political and institutional backing should have raised immediate red flags for Democratic lawmakers. Its most vocal champion, Senator Ted Cruz, is a committed culture warrior whose track record includes opposing same-sex marriage, attacking DEI programs, and using students as political props—ironically, the same group this law claims to protect.

The law’s support coalition reads like a who’s who of Christian nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ activism. Among the 120 organizations backing it are the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, Family Policy Alliance, American Principles Project, and Heritage Action for America. These groups have long advocated for expanded state control over online speech and sexual expression, particularly targeting LGBTQ+ communities and sex workers.

Civil liberties groups and digital rights organizations quickly flagged the law’s vague language, overbroad enforcement mechanisms, and obvious potential for abuse. Even groups who typically support online speech regulation warned that the law was poorly drafted and structurally dangerous, particularly in the hands of the Trump Administration.

At this point, it’s not just disappointing, it’s indefensible that so many Democrats waved this law through, despite its deep alignment with censorship, discrimination, and religious orthodoxy. The Democrats’ support represents a profound failure of both principle and judgment. Worse, it reveals a deeper rot within the Democratic establishment: legislation that is plainly dangerous gets waved through not because lawmakers believe in it, but because they fear bad headlines more than they fear the erosion of democracy itself.

In a FOSTA-SESTA-style outcome, Mr. Deepfakes—one of the Internet’s most notorious hubs for AI-generated NCII and synthetic abuse—shut down before the TAKE IT DOWN Act even took effect. More recently, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office announced a settlement with one of the many companies it sued for hosting and enabling AI-generated NCII. That litigation has already triggered the shutdown of at least ten similar sites, raising the age-old Internet law question: was this sweeping law necessary to address the problem in the first place?

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This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they’re finding out it won’t be bent quite as easy as they thought.

First, let’s take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we’ve come to expect from the performative mooks currently serving terms as Republican politicians. Here’s what the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R) mandated for the 2025-26 school year:

The new curriculum includes a section that requires students to “analyze contemporary turning points of 21st-century American society.” That requirement includes the following:

Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of “bellwether county” trends.

According to Walters, it’s essential to dump Republican conspiracy theories into students’ heads because doing otherwise would force them to be “spoon-fed left-wing propaganda.” Walters’ proposal goes the other way, dumping right-wing propaganda into students by the shovelful to ensure they are properly instructed about “legitimate concerns” raised during the 2020 election.

The problem, of course, is that there are no “legitimate concerns,” which means students will purposefully be made stupider by idiots who are heavily reliant on an ignorant voter base to remain in office. $33 million is being spent to indoctrinate students, which is apparently fine with state Republicans who don’t mind indoctrination, so long as it’s their indoctrination.

Here’s what makes this new development really fun. The Republicans pushed through a bill that allows parents to opt their kids out of any “learning material or activity” a parent felt was “harmful” to their children. That law went into effect this year, and was crafted specifically to allow parents to prevent their kids from being subjected to anything they considered to be “woke.”

In a truly hilarious twist, parents who don’t want their kids to be subjected to pro-Trump propaganda are using the Republican’s anti-woke law to opt out of the newly mandated conspiracy theory “instruction.” Here’s Judd Legum, reporting for Popular Information:

A group called “We’re Oklahoma Education,” or WOKE, is distributing a form letter that allows parents to opt-out of aspects of the new curriculum, including lessons on “discrepancies in 2020 elections results” and “Judeo-Christian concepts of ethics and government as the basis for American civilization.” The letter also allows parents to opt their children out of instruction created by right-wing groups, such as PragerU and Hillsdale College. Parents can also request that their child not have “[a]ny interaction with State Superintendent Ryan Walters in any capacity, including viewing any video or audio recording of Mr. Walters.”

WOKE Director Erica Watkins says the group created the opt-out form because they consider some lessons in the new curriculum “propaganda” that is not “appropriate to be taught in school.”

Love it. Lawmakers who engage in performative legislating always forget the laws they enact to give them ways to do the stupid stuff they want to do can be utilized by their political opponents. Expanding power just because you’re currently in power seems like a great idea right up until the other party has the majority. Crafting laws designed to be abused by people with certain “conservative beliefs” can prove to be just as useful to people opposed to these beliefs.

That’s how it’s going here: the state superintendent is watching two mandates he supported being utilized to prevent students from being subjected to debunked conspiracy theories and “judeo-christian ethics” that are seemingly present in the people seeking to shove these particular ethics down other people’s throats.

Don’t put in the papers that Superintendent Walters is mad.

In response, Walters said that it was “concerning that parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history.” Walters also said that the waiver created by WOKE was “absolutely not enforceable” in part because it was created by “a hyper-partisan organization.” Walters claimed that a “parent would need to provide his or her own form, or, in some cases, the individual school district might have a form that they use.”

Hmm. Seems like there are several ways to get around these restrictions on opt-out forms. Not that you’ll need them because…

Nothing in the law prevents parents from using a form created by a third party.

Suck it up, Superintendent. You’ve been beaten at your own game by people who aren’t so blinded by their partisan hackery that they’re incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Take the loss like a big boy and get back to your day-to-day business of proving you’re unworthy of the public’s trust or respect. I look forward to further reporting during the upcoming school year, hopefully detailing the dispensing of state-mandated conspiracy theory propaganda to room after room of empty desks.

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Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order — in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge’s orders — by talking about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, you’d think that the judge is going to go hard against the government.

Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers quite a frustrating ruling: after eloquently explaining why the government’s actions mirror Kafka’s nightmarish bureaucracy, he proceeds to accept the Trump administration’s transparently ridiculous claim that they have no control over people they literally paid El Salvador to imprison.

He does try to concoct a workaround — arguing that while the prisoners can’t file habeas because they’re supposedly not in US custody, their due process rights were violated, so the remedy is to somehow restore their ability to file the habeas petitions they can’t file. But as we’ll see, this “solution” seems quite toothless.

The ruling starts with this somewhat incredible paragraph:

One morning, Kafka’s Josef K. awakens to encounter two strange men outside his room. As he gets his bearings, he realizes that he is under arrest. When he asks the strangers why, he receives no answer. “We weren’t sent to tell you that,” one says. “Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.” Franz Kafka, The Trial 5 (Breon Mitchell trans., Schocken Books Inc. 1998). Bewildered by these men and distressed by their message, K. tries to comfort himself that he lives in “a state governed by law,” one where “all statutes [are] in force.” Id. at 6. He therefore demands again, “How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?” “Now there you go again,” the guard replies. “We don’t answer such questions.” Undeterred, K. offers his “papers” and demands their arrest warrant. “Good heavens!” the man scolds. “There’s been no mistake.” “[O]ur department,” he assures K., is only “attracted by guilt”; it “doesn’t seek [it] out . . . . That’s the Law.” Id. at 8–9. “I don’t know that law,” K. responds. “You’ll feel it eventually,” the guard says. Id. at 9.

And then he makes the direct tie-in from that story to what’s actually happening:

Such was the situation into which Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, and scores of other Venezuelan noncitizens say they were plunged on March 15, 2025. In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred…. To where? That they were not told…. When asked, some guards reportedly laughed and said that they did not know; others told the detainees, incorrectly, that they were being transferred to another immigration facility or to Mexico or Venezuela.

Before long, Reyes Mota, Hernandez Romero, and the other detainees were shuttled onto buses, driven to a nearby airport, and loaded onto planes…. As the planes waited on the tarmac, many passengers aboard reportedly began to panic and beg officials for more information, but none was provided…. The planes eventually departed that evening and, after a stop in Honduras, landed in El Salvador…. Upon their arrival, the detainees were transferred into a Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT).

And he reminds everyone that the government literally ignored his pretty clear order to not take these men out of the country:

This Court, at a swiftly convened hearing on March 15, ordered the Government not to relinquish custody of the men, but that mandate was ignored*. Such defiance is currently the subject of the Court’s contempt inquiry.*

So far, so good. The judge has laid out a perfect analogy for what happened and documented the government’s contempt of his direct orders. Then he completely undermines himself:

While it is a close question, the current record does not support Plaintiffs’ assertion that they are in the constructive custody of the United States*. Even crediting the public statements characterizing the arrangement as outsourcing the U.S. prison system and acknowledging the President’s unofficial assertion of his power to request a release, such comments cannot overcome a sworn declaration from a knowledgeable government official attesting that the CECOT Class’s ongoing detention is a question of Salvadoran law*

This is where the ruling goes completely off the rails. Judge Boasberg claims that further details that the DOJ filed under seal about the nature of the deal between the US and El Salvador suggest that the deal is basically “we ship ‘em to you, you do whatever the fuck you want with them,” and thus they shouldn’t be seen as being in “constructive custody” of the US any more.

This is obvious bullshit, and the judge knows it. Because there’s almost no one in the world who thinks that if the US government called up President Bukele and said “yo, we need that person back” that Bukele wouldn’t do it. Hell, we know this because the US already did that. As an article the NY Times wrote back in April revealed (buried so deep down that I haven’t seen much commentary on it) El Salvador has already sent back at least eight people that were incorrectly sent there:

In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele’s confusion about whom the United States had sent him. Eight women who had been mistakenly sent were swiftly flown back.

So when the US wants someone back from CECOT, they get them back. But somehow that information isn’t at play here.

Judge Boasberg does admit that it’s entirely possible the government is lying to him, but basically says his hands are tied by the Supreme Court:

This conclusion, to be sure, presumes the truthfulness and reliability of the Kozak Declaration, which is rendered more difficult given the Government’s troubling conduct throughout this case. The Court nonetheless follows the lead of the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit, and other courts within this district in taking Kozak at his word. In Munaf, the Supreme Court instructed federal district courts not to “second-guess” assessments of the political branches as to the nature of detention under a foreign sovereign. See 553 U.S. at 702. Applying that principle, our Circuit has found governmental submissions similar to the Kozak Declaration to be conclusive on the question whether ongoing detention is “on behalf of the United States.”

Seems bad!

He also admits that the Trump admin’s claims in this case aren’t nearly as detailed or believable as in the precedents he feels bound by, but basically says the plaintiffs (who, again, are mostly disappeared in a concentration camp no one gets released from) really need to provide more proof that the US government has some say in their detention, even as he admits it contradicts other statements that [checks notes]… the US government is making.

Plaintiffs, however, have unearthed no comparably reliable evidence to rebut the Kozak Declaration. The Court must therefore at this point accept the Government’s representations as to the nature of the CECOT Plaintiffs’ ongoing detention, despite their incongruity with multiple public statements made by both Salvadoran and U.S. officials.

Great.

The judge then proceeds to explain why this exact scenario — shipping prisoners beyond the reach of habeas corpus — was one of the grievances that led to American independence. But apparently that’s just an interesting historical footnote now:

The Court is nonetheless mindful of the possibility, raised by Plaintiffs, that the Government has adopted and presented its arrangement with El Salvador as a “ruse — and a fraud on the court — designed to maintain control over the detainees beyond the reach of the writ.” …. Our legal tradition is wholly incompatible with the establishment of a network of overseas prisons, shielded from the Great Writ by the facade of foreign control, to which the Government routinely exports detainees without due process — a legal no man’s land. Indeed, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 generally prohibited detention “beyond the seas” to places where the writ did not run, … and such abuses partly animated this nation’s War for Independence. See Declaration of Independence para. 21 (U.S. 1776) (listing amongst grievances against the King that he “transport[ed]” colonists “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). Were such a scheme to subsequently be made apparent to the Court, it would follow the Supreme Court’s instruction to “take such action as will defeat attempts to wrongfully deprive parties entitled to sue in Federal courts [for] the protection of their rights in those tribunals.”

It feels like he’s begging for evidence that the Justice Department is lying to him and reminds the government that “any official who makes knowingly false statements in a sworn declaration subjects himself to perjury prosecution.”

Having accepted the government’s lie about custody, the judge then concocts a workaround that’s somehow even more absurd: since the men’s due process rights were violated, the equitable remedy is… to have the Trump admin somehow restore their ability to file habeas petitions they can’t file because they’re supposedly not in US custody.

That principle permits Plaintiffs to proceed here. Just like litigants have since the beginning of our legal tradition, they may invoke this Court’s equitable authority to restrain the Government from infringing upon constitutional protections. They need not do so in habeas, nor are they obligated to identify a cause of action conferring that right.

The judge does conclude the due process violation is clear, citing recent Supreme Court holdings in this and related cases:

In light of those Supreme Court holdings, this Court ultimately agrees with the CECOT Plaintiffs that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their due-process claim. Defendants plainly deprived these individuals of their right to seek habeas relief before their summary removal from the United States — a right that need not itself be vindicated through a habeas petition. Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members. But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so. Defendants instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.

This is the point we’ve raised before. Without due process, there is no rule of law.

So what’s the remedy for this constitutional violation? The judge orders the government to “facilitate” the prisoners’ ability to seek habeas relief — the same meaningless directive that’s already been ignored (if not mocked) in similar cases:

Because the other preliminary-injunction factors also support the CECOT Plaintiffs, the Court concludes that their Class is entitled to preliminary relief. In short, the Government must facilitate the Class’s ability to seek habeas relief to contest their removal under the Act. Exactly what such facilitation must entail will be determined in future proceedings. Although the Court is mindful that such a remedy may implicate sensitive diplomatic or national-security concerns within the exclusive province of the Executive Branch, it also has a constitutional duty to provide a remedy that will “make good the wrong done.”

Let’s recap this judicial pretzel: The prisoners can’t file habeas because they’re supposedly not in US custody. But their due process rights were violated by being denied the chance to file habeas before removal. So the remedy is to restore their ability to file habeas… which they still can’t do because they’re not in US custody.

As is now clear, CECOT Class members were entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removability pursuant to the Proclamation. That process — which was improperly withheld — must now be afforded to them. Put differently, Plaintiffs’ ability to bring habeas challenges to their removal must be restored. In light of the well-established law of remedies and the example that has already been set by all three levels of the federal judiciary, then, Defendants must facilitate Plaintiffs’ ability to proceed through habeas and ensure that their cases are handled as they would have been if the Government had not provided constitutionally inadequate process.

The judge acknowledges what’s really at stake here:

The Court determines that such a remedy balances Defendants’ distinct role in conducting foreign affairs with the grave need to right their legal wrongs; absent this relief, the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action. See Abrego Garcia, 145 S. Ct. at 1019 (statement of Sotomayor, J.).

Well, duh. That’s the whole fucking concern. And, yes, the government already did snatch people off the street to send to a foreign country, effectively foreclosing any corrective course of action.

So what happens now? The judge punts, asking the government to submit a “plan” for facilitating something they’ve already shown zero interest in facilitating:

Mindful of national-security and foreign-policy concerns, the Court will not — at least yet — order the Government to take any specific steps*. It will instead allow Defendants to submit proposals regarding the appropriate actions that would “allow [Plaintiffs] to actually seek habeas relief.”*

We all know how this ends: the DOJ will file some theatrical bullshit claiming they’d love to help but gosh, foreign sovereignty and all that. The judge will wring his hands some more. And hundreds of men will continue rotting in CECOT because everyone involved would rather play legal theater than acknowledge the obvious solution: if you shipped them there, you can damn well get them back.

Perhaps Judge Boasberg will surprise us and come up with something that has actual teeth, but it feels long past the time for that.

Meanwhile, the men who were disappeared into this Kafkaesque nightmare remain trapped in a foreign prison, casualties of a legal system more interested in procedural niceties than actual justice. The judge opened with Kafka, which would lead you to believe his goal is to not be just another cog in a Kafkaesque machine, but the authority who puts an end to the nonsense. Instead, we just keep getting another round of bureaucratic bullshit.

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During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the Supreme Court recently refused to hear their complaint.

So the law took effect, even though there’s no actual evidence that New York state is actually bothering to enforce it. Still, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast are terrified that other states might follow suit and start forcing them to make broadband affordable. Some states, like California, are considering it.

They (justifiably) see this as a slippery slope toward the U.S. government actually doing something about the fact that these companies have spent a generation carving out lucrative regional monopolies they use to overcharge Americans for shitty, sluggish, substandard broadband access.

So telecoms have spent much of the last year absolutely begging the Supreme Court to declare such laws “illegal rate regulation.” AT&T even went so far at one point as to pretend it was going to stop doing business in New York State to try and pretend that such laws — which again don’t ask much and probably wouldn’t even be enforced by lazy states — are some kind of onerous demand on the company.

The Supreme Court, too busy destroying all corporate oversight and making Donald Trump a king, so far has refused to hear their case. The court refused to hear telecom lobbyists’ challenge in December 2024 and rejected a follow-up request by the ISPs last February.

So they’re trying again with a new filing to the DOJ that trots out some old, familiar arguments. Namely that state or federal governments doing anything to protect consumers from harmful monopolies is illegal. And somehow harms competition (which largely doesn’t exist in fixed-line U.S. telecom):

“State laws that seek to roll back the clock and impose utility-style, 1930s-era regulatoryschemes that dictate the exact prices and terms at which broadband providers must offer their services threaten competition and are inconsistent with federal law.”

The thing is, contrary to a lot of industry pretense, there really is no more “federal law.” Telecom lobbyists and the U.S. right wing have had incredible recent success in completely dismantling whatever is left of U.S. consumer protection, regulatory independence, and corporate oversight. Usually under the pretense that this would result in bold, miraculous new Utopian outcomes for all.

Spoiler: that didn’t happen. Instead we get expensive, shitty, sluggish, outage-prone Comcast service.

With federal power crippled, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are now shifting their attention to the handful of remaining states that care about this sort of stuff. Usually by claiming that any state efforts to protect consumers from telecom monopoly predation is (or should be) somehow illegal.

Thanks to corruption and a rightward-lurching court system, they’ve won many of their arguments so far, so it makes sense that, sooner or later, they’ll win this one too with the help of the Supreme Court. We’ve basically built an absolute corporatocracy while a lot of people in the press and policy circles were taking a fucking nap. The end result won’t be a pleasant one.

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It’s time for yet another reminder that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an incapable leader at odds with the scientists who actually know what they’re talking about. At the CDC specifically, we recently discussed the government’s decision to do away with the team that was helping to identify, track, and remediate elevated levels of lead appearing in the blood of children throughout the country. While Kennedy appeared to lie directly about his agency’s response to at least one instance of elevated BLLs in Milwaukee, along with how he was going to retain staff at HHS generally, he also recently and seemingly unilaterally altered the guidance for COVID vaccines. More specifically, he revoked the guidance that healthy children and pregnant women should get vaccinated and boosted. It appears that the CDC itself was completely unaware this change in policy was coming.

The health agency’s immunization schedules were not, in fact, updated at the time of the announcement, though. The Washington Post subsequently reported that the CDC was blindsided by the announcement. Five hours went by after the video was posted before CDC officials said they received a one-page “secretarial directive” about the changes, which was signed by Kennedy and puzzlingly dated May 19, according to the Post.

The reversal for vaccination during pregnancy was received particularly poorly by the medical community, given that a COVID infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic to the mother, who’s immune system is weakened during pregnancy, and for the pregnancy itself. On the CDC site itself there are still pages recommending COVID vaccination for children as young as six months old to prevent things like long COVID or related longer term illnesses. Perhaps that explains why the CDC didn’t exactly do as Kennedy directed.

Late Thursday, the CDC updated the immunization schedules. Contradicting what Kennedy said in the video, the CDC did not remove its recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children in the child and adolescent immunization schedule. Instead, it added a stipulation that if a child’s doctor agrees with the vaccination and parents “desire for their child to be vaccinated,” healthy children can get vaccinated.

In practice, it is unclear how this change will affect access to the vaccines. Health insurers are required to cover vaccines on the CDC schedules. But, it’s yet to be seen if children will only be able to get vaccinated at their doctor’s office (rather than a pharmacy or vaccine clinic) or if additional consent forms would be required, etc. Uncertainty about the changes and requirements alone may lead to fewer children getting vaccinated.

Which appears to be all that Kennedy is after here. A longtime vaccine opponent, Kennedy appears to be applying his own viewpoints, rather than those of scientists or medical professionals, to American healthcare policy. And, as a result, the CDC recently lost its top expert on COVID vaccinations.

The resignation, first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by CBS News, comes just a week after health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally revoked and altered some of the CDC’s recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, restricting access to children and pregnant people. The resignation also comes three weeks before CDC’s experts and advisors are scheduled to meet to publicly evaluate data and discuss the recommendations for this season—a long-established process that was disrupted by Kennedy’s announcement.

The departing CDC official, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a pediatric infectious disease expert, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). She informed her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an email on Tuesday.

“My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role,” Panagiotakopoulos wrote.

With Kennedy at the helm, this tracks with what we’ve written about before. Vulnerable populations, in Kennedy’s documented views, are not victims. They, or their genetics, are the cause of their own suffering or vulnerability, and can be more or less dismissed from concern.

But an exodus of scientists and medical professionals from the CDC should be viewed as a sort of cry for help from those communities. The man running HHS is implementing healthcare policy at odds with healthcare professionals and scientists. And based on what? A report on American health that is built upon an AI fever-dream?

“More of us should be resigning in protest,” one federal health official told CBS News in response to Panagiotakopoulos’ resignation.

If they’re not allowed to actually do their work, then I guess that’s probably true. But draining the brainpower from HHS such that all that remains is whatever the brain worm left in Kennedy’s head can takeover is not going to produce better healthcare outcomes for Americans.

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While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the “right to repair” movement — making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own — continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair in creative and obnoxious ways.

Washington State just became the eighth state to pass a new law theoretically making it easier and cheaper to repair the technology you own. Now, barring a veto from Governor Abbott, Texas is poised to be the ninth state to do so after the State’s new right to repair law (HB2963) passed a vote in a the Texas state Senate last week 31-0. That comes after the House passed the legislation 126-0.

Again, this movement continues to make inroads because anti-consumer repair monopolies annoy everybody. Unlike many consumer reform efforts, companies haven’t had much success (yet) scaring the public away from “right to repair” reforms, despite a lot of scary (and false) claims about how such laws pose a risk to consumer security and privacy or aid sexual predators.

Texas’s new law requires manufacturers to make spare parts, manuals and repair tools available to consumers and independent shops. Consumer groups and “right to repair” advocates are unsurprisingly excited:

“When you can’t fix something, you either have to buy a new one or do without. It drives up waste and costs. People are tired of throwing away things they prefer to fix, and clearly this is a message that has gotten through to lawmakers,” said Nathan Proctor, PIRG’s Senior Right to Repair Campaign Director. “Congratulations to Rep. Capriglione for his excellent work standing up for the rights of product owners, and the small repair shops all across Texas. This is a Texas-sized win.”

This is definite progress, and I hate to be a buzzkill, but it’s worth reiterating that of the 8 states that have passed right to repair reforms so far, not a single one has actually enforced them in any meaningful way. This despite no shortage of bad corporate actors working overtime to kill independent repair shops, make manuals and parts hard to find, use obnoxious DRM, or claim that repairing your own stuff violates warranty.

Many states are facing unprecedented legal and financial challenges thanks to new Trump-triggered legal fights across everything from environmental law to healthcare. As a result most states aren’t going to be keen to launch costly new legal battles against deep-pocketed corporations.

Republican states like Texas, in particular, aren’t likely to say…start picking meaningful new fights with Apple or Sony. That runs in pretty stark contrast to the central Republican mission to effectively demolish whatever’s left of regulatory independence, consumer protection, and corporate oversight. They like to pick fights with “big tech,” but only in a bid to bully them into doing nothing about racist propaganda.

At some point at least a portion of the activism calories spent passing these right to repair laws needs to be redirected to yelling at states to actually enforce them, if the overall movement itself is to have any actual meaning and the laws are seen as anything more than populist set dressing.

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Here we go again with the party of the “rule of law.” The rule of law doesn’t apply to the Trump Administration. It only applies to the victims of its vindictive policies.

But the least it could do is get some basic facts straight before talking out of its ass about whatever new fascist scheme it wants to deploy. And who better to display his ignorance of the law (which used to be no excuse) than the man who spent some time being Trump’s punching bag before convincing the Big Boss he could be a valuable bootlicker.

Anchor baby Rubio used to be nothing more than an opportunistic senator who hitched his wagon to Trump’s star. It took several years for that risky bet to pay off. When Trump returned to office for a belated victory lap in 2024, Rubio was elevated to the position of Secretary of State, a position he has absolutely no qualifications for. That certainly doesn’t make him unique in the Trump Administration, but perhaps explains why he’s so bad at everything he’s doing now, including (apparently) being able to remember basic facts about the US government.

On his way to claiming Trump has no masters, Rubio swept away an entire branch of government in his haste to defend the administration’s actions in its War on Brown People. Here’s how that went down in a recent Senate hearing, as reported by Hafiz Rashid for The New Republic.

After first insulting the senator who actually went to visit Kilmer Abrego Garcia — someone the Trump Administration has openly admitted it mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison — by claiming (without facts in evidence) that Garcia is a “human trafficker” Senator Chris Van Hollen “had margaritas with” — Rubio went on to claim no one can take Trump down.

His reasoning for this claim? Well, it involves vanishing an entire branch of the US government before moving on to claim the courts don’t have the power to prevent the King from cooking.

“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio said. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”

Well, there are actually three branches. Rubio may have chosen to forget the legislative branch since he’s been elevated out of it. But even if he just meant to delineate the difference between these two branches, he’s still wrong. That’s why there are three branches: to ensure no single branch consolidates so much power it can’t be held back by the other two branches.

But that’s exactly what Rubio goes on to assert: the executive branch is at the top of the republic’s food chain. And when the King is hungry, he eats. In addition, everyone appointed to an executive position — despite their complete lack of qualifications or skills — is above the rest of the co-equal branches.

So, it’s all wrong. It’s all very disturbing. Rubio is saying all of this out loud, not caring what the legislative and judicial branches think of his proclamations. He truly believes the executive branch answers to no one. And even if he doesn’t truly believe this, he’s pushing this narrative on behalf of his benefactor (singular!).

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is what the administration has been claiming in court, albeit far more subtly. First, it’s alleging its power grabs are unable to be questioned by courts. Second, it’s refusing to comply with court orders. And, finally, it’s openly daring the rest of the government to do something — anything! — about it.

Everything Rubio said here is something Trump and his highest ranking officials truly believe: the President answers to no one. They’re wrong (in terms of the law) but so far they’ve been mostly right because the other branches are failing their duties to act as a check against the administration’s unprecedented power grabs. Rubio is still just a foot soldier who will be discarded as soon as Trump’s done with him. But he’s letting all of us know exactly what the administration thinks about being part of an operative democratic republic: it wants no part of this.

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If asked, do you think corporate America would prefer to hire (1) lawyers who fight, or (2) lawyers who immediately surrender, I think you’d know the answer.

And now we have some fairly unambiguous empirical data to support what the answer is.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison loves Trump. Morgan Stanley contributed one of their top execs to the Trump administration. But even they won’t work with law firms that capitulated to Trump’s bogus executive orders targeting lawyers who dared to challenge him in court.

The WSJ reports that at least 11 major companies are dumping law firms that struck deals with Trump’s obviously bogus executive orders targeting lawyers. Meanwhile, the firms that fought back keep winning in court and picking up the fleeing clients.

The message from corporate America shouldn’t require an expert at $1,000+ per hour to decipher: if you won’t fight for yourself against an obviously frivolous legal threat, why would anyone pay you to fight for them?

Support for the law firms that didn’t make deals has been growing inside the offices of corporate executives. At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.

Among them are technology giant Oracle, investment bank Morgan Stanley, an airline and a pharmaceutical company. Microsoft expressed reservations about working with a firm that struck a deal, and another such firm stopped representing McDonald’s in a case a few months before a scheduled trial.

In interviews, general counsels expressed concern about whether they could trust law firms that struck deals to fight for them in court and in negotiating big deals if they weren’t willing to stand up for themselves against Trump. The general counsel of a manufacturer of medical supplies said that if firms facing White House pressure “don’t have a hard line,” they don’t have any line at all.

When these law firm executive orders first came down, plenty of legal commentators called it a “no win situation.” Some argued that if you didn’t cave, clients would leave, because the firm would have a target on its back from the executive orders (and if those EOs were upheld, it would limit the ability of the law firms to do any business at all). But it looks like the reverse is true. The EOs are being tossed out easily, and the firms that fought them look like fighters.

The economics here are pretty straightforward. If you’re a general counsel, you have two main concerns about your outside lawyers: (1) Can they win? and (2) Can I trust them to fight for me when it matters? The firms that caved just answered both questions with a resounding “no.”

The firms that caved look just as weak and bad at their jobs as many of us expected.

Not long after Latham struck a deal in April, the firm’s chair, Richard Trobman, met with Morgan Stanley’s chief legal officer, Eric Grossman, people familiar with the meeting said. Grossman heard him out about the firm’s reasoning for striking a deal and acknowledged that companies have to do what is best for themselves.

Soon after that meeting, Grossman and other Morgan Stanley lawyers communicated to law firms targeted by the White House that hadn’t signed deals that they were looking to give them new business, the people familiar with the meeting said.

[….]

The day after Paul Weiss struck its deal, female general counsels gathered for a conference in Washington. During a panel at the Women’s General Counsel Network event, a lawyer stood up and said her company had taken steps that morning to pull its business from Paul Weiss. The lawyer received thunderous applause.

[….]

In April, the general counsel of Microsoft, Jon Palmer, discussed with leaders of Latham his concerns about the deal the firm had struck, including how it could affect Latham’s ability to represent Microsoft, especially before the government, according to people familiar with the discussion.

On April 17, Microsoft put its concerns in writing, removing Latham from a list of about a dozen preferred firms that it has vetted to handle outside legal work, according to a document described to the Journal.

Here’s the thing about the biggest law firms: they’re essentially selling confidence. When you hire BigLaw at $1,000+ per hour, you’re not just buying legal expertise — you can often get that much cheaper. You’re buying the confidence that when things get really ugly, your lawyers will be the last people standing in the room.

These firms spectacularly failed that test. They faced a legal threat that was so obviously bogus that conservative judges keep laughing it out of court, and their response was immediate capitulation, with bizarre justifications about how this bending of the knee would somehow work. It’s like hiring a bodyguard who runs away at the first sign of trouble.

The market’s response makes perfect sense. If you’re Oracle or Microsoft, you have lawyers on speed dial because someday you’re going to face an existential legal threat — maybe antitrust, maybe a massive lawsuit, maybe regulatory overreach. When that day comes, do you want lawyers who fold under pressure, or lawyers who fight?

The firms that caved have answered that question for everyone to see. They’ve essentially put up a giant billboard saying “We Will Fold Under Pressure” and then acted surprised when clients started shopping elsewhere.

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Never give up. That’s the unofficial motto of the Republican party pretty much everywhere in the nation. No matter how many rights you violate, court decisions you lose, and public criticism you receive, always remember, you’re in the for the long haul. It is your (allegedly) God-given right to take away other people’s rights and to impose your personal morals and bigotry on everyone who has the misfortune of being a constituent.

Book ban laws are a dime a dozen these days. Texas legislators are particularly enthusiastic about limiting access to content they don’t like, so they’re not going to let loss after loss derail their plans to impose their will on the entire state.

Speaking of losses, Texas House members just took an L with a bill that would have prevented minors from accessing books deemed “sexually explicit” by the state’s censors without approval of a legal guardian. In this context, “sexually explicit” tends to mean nothing more than a book treats anyone not white and straight as an actual human being. This bill also added $10,000 fines to the mix, threatening to impoverish already underpaid librarians for providing their services as librarians.

That one is dead. Great. But others are still alive, including this one, which the bill’s author admits would end up banning classics like Romeo and Juliet, the hugely popular Lonesome Dove series, and frequent target of book ban/burns, Catcher in the Rye.

Here’s how this book ban bill plans to get around the First Amendment and other impediments to its proposed censorship of content that’s often on required reading lists for school students.

Senate Bill 13 would give school boards, not school librarians, the final say over what materials are allowed in their schools’ libraries by creating a framework for them to remove books based on complaints they receive. The final version of the bill agreed upon by lawmakers from both chambers would allow school boards to oversee book approvals and removals, or delegate the responsibility to local school advisory councils if parents in a district sign a petition allowing their creation. The House version of SB 13 required 20% of parents to sign the petition, but the version agreed upon between chambers requires only 50 parents or 10% of parents in the district, whichever is less.

Any last minute alterations to this Senate bill can probably be traced to a disappointing, disjointed decision handed down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last month. The Appeals Court took two swings at the case, which dealt with censorship attempts in Llano County, Texas. The second attempt was no better than the first. In the end, the Fifth Circuit said libraries (and library boards) should have final say in content curation. If they didn’t, they could (rhetorically) be forced to provide readers with access to (using the court’s example) “racist content.”

Of course, no one pushing for book bans in Texas cares about removing racist content. In fact, two of the books they were pushing to have removed were books detailing the history of racism in America. But the final call by the court says curation is up to the libraries themselves, decisions which are not made by librarians, but rather by library boards.

Which is what this bill hopes to do — allow the government to censor content it doesn’t like while pretending it’s all about libraries’ rights to curate content to better serve the public. It’s bullshit, but it’s modeled after bullshit that’s been proven to work in the Fifth Circuit.

Here’s what happened in Llano County after local politicians first tried to force the local library to remove content they didn’t personally care for:

The original library board was disbanded and reformed. The library director (Amber Milum) was prohibited from attending these meetings and forced to ask permission from the new board to purchase any new books.

The Fifth Circuit has given its blessing to local governments stacking the deck to force libraries to engage in viewpoint discrimination. This bill lowers that bar even further, allowing parents to become part of the government by elevating themselves to the position of regulators with only 50 signatures or 10% of parents in the district, whichever is less. So, if a school pushes back against censorship, those making that decision can easily be replaced by parents and others fully aligned with the ruling party’s inherent bigotry.

And there’s more to it than just stacking the deck against personal freedom. The intent of the bill’s crafters is to place many barriers between constituents and content these legislators don’t like. This bill allows the hecklers to achieve a veto with a minimum of heckling and then enjoy the result of their veto for as long as possible, even if they don’t ultimately succeed in getting books permanently removed from library shelves.

School boards will have 90 days after complaints on each book are filed to reach a decision on whether to add, keep or remove material from school bookshelves. The proposed advisory councils are only required to meet twice per school year…

Libraries and schools have to comply within 90 days. If they wish to challenge the decision made by the “advisory councils,” they will just have to wait until the next time the council convenes, which could be as long as six months after the school boards’ responses to challenges are required. Keeping content off shelves for a year is as simple as mandating it in the first session and tabling any discussion of this decision during the next session. Rinse and repeat. It makes permanent bans just as easy to accomplish as temporary removals. All council members have to do is remember to kick the can down the road during the next meeting.

Will the governor sign this bill? Given that it’s unlikely to be successfully challenged in this appellate circuit, I can’t see how he won’t. This is a censor’s dream, aided and abetted by legislative enablers and a court that can’t seem to find the willpower to act as a check against government overreach if it’s overreach performed by their preferred side of the partisan divide.

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We’ve noted for years how U.S. regional telecom monopolies have effectively crushed competition in many U.S. markets and utterly defanged our regulators. This one-two punch of muted competition and no oversight routinely results in expensive, slow, spotty broadband access.

Frustrated by this, communities all over the U.S. have responded to this market and regulatory failure by building their own, more affordable, fiber networks. At last count there were somewhere around 400 such networks providing cheap fiber to 700 communities nationwide. There was a big boom during COVID born out of frustration from home telecommuting and education broadband problems.

One of the biggest and most popular such networks in the U.S. is UTOPIA Fiber, which is an open access fiber network serving 23 markets, mostly across Utah. UTOPIA offers fiber speeds up to 10 Gbps across 19 different partner ISPs, all competing on price and customer service. Such open access fiber deployments are a useful, local, and popular way to dismantle the monopoly logjam on internet access.

Recently, UTOPIA (now operating in the green after years of heavy fiber investment) began expanding broadband access into the town of Bountiful, Utah, population 46,000. Big broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast didn’t much like that. But because they have such terrible reputations, and UTOPIA is so popular, they didn’t feel they could attack the project directly.

So they did what they always do: they funded a dodgy proxy group to try and scare locals away from supporting the project. In this case it was called the “Utah Taxpayer Association,” and it’s a nonprofit funded by telecoms, pretending to be an objective third party simply concerned about the potential impact of the project on local taxpayers.

Except when the group went door to door to try and tell false and scary stories about how community broadband is dangerous to taxpayers, it failed completely because locals quickly sniffed out that the group wasn’t actually local:

“A dark money group called Utah Taxpayers Association financed a petition effort to force a vote on project funding. It hired signature collectors to try to persuade registered voters to oppose the project.

Timmerman said the signature campaign failed because residents would ask, “Who do you work for?” and the signature gatherers didn’t even know who was behind the campaign. And when residents asked, “Are you a resident of Bountiful?” the signature gatherers said, “No.”

Although these dark money groups don’t disclose their donors, one can only assume that they were funded by the incumbent providers in Bountiful, which include Comcast and CenturyLink. However, there is no verification of exactly who was behind the campaigns.”

You don’t have to assume, it’s on record. Such campaigns don’t cost these providers much. AT&T gave this particular group $1,163 during a six month span last year according to financial disclosure records. Comcast and Centurylink also sponsor the group’s annual conference. All entirely coincidental, I’m sure.

Telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter have spent much of the last few years trying to derail these kinds of community-owned networks. Either by spreading lies about them, or trying to sue them out of existence. UTOPIA’s creation years ago was immediately met with a lawsuit from Qwest (now Centurylink/Lumen) which saddled the effort with extra legal costs right out of the gates.

Big telecom has also employed the help of Republicans, who have, at several different points (including during peak COVID lockdowns when affordable fiber was essential) tried to impose a federal ban on such popular networks. Loyal Republican puppets can often be found making up absurd claims about municipal broadband, like lies that they somehow “harm the First Amendment.”

The great irony is that telecom giants could derail such efforts by providing better, cheaper, and faster broadband access. But it’s generally cheaper to fund a few dodgy proxy groups, or bribe a senator, than it is push fiber out into neighborhoods they don’t care about because the ROI is two years longer than some bean counter would like. So here we are.

In this case it failed, spectacularly. As a result, Bountiful residents have access to a UTOPIA network, being paid for via bond, that’s offering gigabit fiber for as little as $50 a month. You can see why executives at companies like Comcast are afraid of this sort of model, the benefits of which we outlined in a Techdirt/Copia paper three years ago.

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I’ll start this off by acknowledging that, sure, there are times when it is perfectly reasonable to say, or even shout, “We’re all going to die!” Say you’re on a plane that has just lost all engine power and is hurtling towards the ground, for instance. Or perhaps someone has asked you the question, “Name one thing every human being has in common.” In each of those situations, the phrase is fairly appropriate, and I’m sure there are others.

But if you’re a Republican senator fielding questions from constituents at a town hall event and you are questioned about your support of Medicaid cuts despite the negative outcomes that will result, your response probably shouldn’t be, “Well, we’re all going to die, for heaven’s sake.” And, yet, that is precisely the route that Joni Ernst chose to take.

The exchange began with an attendee complaining to Ernst that thebillwould give significant tax breaks to the ultrawealthy while kicking some people off Medicaid and food assistance programs. Ernst said the only people who face getting booted are those who should not be on Medicaid in the first place.

“They are not eligible, so they will be coming off,” Ernst said, which is when she was interrupted by the attendee who yelled, “People are going to die!”

“People are not — well, we all are going to die, so, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, prompting resounding jeers.

This is one of those things that is not technically wrong, but serves mostly as a non sequitur. Sure, we’re all hurtling towards death in some form or another, as Nietzsche pronounced in his philosophy all those years ago. But the general idea of, you know, medicine is to prolong life for as long as possible. Medicaid helps provide healthcare for plenty of people, primarily disadvantaged or poor citizens. The claim that 1.4 million illegal immigrants are on Medicaid is, unsurprisingly, almost entirely made up.

She later claimedthat 1.4 million undocumented immigrants are receiving Medicaid benefits. That figure, which the White Houseand other top Republicans have also cited, is based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis that said that one provision of the bill would cause 1.4 million people to lose coverage (including but not limited to those without verified immigration status).

But even so, this kind of callous response to a reasonable concern by the very people Ernst represents is very much a Things Not To Say In Politics 101 sort of thing. Acting so cavalier while essentially acknowledging that support of the bill will result in lives being snuffed out before their time is, well, fucking evil. Even if were the case that some illegal immigrants, or even many of them, were benefitting from Medicaid, those are still people’s lives. To hand-wave their deaths away as though it were nothing is the sort of thing that should result in a psychiatric evaluation, not re-election.

If you were assuming that Ernst must surely have apologized for this by now, you’re right. If you were assuming that the apology was genuine or made things better in any way, hoo-fucking-boy, are you ever wrong.

Against all odds, Joni Ernst has made it worse

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T20:53:05.741Z

Now, at great cost to my own desires, I’m going to go ahead and just leave entirely alone the juxtaposition of the Tooth Fairy and Ernst’s god as though a sizable portion of the world saw those two things as fundamentally different. Applaud me, because that took effort.

Instead, I’ll simply point out that it takes an incredible amount of entitlement to fuck up the political messaging as badly as Ernst did, only to turn around and essentially call the audience at her town hall event stupid and childish. So, let me try to clear this up for the senator.

I go to the dentist, even though some day, no matter what, my teeth will fall out. I go to the gym, even though some day, no matter what, my body will decline into a doughy bag of goo. I take my car to the mechanic for regular upkeep, even though some day, no matter what, that car will be fit for the junk yard. And I access my own privileged ability to get medical care, even though some day I’m going to die.

My humble suggestion is that we should have senators representing us who understand these distinctions. It appears that we have at least one example of a senator who does not.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica & the Chicago Tribune. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state.

The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It will require school districts, beginning in the 2027-28 school year, to report to the state how often they involve police in student matters each year and to separate the data by race, gender and disability. The state will be required to make the data public.

The legislation comes three years after a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” revealed that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirted the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances.

“The Price Kids Pay” found that thousands of Illinois students had been ticketed in recent years for adolescent behavior once handled by the principal’s office — things like littering, making loud noises, swearing, fighting or vaping in the bathroom. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

From the House floor, Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago, thanked the news organizations for exposing the practice and told legislators that the goal of the bill “is to make sure if there is a violation of school code, the school should use their discipline policies” rather than disciplining students through police-issued tickets.

State Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat from suburban West Chicago and a sponsor of the measure, said in a statement that ticketing students failed to address the reasons for misbehavior. “This bill will once and for all prohibit monetary fines as a form of discipline for Illinois students,” she said.

The legislation also would prevent police from issuing tickets to students for behavior on school transportation or during school-related events or activities.

The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the legislation. The group said in a statement that while school-based officers should not be responsible for disciplining students, they should have the option to issue citations for criminal conduct as one of a “variety of resolutions.” The group said it’s concerned that not having the option to issue tickets could lead to students facing arrest and criminal charges instead.

The legislation passed the House 69-44. It passed in the Senate last month 37-17 and now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker, who previously has spoken out against ticketing students at school. A spokesperson said Wednesday night that he “was supportive of this initiative” and plans to review the bill.

The legislation makes clear that police can arrest students for crimes or violence they commit, but that they cannot ticket students for violating local ordinances prohibiting a range of minor infractions.

That distinction was not clear in previous versions of the legislation, which led to concern that schools would not be able to involve police in serious matters — and was a key reason legislation on ticketing foundered in previous legislative sessions. Students also may still be ordered to pay for lost, stolen or damaged property.

“This bill helps create an environment where students can learn from their mistakes without being unnecessarily funneled into the justice system,” said Aimee Galvin, government affairs director with Stand for Children, one of the groups that advocated for banning municipal tickets as school-based discipline.

The news investigation detailed how students were doubly penalized: when they were punished in school, with detention or a suspension, and then when they were ticketed by police for minor misbehavior. The investigation also revealed how, to resolve the tickets, children were thrown into a legal process designed for adults. Illinois law permits fines of up to $750 for municipal ordinance violations; it’s difficult to fight the charges, and students and families can be sent to collections if they don’t pay.

After the investigation was published, some school districts stopped asking police to ticket students. But the practice has continued in many other districts.

The legislation also adds regulations for districts that hire school-based police officers, known as school resource officers. Starting next year, districts with school resource officers must enter into agreements with local police to lay out the roles and responsibilities of officers on campus. The agreements will need to specify that officers are prohibited from issuing citations on school property and that they must be trained in working with students with disabilities. The agreements also must outline a process for data collection and reporting. School personnel also would be prohibited from referring truant students to police to be ticketed as punishment.

Before the new legislation, there had been some piecemeal changes and efforts at reform. A state attorney general investigation into a large suburban Chicago district confirmed that school administrators were exploiting a loophole in state law when they asked police to issue tickets to students. The district denied wrongdoing, but that investigation found the district broke the law and that the practice disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The state’s top legal authority declared the practice illegal and said it should stop.

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We’ve got a cross-post episode for you this week, courtesy of the Tech Policy Podcast by TechFreedom, hosted by Corbin Barthold. Both TechFreedom and The Copia Institute submitted comments on the FTC’s inquiry into social media censorship, Corbin invited Mike and TechFreedom’s Santana Boulton for a discussion all about what’s going on. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

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This is part two of my series on using AI tools to fight back against tech company control. Part one explained why we can get beyond just begging billionaires to fix our tools. This part shows exactly how I built my own tool — with zero coding skills and almost no money.

A few weeks back, I got tired of productivity apps that don’t work the way I think and decided to build my own. Not for millions of users or venture capital — just for me. Using nothing but plain English prompts to AI tools (what’s referred to as “vibe coding”), I now have a task management system that works almost exactly how my brain works, costs almost nothing to run, and can’t be enshittified by some growth-hacking product manager.

As a joke/homage to the absolutely brilliant UK TV show Taskmaster, I call my app, “L’il Alex,” in honor of the show’s creator “Little” Alex Horne who is, after all, the “Taskmaster’s Assistant.” Which is exactly what I need. An assistant to help me with tasks.

Like plenty of people, I’m obsessed with productivity but terrible at productivity tools. I’ve tried dozens of different systems, but none stuck. I’m one of those awful people who keeps a mental list of tasks, supplemented by email, calendar chaos, and browser tabs I swear I’ll get to eventually.

This means things fall through the cracks — but more importantly, it means I’m constantly fighting tools designed for someone else’s workflow, not mine.

I’ve tried dozens of task management tools, and they all suffer from the same problem: they’re built for the mythical “average user” rather than how any specific person actually thinks. The closest I’ve found is Intend.do, which calls itself an “intentionality” tool rather than a productivity tool.

The key difference with Intend is that rather than loading up a million tasks that you never get to (the downfall I — and many others — have with most task manager tools), Intend is focused just on today. You create a few larger goals, and then each day, you jot down which tasks you want to do towards those goals. It makes it very simple to do that, and then as you go, you can check off what you accomplished. It also asks you some questions, and checks in with you over time.

Intend gets daily planning mostly right, but it can’t handle future task planning the way my brain works. There’s a hacky Workflowy integration, but it’s awkward. More fundamentally, Intend has strong opinions about how I should work, and like every other tool, forces me to adapt to its worldview. It got me maybe 65% of the way there — which is why I kept abandoning it.

This is the core problem with all productivity software: you’re renting someone else’s vision of how work should happen. When that vision doesn’t match yours, tough shit. You adapt or you leave. But you never get to actually control the tool.

So I decided to build exactly what I needed: daily planning like Intend, but with integrated future task management, and none of the philosophical baggage (some of which may be great for others, but didn’t mesh with me!). A tool that adapts to me, not the other way around.

Here’s where the “vibe coding” magic happens — and it’s way simpler than you think. I started with two popular AI coding tools (Bolt and Lovable) and just… asked them to build what I wanted. In plain English. No technical specs, no wireframes, no user stories. Just this:

I would like to create a kind of task manager, with the focus being on what you need to work on today, but which will also store “future” tasks. The main goal would be to let me choose which tasks I will work on that day, put them in a list and check them off, while also listing out future tasks that can be stored in a separate screen, but which can then easily be added to today’s tasks as necessary. It would also be useful to have the system nudge me if I put a task in “today’s tasks” multiple days without accomplishing it, perhaps asking me if I want to break it up into multiple tasks. The tasks can also be separated into different categories of tasks so I can organize what types of tasks they are. The categories should be changeable/editable. Tasks should be movable from category to category, and I should be able to prioritize tasks. Also, it should be possible to set tasks to be recurring. Tasks should also be able to store clickable links and notes. Future tasks can have dates attached to them. There should be a daily “check in” at the end of the day to see how I’ve done.

I wanted to try multiple platforms partly out of curiosity, but mostly because this is the beauty of vibe coding: if one AI interprets your request in a way that doesn’t click, you just try another. You’re not locked into anyone’s interpretation of what you need.

With that, both created initial versions of this tool. Bolt called its version “TaskIntent” while Lovable called its version “Future Focus Daily.” I started playing around with each one, making some suggested changes or explaining how I wanted things to work slightly differently. Each service gives you a certain amount you can prompt the system for free each day (with Lovable it’s 5 free prompts, with Bolt it’s based on the number of tokens you use, but is roughly 5 free prompts).

After three days, I realized that the version Lovable had created was closer to what I wanted and decided to just focus on that one (this is also where I renamed it to “L’il Alex”; RIP “Future Focus Daily”). This highlights something important about vibe coding: different tools interpret the same request differently, and finding the right fit is part of the process. It’s not about the “best” tool — it’s about what works for your specific brain.

At that point, I also thought I’d see if I could build and deploy the tool for myself for no money, based on just giving it five prompts per day. By that third day, I started using the tool to manage my tasks. The only major problem I ran into early on was a realization that, despite my connecting this new app (at Lovable’s suggestion!) to a database at Supabase, it initially was storing all my tasks locally. So when I logged in on my phone to see how it worked as a mobile app, it was empty. But all it took was a single prompt to rectify that, and now my tasks are stored in a database.

My plan to do the whole thing for free hit a stumbling block a few days later, when I realized that while Lovable’s free account gives you five free prompts per day, there is still a limit of 30 total per month. So, after about six days of using it, you’re likely on hold until the next month starts.

At that point, I tried a few other approaches. I had connected my Lovable project to GitHub, so I had a repository with all the code, and I saw that Bolt had recently integrated with GitHub as well. I tried to open the repository with Bolt to see if I could continue working on it there, but it… didn’t work. It literally would ask me which project I wanted to use in GitHub, I would click on the repository, and Bolt would just reload as if nothing happened.

Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I tried to import the project into Firebase Studio, owned by Google, and built on top of Firebase. As with Bolt, I first tried to pull in my GitHub repo, which worked… except, for reasons I don’t understand, the AI features then all seemed disabled. After messing around with it for a bit and getting nowhere, the same friend who recommended I try Firebase Studio said “it might just be faster to ask Firebase Studio to recreate the project from scratch.” I gave it the same prompt and… it created “Momentum Flow,” with its own interpretation of the prompt.

I played around with it a bit more, but quickly realized that Firebase Studio definitely expects a bit more knowledge/experience to use and is not nearly as seamless as Lovable. For example, knowing I needed a database backend, I asked it to set that up and (not surprisingly) it suggested I use Firebase. But… rather than set it up, like Lovable did with Supabase, it just told me I needed to set it up manually. And I kept running into similar issues, where it would suggest what I should do, rather than just doing it. I’m sure that’s great for actual programmers, but my goal here was different.

For what it’s worth, I also tried another tool called Adaptive.ai (it named my app FocusDay), which seems pretty cool, but after running into a few more issues with it, I gave in and decided that my goal of a totally free app was too ambitious and agreed to pay $25/month for 100 prompts at Lovable. It turns out that you actually get more than that, as Lovable gives you five free prompts a day (use ‘em or lose ‘em that day), and after you use those up, you get those 100 additional prompts. So, in reality, you can do somewhere between 100 and 250 prompts, if you time it right.

Since then, I’ve been iterating the app to work exactly how my brain works. It’s probably terrible for anyone else — but that’s the point. For the first time in years, I have a productivity tool that doesn’t fight me.

This is what total control over your tools actually looks like. Here’s the “plan your day” page, which I either use late at night for the next day, or early in the morning for the upcoming day:

Tasks age visibly so I can see what I’ve been avoiding. Everything flows the way my brain actually works.

I prioritize tasks however makes sense to me that day. I can mark what I’m working on now versus next, and it automatically organizes itself around my actual workflow.

At day’s end, it checks in with me the way I want to be checked in with — not with guilt-inducing streaks or gamification bullshit, just some simple stats and details about the day (and it lets me create follow-ups on tasks I completed recently).

The system handles my unfinished tasks exactly how I want: no shame, no penalty, just moving them back to the future pile for tomorrow’s planning session, with the kind of notifications I want. So each day starts fresh, and I get to plan out how I want my day to go.

The whole thing has worked brilliantly since about day three. After two weeks of daily use, I’m genuinely hooked — not because of gamification tricks or habit-forming design patterns, but because the tool actually serves me instead of fighting me. I’m still tweaking some things here and there, but the tool just works. For me.

Here’s the real magic: when I want a new feature, I just ask for it. Last week I decided I wanted habit tracking integrated into my task flow. A few prompts later, done. No waiting for the next product roadmap, no hoping some PM thinks my use case matters. No upsell on it as a “premium” feature. I just had the system build it.

I also added a bookmarklet for capturing articles to write about and turning them into tasks as well as an email integration for turning emails into tasks. These weren’t planned features — they were just friction points that annoyed me, so I eliminated them.

The email integration required setting up a webhook through IFTTT — the AI initially suggested Gmail could handle webhooks directly (wrong), but it quickly pivoted to working solutions. This is typical of vibe coding: the AI makes occasional mistakes, but iterating toward working solutions is still faster than begging some company to maybe add your feature request to their backlog.

Sure, there are still some small bugs to fix and features to add. But here’s the difference: when something doesn’t work the way I need it to, I can actually fix it. I’m not stuck filing support tickets into the void or hoping the next update doesn’t break something I rely on.

There have been minor annoyances — occasionally when I asked it to add a feature, it reverts older changes or gets weird design ideas — but I can just tell it to fix things and it does. Compare that to every other productivity tool I’ve used, where design decisions that annoy me are just permanent facts of life I have to accept.

Intend got me 65% of the way there. L’il Alex is already at 85% and climbing. More importantly: when my needs change, the tool adapts. I’m not locked into someone else’s vision.

This is exactly what vibe coding is for: solving personal friction points without waiting for permission from product managers whose incentives don’t align with yours.

So, for all the folks who are concerned about centralized control and losing agency over their digital lives: there are now more options beyond just yelling at tech companies or hoping for better government regulation. For personal productivity tools, workflow automation, and small community projects, you can actually build what you need, no coding skills needed. The tools exist, they’re accessible, and they work. Sometimes the best way to escape someone else’s control is to just stop asking, and just take charge.

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This is part one of a two-part series on using AI tools as one piece to fight back against tech company control of our lives. Part two shares the details of how I built my own task management tool in a few days for next to no money and without any coding skills. But first, we need to talk about why this matters.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how people need to take back some control and agency over the tools they use online. As I wrote at the time:

The internet was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it’s left us feeling helpless, waiting for billionaires, governments, and tech giants to save us.

The most insidious thing about Big Tech’s takeover of the internet isn’t the concentration of power — it’s how it’s trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords.

So I decided to practice what I preach: I built myself a sophisticated personal task management tool using only AI — no coding knowledge required. Within three days, I was using it to manage my workday — and I keep making it better.

Here’s the thing: I know many of you think AI is overhyped bullshit. That it’s just another way for tech companies to extract value while delivering nothing useful. And you’re not entirely wrong about some of the hype. But, at times, those same AI tools can actually help you escape the very companies peddling them.

You can actually use those big tech company AI tools to escape some of “Big Tech’s” hold on your digital lives.

I now have a tool that works exactly to my specifications. I control the code, the hosting, the data. No company can enshittify it. No growth hacker can “optimize” it to extract more engagement. No billionaire can wake up one day and decide to charge for verification badges, import Nazis, or kill third-party apps.

It’s personal. It’s intentional — in that it’s based on my own intentions directly, rather than forcing me to fight a service provider’s best interests when they conflict with my own.

This is what “vibe coding” offers: the ability to build personal tools without knowing how to code, using natural language to create exactly what you need.

It’s not software from some big company trying to upsell me, grab my data, or control me.

In my original post earlier this year, I pointed out that we now have a generation of internet users who grew up entirely on giant platforms controlled by billionaires who believe their only recourse for anything is begging those same billionaires — or the government — to fix things.

But the nature of an open internet is that you have agency and you can make some choices yourself, taking back the power for yourself, rather than demanding that others make them for you.

The early internet was about many people building things themselves, often for themselves. The rise of giant platforms trained us to accept their constraints as immutable facts of digital life. But they’re not.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about AI, including about the companies that provide it and how they operate. But dismissing the technology entirely means missing how it can be weaponized against the very systems of control we’re trying to escape.

Let me be clear about what this is and isn’t good for:

Do use it for personal productivity tools, workflow automation, and small community projectsDo think of it as digital DIY — sometimes you need a professional, sometimes you can handle it yourselfDon’t use pure vibe coding for anything involving serious security, payments, or legal liabilityDon’t build public-facing apps expecting millions of users — at least not unless you’re okay dealing with major problems down the road

For social platforms, protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol are key (disclosure: I’m on the board). But for personal tools that don’t need social? Vibe coding changes the game entirely.

It was only in early February of this year that Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” to describe using AI tools to code things for you without needing to worry about all the details. You literally just chat with an AI until you get working software.

The concept exploded. By now, just four months later, there are already at least 15 books on Amazon about it (though the only serious ones — by Steve Yegge/Gene Kim and Addy Osmani — aren’t out until Fall, and I assume many of the others are AI generated slop).

This isn’t just “AI-assisted coding” where you still need to understand programming. This is describing what you want in plain English and iterating until it works. No coding knowledge required — my own coding skills are basically non-existent as the last time I really did anything directly with code was in the 1990s.

It turns out to be quite powerful. And liberating.

Ernie Smith used vibe coding to improve his own workflow, building a tool to use Obisidian (the popular note taking app) to post directly to his blog, which is built on Craft CMS. Smith, who is not prone to hyping AI tools notes how this seems like the proper use of the tool:

This is a situation where LLMs helped me solve a “me” problem without getting in the way of anyone else. I’m not going to be using LLM-created copy or images. But I did just figure out a way to save myself a ton of time when uploading a post, which I hope will make it easier to do so over time.

That’s exactly it. This isn’t about creating the next unicorn startup or replacing human creativity. It’s about solving personal friction points without waiting for some company to maybe add the feature you need (right before they pivot to crypto or whatever).

My task management system cost almost nothing to build and runs exactly how I want it to. No subscription fees, no feature creep (unless I decide to add those features), no suddenly discovering that my workflow has been “optimized” for someone else’s engagement metrics. No chance of waking up and finding out that my tool is owned by a fascist.

This is what taking back control actually looks like. Not begging Zuckerberg to “do better.” Not yelling at people on social media. Not hoping the government will save us. Just building what we need, for ourselves, on our own terms.

The companion piece shows you exactly how I did it for myself. But the why should already be clear: because what good is the open internet if we’re not using it for our own purposes.

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Here are your options as a foreigner, whether you live in the US already or are just seeking a chance to enter the country: support Israel’s actions against Palestine or GTFO.

The Trump Administration continues to pretend supporting Palestine is the same thing as being racist against Israel. And it’s using this false dichotomy to further punish a university it’s already punishing and to allow government staffers performing entrance visa vetting to pretend any opposition to Trump is just as bad as being antisemitic on main.

The executive orders aimed at enforcing only Trump’s approved view on the Israel-Palestine conflict pretend they have something to do with “national security.” The vanishing of migrants and legal residents who are opposed to Israel’s actions is just more of the same thing. And the DHS’s recent targeting of Harvard shows Trump and his enablers will only amp up the bullying if their intended victims refuse to immediately acquiesce.

A cable sent by State Department figurehead Marco Rubio to consulates all over the world instructs them to amp up their vetting process for visa applicants, specifically in order to prevent people with anti-Israel (or anti-MAGA) views from being allowed to enter the country for the purpose of heading to Harvard. The cable only targets applicants heading to Harvard and covers everyone from prospective students to instructors to contractors.

Marisa Kabas posted some screenshots on Bluesky before covering the full cable at The Handbasket. There’s more to Rubio’s instructions than can be seen in Kabas’ social media post, so definitely head to the source to get all the details.

The opening of the cable might lead people to believe this vetting is only targeting a few outliers on the migrate-to-Harvard spectrum:

“Effective immediately, consular officers must refer certain student and exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa applicants to the Fraud Prevention Unit (FPU) for a mandatory social media check as described below,” the cable reads. It then references a quote from Rubio on March 16th: “We don’t want people in our country that are going to be committing crimes and undermining our national security or the public safety. It’s that simple. Especially people that are here as guests. That is what a visa is… It is a visitor into our country. And if you violate the terms of your visitation, you are going to leave.”

But it’s actually a lot worse than that. It tells those doing the vetting to instruct applicants to set all social media accounts to Public and assume that anyone utilizing private accounts or refusing to do so when instructed must be hiding something.

As in all instances in which an applicant refuses to provide certain information upon request, consular officers should consider whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to “private” or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.

I know the wording sounds like it’s telling them to use their judgment, but considering this memo specifically targets only applicants seeking to visit Harvard, the most common assumption will be in favor of blocking their application.

And this is just the warning shot. Harvard is the target du jour. There will be more targets in the future and consulate officers should probably just starting vetting every applicant for anti-Israel (or anti-Trump) sentiment.

Implementation of this vetting measure for applicants traveling to Harvard will also serve as a pilot for expanded screening and vetting of visa applicants, and as the Department continues to develop and expand any enhanced vetting requirements to student visas generally, it may announce similar measures for other groups of visa applicants…

Speaking of expanded implementation, here’s the part that goes past the supposed national security concerns of rooting out antisemitic visa applicants:

[I]n another section, it states that a student visa applicant doesn’t necessarily need to express explicit support for “terrorist activity” in order to be denied, but just that they demonstrate “a degree of public approval or public advocacy for terrorist activity or a terrorist organization.”

It goes on to say: “This may be evident in conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles). Or it may be evident in advocacy or sympathy for foreign terrorist organizations. All of these matters may open lines of inquiry regarding the applicant’s credibility and purpose of travel.”

The Trump Administration is doing everything it can to homogenize the nation with its mass deportation program. This addition to visa vetting procedures makes it clear it’s only willing to extend this privilege to people who appear to like Trump and this administration or, at the very least, have never posted anything remotely controversial ever. And that’s why white South Africans are getting the red carpet rolled out for them while everyone sporting browner shades of skin are getting hustled into planes bound for whatever country has expressed an interest in jailing non-citizens indefinitely.

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Let’s be clear: CBS/Paramount, like many corporate U.S. media outlets, initially responded to the threat of authoritarian rule by kissing Republican ass in a bid to curry favor. CBS management has long made it clear that access and ad engagement are significantly more important than the truth. But the company’s looming acquisition by Skydance has taken existing fecklessness to the next level.

It’s looking increasingly likely that CBS/Paramount executives are going to give Donald Trump a huge pile of money to not only gain FCC approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance, but to settle Trump’s completely bogus lawsuit(s) trying to bully the company away from doing basic journalism.

There’s even some reporting from the right wing NY Post (for whatever that’s worth) claiming that CBS/Paramount executives are considering promising Trump that they’ll run free “public service announcements” (read: pro-Trump, right wing propaganda ads) to finalize the settlement:

“A proposal to break the legal quagmire between CBS News parent Paramount and President Trump involves the Tiffany Network running millions of dollars in public service ads for causes that appeal to the administration, On The Money has learned.”

Pathetic. CBS majority owner Shari Redstone just wants to get out of the media business. The guys looking to buy CBS, most notably Larry Ellison’s son David, have been kissing Trump’s ass on the daily. There’s every indication that once CBS is acquired, they’re going to push the already fairly pathetic media arm of the company further to the right, a la Washington Post or the LA Times.

Kissing Republican ass and telling weird right wing zealots what they want to hear is where all the money is. Telling people the truth risks upsetting governments, advertisers, and billionaire ownership. It also likely results in a loss of broader advertising engagement and makes it less likely you’ll be invited to the next White House Christmas party.

As a result, all the journalists and executives left at CBS with any integrity are jumping ship. Curiously, state senators in California are launching an “investigation” into whether any part of this bizarre bribery scheme violates any state laws against bribery and unfair competition. Semafor, in typical “both sides” fashion, frames this all as a difference of bipartisan opinion:

“The settlement talks have infuriated many staff members at CBS as well as many national Democrats who believe that Paramount is caving to pressure from Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit.”

CBS/Paramount absolutely is caving to pressure from Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit. It’s not an opinion. They’re not being subtle about it. The Trump administration is abusing government power and trampling the constitution in order to bully the U.S. press into feckless compliance. And it’s working. Whether a California Senate inquiry will hold anybody accountable for it is another matter entirely.

This is all the culmination of decades of U.S. failures on media policy and antitrust reform. Historically bipartisan “U.S. media policy” has involved rubber stamping problematic media mergers, allowing the ad-based modern media to turn into a monolithic, ad-engagement chasing dumpster fire jam-packed with propaganda and corporatist infotainment, all managed by some of the least competent people imaginable. We spent decades paying empty lip service to real journalism, and the check is due.

The end result has been positively fatal for U.S. journalism, collective consensus, an educated public, and an informed electorate.

The only real way out of this mess is for CBS executives to find a backbone, cancel the merger, and tell the Trump administration and Brendan Carr to go fuck themselves. They can afford the fight, and they’d have plenty of support. But because that would be a bigger, more expensive hassle than throwing independent journalism and ethics in the toilet, it’s very clear which direction CBS is ultimately headed.

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With all the conversations we’ve had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that’s not entirely true. Despite the rash of budget, staff, and grant cuts that have kneecapped HHS, you can still get a great deal of information from the HHS website, for instance. As an example, here is the CDC site’s page providing information about lead poisoning in the country. It describes how the agency began measuring blood lead levels (BLLs) nationally in 1995 to find where elevated BLLs exist, especially in children, in order to deploy federal resources to combat its occurrence. The CDC page has this to say about BLLs generally in terms of their impact on children.

There is no known safe BLL. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health. Millions of children are being exposed to lead in their homes, increasing their risks for:

*Damage to the brain and nervous systemSlowed growth and developmentLearning and behavior problems (e.g., reduced IQ, ADHD, juvenile delinquency, and criminal behavior)*Hearing and speech problems

Well, I’m no doctor, but gosh golly gee, that seems bad! Like, the kind of thing a federal government that has protecting its own population as a supposed chief aim would want to combat. And, in touting its own progress on that same page, the CDC agreed at the time the page was written in 2024.

The decrease is most likely a result of an intense coordinated effort to control or eliminate lead sources in children’s environments by:

Government officialsHealthcare and social service providersThe communities most at risk

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a child agency of HHS, has its own page on the topic as well. There they talk again about how this was historically a much larger problem, but one that still remains and needs to be addressed through a coordinated and likely federal effort.

Researchers estimate that half of the U.S. population, more than 170 million people, were exposed to harmful lead levels in early childhood. “The scope of such widespread exposure, particularly from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, suggests the legacy of lead continues to shape the health and wellbeing of the country in ways we do not yet fully understand,” according to the researchers. Lead exposure is associated with IQ loss, for which even small deficits can have a meaningful adverse effect on people’s lives and on society.

The Biden-Harris Administration actively works to protect communities from lead exposure. More than 9 million homes, schools, daycares, and businesses receive their drinking water through a lead pipe, putting people at risk of lead exposure. A whole-of-government effort is deploying resources across federal, state and local governments to address lead hazards. Read more in this May 2024 brief: $3 Billion to Replace Toxic Lead Pipes and Deliver Clean Drinking Water to Communities Across the Country.

There’s not a lot of ambiguity in any of this. Lead poisoning and any level of BLLs, particularly in children, are problems worthy of combatting. To say that we don’t want lead in the blood of our children ought to be as uncontroversial a position as one can take. And, yet, it appears that one of the victims of HHS’ budget slashing is the very program designed to help local communities, particularly those in poorer areas.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.

The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.

That Milwaukee example is an interesting one, as it offers us yet another opportunity to watch RFK Jr. simply obfuscate and/or lie in response to it. In a hearing, members of Congress asked RFK Jr. directly about the Milwaukee issue. Kennedy assured those lawmakers that he had a crackerjack team from HHS on the ground in the city working on this. Turns out, not so much.

Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.

Look, I realize that we’re in a brave new world in which Trump officials can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and that they all have an expectation that they are untouchable. But at some point, there have to be consequences for a Cabinet member sitting before Congress and lying through his teeth. Hearings. Inquiries. Charges for contempt of Congress, or for lying under oath. Something. Anything.

Children are suffering and will suffer even worse because of this nonsense, all while Kennedy plays “pin the tail on my own bullshit” with lawmakers. This simply cannot go on.

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A federal appeals court just delivered yet another reality check to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s transparently retaliatory investigation into Media Matters — and the timing couldn’t be better, given that the FTC just opened its own bullshit investigation into the same organization for the same supposed “crime”: reporting factual information that made Elon Musk sad.

Here’s what happened: Media Matters published a single article documenting that big brand ads were appearing next to neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter. No one disputes this happened (no, not even Elon, though he does complain that they weren’t fully transparent in how they found those ads). But some advertisers paused their spending, which enraged Musk enough that he (egged on by Stephen Miller) convinced state officials in Texas and Missouri to weaponize their offices against Media Matters for the sin of accurate reporting.

This was in addition to Musk’s own filing of lawsuits in multiple countries against Media Matters (not to mention Musk telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself” if they didn’t want to advertise).

It should be pretty blatantly obvious why this is dangerous. When state prosecutors start investigating journalists for publishing inconvenient facts, that’s not protecting the public — it’s textbook government retaliation against speech.

Media Matters went to court to try to stop these investigations, and a district court judge blocked both Texas’ and Missouri’s investigations, calling out how they were obviously unconstitutional retaliatory attacks on Media Matters’ First Amendment protected speech.

Texas appealed to the DC Circuit. On Friday, the DC Circuit upheld the lower court opinion. The opinion was written by the 84-year-old Judge Harry Edwards, who basically says that the district court’s findings that this was an attack on First Amendment speech is obviously correct:

The First Amendment generally “prohibits government officials from subjecting individuals to retaliatory actions after the fact for having engaged in protected speech.” Hous. Cmty. Coll. Sys. v. Wilson, 595 U.S. 468, 474 (2022); see, e.g., Boquist v. Courtney, 32 F.4th 764, 774 (9th Cir. 2022). As the District Court correctly recognized, Appellees’ complaint is not focused merely on the chilling effects of the actions taken against them. Rather, the heart of Appellees’ claim is that the actions taken by Paxton are justiciable and warrant relief because they involve concrete and felt acts of retaliation against a media company and one of its investigative reporters for having exercised their protected rights of free speech*.*

The opinion calls out how Paxton tried to pretend his investigation wasn’t retaliatory even as it quite obviously was:

Paxton additionally argues that Appellees’ complaint should be dismissed because it does not raise a justiciable claim. We disagree. Paxton has elided the compelling evidence of the campaign of retaliation against Appellees so as to mischaracterize the action before the court. This case is not simply about a pre-enforcement challenge to a non-self-executing CID, as Paxton would have it. Rather, Appellees have alleged present, concrete, and objective harms (not merely “chilling effects”) resulting from retaliatory government actions that have adversely affected their newsgathering activities and media business operations. Accordingly, Appellees have satisfied the injury-in-fact requirement of standing and may pursue injunctive relief for their First Amendment retaliation claim.

Here’s the most damning part: Judge Edwards points out that Paxton provided no argument at all “to dispute that the investigation was retaliatory.” In other words, a state attorney general couldn’t even be bothered to deny that he was abusing his office to punish journalists. That’s not legal strategy — that’s confession.

Instead of defending the legitimacy of his investigation, Paxton tried to hide behind procedural arguments, pointing to a case about challenging hypothetical future enforcement. But as Edwards makes clear, this isn’t about some potential future harm:

This case is quite different. Appellees in this case are not challenging a general government policy; rather, they are the specific targets of a retaliatory government investigation. Indeed, as noted above, Paxton readily declared that he was targeting Media Matters for investigation in a press release and interviews. Shortly thereafter, he then served the CID on Media Matters as part of the investigation. Thus, there is no hypothetical harm or a threatened future enforcement action because the retaliatory investigation has already begun.

The timing of this ruling is perfect because FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson just launched his own investigation into Media Matters for the exact same “offense” — accurate reporting that upset a billionaire. Ferguson should read this opinion carefully, because the DC Circuit just explained in very clear terms why using government power to punish journalism is unconstitutional.

But, of course, Ferguson probably doesn’t care. The cruelty is the point. These investigations aren’t meant to uncover wrongdoing — they’re designed to drain resources, chill reporting, and send a message to other journalists: step out of line and we’ll weaponize the state against you.

That’s how “free speech” works in the Trump admin.

The DC Circuit just told state prosecutors they can’t get away with this authoritarian bullshit. Now we’ll see if federal agencies got the memo.

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Reports that prominent American national security officials used a freely available encrypted messaging app, coupled with the rise of authoritarian policies around the world, have led to a surge in interest in encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp. These apps prevent anyone, including the government and the app companies themselves, from reading messages they intercept.

The spotlight on encrypted apps is also a reminder of the complex debate pitting government interests against individual liberties. Governments desire to monitor everyday communications for law enforcement, national security and sometimes darker purposes. On the other hand, citizens and businesses claim the right to enjoy private digital discussions in today’s online world.

The positions governments take often are framed as a “war on encryption” by technology policy experts and civil liberties advocates. As a cybersecurity researcher, I’ve followed the debate for nearly 30 years and remain convinced that this is not a fight that governments can easily win.

Understanding the ‘golden key’

Traditionally, strong encryption capabilities were considered military technologies crucial to national security and not available to the public. However, in 1991, computer scientist Phil Zimmermann released a new type of encryption software called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). It was free, open-source software available on the internet that anyone could download. PGP allowed people to exchange email and files securely, accessible only to those with the shared decryption key, in ways similar to highly secured government systems.

Following an investigation into Zimmermann, the U.S. government came to realize that technology develops faster than law and began to explore remedies. It also began to understand that once something is placed on the internet, neither laws nor policy can control its global availability.

Fearing that terrorists or criminals might use such technology to plan attacks, arrange financing or recruit members, the Clinton administration advocated a system called the Clipper Chip, based on a concept of key escrow. The idea was to give a trusted third party access to the encryption system and the government could use that access when it demonstrated a law enforcement or national security need.

Clipper was based on the idea of a “golden key,” namely, a way for those with good intentions – intelligence services, police – to access encrypted data, while keeping people with bad intentions – criminals, terrorists – out.

Clipper Chip devices never gained traction outside the U.S. government, in part because its encryption algorithm was classified and couldn’t be publicly peer-reviewed. However, in the years since, governments around the world have continued to embrace the golden key concept as they grapple with the constant stream of technology developments reshaping how people access and share information.

Following Edward Snowden’s disclosures about global surveillance of digital communications in 2013, Google and Apple took steps to make it virtually impossible for anyone but an authorized user to access data on a smartphone. Even a court order was ineffective, much to the chagrin of law enforcement. In Apple’s case, the company’s approach to privacy and security was tested in 2016 when the company refused to build a mechanism to help the FBI break into an encrypted iPhone owned by a suspect in the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

At its core, encryption is, fundamentally, very complicated math. And while the golden key concept continues to hold allure for governments, it is mathematically difficult to achieve with an acceptable degree of trust. And even if it was viable, implementing it in practice makes the internet less safe. Security experts agree that any backdoor access, even if hidden or controlled by a trusted entity, is vulnerable to hacking.

Competing justifications and tech realities

Governments around the world continue to wrestle with the proliferation of strong encryption in messaging tools, social media and virtual private networks.

For example, rather than embrace a technical golden key, a recent proposal in France would have provided the government the ability to add a hidden “ghost” participant to any encrypted chat for surveillance purposes. However, legislators removed this from the final proposal after civil liberties and cybersecurity experts warned that such an approach would undermine basic cybersecurity practices and trust in secure systems.

In 2025, the U.K. government secretly ordered Apple to add a backdoor to its encryption services worldwide. Rather than comply, Apple removed the ability for its iPhone and iCloud customers in the U.K. to use its Advanced Data Protection encryption features. In this case, Apple chose to defend its users’ security in the face of government mandates, which ironically now means that users in the U.K. may be less secure.

In the United States, provisions removed from the 2020 EARN IT bill would have forced companies to scan online messages and photos to guard against child exploitation by creating a golden-key-type hidden backdoor. Opponents viewed this as a stealth way of bypassing end-to-end encryption. The bill did not advance to a full vote when it was last reintroduced in the 2023-2024 legislative session.

Opposing scanning for child sexual abuse material is a controversial concern when encryption is involved: Although Apple received significant public backlash over its plans to scan user devices for such material in ways that users claimed violated Apple’s privacy stance, victims of child abuse have sued the company for not better protecting children.

Even privacy-centric Switzerland and the European Union are exploring ways of dealing with digital surveillance and privacy in an encrypted world.

The laws of math and physics, not politics

Governments usually claim that weakening encryption is necessary to fight crime and protect the nation – and there is a valid concern there. However, when that argument fails to win the day, they often turn to claiming to need backdoors to protect children from exploitation.

From a cybersecurity perspective, it is nearly impossible to create a backdoor to a communications product that is only accessible for certain purposes or under certain conditions. If a passageway exists, it’s only a matter of time before it is exploited for nefarious purposes. In other words, creating what is essentially a software vulnerability to help the good guys will inevitably end up helping the bad guys, too.

Often overlooked in this debate is that if encryption is weakened to improve surveillance for governmental purposes, it will drive criminals and terrorists further underground. Using different or homegrown technologies, they will still be able to exchange information in ways that governments can’t readily access. But everyone else’s digital security will be needlessly diminished.

This lack of online privacy and security is especially dangerous for journalists, activists, domestic violence survivors and other at-risk communities around the world.

Encryption obeys the laws of math and physics, not politics. Once invented, it can’t be un-invented, even if it frustrates governments. Along those lines, if governments are struggling with strong encryption now, how will they contend with a world when everyone is using significantly more complex techniques like quantum cryptography?

Governments remain in an unenviable position regarding strong encryption. Ironically, one of the countermeasures the government recommended in response to China’s hacking of global telephone systems in the Salt Typhoon attacks was to use strong encryption in messaging apps such as Signal or iMessage.

Reconciling that with their ongoing quest to weaken or restrict strong encryption for their own surveillance interests will be a difficult challenge to overcome.

Richard Forno is Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Assistant Director, UMBC Cybersecurity Institute, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Here’s yet another worrying development in the world of privately-owned security cameras. Flock Safety has made aggressive in-roads in both the private and public sector, something aided greatly by the company’s ability to blend the two.

Much like Ring before it, Flock is pitching cheap cameras with local law enforcement buy-in, nudging residents towards leaving their cameras (some of which have license plate reader capabilities) open so law enforcement can search their plate captures without a warrant. Law enforcement agencies are also buying their own cameras to ensure people can’t travel very far without leaving at least a temporary record of their travels the government can access pretty much at will.

And this is how that meshing of public-private is playing out in real life. As Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler report for 404 Media, at least one law enforcement officer has used this meshed network of Flock ALPR cameras to help locate a woman who recently had an abortion.

On May 9, an officer from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock cameras and gave the reason as “had an abortion, search for female,” according to the multiple sets of data. Whenever officers search Flock cameras they are required to provide a reason for doing so, but generally do not require a warrant or any sort of court order. Flock cameras continually scan the plates, color, and model of any vehicle driving by, building a detailed database of vehicles and by extension peoples’ movements.

Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.

Some of these cameras were likely owned and operated by private purchasers. But even with those excluded, it’s still a massive data set the government can access without having to offer up much in the way of justification. The justification here (one that was reflected in access audits from Flock systems located as far away as Washington state) seems especially ominous and especially flimsy: “had an abortion, search for female.”

The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office claims this search was performed to help, not harm.

Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.”

“We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.”

Even if that’s completely true, it’s not that comforting to know Texas law enforcement officers can perform the same searches for the purpose of prosecuting people who have sought abortions in nearby states where this is still legal. The justifications offered during the acquisition process always stresses the equipment will be used to deal with the most violent crimes. While utilizing the tech to search for a missing person is something most people would find acceptable, its proximity to the state’s recent abortion ban definitely isn’t an encouraging sign.

If these tools can be used this way, you can guarantee they will be used this way. Once one law enforcement agency gets the ball rolling on abortion arrests and weathers the press storm that it will provoke, the rest will follow suit, especially in areas populated by prosecutors with anti-abortion beliefs. Companies like Flock will just make everything easier for people looking to punish women for daring to explore their options and retain what’s left of their bodily autonomy.

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Picture this: You’re a researcher who has spent years developing a grant proposal, gone through layers of expert review, and received National Science Foundation (NSF) approval. Then some kid barely out of college — whose main qualification appears to be founding a company that puts ads on the blockchain — logs into a Zoom meeting, pays more attention to his fingernails than the discussion, and kills your grant with a disinterested thumbs down.

Welcome to science under DOGE.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s exactly what prompted Alondra Nelson — a pioneering scholar at the intersection of tech, policy, and society who led the Social Science Research Council and headed the Office of Science and Technology Policy under Biden — to publicly resign from both the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. As she explained in a piece at Time Magazine, the DOGE/Trump assault on institutions is systematically destroying scientific inquiry and academic freedom.

The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission.

But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.

Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts. Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a “consultant” in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.

Meet Zachary Terrell, DOGE’s apparent authority on scientific merit. Fedscoop identified him as one of three DOGE operatives deployed to NSF. They had such little info on him that they didn’t even list any associations (unlike the other two DOGE kids at NSF). Terrell’s apparent qualifications for overruling decades of scientific expertise? A 2022 bachelor’s degree from Kansas State and a brief career in crypto.

Since graduating, Terrell has managed to found three companies, including “Spindl,” which Coinbase acquired earlier this year for its groundbreaking innovation of… putting ads on the blockchain. His LinkedIn profile lists his current government role as “Yeoman” — apparently the official title for “person who kills research grants while playing with water bottles.”

This is the expertise now trumping peer review at the NSF. Not content knowledge, not research experience, not even basic familiarity with how science works. Just the confidence that comes with being a 23-year-old techbro who thinks he knows better than any actual expert.

This is who Elon had sit in NSF board meetings, staring at his water bottle, and then giving the up/down vote on grants over the decisions of actual knowledgeable and experienced experts.

The pattern extends beyond NSF. Nelson also resigned from the Library of Congress following Trump’s firing of Librarian Carla Hayden over completely fabricated claims about “inappropriate books for children”—despite the fact that the Library of Congress doesn’t lend books and restricts access to those over 16.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just administrative incompetence — it’s the systematic replacement of expertise with ideology. Nelson recognizes this broader authoritarian pattern, along with the only logical response for herself.

The steady accumulation of procedural adjustments, each seemingly minor, stand to systematically and collectively alter the purpose and impact of our institutions. The dismissal of Hayden, who took the helm of the Library of Congress with a vow to extend its resources to all of us, represents not merely a personnel change but a statement about what kind of knowledge stewardship is deemed acceptable.

To watch these changes unfold without naming them for what they are is to participate in a collective amnesia about how knowledge infrastructures shape power relations. Like the shopkeeper in an authoritarian society described by Vaclav Havel in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” who participates in his own oppression through small daily acts of complicity, placing a party slogan in his window not out of conviction but out of habit. To remain on advisory boards that have been stripped of meaningful advisory function is to become that shopkeeper, to lend legitimacy to a process that has been systematically delegitimized.

As she rightly notes, it’s much more powerful for her to make the statement by publicly resigning and calling this out, than adding legitimacy to illegitimate activities:

What then, is the responsible course of action? For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging. My resignation represents such a refusal, not a surrender of responsibility but an assertion of it.

The NSF helped create GPS, the internet, and countless innovations that define modern life. Now it’s being run by someone who thinks blockchain advertising represents the cutting edge of human knowledge.

And Nelson is right to speak out on how terrifying this is:

The aim of my resignation is to break free of powers that seek to limit knowledge and silence voice. To signal that certain boundary lines have been crossed. To insist that advisory roles must expand knowledge and be more than appendages to predetermined decisions.

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We recently noted how U.S. telecom giant Verizon was more than happy to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion merger with Frontier. That included quickly kowtowing to the administration’s demands that it do its best to be more racist and sexist.

For its part, Verizon counterpart AT&T claims it’s not following on Verizon’s heels. Despite the fact that AT&T will be seeking approval to purchase Lumen’s residential fiber network for $5.75 billion, CEO John Stankey says it won’t be retreating from its “DEI initiatives” (read: he claims it won’t start being more racist and sexist just because the Trump administration asks it to):

“We don’t have to roll back anything. Our policies and our approach at AT&T have always been that we progress people on merit. That any employee that comes to work here should have an opportunity to grow their career, work on building their skills, have an opportunity to succeed and earn a living. “And our goal is to make sure that every employee that walks through the door of AT&T feels like they belong here and it’s a good place for them to work.”

On one hand, with a merger approval pending at the FCC, Stankey could have easily followed Verizon’s lead and behaved like a feckless coward. Verizon’s CEO, you might recall, couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary was happening when interviewed by The Verge recently.

That said, it’s not clear how much value AT&T’s words and promises have.

For one thing, AT&T had already indicated it was walking back its support for LGBTQ causes, including cancelling funding support for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. It cancelled a long list of programs and renamed some others to get in the good graces of the administration already. It also throws a ton of money at extremist right wing politicians after specifically claiming it wouldn’t do that.

AT&T also has a long history of hijacking or “co-opting” civil rights groups in bizarre and unethical ways. AT&T has often been caught paying civil rights groups with malleable ethics in exchange for support for shitty policies (merger approvals, the elimination of consumer protections, the death of net neutrality) that often harm these groups’ real-world constituents.

In effect, AT&T has a long history of using diversity as a lobbying marionette to pretend there’s broad support for widely unpopular policies.

Still, Stankey’s comments resulted in a bunch of headlines suggesting that AT&T was a corporate leader when it comes to not being a bunch of obnoxious bigots:

Again, I’m not sure AT&T’s doing anything particularly courageous here, but with a merger awaiting approval the company could have followed Verizon’s route and simply become a spineless pumpkin operating in blind fealty to a bunch of weird, authoritarian zealots. So, good job. I guess.

The Trump administration and the Brendan Carr FCC have been launching a bunch of “investigations” into companies for not being racist enough. The cornerstone of these efforts is the laughable legal claim that diversity and inclusion efforts are, themselves, somehow discriminatory against white people. AT&T has good lawyers, and likely knows these efforts don’t have much legal standing.

AT&T lawyers also know that at the same time the Trump FCC claims to have all this authority to bully companies, Trump court rulings and executive orders are effectively destroying all remaining U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory power, something AT&T’s been lobbying for for decades. AT&T lawyers and executives know that the trajectory we’re on ultimately ensures that nobody can tell AT&T what to do on any subject, whether it’s racism, taxpayer fraud, anti-consumer protection efforts, or its longstanding quest to crush competition underfoot.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB&J with a straightforward reaction to one of the more stunning details about oppressive laws pushing people out of Idaho:

TWO-FUCKING-THIRDS of the doctors have left already?!?!

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about the apparent decline in support for free speech among young Americans:

Adding on to this I’m willing to bet there’s a slice of people who look at the harm caused by Trump and those like him and think there’s something wrong with a system that allows those sorts of dangerous and malicious lies.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from nerdrage, slightly disputing the idea that everyone fleeing certain states is only doing so because of Trump’s ineptitude:

Trump’s an idiot, but…

“people leaving California to escape wild fires President Trump refuses to provide aid to fight or protect against”

There’s no protecting against fires driven by climate change and Santa Ana winds. If people are fleeing LA before the next firestorm, they’re the smart ones.

There will be plenty of climate change refugees in the future. It’s too late to save Florida for instance.

Next, it’s MrWilson with a comment about the notion that Trump’s tariffs are profitable for the country:

Any money rolling in from tariffs is blood from the stone of the American consumer and any money that does roll in will go right back out the door to subsidize billionaires like Musk. They need to cut your medicaid in order to give money to people who already have too much.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump’s assertion that autism doesn’t occur naturally:

While he’s at it..

… 120 years ago only 1 in 30 people were left-handed. Now the number is about 1 in 8. Clearly vaccines cause left-handedness.

In second place, it’s Thad with a comment about anti-education backlash from far right activists, and one teacher being accused of “teaching Marxist commie CRT in your classroom”:

No, you’re thinking of apostrophes.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Uriel-238 about the headline on our post about a judge chewing out the DOJ for arresting Newark’s mayor:

Benchslap

I was hoping the act of benchslapping involved having the bailiff wield a literal bench and slap the responsible parties across the jaw with it.

A fellow can dream, I guess.

Finally, it’s mechtheist with a comment about RFK Jr.’s health report that cites studies that don’t seem to exist:

This is like playing air guitar and it being out of tune.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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