There are lots of good reasons to call for the impeachment or ouster or RFK Jr. He’s flatly unqualified for the role. He’s introducing all kinds of health risks for diseases we shouldn’t even have to worry about any longer because he’s an anti-vaxxer con-artist. He’s so bad at his job that high level administrators at DHS and its child agencies are leaving in droves, sometimes after only being on the job for weeks at a time. These are all great, righteous reasons to state publicly that RFK Jr. must go.

Please welcome Mike Pence to the team, I guess. His organization also recently stated publicly that RFK Jr. should be exited from his cabinet position. That it took a failure to review an abortion pill to get him there and not all of that other shit I mentioned is disappointing, though not in any way surprising.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s organization said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “must go,” accusing the secretary of refusing to review the abortion pill mifepristone.

In a statement posted on the social platform X, Pence’s nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom, said, “HHS Secretary RFK Jr. continues to refuse to review the dangerous chemical abortion pill, mifepristone. Despite the calls of state attorneys general across the country and pro-life promises made to Congress, RFK Jr. has followed in the footsteps of the Obama and Biden administrations by stonewalling pro-life efforts at HHS.”

“RFK Jr. must go,” the group added.

Folks, I’m in no way qualified to talk at any length about mifepristone and how safe or not it is. I can tell you that the current FDA website says that it is when properly used, as does the Johns Hopkins website. Basically every medical organization that has anything to do with obstetrics and gynecology has said that the drug is very safe (and you would think they would know). The American Medical Association has pointed out that reducing access to mifepristone would lead to real harm for patients. Basically, almost every credible expert on this topic appears to agree.

I can also tell you the listing of side effects on the Mayo Clinic’s site is long. So, is a review of the drug warranted? I’m going to rest comfortably on the idea that I am in no way qualified to say one way or the other.

Like me, Mike Pence is also not a medical professional. Unlike me, Mike Pence has been remarkably silent about RFK Jr. as he’s taken a flamethrower to HHS, to federal vaccine guidance, and has overseen the worst measles outbreak in America in over three decades. Apparently failing to review an FDA approved drug with a decades-long track record of safety is just a bridge too far.

No more aborted babies, all of you! If they aren’t brought to term, how are they supposed to get measles and Hep B?

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

After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

This is one of the unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. For months, ICE has been on a recruiting blitz, offering $50,000 starting bonuses and tuition reimbursement at an agency that has long offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many corrections officers, it’s been an easy sell. 

Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.

“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”

The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene items, and threatens to make the already grim conditions in federal prisons even worse. Fewer corrections officers means more lockdowns, less programming and fewer health care services for inmates, along with more risks to staff and more grueling hours of mandatory overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are being forced to step in as corrections officers on a regular basis. 

And at some facilities, staff said the agency had even stopped providing basic hygiene items for officers, such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper.

“I have never seen it like this in all my 25 years,” an officer in Texas told ProPublica. “You have to literally go around carrying your own roll of toilet paper. No paper towels, you have to bring your own stuff. No soap. I even ordered little sheets that you put in an envelope and it turns to soap because there wasn’t any soap.”

The prisons bureau did not answer a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Director Josh Smith said that the agency was “left in shambles by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. Staffing levels, he said, were “catastrophic,” which, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption, had made the prisons less safe.

Smith said that he and Director William Marshall III had been empowered by the Trump administration to “confront these challenges head-on.” “Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of our mission to make the BOP great again, and we’re going to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”

ICE, meanwhile, responded to a request for comment by forwarding a press release that failed to answer specific questions but noted that the agency had made more than 18,000 total tentative job offers as of mid-September.

The BOP has long faced challenges, from sex abuse scandals and contraband problems to crumbling infrastructure and poor medical care. It has repeatedly been deemed the worst federal workplace by one analysis of annual employee surveys, and in 2023 union officials said that some 40% of corrections officer jobs sat vacant.

That dearth of officers helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities and attracted the eye of oversight officials, who blamed chronic understaffing for contributing to at least 30 prisoner deaths.

The bureau tried tackling the problem with a long-term hiring push that included signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. By the start of the year, that effort seemed to be working.

Kathleen Toomey, then the bureau’s associate deputy director, told members of Congress in February that the agency had just enjoyed its most successful hiring spree in a decade, increasing its ranks by more than 1,200 in 2024. 

“Higher staffing levels make institutions safer,” she told a House appropriations subcommittee. 

But the costly efforts to reel in more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched thin. Toomey told Congress the bureau had not seen a funding increase since 2023, even as it absorbed millions in pay raises and retention incentives. As inflation and personnel costs rose, the bureau was forced to cut its operating budgets by 20%, Toomey said. 

And despite some improvement, the staffing problems persisted. In her February testimony, Toomey acknowledged there were still at least 4,000 vacant positions, leaving the agency with so few officers that prison teachers, nurses and electricians were regularly being ordered to abandon their normal duties and fill in as corrections officers. 

Then ICE rolled out its recruiting drive. 

“At first it seemed like it was going to be no big deal, and then over the last week or so we already lost five, and then we have another 10 to 15 in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us that’s almost 20% of our custody staff.”

He, like most of the prison workers and union officials who spoke to ProPublica, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — a concern that has grown since the agency canceled the union’s contract in September following an executive order. Now union leaders say they’ve been warned that without their union protections, they could be punished for speaking to the media.

After the contract’s cancellation, many of the current staff who had originally spoken on the record asked to have their names withheld. Those who still agreed to be identified asked ProPublica to note that their interviews took place before the agency revoked the union agreement.

Earlier this year, Brandy Moore White, national president of the prison workers union, said it’s not unprecedented to see a string of prison staffers leaving the agency, often in response to changes that significantly impact their working conditions. Prior government shutdowns, changes in leadership and the pandemic all drove away workers — but usually, she said, people leaving the agency en masse tended to be near the end of their careers. Now, that’s not the case.

“This is, from what I can remember, the biggest exodus of younger staff, staff who are not retirement-eligible,” she said. “And that’s super concerning to me.”
ICE’s expansion has even thrown a wrench into BOP’s usual training program for rookies. Normally, new officers have to take a three-week Introduction to Correctional Techniques course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia within their first 60 days on the job, according to the prisons bureau’s website. In August, FLETC announced that it would focus only on “surge-related training,” pausing programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica. Afterward, FLETC said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner agencies,” though it’s not clear whether any of those solutions have since been implemented. The centers did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

At the same time, the effects of the budget crunch were starting to show. In recent months, more than 40 staff and prisoners at facilities across the country have reported cutbacks even more severe than the usual prison scarcities.

In September, Moore White told ProPublica some prisons had fallen behind on utility and trash bills. At one point, she said, the prison complex in Oakdale, Louisiana, was days away from running out of food for inmates before the union — worried that hungry prisoners would be more apt to riot — intervened, nudging agency higher-ups to address the problem, an account confirmed by two other prison workers. (Officials at the prison complex declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and prisoners reported shortages — no eggs in a California facility and no beef in a Texas lockup where staff said they were doling out smaller portions at mealtimes.

Earlier this year, a defense lawyer complained that the Los Angeles detention center ran out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement, where people without phone or e-messaging privileges rely on snail mail to contact the outside world. One of his clients was “rationing his ink to write letters to his family,” the attorney said. The center didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Personal hygiene supplies have been running low, too. Several prisoners said their facilities had become stingier than usual with toilet paper, and women incarcerated in Carswell in Texas reported a shortage of tampons. “I was told to use my socks,” one said. The facility did not answer questions from ProPublica about conditions there.

Fewer staff has meant in some cases that inmates have lost access to care. At the prison complex in Victorville, California, staff lodged written complaints accusing the warden of skimping on the number of officers assigned to inmate hospital visits in order to cut back on overtime. (The complex did not respond to a request for comment.) In some instances, the complaints alleged, that left so few officers at the hospital that ailing inmates missed the procedures that had landed them there in the first place.

Chyann Bratcher, a prisoner at Carswell, a medical lockup in Texas, said she missed an appointment for rectal surgery — something she’d been waiting on for two years — because there weren’t enough staff to take her there. She was able to have the procedure almost two months later, after another cancellation.

Staffers say several facilities have started scheduling recurring “blackout” days, when officers are banned from working overtime in an effort to save money. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “augmentation,” where they direct teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in as corrections officers.

“That’s why I left,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from the federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, after 29 years with the bureau. “My job was to try to settle EEO complaints, so if somebody alleged discrimination against the agency it was my job to look into it and try to resolve it.”

When he found out earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts per week as a corrections officer, he decided to retire instead.

“I hadn’t been an officer in a housing unit since like 2001 — it had been like 24 years,” he said. “I had really no clue how to do that anymore.”

Augmentation isn’t new, but staff and prisoners at some facilities say it’s being used more often than it once was. It also means fewer medical staff available to address inmates’ needs. “Today we had a Physical Therapist as a unit officer so all of his PT appointments would have been cancelled,” Brian Casper, an inmate at the federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year. “Yesterday one of the other units had the head of Radiology for the unit officer so there would have been one less person doing x-rays and CT scans.” The prison didn’t respond to emailed questions.

When the government shutdown hit in October, it only made the situation worse, exacerbating the shortages and increasing the allure of leaving the bureau. While ICE agents and corrections officers continued bringing home paychecks, thousands of prison teachers, plumbers and nurses did not. 

The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy megabill that Trump signed into law on July 4, could offer some financial support for the agency’s staffing woes, as it will route another $5 billion to the prisons bureau over four years — $3 billion of which is specifically earmarked to improve retention, hiring and training. Yet exactly what the effects of that cash infusion will look like remains to be seen: Though the funding bill passed more than four months ago, in November the bureau declined to answer questions about when it will receive the money or how it will be spent.

The relationship between journalism and AI has been off to an antagonistic start, with multiple court cases underway and plenty of discourse about what should happen next. There are various proposed approaches to setting up a better interplay between the two, but one person with an especially unique idea is Professor Jeff Jarvis, who joins the podcast this week to discuss the concept of an API for news that would help journalists embrace AI in a positive way.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Although the field of artificial intelligence (AI) goes back more than half century, its latest incarnation — generative AI — is still very new: ChatGPT was launched just three years ago. During that time a wide variety of issues have been raised, ranging from concerns about the impact of AI on copyright, people’s ability to learn or even think, job losses, the flood of AI slop on the Internet, the environmental harms of massive data centers, and whether the creation of a super-intelligent AI will lead to the demise of humanity. Recently, a more mundane worry is that the current superheated generative AI market is a bubble about to pop. In the last few days, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has admitted that there is some “irrationality” in the current AI boom, while the Bank of England has warned about the risk of a “sharp correction” in the value of major players in the sector.

One element that may not yet be factored in to this situation is the rising sophistication of open source models from China. Back in April, Techdirt wrote about how the release of a single model from the Chinese company DeepSeek had wiped a trillion dollars from US markets. Since then, DeepSeek has not been standing still. It has just launched its V3.2 model, and a review on ZDNet is impressed by the improvements:

the fact that a company — and one based in China, no less — has built an open-source model that can compete with the reasoning capabilities of some of the most advanced proprietary models currently on the market is a huge deal. It reiterates growing evidence that the “performance gap” between open-source and close-sourced models isn’t a fixed and unresolvable fact, but a technical discrepancy that can be bridged through creative approaches to pretraining, attention, and posttraining.

It is not just one open source Chinese model that is close to matching the best of the leading proprietary offerings. An article from NBC News notes that other freely downloadable Chinese models like Alibaba’s Qwen were also “within striking distance of America’s best.” Moreover, these are not merely theoretical options: they are already being put to use by AI startups in the US.

Over the past year, a growing share of America’s hottest AI startups have turned to open Chinese AI models that increasingly rival, and sometimes replace, expensive U.S. systems as the foundation for American AI products.

NBC News spoke to over 15 AI startup founders, machine-learning engineers, industry experts and investors, who said that while models from American companies continue to set the pace of progress at the frontier of AI capabilities, many Chinese systems are cheaper to access, more customizable and have become sufficiently capable for many uses over the past year.

As well as being free to download and completely configurable, these open source models from Chinese companies have another advantages over many of the better-known US products: they can be run locally without needing to pay any fees. This also means no data leaves the local system, which offers enhanced privacy and control over sensitive business data. However, as the NBC article notes, there are still some worries about using Chinese models:

In late September, the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation released a report outlining risks from DeepSeek’s popular models, finding weakened safety protocols and increased pro-Chinese outputs compared to American closed-source models.

And the success of China’s open source models is prompting US efforts to take catch up:

In July, the White House released an AI Action Plan that called for the federal government to “Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI.”

In August, ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its first open-source model in five years. Announcing the model’s release, OpenAI cited the importance of American open-source models, writing that “broad access to these capable open-weights models created in the US helps expand democratic AI.”

And in late November, the Seattle-based Allen Institute released its newest open-source model called Olmo 3, designed to help users “build trustworthy features quickly, whether for research, education, or applications,” according to its launch announcement.

The open source approach to generative AI is evidently growing in importance, driven by enhanced capabilities, low price, customizability, reduced running costs and better privacy. The free availability of these open source and open weight models, whether from China or the US, is bound to call into question the underlying assumption of today’s generative AI companies that there will be a commensurate payback for the trillions of dollars they are currently investing. Maybe it will be the realization that today’s open source models are actually good enough for most applications that finally pops the AI bubble.

Follow me @glynmoody on  on Bluesky and Mastodon.

The President of the United States is currently promising to spend the same pot of money on at least nine different things. The pot in question: revenue from all the random and fluctuating tariff duties that are almost certainly unconstitutional, which means he’s likely going to have to pay some or all of it back. While he’s busy making impossible promises with money that isn’t really his, his administration is simultaneously trying to hide that revenue from the courts to make it harder for companies to recover what they’re owed.

If this sounds like a multi-layered scam, that’s because it is.

I’m sure you’ve heard Trump mention this or that thing he’s planning to spend the tariff revenue on, such as rebate checks, farmer bailouts, better childcare or covering the loss of revenue from the tax cuts he gave to all his billionaire friends.

Ben Werkschkul, at Yahoo Finance, has now detailed nine different things that Trump has promised to fund with the tariff revenue (and I’m pretty sure the number was seven when I first opened the article, but it appears to have been updated).

According to Yahoo Finance’s count, the president has floated at least nine different ideas for how tariff money could be used, stretching back to the 2024 campaign.

It’s a list of promises that ranges from sending Americans $2,000 tariff dividend checks to paying for the tax cuts that Republicans instituted this summer.

The math alone should be disqualifying. The tariff revenue couldn’t cover even a fraction of these nine different spending promises if you added them all up. But Trump appears to be treating this like an endless pool of money—repeatedly spending the same dollars on different programs as if the laws of basic accounting don’t apply to him.

But, even worse, the tariffs are pretty clearly unconstitutional nonsense, and the Supreme Court seems poised to strike them down quite soon. Companies like Costco are already getting in line, demanding they get the money they paid for tariffs back from the US government.

And then, as if to emphasize how much of a criminals scam this is, rather than setting aside funds to pay back what’s likely to be tens of billions in refunds once the Court rules, the Trump admin is already trying to hide the money to make it harder to pay back.

The Trump administration is racing to deposit the money it’s raised from tariffs into the U.S. Treasury, a tactic that could make it harder for companies to get refunds for duties the Supreme Court may strike down in the coming months.

That has triggered a flurry of lawsuits in recent weeks, with companies ranging from wholesaler Costco to canned tuna seller Bumble Bee looking to preserve access to potential refunds for tens of billions of dollars worth of tariff fees. And it foreshadows the messy legal battles likely to play out if the high court rules President Donald Trump overstepped his legal authority when he imposed his steep “reciprocal” tariffs and other duties on major trading partners.

According to court filings and half a dozen people familiar with the cases, Trump’s Customs and Border Protection is denying requests to delay finalizing tariff payments and transferring the funds to the Treasury.

To recap: the administration is collecting what are effectively illegal taxes, rushing to co-mingle those funds with general Treasury revenue to make them harder to trace and recover, while simultaneously promising to spend that same money multiple times over on programs that would cost far more than the tariffs have generated. And they’re doing all of this while the Supreme Court is actively considering whether the tariffs are constitutional in the first place.

Here’s the final insult: when the Supreme Court strikes down these tariffs and orders refunds, American taxpayers will be on the hook to cover those payments. And that’s to pay back money that many of us already paid in the form of higher prices to companies to cover the cost of tariffs.

Trump was swept into office with promises of lowering costs. Instead, he raised taxes massively through tariffs, drove inflation higher, and engineered a scheme where Americans effectively pay twice—once through higher prices, and again through the tax refunds his unconstitutional gambit will require.

The guy who bankrupted a casino and built an empire on stiffing his vendors is now running the same playbook on the American public—except this time, we’re all stuck paying the bill.

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There is no doubt that fentanyl is a dangerous drug. It has long since surpassed heroin on the list of drugs people only do once. That its prevalence has more to do with pharma companies irresponsibly pushing opioids than drug pushers pushing a new drug often goes ignored during this heated, ongoing debate that is often so far removed from reality as to be literally laughable.

I mean, we’ve seen several law enforcement officials claim merely being in the proximity of fentanyl is capable of generating overdoses in officers. We’ve also seen law enforcement officials claim the amount of seized fentanyl is capable of killing the entire population of US states, if not the entire nation. And yet, states remain populated and the US public generally capable of surviving the drug’s existence if they choose not to ingest it.

What’s happening here is not only idiotic but intentional. The executive order issued by Trump yesterday is meant to do several things, none of them good. First, it seeks to retcon the boat strike narrative by reinforcing Trump’s hallucinatory claim that drug mules are, in fact, terrorists engaged in terrorist acts targeting America.

Second, it gives him the excuse to add military troops to the law enforcement mix by pretending an illicit substance that is generally voluntarily ingested in order to take effect is somehow a “weapon of mass destruction.” No one (well, outside of the CIA, anyway) has treated drugs like a weapon. Keeping your customer base alive is crucial to maintaining a steady revenue stream. Overdoses are an expected negative outcome in the drug trade, but they are never the point of drug trafficking operations.

This is all stuff you already know. I’m not going to sit here and insult your intelligence. I’ll turn things over to Donald Trump and allow him to insult your intelligence:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose and Policy.  Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.  Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses.

[Some stuff about how drug cartels are now “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”]

As President of the United States, my highest duty is the defense of the country and its citizens. Accordingly, I hereby designate illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Well, I hope I don’t need to worry about drone strikes when visiting my primary care provider or local pharmacy. Or do I?

Trump eases into his martial law plan by directing the Attorney General to “pursue” fentanyl investigations and, if possible, add sentencing enhancements (not specified here) for those charged with fentanyl trafficking.

But here’s where Trump gets his war at home on:

[T]he Secretary of War and the Attorney General shall determine whether the threats posed by illicit fentanyl and its impact on the United States warrant the provision of resources from the Department of War to the Department of Justice to aid in the enforcement of title 18 of the United States Code, as consistent with 10 U.S.C. 282

10 U.S.C. 282 simply says the military can assist law enforcement if there’s a credible WMD threat that law enforcement isn’t capable of handling on its own, including locating, securing, and safely disposing of said WMD.

But here Trump links it to Title 18, which encompasses the entirety of law enforcement operations, including handling court cases, overseeing convicted criminals, and — obviously — engaging in normal law enforcement activities. That part of the law has already posed a problem for Trump, who definitely wanted military troops to be the new cops, especially in cities run by people he didn’t like. While there are existing provisions in 10 U.S.C. 282 linking it to parts of Title 18, it’s hard to believe Trump will be content with limiting military participation to the preexisting legal carve-outs.

The administration’s concurrent fact sheet glosses over the stapling of Title 18 to 10 U.S.C. 282, pretending instead that this new designation doesn’t actually change anything other than forcing the military to pretend fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction.

The Order directs the Secretary of War and Attorney General to determine whether the Department of War should provide enhanced national security resources to the Department of Justice as necessary during an emergency situation involving a weapon of mass destruction.

The most immediate effect of this order is on sentencing. Possessing fentanyl with intent to distribute will not only get the usual drug enhancements, but the lengthy mandatory sentences attached to acts of terrorism. Buying drugs could plausibly get someone charged with “providing material support to terrorists,” which means some low-level felonies will instead come with prison sentences of 10-25 years pre-attached.

But it appears the real purpose of this executive order is to create an excuse to send soldiers into cities to do police work, while also allowing the administration to continue to engage in extrajudicial killings in international waters. Whatever it actually ends up being will definitely make America worse. It’s another abuse of executive power that comes with a universal adapter. If Trump can call fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” anyone can call anything that could possibly be deadly a WMD. Fentanyl is just the beginning.

We’ve already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn’t really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it’s simply extension of the right wing extraction class’s assault on informed consensus and real journalism.

The goal is to consolidate what’s left of our sorry ass establishment corporate media, then create a simulacrum of actual journalism that blows smoke up the ass of wealth, power, and the U.S. right wing’s phony victimization complex. While hoping the public doesn’t notice the difference.

And while Weiss likes to pretend she’s shaking things up at CBS with audience-focused innovation, most of her early moves have fallen completely flat. Like Weiss’ recent new town hall effort, whose inaugural episode featured a softball interview with right wing activist Erika Kirk. The interview was pretty much what you’d expect, with lots of downplaying of Charlie Kirk’s role as a radical, divisive, inflammatory bigot.

But as we’ve noted previously, the U.S. media market is already well-saturated with news organizations focused on telling affluent, white, right wingers what they want to hear. In Weiss’ case, the new CBS is a gambit to make men like Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, and Benjamin Netanyahu happy. The actual, real-world interest in this bizarre pseudo-journalistic kayfabe is arguably very limited.

As Weiss quickly found out, as her inaugural chat was relegated to a hollow ratings hour filled with ads for products like the Chia Pet:

“The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.”

Mainstream advertisers are reticent to affix themselves to absolutely anything deemed remotely off-putting, whether that’s an exposé on mass shootings, or a softball interview with the grieving wife of a right wing propagandist paid by U.S. billionaires to sow division and stall consensus-oriented reform.

Weiss, a shameless opportunist without much actual journalism experience, made all manner of proclamations when she was hired about how she was going to “shake things up,” solve CBS’ perceived bias, and restore journalistic rigor. Yet her very first major move not only involved platforming herself, it involved elevating a fringe, right wing activist who isn’t particularly of interest to most normal people.

Again, she had the opportunity here to platform any of the amazing scientists, academics, artists, thinkers, athletes and doers America has on offer, and settled on a fringe right wing activist of fleeting interest to CBS’ actual news audience.

Larry and David Ellison are very obviously trying to buy up the dying remnants of U.S. corporate media (plus TikTok) in the hopes of creating yet another Fox-esque right wing propaganda mill. But again, there’s no real evidence there’s an actual audience here. Surviving and profiting in media is already difficult; but it’s going to be extra treacherous if CBS’ focus is weird fringe gibberish nobody wants.

Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left U.S. media should be extremely alarming, but there’s a single, solitary bright spot: there’s very little evidence anybody involved in this strange collection of trolls, brunchlords, and nepobabies has any actual idea what they’re doing.

On the topic of artificial intelligence, like far too many topics these days, it seems that the vast majority of opinions out there are highly polarized. Either you’re all about making fun of AI not living up to the hype surrounding it, and there are admittedly a zillion examples of this, or you’re an AI “doomer”, believing that AI is so powerful that it’s a threat to all of our jobs, and potentially to our very existence. The latter version of that can get really, really dangerous and isn’t to be taken lightly.

Stratified opinions also exist in smaller, more focused spaces when it comes to use of AI. Take the video game industry, for example. In many cases, gamers learn about the use of AI in a game or its promotional materials and lose their minds over it. They will often tell you they’re angry because of the “slop” that AI produces and is not found and corrected by the humans overseeing it… but that doesn’t tell the full story. Some just have a knee-jerk response to the use of AI at all and rail against it. Others, including industry insiders, see AI as no big deal; just another tool in a game developer’s tool belt, helping to do things faster than could be done before. That too isn’t the entire story; certainly there will be some job loss or lack of job expansion associated with the use of AI as a tool.

Somewhere in the middle is likely the correct answer. And what developer Supertrick has done in being transparent about the use of AI in Let It Die: Inferno is something of an interesting trial balloon for gauging public sentiment. PC Gamer tells the story of how an AI disclosure notice got added to the game’s Steam page, noting that voices, graphics, and music were all generated within the game in some part by AI. The notice is completely without nuance or detail, leading to a fairly wide backlash from the public.

No one liked that, and in response to no one liking that, Supertrick has come out with a news post to clarify exactly what materials in the game have AI’s tendrils around them. Fair’s fair: it’s a pretty limited pool of stuff. So limited, in fact, that it makes me wonder why use AI for it in the first place.

Supertrick attempted to explain why. The use of AI generated assets breaks down mostly like this:

1. Graphics/art: AI generated basic images based entirely on human-generated concept art and text and human beings then used those basic images as starting points, fleshing them out with further art over the top of them. Most of the assets in question here are background images for the settings of the game.
2. Voice: AI was used for only three characters, none of which were human characters. One character was itself an fictional AI machine and the developers used an AI for its voice because they thought that just made sense and provided some realism. The other two characters were also non-human lifeforms, and so the developer used AI voices following that same logic, to make them sound not-human.
3. Music: Exactly one track was generated using AI, though another AI editor was involved in editing some of the other tracks on a minimal basis.

And that’s it. Are the explanations above all that good? Nah, not all of them, in my opinion. Actors have been portraying computers, robots, and even AI for many years. Successfully in many cases, I would say. Even iconically at times. But using AI to create some base images and then layering human expression on top of them to create a final product? That seems perfectly reasonable to me. As does the use of AI for some music creation and editing in some specific uses.

Overall, the use here isn’t extensive, though, nor particularly crazy. And I very much like that Supertrick is going for a transparency play with this. The public’s reaction to that transparency is going to be very, very interesting. Even if you don’t like Supertrick’s use of AI as outlined above, it’s not extensive and that use certainly hasn’t done away with tens or hundreds of jobs. Continued public backlash would come off as kind of silly, I think.

Though the games overall reception isn’t particularly helpful, either.

Regardless, Let It Die: Inferno released yesterday, and so far has met a rocky reception. At the time of writing, the game has a Mostly Negative user-review score on Steam, with only 39% positive reviews.

Scanning those reviews, there doesn’t seem to be a ton in there about AI usage. So perhaps the backlash has moved on to the game just not being very good.

In late September, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his government’s plans to introduce a new digital ID scheme in the country to take effect before the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029). The scheme will, according to the Prime Minister, “cut the faff” in proving people’s identities by creating a virtual ID on personal devices with information like people’s name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and photo to verify their right to live and work in the country. 

This is the latest example of a government creating a new digital system that is fundamentally incompatible with a privacy-protecting and human rights-defending democracy. This past year alone, we’ve seen federal agencies across the United States explore digital IDs to prevent fraud, the Transportation Security Administration accepting “Digital passport IDs” in Android, and states contracting with mobile driver’s license providers (mDL). And as we’ve said many times, digital ID is not for everyone and policymakers should ensure better access for people with or without a digital ID. 

But instead, the UK is pushing forward with its plans to rollout digital ID in the country. Here’s three reasons why those policymakers have it wrong. 

Mission Creep 

In his initial announcement, Starmer stated: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Since then, the government has been forced to clarify those remarks: digital ID will be mandatory to prove the right to work, and will only take effect after the scheme’s proposed introduction in 2028, rather than retrospectively. 

The government has also confirmed that digital ID will not be required for pensioners, students, and those not seeking employment, and will also not be mandatory for accessing medical services, such as visiting hospitals. But as civil society organizations are warning, it’s possible that the required use of digital ID will not end here. Once this data is collected and stored, it provides a multitude of opportunities for government agencies to expand the scenarios where they demand that you prove your identity before entering physical and digital spaces or accessing goods and services. 

The government may also be able to request information from workplaces on who is registering for employment at that location, or collaborate with banks to aggregate different data points to determine who is self-employed or not registered to work. It potentially leads to situations where state authorities can treat the entire population with suspicion of not belonging, and would shift the power dynamics even further towards government control over our freedom of movement and association. 

And this is not the first time that the UK has attempted to introduce digital ID: politicians previously proposed similar schemes intended to control the spread of COVID-19, limit immigration, and fight terrorism. In a country increasing the deployment of other surveillance technologies like face recognition technology, this raises additional concerns about how digital ID could lead to new divisions and inequalities based on the data obtained by the system. 

These concerns compound the underlying narrative that digital ID is being introduced to curb illegal immigration to the UK: that digital ID would make it harder for people without residency status to work in the country because it would lower the possibility that anyone could borrow or steal the identity of another. Not only is there little evidence to prove that digital ID will limit illegal immigration, but checks on the right to work in the UK already exist. This is nothing more than inflammatory and misleading; Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey noted this would do “next to nothing to tackle channel crossings.”

Inclusivity is Not Inevitable, But Exclusion Is 

While the government announced that their digital ID scheme will be inclusive enough to work for those without access to a passport, reliable internet, or a personal smartphone, as we’ve been saying for years, digital ID leaves vulnerable and marginalized people not only out of the debate and ultimately out of the society that these governments want to build. We remain concerned about the potential for digital identification to exacerbate existing social inequalities, particularly for those with reduced access to digital services or people seeking asylum. 

The UK government has said a public consultation will be launched later this year to explore alternatives, such as physical documentation or in-person support for the homeless and older people; but it’s short-sighted to think that these alternatives are viable or functional in the long term. For example, UK organization Big Brother Watch reported that about only 20% of Universal Credit applicants can use online ID verification methods. 

These individuals should not be an afterthought that are attached to the end of the announcement for further review. It is essential that if a tool does not work for those without access to the array of essentials, such as the internet or the physical ID, then it should not exist.

Digital ID schemes also exacerbate other inequalities in society, such as abusers who will be able to prevent others from getting jobs or proving other statuses by denying access to their ID. In the same way, the scope of digital ID may be expanded and people could be forced to prove their identities to different government agencies and officials, which may raise issues of institutional discrimination when phones may not load, or when the Home Office has incorrect information on an individual. This is not an unrealistic scenario considering the frequency of internet connectivity issues, or circumstances like passports and other documentation expiring.

Attacks on Privacy and Surveillance 

Digital ID systems expand the number of entities that may access personal information and consequently use it to track and surveil. The UK government has nodded to this threat. Starmer stated that the technology would “absolutely have very strong encryption” and wouldn’t be used as a surveillance tool. Moreover, junior Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons told Parliament that “data associated with the digital ID system will be held and kept safe in secure cloud environments hosted in the United Kingdom” and that “the government will work closely with expert stakeholders to make the programme effective, secure and inclusive.” 

But if digital ID is needed to verify people’s identities multiple times per day or week, ensuring end-to-encryption is the bare minimum the government should require. Unlike sharing a National Insurance Number, a digital ID will show an array of personal information that would otherwise not be available or exchanged. 

This would create a rich environment for hackers or hostile agencies to obtain swathes of personal information on those based in the UK. And if previous schemes in the country are anything to go by, the government’s ability to handle giant databases is questionable. Notably, the eVisa’s multitude of failures last year illustrated the harms that digital IDs can bring, with issues like government system failures and internet outages leading to people being detained, losing their jobs, or being made homeless. Checking someone’s identity against a database in real-time requires a host of online and offline factors to work, and the UK is yet to take the structural steps required to remedying this.

Moreover, we know that the Cabinet Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will be involved in the delivery of digital ID and are clients of U.S.-based tech vendors, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS). The UK government has spent millions on AWS (and Microsoft) cloud services in recent years, and the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA)—first introduced in 2020 and of which provides discounts for cloud services by contracting with the UK government and public sector organizations as a single client—is still active. It is essential that any data collected is not stored or shared with third parties, including through cloud agreements with companies outside the UK.

And even if the UK government published comprehensive plans to ensure data minimization in its digital ID, we will still strongly oppose any national ID scheme. Any identification issued by the government with a centralized database is a power imbalance that can only be enhanced with digital ID, and both the public and civil society organizations in the country are against this.

Ways Forward

Digital ID regimes strip privacy from everyone and further marginalize those seeking asylum or undocumented people. They are pursued as a technological solution to offline problems but instead allow the state to determine what you can access, not just verify who you are, by functioning as a key to opening—or closing—doors to essential services and experiences. 

We cannot base our human rights on the government’s mere promise to uphold them. On December 8th, politicians in the country will be debating a petition that reached almost 3 million signatories rejecting mandatory digital ID. If you’re based in the UK, you can contact your MP (external campaign links) to oppose the plans for a digital ID system. 

The case for digital identification has not been made. The UK government must listen to people in the country and say no to digital ID.

Originally published to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

When Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were murdered Sunday evening—allegedly by their son, who was arrested—you might (had you been living in another time with a different President) have expected the President of the United States to either stay silent or offer condolences.

Instead, Donald Trump saw an opportunity to demonstrate to the world—yet again—how truly depraved and obsessed he is.

That’s Trump on Truth Social saying:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

Read that again. The President of the United States is claiming—with zero evidence—that Reiner’s murder happened “due to the anger he caused others” through his criticism of Trump. He’s framing political speech against Trump as something that drives people “crazy” and justifies violence.

This is the same administration that spent months after Charlie Kirk’s death insisting that even quoting Kirk’s own hateful rhetoric was unacceptable and deserving of cancellation. Pam Bondi threatened to prosecute those who criticized Kirk, claiming it incited violence. There was a flood of think pieces demanding we “turn down the rhetoric” even as MAGA immediately ramped up “the war on the left” in Kirk’s name.

But when someone who spent decades speaking out against fascism—Rob Reiner, beloved for his work on All in the Family and for directing genre-defining films, a key player in legalizing same-sex marriage, someone whose empathy and kindness touched countless lives—is murdered? Trump claims Reiner basically had it coming because his anti-Trump activism drove people “crazy.”

Trump is mad because Reiner has been a loud, consistent, and vocal critic of the President, highlighting the many ways in which Donald Trump is unfit for office. And Trump’s obsession with that criticism is the only thing in this story that’s truly “crazy.”

The message from Trump is clear: criticizing Trump is what causes violence. Supporting Trump justifies it.

And much of the media is just letting it slide by, “reporting the facts” of what Trump said, rather than just how unhinged it is:

Thankfully, at least some in the media are calling out how ridiculous and unhinged this is, but the rush to try to normalize Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. The underlying point remains the same: Trump just told everyone, from the Oval Office, that a murdered man basically had it coming for criticizing him too much.

Add to this Trump’s pardoning of all the January 6th criminals, the ramping up of violence by ICE and CBP in cities, and the non-stop hateful rhetoric, and Donald Trump is making it clear: violence in support of Donald Trump is noble.

And that’s fucking crazy.

The only consistency with Donald Trump is that if you support Trump, you can be as violent as you want.

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The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.

This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.

The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.

To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.

A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.

Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.

The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.

The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.

Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.

[…]

“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.

If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.

To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”

That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).

Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.

We’ve talked about the Australian social media ban that went into effect last week, how dumb it is, and why it’s already a mess.

But late last week, some additional news broke that makes the whole thing even more grotesque: turns out the campaign pushing hardest for the ban was run by an ad agency that makes gambling ads. The same gambling ads that were facing their own potential ban—until the Australian government decided that, hey, with all the kids kicked off social media, gambling ads can stay.

Really.

That’s the latest in this incredible scoop from the Australian publication Crikey.

The big marketing campaign pushing the under-16 social media ban was called “36 Months”—framed (misleadingly) that way because they claimed that raising the social media age from 13 to 16 was keeping kids offline for an additional 36 months.

But, as Crikey details, the entire 36 Months campaign was actually planned out and created by an ad company named FINCH, which just so happened to also be working on a huge gambling ad campaign for TAB, which is a huge online betting operation in Australia. And, it wasn’t their only such campaign:

FINCH has worked on at least five gambling advertisements since 2017, according to public announcements and trade magazine reporting. Its clients include TAB Australia (a 2023 campaign called “Australia’s national sport is…”), Ladbroke, Sportsbet and CrownBet (now BetEasy).

There was staff overlap, too. Attwells’ LinkedIn lists him as both 36 Months’ managing director and FINCH’s head of communications from May to December 2024. FINCH staff worked on the 36 Months campaign.

Now, add to that the missing piece of the puzzle, which is that Australia had been investigating bans on online gambling ads, but just last month (oh, such perfect timing) it decided not to do that citing the under-16 ban as a key reason why they could leave gambling ads online.

The Murphy inquiry suggested bookmakers were grooming children with ads online, but Labor’s new social media ban on under-16s is viewed as a solution because it would, in principle, limit their exposure to such advertising online.

How very, very convenient.

This is exactly the false sense of security many ban critics warned about. Politicians and parents now think kids are magically “safe,” even though kids are trivially bypassing the ban. Meanwhile, the adults who might have educated those kids about online gambling risks—a problem that heavily targets teenage boys—now assume the government has handled it. Gambling ads stay up, kids stay online, and everyone pretends the problem is solved.

Crikey goes out of its way to say that there’s no proof that FINCH did this on behalf of their many gambling clients, but it does note that FINCH has claimed that it funded the 36 Months campaign mainly by itself, which certainly raises some questions as to why an advertising firm would do that if it didn’t have some other reason to do so.

Incredibly, Crikey notes that part of the 36 Months campaign was to attack anyone who called the social media ban into question by calling them big tech shills, even without any proof:

Spokespeople for 36 Months had previously accused an academic and youth mental health group of being bought off by big tech because of their unpaid roles on boards advising social media platforms on youth safety.

When Crikey asked them what proof they had, citing denials from those they accused, Attwells said he “hadn’t looked into it” but that they’d heard of a trend where technology companies would indirectly fund people to support work that supports “their agenda”.

“The money doesn’t go straight to them,” he said.

Yes: an ad agency funded by gambling clients, running a campaign that benefits those gambling clients, accused critics of being secretly funded by tech companies—without evidence—while claiming indirect funding is how these things work. Such projection.

There’s a famous concept around regulations known as “bootleggers and Baptists,” as a shorthand way of denoting some of the more cynical “strange bedfellows” that team up to get certain regulations in place. The canonical example, of course, being the temperance movement that sought to ban alcohol. Bootleggers (illegal, underground alcohol producers) loved the idea of prohibition, because it would greatly increase demand for their product, for which they could cash in.

But, no one wants to publicly advocate for prohibition on behalf of the bootleggers. So, you find a group to be the public face to present the cooked up moral panic, moralizing argument for the ban: the Baptists. They run around and talk about how damaging alcohol is and how it must be banned for the good of society. It’s just behind the scenes that the bootleggers looking to profit are helping move along the legislation that will do exactly that.

Here we’ve got a textbook case. The gambling industry, facing its own potential ban, appears to have had a hand in funding the moral panic campaign, complete with think-of-the-children rhetoric, that convinced the government to ban kids from social media instead. Now the gambling ads flow freely to an audience the government has declared “protected,” while the actual kids slip past the ban with zero new safeguards in place.

Instead of Bootleggers and Baptists, this time it’s Punters and Parents, or maybe Casinos and Crusaders. Either way it’s a form of regulatory capture hidden behind a silly moral panic.