Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn’t need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump’s 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast’s expanded usage caps while AT&T was bringing its own caps back after temporarily suspending them due to COVID. But surely the most notable event was the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, which we wrote about at length and which also led to Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, Homeland Security admitted that it seized a hip-hop blog for five years despite no evidence of infringement, the Authors Guild predictably asked the Supreme Court to overturn the fair use ruling on Google Books, and the US Copyright Office was asking for public comments on the DMCA’s notice and takedown procedures. Richard Prince was finally sued (again) for copyright infringement over his “Instagram” art piece, while a skeptical judge gave PETA a second chance to make its nutty argument about copyright in the infamous monkey selfie. And we wrote about how the TPP was explicitly tossing out public interest in favor of corporate interests.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, the new congressional leadership was prioritizing the investigation of Wikileaks, an anonymous Senator killed the Senate’s proposed whistleblower protection law, and we debunked the myth that Wikileaks was putting lives in danger in Zimbabwe. As for those domain seizures that Homeland Security would later quietly reverse course on, at this point they were still clamming up about their obvious errors while we wrote about how much those legal and technical errors mattered and how it appeared they invented a non-existent rule about criminal contributory infringement. Also, this was the week a new report argued that Andrew Wakefield’s infamous study linking vaccines to autism was not just a mistake, but an outright fraud.

Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy’s response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines.

The last time we saw this was back in October of last year. In the wake of an absolutely insane press conference in which Kennedy and Trump decided to point the finger at Tylenol, of all things, as a major cause of autism spectrum disorder, Cassidy bravely took to social media and the radio to criticize the HHS Secretary for essentially not having a single fucking idea about which he was speaking… and then he did absolutely fuck all about it. And now, days after Kennedy’s CDC altered the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, he’s once more out in public spilling all kinds of words in response.

Cassidy, a physician and longtime proponent of vaccinations, said this move will “make America sicker.”

“As a doctor who treated patients for decades, my top priority is protecting children and families. Multiple children have died or were hospitalized from measles, and South Carolina continues to face a growing outbreak. Two children have died in my state from whooping cough. All of this was preventable with safe and effective vaccines,” Cassidy wrote on the social media platform X.

“The vaccine schedule IS NOT A MANDATE. It’s a recommendation giving parents the power. Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker,” he added.

Well, gosh golly gee, Senator, if only there was someone in some kind of position of power that could actually do something about it. Maybe a respected figure in the Republican majority, one who is a doctor by background and who cast and whipped up critical votes to confirm Kennedy’s appointment, who could do more than offer stern warnings about how horrible this is all going to be. I’d like to find someone like that and implore them to take action. Like… any action. Do literally anything other than flap their lips, as though that were accomplishing anything.

The incredible part of all of this is the context in which Kennedy’s betrayal of Cassidy has occurred. According to Cassidy, Kennedy committed to the following, either in confirmation hearings or to him personally:

1. Not changing vaccine review processes or slowing down vaccine approvals
2. Leave the CDC’s ACIP committee unchanged
3. Not changing the CDC website’s language debunking misinformation about vaccines and autism
4. Basing vaccine approvals and schedule recommendations on established and peer-reviewed science

Lie, lie, lie, and lie! It’s a superfecta of broken promises made to a sitting senator that has the stature, standing, and ability to do something about it. He could back the effort to impeach Kennedy, as he absolutely should. He could hit him in funding. He could haul him before Congress and demand answers, using his bully pulpit to expose the dangers further than some ExTwitter posts.

“Senator Cassidy put his personal political preservation above all by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr., even after raising many valid concerns over Kennedy’s pursuit of a dangerous anti-vaccine agenda,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “It is obvious that Kennedy was always hellbent on pushing vaccine misinformation to AmericansAmericans no matter how much the data and science show them to be safe and effective. And now, with each new baseless attack on vaccine safety and efficacy that  Secretary Kennedy carries out — like gutting the child vaccine schedule — more American lives are needlessly put in jeopardy. Dr. Cassidy knows this better than anyone, and it’s time he backs up his empty words of ‘concern’ with serious action.”

Instead, we have Cassidy’s mere words. Inaction is tacit endorsement, as far as I’m concerned. And every day that goes by in which Cassidy continues to not lift a single finger to protect his own constituents at a minimum, and all Americans more generally, is another violation of the Hippocratic Oath he once took.

It’s “do no harm”, Senator. Not “do nothing.”

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

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In this sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw talks to Oversight Board co-chair Paolo Carozza (Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana) and Board member Julie Owono (Executive Director of Internet Without Borders and research affiliate at Berkman Klein Centre) about the Board’s five-year journey and its plans for the future.

Together, Ben, Paolo and Julie discuss the Board’s recently published report, From Bold Experiment to Essential Institution, and what it means to call Board “essential” in today’s ever-evolving internet landscape. They also talk about how the Board has changed, the criticisms it faces around cost and influence, and what comes next in 2026 and beyond.

This episode is brought to you in partnership with the Oversight Board. To sponsor a Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, get in touch via email (podcast@ctrlaltspeech.com) or visit ctrlaltspeech.com

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy—it’s a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That’s what we told a federal court in Channel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists.

Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), a public access cable station in Waltham, Massachusetts, records city council meetings on video. Channel 781 News (Channel 781), a group of volunteers who report on the city council, curates clips from those recordings for its YouTube channel, along with original programming, to spark debate on issues like housing and transportation. WCAC sent a series of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), accusing Channel 781 of copyright infringement. That led to YouTube deactivating Channel 781’s channel just days before a critical municipal election. Represented by EFF and the law firm Brown Rudnick LLP, Channel 781 sued WCAC for misrepresentations in its takedown notices under an important but underutilized provision of the DMCA.

The DMCA gives copyright holders a powerful tool to take down other people’s content from platforms like YouTube. The “notice and takedown” process requires only an email, or filling out a web form, in order to accuse another user of copyright infringement and have their content taken down. And multiple notices typically lead to the target’s account being suspended, because doing so helps the platform avoid liability. There’s no court or referee involved, so anyone can bring an accusation and get a nearly instantaneous takedown.

Of course, that power invites abuse. Because filing a DMCA infringement notice is so easy, there’s a temptation to use it at the drop of a hat to take down speech that someone doesn’t like. To prevent that, before sending a takedown notice, a copyright holder has to consider whether the use they’re complaining about is a fair use. Specifically, the copyright holder needs to form a “good faith belief” that the use is not “authorized by the law,” such as through fair use.

WCAC didn’t do that. They didn’t like Channel 781 posting short clips from city council meetings recorded by WCAC as a way of educating Waltham voters about their elected officials. So WCAC fired off DMCA takedown notices at many of Channel 781’s clips that were posted on YouTube.

WCAC claims they considered fair use, because a staff member watched a video about it and discussed it internally. But WCAC ignored three of the four fair use factors. WCAC ignored that their videos had no creativity, being nothing more than records of public meetings. They ignored that the clips were short, generally including one or two officials’ comments on a single issue. They ignored that the clips caused WCAC no monetary or other harm, beyond wounded pride. And they ignored facts they already knew, and that are central to the remaining fair use factor: by excerpting and posting the clips with new titles, Channel 781 was putting its own “spin” on the material – in other words, transforming it. All of these facts support fair use.

Instead, WCAC focused only on the fact that the clips they targeted were not altered further or put into a larger program. Looking at just that one aspect of fair use isn’t enough, and changing the fair use inquiry to reach the result they wanted is hardly the way to reach a “good faith belief.”

That’s why we’re asking the court to rule that WCAC’s conduct violated the law and that they should pay damages. Copyright holders need to use the powerful DMCA takedown process with care, and when they don’t, there needs to be consequences.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

If you want to understand how far MAGA Republicans have strayed from any actual “free speech” principles, look no further than this: Congress issued a subpoena to Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, because he posted on X a publicly available online biography of someone involved in the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. There was no private information shared. There was no “doxxing” in any sense of the word.

Just to be crystal clear about what we’re talking about here: a member of Congress subpoenaed a journalist and referred him for criminal prosecution for posting information that was publicly available on a university website. Information that a university proudly displays on its own website. Information that, even if it were classified (which it isn’t), would still be constitutionally protected to publish.

Yet, because MAGA folks always need to attack anyone who makes them look silly, they went crazy. First, they got X to lock his account until he deleted the post. Harp explained how there’s no way you could consider this to be doxxing.

If you can’t read that screenshot, Harp’s detailed explanation of why he did nothing wrong is quite thorough and quite obviously true:

Yesterday, X admins locked my account and required me to delete certain posts in order to log back in. No explanation was given, but I had posted the publicly available, online bio of a Delta Force commander, a full-bird colonel, whose identity is not classified and which anyone skilled at FOIA can ascertain.

In no way did I “doxx” the officer. I did not post any personally identifying information about him, such as his birthday, social security number, home address, phone number, email address, the names of his family members, or pictures of his house. What I posted is still online on Duke University’s website for all the world to see.

If you serve in the US military, your personnel documents are public records, as they should be. Because I served in the Army myself, anyone can obtain my records, which show the units in which I served. Nothing exempts Delta Force from this basic transparency.

To illustrate these points, I also posted the records of deceased special operators, obtained through FOIA, that specifically say “Delta Force” on them, unredacted. In the spirit of fairness, I also posted my own service record. X required me to delete those posts, too.

Nothing about this should distract from the larger issue: Delta Force, acting on President Trump’s unlawful orders, which contravened every principle of international law and sovereignty, as well as the Congress’s prerogative to declare war, invaded Venezuela, killed scores of Venezuelans who posed no threat to the United States, and kidnapped the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, as well as his wife.

Every civilian official and military officer in the American chain of command who participated in this outrageously illegal and provocative act of war – which a supermajority of Americans oppose is the legitimate subject of journalistic scrutiny, and X has no business censoring my timely and accurate reporting.

And just to underscore how ridiculous this entire affair is: Duke University, apparently spooked by the controversy, has now scrubbed the bio from its website. The officer’s name and photo remain, but the biographical text—which revealed nothing even remotely sensitive—has been deleted. So Luna’s intimidation campaign worked, at least in getting a university to memory-hole publicly available information about one of its own fellows. This is exactly how chilling effects operate in practice.

And, for that, he gets a subpoena driven by MAGA Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who falsely claimed he was “leaking classified information.” She then followed it up by referring Harp to the DOJ:

That’s Rep. Luna misleading everyone and misrepresenting what Harp did, saying:

I have referred Seth Harp to the DOJ for investigation and to pursue criminal charges regarding the intentional publication of information related to Operation Absolute Resolve, including the doxxing of a U.S. Delta Force operator. That conduct is not protected journalism. It was reckless, dangerous, and put American lives at risk. The First Amendment does not give anyone a license to expose elite military personnel, compromise operations, or assist our adversaries under the guise of reporting.

Congress has a constitutional duty to investigate when national security is endangered, and no one is above oversight. It is also well within my constitutional authority to work with the DOJ to ensure that justice is served. I look forward to the results of a very thorough investigation and the potential filing of charges for violations of multiple U.S. codes.

I have confirmation that the DOJ has received the letter, and we look forward to their findings.

The only truthful part of that is that she has, in fact (ridiculously), referred Harp to the DOJ.

She’s wrong on every other account. He did not “doxx” anyone. And even if he was revealing “information related to Operation Absolute Resolve,” that is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.

It’s not even a close call. We did this 55 years ago in the Pentagon Papers case, where the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear that of course the First Amendment protects journalists publishing even secret government documents about military operations (which isn’t even what Harp did here)—documents that were actually classified, unlike the public university bio that Harp posted.

Take a moment to review all this: In 1971, the Nixon administration tried to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers—genuinely secret documents about the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court told Nixon to pound sand. Now, in 2026, we have a member of Congress going even further, not just trying to stop publication (which already failed half a century ago), but criminally referring a journalist for publishing information that was publicly available on a university website.

In a concurring opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black wrote poetically about the power of the First Amendment protecting journalists especially when they are embarrassing the government:

In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

Rep. Luna either hasn’t read that, doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t care. Because what she is engaging in is out-and-out harassment of journalists doing their jobs, in an effort to intimidate and chill speech of reporters who report information that Luna and the MAGA Trump world would prefer not see the light of day.

That’s not how this works. It’s not how journalism works. It’s not how the First Amendment works, and it’s not how free speech works.

As Seth Stern from Freedom of the Press said in response to this:

Journalists don’t work for the government and can’t ‘leak’ government information — to the contrary, it’s their job to find and publish the news, whether the government wants it made public or not. Identifying government officials by name is not doxxing or harassment, no matter how many times Trump allies say otherwise. Reporters have a constitutional right to publish even classified leaks, as long as they don’t commit any crimes to obtain them, but Harp merely published information that was publicly available about someone at the center of the world’s biggest news story.

You may recall that after the election in 2024, President Trump demanded that Republicans in the Senate kill the PRESS Act, which had been approved in the house with broad bipartisan support. That law, which would make it even more explicit how the First Amendment protects journalists was killed because Trump and the MAGA base have known all along that they need to violate the First Amendment rights of journalists to try to intimidate and silence them.

This fits a pattern that’s become impossible to ignore: the same people who spent years screaming about “big tech censorship” and “free speech” are now wielding actual government power to silence journalists who embarrass them. The same crowd that insisted Trump would “bring free speech back” is now cheering as he and his congressional allies deploy subpoenas and criminal referrals against reporters.

Remember, it was just a few years ago that Rep. Luna herself was apoplectically accusing the Biden administration of colluding with Twitter to censor users… because she didn’t understand what Jira is. Yet, here, she’s helping the bastardized remains of Twitter, X, silence a journalist herself.

In normal times you could trust that the DOJ would laugh at Rep. Luna’s call for prosecution. But these aren’t normal times. We’ve seen case after case after case of the DOJ bringing bogus, bullshit federal criminal cases against perceived enemies for no reason other than intimidation. That most of those cases are failing in the courts is besides the point. The process itself is the punishment.

And here, Rep. Luna is holding the censor’s axe, abusing her power as an elected official to intimidate and suppress the speech of journalists who were just reporting publicly available information. The First Amendment doesn’t stop applying just because the subject of journalism is inconvenient for the government. But Luna and her MAGA colleagues seem to think it does—or at least, they’re betting that their base won’t care about constitutional principles when it’s “their guy” doing the censoring.

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This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner.

Let’s not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won’t change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone who is incarcerated, even if they’re just stuck there awaiting trial.

But it still needs to be seen to be believed. The baseline disregard for detainees health and well-being is nothing new. Neither are the attempts of law enforcement officials to lie their way out of a lawsuit. But the absolute stupidity of the lies and the complete lack of effort of those attempting to shield themselves from accountability goes past the normal ghoulishness we associate with the people doing the imprisoning.

There’s a new level of contempt on display here — one that indicates these people have nothing to fear from the courts because this administration will never consider these acts and the lies used to cover them up as something in need of punishment.

The background of the case is this: Erron Anthony Clarke arrived in the United States in 2018 on a work visa at the request of a US employer. He remained in the country after his visa expired but married a US citizen which put him on track to obtain permanent residency. He picked the wrong time to pursue his legal options, as the New York Times reports:

On Nov. 6, Mr. Clarke applied to become a permanent resident, noting in his application that he had worked in the United States without authorization. As part of his application process, he arrived on Dec. 5 for a fingerprinting appointment at an ICE office in Hauppauge, N.Y. He was pulled over and arrested by immigration enforcement agents shortly after leaving the facility. ICE immediately began proceedings to deport him.

These are the conditions he dealt with while being detained by ICE: he was placed in a 6′ x 6′ cell with eight other people. The cell’s temperature dipped below 30 degrees and occupants were forced to sleep on the floor next to an open toilet. The lights stayed on 24 hours a day. The only reprieve from these conditions came when ICE moved him to other detention centers in order to prevent him from appearing in court.

For 12 hours that night, Mr. Clarke was detained in the tiny room in the federal courthouse. On Dec. 6, he was moved to an ICE detention facility in East Meadow, N.Y., only to be brought back to the squalid conditions three days later.

After petitioning for his release, Mr. Clarke was again transferred on Dec. 10 to an ICE detention facility, this time in Newark. After the agency initially ignored his order to present him for a hearing, he appeared on Dec. 11 before Judge Brown, who ordered him immediately released. Yet Mr. Clarke was held for another night in Newark.

New York federal court judge Gary Brown isn’t happy to have found this sort of thing going on almost literally under his nose in the Islip (New York) courthouse detention facilities. He’s even less happy to have been repeatedly lied to by federal law enforcement officers, whose contempt for the rule of law meant they couldn’t even be bothered to lie semi-competently.

From the decision [PDF] (that I’ll be quoting extensively):

The ICE agent swears that “[b]ased on that investigation, Acting Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer John T. Keane executed a Form I-200, Warrant for Arrest of Alien.” Yet the documents submitted do not fully support this. The arrest warrant is unsigned and dated December 5, 2025 – the date of Clarke’s biometrics appointment and ensuing arrest – and bears no time notation. That warrant offers check boxes to indicate the basis of probable cause; the only box marked states the warrant emanated from “biometric confirmation of the subject’s identity and a records check of federal databases.” Thus, the warrant was issued after the biometric appointment.

Crucially, in issuing the warrant, the officer did not indicate that removal proceedings had been commenced, even though there are two boxes to so indicate. At the Court’s direction, ICE also supplied a Notice to Appear (NTA) – the charging document that commenced removal proceedings. The NTA is also dated December 5, 2025, again without a timestamp. There remains a serious question as to whether the NTA preceded Clarke’s arrest; if not, then ICE improperly arrested him. ICE’s declaration offers no insight into this question.

Also, the alleged “investigation” apparently occurred on the same day that Clarke’s spouse filed the paperwork to convert him to a full-time resident due to his marriage to her. That means ICE was doing nothing more than running searches on anyone expected to appear at the court in hopes of finding people it could detain and remove. This action had nothing to do with Clarke or his pending legal residence status and everything to do with expelling him from the country before his application for permanent residence was processed.

Then there’s the matter of the holding facilities, which were their own violation of Clarke’s rights. The court demanded answers from ICE. It did get ICE to talk. But all ICE had to offer was another set of lies.

First, it defied the judge’s oral and written order demanding Clarke be released immediately on December 11. The government received both before 3 pm on December 11, but ICE held Clarke for another night before finally releasing him on December 12.

Then it produced a endless string of lies when the court demanded the full records of Clarke’s detention (and movements to and from the Islip holding cell), along with photos of the cell Clarke had been held in.

Not only did the government ignore most of the court order, the stuff it sort of complied was a blend of lies and preposterous assertions:

In response, the Government filed a declaration from Supervisory Detention Officer John C. Diaz, based entirely on ICE records and conversations with other officers.

In addition to being rank hearsay, the information presented in the Diaz Declaration proves evasive and demonstrably false. For example, Diaz swears that Clarke “was booked out of NCCC at 3:45 p.m., and into CIHR on the same day at 3:53 p.m.” Given that the two facilities are more than twenty miles apart, requiring a drive of 35 minutes or more, it is physically impossible that ICE officers moved Clarke from one facility to another in eight minutes. Even more preposterous is Diaz’s sworn statement that Clarke was “booked out [of the Central Islip hold room] on December 10, 2025, at 8:30 p.m.” and then “transported to Delaney Hall Detention Facility (“DHDF”) [in Newark. N.J.] where he was booked in at 9 p.m.” Since that journey of about 60 miles consumes, depending on traffic, more than 90 minutes to as much as three and a half hours, it is again objectively impossible that the transport was completed in 30 minutes.

Time-keeping at ICE detention facilities appears to be deliberately sloppy:

These misstatements of fact serve to undermine the information presented and the reliability of the records maintained by ICE. Moreover, the declaration contains material misstatements. Clarke’s stay at the NCCC provides a powerful example. Diaz presents a series of booking times and concludes under oath that Clarke spent a total of under 65 hours at the NCCC. (stating that Clarke “spent two days, sixteen hours and forty-five minutes at NCCC.”). This is important, Diaz emphasizes, “because NCCC does not house DHS detainees for more than seventy-two-hour periods.” However, examination of the NCCC booking times presented by Diaz in his declaration – from December 6 at 11 a.m. to December 9 at 3:45 p.m. – reveals that Clarke spent about 77 hours at NCCC.

It also lied about the rooms people were being held in — or, at the very least, refused to answer any questions about them truthfully.

While there are other misstatements in the Diaz Declaration, of greater concern isICE’s failure or refusal to provide information ordered by the Court. First, though ICE provided its approximate measurements of the Central Islip hold rooms (four rooms measuring, according to Diaz, about 10’ x 7’ or 8’), nowhere in his declaration does he provide the capacity of those cells, a critical question here. Id.

While even that could be seen as a convenient omission, ICE has flatly refused to provide the requested photographs of the facilities. (“DHS is not prepared at this time to provide photographs of CIHR.”). Though legally immaterial – DHS was ordered to provide such photographs – part of the expressed rationale proves revelatory. Diaz avers that:

CIHR is populated 24/7 by detainees, and taking photographs while detainees were present would create privacy concerns for those detainees. [ ] Moving detainees out of CIHR for the purpose of taking photographs is also challenging, because those detainees would have to all be transported to a different facility.

If ICE is incapable of clearing a cell for the split second it takes to snap a photograph, it raises – or perhaps answers – other questions, such as ICE’s ability to clean, inspect and maintain the Central Islip hold rooms.

ICE is sliding headfirst towards a contempt holding. And even if that will just become another thing ICE (and the administration overseeing it) chooses to blow off, at least all of this will be on the public record:

ICE’s failure and, in at least one instance, flat out refusal, to comply with the Court’s directives along with its provision of demonstrably false evidence, requires some comment. While this matter was necessarily conducted in haste, and the Court believes that the assigned AUSA struggled to handle these matters in a reasonable fashion, ICE’s transgressions which include (1) failure to produce the Petitioner for the hearing, (2) failure to provide the holding capacity of the Central Islip hold rooms, (3) refusing to provide photographs of the Central Islip hold rooms and (4) ignoring this Court’s order providing for Clarke’s immediate release, cannot be overlooked.

Of these failings, perhaps the most indefensible is the agency’s refusal to provide photographs consistent with this Court’s order. A party who believes that a court order is unlawful – or in this case, unduly burdensome – does not have the right to resort to self-help. That party has legal alternatives – like a motion for reconsideration (which certainly would have been entertained here) or an interlocutory appeal – but cannot just simply refuse to comply.

Remember this the next time some government official is complaining about ICE being treated like a pariah or anonymous officers are bending reporters’ ears to tell them they’re just trying to do the right thing by enforcing immigration laws. They’re not. And they are the villains people think they are. This is what came to light as the result of a single detainee filing a complaint about the conditions of his incarceration. Imagine what could be exposed if people with actual power got involved.

Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to hack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, initially didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers this happened.

Like most hacks, the scale of the intrusion was significantly worse than originally stated. And it keeps expanding. This week, lawmakers finally revealed that they only recently realized that the same Chinese hackers accessed email systems used by some staffers on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee, and armed services committee:

“The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers’ emails.”

Which means that they almost definitely had access to confidential lawmakers’ emails, something it will take our Keystone-Cops-esque government another six months to admit.

It can’t be overstated what a complete and massive hack this was. The Chinese government had broad, historic access to the sensitive phone and email conversations of a massive number of sensitive U.S. public and government figures, for years. Thanks, in large part, to big telecoms like AT&T leaving key network access points “secured” with default administrative usernames and passwords.

Last June, NextGov reported that lawyers at big telecoms had started advising their engineers to stop looking for signs of Salt Typhoon intrusion because they were worried about bad press and liability. Due to this coverup and a lack of transparency by the dying U.S. government, it’s likely we still don’t know the full scope of the intrusions.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has responded by gutting government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the Salt Typhoon hack), dismantling the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and firing oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Trump’s courts have made it impossible to hold telecoms accountable for privacy violations. His earlobe nibbler at the FCC, Brendan Carr, constantly undermines efforts to improve security in Chinese-made smart home devices, and is dismantling what little telecom oversight we had. Their big “win” on “national security” was transferring TikTok ownership to Trump’s unethical billionaire friends.

The Chinese hacked into most of our sensitive systems and spied on powerful people, across the entirety of U.S. governance, for years. The companies involved covered it up and the Trump administrations’ “fix” was to destroy our cybersecurity protections and corporate oversight.

The press, with scattered exception, yawned and put the story on page four.

This generational damage to U.S. IT infrastructure will likely take decades to recover from, and we can’t even begin the process of a proper, competent audit (assuming we’re even capable of that) until Trump is removed from office. Even then, course correcting may not be possible without fixing Trump’s domination of the Supreme and 5th and 6th Circuit courts, which have proudly declared all corporate oversight to be illegal.

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many levels, of course. When it comes to art, no one person or group of people get to determine what is important culture and what isn’t. At the present, video games are also a massive cultural force in art and entertainment, with the quality and artistic nature of games having never been higher. And, finally, the bargain that copyright law is supposed to be, where a limited monopoly is granted in exchange for the art it covers eventually going into the public domain, isn’t subject to anyone’s subjective thoughts as to what artforms are important and what isn’t.

When games disappear, that is culture disappearing. When no effort is made to preserve this art, either directly or by prematurely freeing the art into the public domain, that breaks the copyright bargain. The publisher got the monoploy, but the public doesn’t get their end of the deal. Honestly, none of the above should be terribly controversial.

I’m going to try to innoculate against a derivative of all of that for this post by saying the following: it also doesn’t matter if the art that comprises a video game quality is even any good, or if the public generally thinks it’s good. And that brings me to the news that Bioware’s Anthem game will become unplayable next week.

We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.

While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.

Was Anthem any good? I have no idea; I have never played it. My comrade in arms, Karl Bode, mentioned to me that he really liked it. Having discussed video games with Karl for several years, that’s mostly good enough for me. Still, let’s say it was trash. It certainly wasn’t a success by industry standards in terms of sales. And none of that matters.

Bioware could have done several things to make this not a story about the pure disappearance of culture. It chose not to do so. There was no working with fans to cheaply or freely license some fan-run servers. No release of source code. Nothing in the reasonably short list of demands the folks that run the Stop Killing Games campaign have if we’re going to let these shutdowns continue. It’s just… gone.

If there’s one thing that is true in art and culture, it certainly must be that we learn absolutely as much from failure as success. From bad art as much as good art. From the niche as much as the wildly popular. But in cases like Anthem, class is cut short and the learning largely stops because it all just vanishes into the ether. A whisp of cultural smoke disappearing into the sky.

And I keep coming back to the copyright bargain. The public is being shortchanged on what it is owed. If this were music we were talking about, or literature, that suddenly vanished from the universe simply because a record label or publisher decided to disappear it, there would be outrage. The same should be true for the gaming industry.

It shouldn’t be that Bioware can at once benefit from copyright law to make money and leave it such that this same law prevents the art from ever entering the public domain.

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

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In the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben look forward at the year ahead and begin building a bingo card of things that might happen. They discuss a short list of possible squares, ask for listeners to contribute more ideas, and go few a through suggestions that have already come in. Soon, we’ll release an official Ctrl-Alt-Speech bingo card for listeners to play along throughout the year.