Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, we looked at how state laws around community broadband were harming communities during the pandemic, just as one Congressional representative introduced a new such law to do so nationwide. Minneapolis joined the list of cities banning facial recognition tech, while it was revealed that CBP’s use of the technology identified fewer than 300 imposters after gathering 50 million face photos. We also wrote about how history shows Section 230 isn’t just for startups, while North Dakota was considering an anti-230 bill that would let people sue you for reporting their content to Twitter.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, a California judge worryingly ordered Apple to create a new iPhone backdoor following the San Bernardino shooting. Apple responded to the order, and soon after we wrote about how the new backdoor would work on modern iPhones too. A lot of people were extremely confused about what exactly the order would do, including many lawmakers and nearly all the presidential candidates, and we dismantled a lot of the myths going around including the false notion that Apple had done this 70 times before. Also, a footnote in the DOJ motion to compel Apple revealed that the whole mess was caused by the San Bernardino health department resetting Syed Farook’s password.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, evidence suggested that major film studios were uploading movie clips to YouTube and pretending they were pirated, a CBS reporter uploaded footage of the Grammys to YouTube only to have CBS send a takedown notice, and the target of one of Liberty Media’s mass infringement lawsuits was fighting back. We dug deeper into why DHS’s domain name seizures were almost certainly illegal, while DHS was being cagey about whether or not it seized Mooo.com and took down 84,000 sites in the process. Meanwhile, Congress was getting ready to reintroduce COICA and Ron Wyden was speaking out against it.

The Trump administration’s project for erasing the parts of American history they find inconvenient continues unabated. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hit the occasional roadblock.

In January, the administration removed portions of an exhibit at the former Philadelphia home of George Washington that made reference to 9 slaves he owned that spent time at the house. That Washington owned slaves is not a matter of opinion. He did. That he also rotated those slaves in and out of the home, moving them elsewhere for short periods of time, all to get around laws in Pennsylvania that slaves within its borders for a certain period of continuous time would be automatically freed, is also uncontroversial to state. He did that. One of our founding fathers that brought “freedom” to America was also a slave owner. He wasn’t alone.

The Trump administration doesn’t like being reminded of that history. It also prefers that younger generations never learn of that history. I’d call it jingoism, but that doesn’t feel sufficient. This rings as something far more dastardly, fit for the musings of George Orwell.

Well, the city sued to have the exhibit restored and it appears the Judge in the case, a George W. Bush appointee, agrees with my assessment. You can read as much in her blistering opening in her ruling, in which she also orders the government to restore the exhibit to its previous state.

As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.

The ruling, which you can read embedded below, is actually quite technical. It turns out that the agreements, under which these specific sites operate, are shared between the city and federal governments, and they are both old and complicate the government’s efforts.

The layman’s version of this is that several historical sites in Philadelphia were created by an act of Congress in the 1940s. Ownership of the site is retained by the city, while curation of the exhibits are maintained only under the agreement of both the federal government and city government. Adding to the complication is that a 2006 updated agreement between both parties had a short term attached to it, but there is also a survivabilty clause, which states that the expiration of the term of the agreement doesn’t mean that the city loses its rights to agreement on the curation of the exhibits.

Although the 2006 Agreement, as updated by the Third Amendment, ceased as of May 1, 2010,94 the terms in its Project Development Plan remained effective under the Third Amendment Survival Clause. The Survival Clause states that “provisions which, by themselves or their nature are reasonably expected to be performed after the expiration or termination of this Third Amendment shall survive.”95 Because the President’s House project was not contemplated to be completed by the expiration of the Third Amendment, it was reasonably expected that terms relating to the Project Development Plan would remain in effect to ensure that the commemorative exhibit was realized in accordance with the parties’ initial plan. While the Third Amendment granted NPS the right to interpret the exhibit after it was completed, it is the Project Development Plan that established the interpretive framework that NPS would employ. Profound alterations to that framework, seen here in the effort to remove all references to slavery, AfricanAmerican Philadelphia, and the move to freedom for the enslaved, would, under the Project Development Plan, require the written approval of both the City and NPS.

Whoops.

Now, this doesn’t mean that this judge spared words of disgust at the general plan that the federal government is attempting to carry out.

Defendants have completely ignored their legislatively imposed duties. They have disregarded statutory authority, compelled by Congress, by taking unilateral action without seeking agreement from the City of Philadelphia. An agency, part of the Executive branch, is not entitled to act solely as it wishes. Rather, it is the Legislative branch which authorizes agency action, and the Executive branch must comply with that direction.

There’s a lot more in there, but it’s largely legally technical in nature. What is obvious from the analysis in the ruling is that, at least in this one case, the federal government acted outside of its authority due to agreements struck as a result of legislation from Congress that are in good standing. I fully expect the Trump administration to waste time and resources by appealing this decision, but this is fairly straightforward stuff.

Trump, no matter how hard he pretends, is not a king. He does not have as much power as he desires. He cannot change history. In far too many places, he is hiding that history, but he can’t change it.

And, at least in this case, at this moment, he has found the limits to his power.

We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data. 

In the past year, DHS has consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.   

These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it. When a handful of users challenged a few of them in court with the help of ACLU affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision. 

But it is difficult for the average user to fight back on their own. Quashing a subpoena is a fast-moving process that requires lawyers and resources. Not everyone can afford a lawyer on a moment’s notice, and non-profits and pro-bono attorneys have already been stretched to near capacity during the Trump administration.  

 That is why we, joined by the ACLU of Northern California, have asked several large tech platforms to do more to protect their users, including: 

1.  Insist on court intervention and an order before complying with a DHS subpoena, because the agency has already proved that its legal process is often unlawful and unconstitutional;  
2. Give users as much notice as possible when they are the target of a subpoena, so the user can seek help. While many companies have already made this promise, there are high-profile examples of it not happening—ultimately stripping users of their day in court;  
3. Resist gag orders that would prevent companies from notifying their users that they are a target of a subpoena. 

 We sent the letter to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, SNAP, TikTok, and X.  

Recipients are not legally compelled to comply with administrative subpoenas absent a court order 

 An administrative subpoena is an investigative tool available to federal agencies like DHS. Many times, these are sent to technology companies to obtain user data. A subpoena cannot be used to obtain the content of communications, but they have been used to try and obtain some basic subscriber information like name, address, IP address, length of service, and session times.  

Unlike a search warrant, an administrative subpoena is not approved by a judge. If a technology company refuses to comply, an agency’s only recourse is to drop it or go to court and try to convince a judge that the request is lawful. That is what we are asking companies to do—simply require court intervention and not obey in advance. 

It is unclear how many administrative subpoenas DHS has issued in the past year. Subpoenas can come from many places—including civil courts, grand juries, criminal trials, and administrative agencies like DHS. Altogether, Google received 28,622 and Meta received 14,520 subpoenas in the first half of 2025, according to their transparency reports. The numbers are not broken out by type.   

DHS is abusing its authority to issue subpoenas 

In the past year, DHS has used these subpoenas to target protected speech. The following are just a few of the known examples. 

On April 1, 2025, DHS sent a subpoena to Google in an attempt to locate a Cornell PhD student in the United States on a student visa. The student was likely targeted because of his brief attendance at a protest the year before. Google complied with the subpoena without giving the student an opportunity to challenge it. While Google promises to give users prior notice, it sometimes breaks that promise to avoid delay. This must stop.   

In September 2025, DHS sent a subpoena and summons to Meta to try to unmask anonymous users behind Instagram accounts that tracked ICE activity in communities in California and Pennsylvania. The users—with the help of the ACLU and its state affiliates— challenged the subpoenas in court, and DHS withdrew the subpoenas before a court could make a ruling. In the Pennsylvania case, DHS tried to use legal authority that its own inspector general had already criticized in a lengthy report.  

In October 2025, DHS sent Google a subpoena demanding information about a retiree who criticized the agency’s policies. The retiree had sent an email asking the agency to use common sense and decency in a high-profile asylum case. In a shocking turn, federal agents later appeared on that person’s doorstep. The ACLU is currently challenging the subpoena.  

Read the full letter here

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

It’s all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them.

This simply isn’t working during Trump’s second term in office. The rules and laws (and the oft-referenced “rule of law”) are still in place. But they don’t mean much when there are no meaningful methods of enforcement.

Trump continues to staff the DOJ with prosecutors who have never been subjected to the legally required confirmation process. To be fair, it’s always been a struggle to staff Trump’s DOJ. Those who haven’t quit because they refuse to engage in vindictive prosecutions are being fired because they either won’t engage in vindictive prosecutions or they’re simply not doing it as hard and as fast as Trump would like.

Plenty of people who used to serve Trump personally as his attorneys have been elevated into top-level prosecution roles, despite their complete lack of relevant experience. None of these people have been appointed legally.

Judges have been pushing back, which has led to Trump’s former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan being unceremoniously ousted from her role as a US attorney. Alina Habba spent most of a year generating massive conflicts of interest after being quasi-appointed to the position of US Attorney. She did this while still employed by Trump as his personal lawyer. Last December, she resigned from the position she never held legally and is now just another Trump lawyer who gets to hang around in the West Wing.

John Sarcone — Trump’s former campaign lawyer — was disqualified by a judge in January because he, too, had not been legally appointed to his position because Trump (and AG Pam Bondi) decided anyone who Trump wanted to be a US attorney could be one, even if that meant skipping the confirmation process entirely.

That didn’t bode well for Trump’s revenge fantasies. Sarcone being benched by the bench meant that all of his subpoenas targeting NY state attorney general Letitia James were no longer valid.

If the president decides he doesn’t want to subject his prosecutorial appointees to the confirmation process, that’s fine. But they only get to serve for so long (120 days) before they have to be replaced with a confirmed nominee. If that doesn’t happen, the court system gets to appoint a prosecutor to the now-open position.

The courts did this. And here’s where it gets supremely sticky. It didn’t take, as Brendan Lyons reports for the Times Union:

The White House on Wednesday evening fired a new interim U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District less than five hours after a panel of federal judges had appointed Donald T. Kinsella to the position.

The swift termination of Kinsella, a former longtime federal prosecutor, underscored the ongoing tensions in federal districts where the administration of President Donald J. Trump has clashed with judges who have declined to appoint his interim appointments of U.S. attorneys who have not been confirmed by the Senate.

That’s insane. It probably took more time to discuss the appointment than it did for Trump to fire Kinsella. Kinsella was the court-appointed placeholder — one that could only be replaced by a nominee confirmed by the Senate.

But that’s not happening here. Not only did the administration fire Kinsella, but it immediately declared John Sarcone was still the acting US Attorney, no matter what the court had declared. And rather than caution the administration against ritually abusing the process to keep former Trump lawyers in positions of government power, Trump’s high-level officials got up on the socials to make sure everyone knew this president is actually a king.

On Wednesday evening, after the Times Union first reported Kinsella’s appointment as well as his subsequent firing by the White House, the U.S. deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, posted on X: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”

Hopefully, the court will just appoint someone else and force the administration to keep showing its autocratic ass until one of the White House bumblefucks says or does something that can’t be walked back. Attrition is the name of the game here. And I think there are more than enough qualified prosecutors available to outlast Trump’s revolving door of personal lawyers willing to accept government positions in lieu of a personal check from Trump.

And let’s not forget that Sarcone was probably picked not just for his allegiance to Trump, but because Trump is always willing to help out a fellow grifter.

Sarcone ran for Westchester County district attorney as a Republican in 2024 but lost to eventual winner Susan Cacace, a Democrat. He was later nominated by the Trump Administration to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, which covers the Capital region, North Country, Central New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. But neither the U.S. Senate nor federal judges confirmed him, so the Trump Administration made him a special attorney for the region, devoid of term limits and traditional oversight. 

Questions were eventually raised about his residence, since he had lived and campaigned in Westchester just a year before being named U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. The Times Union reported that Sarcone’s listed address was a boarded-up building. Following that report, Sarcone ordered his staff to remove Times Union journalists from the office’s press distribution list.

That’s who Sarcone is. And that’s who he is going to be. If the courts are serious about standing up to abuses of executive power, it might be time to engage in a war of attrition.

I seem to recall a years-long freakout among MAGA folks about the Biden administration pressuring social media companies to remove content. You may have heard about it.

Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of Kassandra Rosado, who ran a 100,000-member Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” and Mark Hodges, who created the Eyes Up app for documenting and archiving videos of ICE enforcement activity.

The suit alleges that Bondi and Noem coerced Facebook into disabling the group and coerced Apple into pulling the app from its App Store, in direct violation of the First Amendment. Because, you know, government officials calling social media companies and demanding they remove content is… bad.

The legal theory is straightforward, the evidence is overwhelming, and perhaps most remarkably, the government handed FIRE much of its case on a silver platter. In other words, for all the talk of “censorship” during the Biden admin, which went nowhere due to the lack of any actual evidence, here there not only is evidence, it was eagerly and readily provided by Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem themselves. In public. Repeatedly. Proudly.

Let’s start with the basics of what actually happened, because the facts here are almost embarrassingly damning. Kassandra Rosado created her Facebook group in January 2025, initially as a small community resource for Chicago-area small business owners trying to understand how ICE raids were affecting foot traffic and community events. The group grew to nearly 100,000 members by October as ICE enforcement escalated under what the agency publicly branded “Operation Midway Blitz.” According to the complaint, Facebook’s own moderators reviewed thousands of posts and found exactly five that violated its guidelines. Just five. Which Facebook removed, telling Rosado that participants acting badly don’t impact the group themselves (a good policy!).

Out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments that members of the Chicagoland group created through October 2025, Facebook’s own moderators found and removed only five purportedly violating its guidelines.

Even as to these five posts, Facebook advised Rosado that they were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group.” Facebook further explained: “Groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”

Then, on October 12, 2025, Laura Loomer tagged Noem and Bondi in a social media post flagging the group. Loomer’s role here deserves a moment of appreciation. This is a person who sued Facebook, claiming it was literally RICO to moderate her posts. Who sued all the major tech companies, arguing that content moderation violated her First Amendment rights. Her entire public identity has been built on the premise that private platforms moderating her speech is unconstitutional censorship.

And here she is, tagging federal officials to demand they force Facebook to suppress other people’s speech. The First Amendment, which constrains government action, apparently only matters when Loomer is the one being moderated. When she wants someone else silenced, she calls in the actual state.

The next day, a DOJ source confirmed to Loomer that DOJ had contacted Facebook to demand removal.

That same day, Facebook disabled the entire group. Then Bondi posted on social media claiming credit:

That’s the AG admitting to a pretty clear First Amendment violation. Not in a leaked email discovered through litigation. Not in a deposition. On X, taking credit. Proudly.

Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago.

…. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.

Noem piled on with her own post, crediting the DOJ for the takedown.

That’s the Secretary of Homeland Security saying:

Anti-ICE radicals are using social media apps to dox, threaten, and terrorize the brave men and women of ICE and their families.

Today, thanks to @POTUS Trump’s @TheJusticeDept under the leadership of @AGPamBondi, Facebook removed a large page being used to dox and threaten our ICE agents in Chicago.

These officers risk their lives every day arresting murderers, rapists, and gang members to protect our homeland. Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our @ICEgov law enforcement.

We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.

The Eyes Up situation is even more instructive. Mark Hodges built Eyes Up specifically as a documentation and archiving tool for videos of ICE enforcement activity. The app uses manual moderation—meaning Hodges or other moderators personally review every video before it becomes publicly accessible.

The complaint specifically notes that:

Eyes Up is not useful for tracking ICE location or movement in real time. Because Hodges or other moderators manually review each video before it becomes publicly available, any ICE officers would be long gone by the time a video is posted.

Apple had independently reviewed and approved Eyes Up for the App Store in August 2025, raising no concerns about the content. On October 3, Apple removed it anyway—citing “information provided by law enforcement” that the app violated its guidelines on “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”

Bondi again made no effort to be subtle about DOJ’s role, gleefully telling Fox News:

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.”

She later boasted at a roundtable that:

“We had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps.”

For years, MAGA world has treated Murthy v. Missouri as a foundational text of government overreach—proof that the Biden administration ran a sophisticated censorship operation by pressuring social media companies to remove content. Jim Jordan convened hearings. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, though MAGA folks love to ignore or downplay what the Supreme Court decision actually said about the case. The argument, reduced to its essence, was that White House officials sending emails asking platforms to review posts against their existing policies constituted unconstitutional “jawboning.”

The Supreme Court threw the case out because the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that the government’s communications actually caused the platforms to take action. The majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett found that the platforms were making their own independent decisions, often rejecting the government’s requests, and that the plaintiffs couldn’t trace any specific content removal directly to government coercion. The evidence, the Court concluded, just wasn’t there. Barrett’s opinion uses the phrase “no evidence” five times. And the little evidence plaintiffs did offer? She called it out as “unfortunately appear[ing] to be clearly erroneous.”

Bondi and Noem have now done something remarkable: they have provided, entirely on their own initiative and through public statements made to friendly media outlets, every single piece of evidence that was missing in Murthy.

Traceability? Bondi literally said “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app—and Apple did so.” Coercion versus mere persuasion? The complaint details how Noem announced she was “working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute” app developers, how Bondi told Fox News that ICEBlock’s creator “better watch out” because the speech was “not protected,” and how these explicit criminal threats preceded the removals.

The NRA v. Vullo standard, which the Supreme Court articulated just before the Murthy ruling (on a case they heard the same day as Murthy), holds clearly that a government official cannot use “the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression” through third-party intermediaries. The complaint quotes this directly. There is no ambiguity here about what happened or who caused it.

In Murthy, investigators spent years poring over internal communications trying to find proof that the government’s requests had actually caused the platforms to act. And found nothing concrete. Here, the government’s own press releases and Fox News appearances serve that function. You don’t need subpoenas or discovery depositions when the Attorney General is posting on X to take credit.

The complaint captures the legal significance:

Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem want to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations. Wielding the power of federal criminal law, they coerced Facebook to disable Rosado’s Facebook group and coerced Apple to remove Kreisau Group’s Eyes Up app from its App Store. That’s unconstitutional. The First Amendment prohibits the government from coercing companies to censor protected speech. NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 190–91 (2024) (“[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”). Without this Court’s intervention, this unconstitutional coercion will continue.

That last line is important as well, because a key piece of Murthy was that to get an injunction, the plaintiffs had to show that these suppression efforts were likely to continue. That wasn’t there in Murthy. But here, we (again) have Noem and Bondi screaming to the heavens that they’re going to keep doing this.

The “officer safety” justification doesn’t survive contact with the actual facts. An app that archives manually reviewed videos of past ICE activity cannot be used to track officers in real time. The complaint notes that Apple had previously approved the app with full knowledge of what it did, then reversed course only after receiving “information from law enforcement”—which appears to mean a phone call from Bondi’s DOJ:

Apple cited its app review guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”

Apple had never previously stated that Eyes Up purportedly violated guideline 1.1.1 or included “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”

In fact, when Apple had independently reviewed Kreisau Group’s application to include Eyes Up in the App Store in August 2025, Apple did not conclude that Eyes Up violated guideline 1.1.1. During that review, Eyes Up was already available on its website, and Apple had full knowledge of the purpose of Eyes Up, of actual videos available on it, and of how it worked (including its location features). Apple flagged some unrelated issues, which Kreisau Group resolved before Apple approved the app. Apple raised no concern that Eyes Up contained “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content in violation of guideline 1.1.1.

This appears to be the exact opposite of the situation in Murthy, where tech companies frequently rejected government requests if they didn’t violate policies. Here, it appears that, under pressure from Bondi, Apple changed its interpretation of the policies in a weak pretext to justify the government-led censorship.

And it was so clearly pretext:

Apple’s transparency reports show that from 2022 to 2024, it almost never removed apps for “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content under guideline 1.1.1. Apple removed only three apps by US-based creators under guideline 1.1.1 in 2022, four apps in 2023, and none in 2024.

Eyes Up was not tracking anyone. It was creating an archive of documented government behavior in public spaces, exactly the kind of activity the First Amendment—and the Seventh Circuit’s precedent in ACLU v. Alvarez—exists to protect.

The viewpoint discrimination point in the complaint is also notable. The government targeted speech that was critical of ICE operations, while ICE itself actively posts on social media about its own enforcement activities, including specific locations and neighborhoods:

Bondi and Noem are not suppressing laudatory speech about ICE’s operations. ICE’s own social media accounts, for example, frequently share videos and photos of ICE arrests and other information indicating where enforcement operations occurred. Bondi and Noem only target such speech, like with Rosado’s Facebook group, that shares information about ICE operations in ways that are critical of those operations or that defendants perceive as such.

The same footage, in the government’s hands, becomes a success story, which make it textbook viewpoint discrimination.

Which brings us back to the political context that makes this so extraordinary to watch.

The people who spent years insisting that Biden’s White House committed the gravest sin against free speech in living memory by asking Twitter to look at some posts about COVID vaccines are, by and large, completely untroubled by Pam Bondi going on Fox News to brag about forcing Apple to remove an app.

The people who elevated Murthy v. Missouri into a constitutional crisis, who convened hearings and issued subpoenas and demanded that the “censorship industrial complex” be dismantled, have found absolutely nothing to say about a case where the Attorney General of the United States explicitly announced that she demanded a tech company remove an application and the company complied within hours.

Their position was, of course, never really about the principle. It was always about which direction the government’s thumb was pressing. When the Biden administration asked platforms to review COVID misinformation posts against their own existing policies—and platforms rejected the vast majority of those requests—that was tyranny.

When Bondi demands Apple remove an app and Apple does it the same day, that’s apparently just law enforcement doing its job.

The lawsuit asks for declaratory relief and injunctions preventing Bondi and Noem from continuing to coerce Apple and Facebook into suppressing this speech.

These irreparable harms will continue absent declaratory and prospective injunctive relief.

At no point have Bondi or Noem backtracked from their position that any involvement in ICE-tracking speech exposes an individual or business to criminal prosecution, nor from their demands that Apple and Facebook suppress such speech.

Accordingly, Bondi and Noem’s threats continue to hang over Apple and Facebook, who would risk adverse government action were they to reinstate Kreisau Group’s app or Rosado’s Facebook group

FIRE’s complaint frames the stakes with appropriate directness:

Our First Amendment right to speak “to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.” City of Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451, 462–63 (1987). Plaintiffs bring this case to preserve our country’s fundamental character as a free nation, asking this Court to protect the basic First Amendment right to share information about our government and its activities.

The MAGA world spent four years constructing an elaborate theory of shadow-government censorship—one that required stretching reality to its breaking point, cherry-picked emails, and ultimately couldn’t survive Supreme Court scrutiny—when the actual government censorship they always claimed to fear was apparently just one phone call from the AG’s office away. They finally got the “coercive jawboning” they warned everyone about. Bondi and Noem are doing it out in the open, on television, and bragging about it in official social media posts.

And the free speech warriors have nothing to say.

Which tells you everything you need to know about what they actually believed all along. The principle was never “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove speech.” The principle was “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove our speech.” Now that the thumb is pressing in the direction they like, the constitutional crisis has mysteriously resolved itself.

Trump couldn’t accept the fact that he lost the 2020 election. So he stood idly by (if you believe his narrative) or urged on (if you believe your own eyes and ears) his supporters to raid the Capitol building to seize the election from the electorate. If that meant killing his own vice president, so be it.

Eventually, Trump left office, replaced by Joe Biden for a whole four years of relative sanity. Then Trump returned to office and immediately pardoned nearly every one of his supporters who had been criminally charged with federal crimes for participating in the January 20th insurrection attempt.

Since then, he and his GOP enablers have been doing everything they can to rig the next election, despite claiming to have been victims of similar election-rigging in 2020. Aggressive gerrymandering has now been superseded by seizures of voting records, attempted prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies, threats to send ICE out to engage in election suppression, and more.

The GOP has a very slim majority at the moment. GOP legislators opting to retire are now derailing pro-MAGA legislation. Democratic opposition is finally showing some signs of life. And California has responded with pro-Dem gerrymandering of its own, limiting the effectiveness of GOP members running for congressional seats.

Now that it’s starting to look like a fair fight out there in the electorate with the mid-term elections approaching, the administration is making a push to seize election power from the states in order to give Trump the congressional majority he needs to keep being as awful as he’s been since his return to office.

President Trump doubled down on his extraordinary call for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States, even as the White House tried to walk it back and members of his own party criticized the idea.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he believed the federal government should “get involved” in elections that are riddled with “corruption,” reiterating his position that the federal government should usurp state laws by exerting control over local elections.

If states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over,” he said in the Oval Office, accusing several Democratic-run cities of corruption. “Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that,” he added. “The federal government should get involved.”

A nationalized election process is just a welcome wagon for autocracy. That’s why it’s never happened before, thanks to the foresight of the founding fathers who definitely weren’t interested in going back to being the subjects of a king, even if the king pretended a captive process was actually a democratic election.

And that’s why it’s being bandied about by this administration — one that clearly doesn’t care what happens to America as long it continues to remain in power. That’s also why Trump isn’t necessarily angling for a full takeover of midterm elections. He just wants to interfere in places where his lackeys have a real chance of losing elections.

During a podcast interview with Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, on Monday, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

No sentence should ever begin with “during a podcast interview with Dan Bongino” and end with an actual sitting president stating he should be allowed to “take over” the midterm elections in a select number of areas where his supporters aren’t likely to win.

None of this matters to Trump, however. Blessed with a lack of foresight or hindsight, Trump ventured out into the relative safety of his favorite conflict of interest — Truth Social — to ensure Americans that he hasn’t ruled anything out when it comes to actually stealing an election. (h/t Derek Guy and his preservation efforts)

If you can’t see/read the embed, consider yourself blessed. Consider yourself cursed (and feel free to do as much cursing as you feel is necessary) if you choose to read on. Here’s the entirety of Trump’s “it’s coup time baby!” Truth Social post:

The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple — They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

These are not the words of a well person. These are certainly not the words of anyone you’d want to have the driver’s keys to a nation, much less the access code to an apartment pool.

Someone who thinks the answer to his hostile takeover of the American election process can be justified by “Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted” is the same sort of person who thinks they’re only days away from perfecting a perpetual motion machine or discovering the secret to eternal life.

But while that part of the post may be comically delusional, it’s the next sentence that’s far more worrying. This is the president claiming he will mandate his version of “Voter I.D.” at the polls, whether it’s legal or not.

And it definitely won’t be legal. Almost every effort the administration has made to disenfranchise voters, alter long-standing election rules, and eliminate voters not likely to side with Trump and the GOP has resulted in lawsuits. Very little of this litigation is settled. And what little of it has been settled has resulted in a loss for Trump.

The GOP’s efforts to codify Trump’s baseless voter fraud conspiracy theories haven’t had much more success. What has managed to move forward is largely redundant, but with the added bonus of allowing Trump’s DOJ to prosecute election officials if the administration believes (hallucinates) local officials didn’t do enough (whatever that means) to dissuade non-citizens from voting.

But this is exactly the sort of thing Trump loves, even if he possibly knows there’s no factual basis for the accusations and insinuations he’s making. If his GOP counterparts lose elections during the midterm, he’ll be the first to start mouthing off about immigrants and “illegal” votes. If his boys win, he’ll take credit for the “fair” election. And the conspiracy theories will return to the slow boil until they’re needed in 2028.

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We’ve written a few times now about how the GOP’s “free speech warriors” have been waging an absolutely absurd campaign against NewsGuard, a company whose entire business model is… expressing opinions about the reliability of news sources. You know, speech. The kind of thing that’s supposed to be protected by that First Amendment thing the GOP pretends to care so much about.

As we noted back in 2024, the entire complaint about NewsGuard boils down to: some conservative news sites got poor ratings, and that made people who relied on those ratings less likely to advertise on those sites. It’s funny how MAGA seems to get so upset about the “marketplace of ideas” when their own ideas get rejected. NewsGuard says “we think this source is unreliable,” advertisers say “okay, we’d rather not be associated with unreliable sources,” and the rated sites get mad about it.

But now the Trump administration’s FTC, led by Chairman Andrew Ferguson, has decided to transform that complaint into an actual government censorship campaign. And NewsGuard, represented by FIRE’s lawyers, is suing to stop it, as first reported in the Washington Post.

The complaint lays out a fairly astonishing abuse of government power. Let’s start with the Civil Investigative Demand (fancy term for a subpoena) the FTC sent to NewsGuard last May. It’s basically a demand for every document the company has ever created or received since its founding in 2018:

The CID requires production of “all documents relating to NewsGuard’s News Reliability Ratings and any other rating[s];” identification of all NewsGuard customers; and essentially all communications from or to NewsGuard.

And it gets worse:

The Specifications go further, demanding all materials about NewsGuard’s work product and methodology, including data sets; all documents about websites and news sources rated; all ratings and reviews issued; all communications regarding ratings; any and all analyses of the effects of NewsGuard’s ratings on advertisers and publishers; and any studies relating to social media or digital advertising

Among its all-inclusive document demands, the CID also requires production of information, materials, and communications relating to NewsGuard’s journalism and reporting, including reporters’ notes and sources.

The FTC is demanding reporters’ notes. From a journalism organization. Because it doesn’t like the opinions that organization expresses. That should be a First Amendment five-alarm fire. I mean, imagine the years of screaming we’d all be subjected to if the Biden admin had demanded reporters’ notes from Fox News.

Oh, and what was the stated basis for this investigation? According to NewsGuard’s complaint, the FTC wouldn’t even tell them, despite it being required by law.

Under the FTC Act, the agency was required to state the specific conduct constituting an alleged violation that is the subject of investigation and the provision of law applicable to such violation. 15 U.S.C. § 57b-1(c)(2). The FTC did not do that in the NewsGuard CID, leaving the company to guess about what the agency alleged was at issue or how it could have anything to do with legitimate enforcement of antitrust or competition laws.

In other words: “we’re investigating you, but we won’t tell you why or what law you allegedly violated.”

Right about here I’ll remind you that when FTC chair Andrew Ferguson applied for the job he promised to “protect freedom of speech” and “end… politically motivated investigations.” Of course, the full quote was “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations”—leaving his own politically motivated investigations as fair game.

NewsGuard tried to work with the FTC for seven months, participating in ten meet-and-confer discussions and producing over 40,000 pages of documents. And what did the FTC do? Kept demanding more, including those customer lists and communications, while refusing to explain what any of this had to do with antitrust law.

Remember, NewsGuard’s share of the “brand safety” market is, according to the complaint, less than 0.1%. The idea that this tiny company is somehow engaged in anticompetitive behavior that requires the FTC to demand every document it’s ever created is absurd on its face.

Then, while NewsGuard was trying to cooperate with the investigation, the FTC was also using its merger review authority to create what amounts to a government blacklist of NewsGuard.

When advertising giants Omnicom and IPG wanted to merge, the FTC conditioned approval on the companies agreeing not to use any service that “reflects viewpoints as to the veracity of news reporting and adherence to journalistic standards or ethics.”

That’s not particularly subtle. That’s a condition specifically designed to prevent Omnicom from doing business with NewsGuard. The complaint notes that the original draft order didn’t quite capture NewsGuard, so Newsmax—yes, the same Newsmax that’s been mad about its poor NewsGuard rating—filed comments urging the FTC to expand the language. And the FTC did exactly that.

Newsmax was not subtle about its aim. Its fourteen-page letter mentioned NewsGuard more than a dozen times. Newsmax echoed Chairman Ferguson’s repeated statements that NewsGuard’s reviews and ratings of news sources based on journalistic standards were “biased” because some conservativeleaning websites and publications scored poorly.

Not content to rely on the official FTC comment process, Newsmax took to the internet to lobby Chairman Ferguson, members of Congress, and the President. In posts on X directed to Chairman Ferguson, Newsmax asserted the FTC’s proposed order was inadequate because it “makes no mention of ‘censorship’ or ‘targeting conservatives’ and ‘[f]ully allows Omnicom to use left-wing NewsGuard.” Newsmax admitted its comments and advocacy to the FTC were specifically targeted at NewsGuard.

[….]

The FTC subsequently issued a revised order removing terms about using third-party services with “political or ideological bias.” Instead, the FTC revised the Consent Order to prohibit the merged Omnicom entity or its ad agencies from using third-party services that evaluate “viewpoints as to the veracity of news reporting” and “adherence to journalistic standards or ethics.”

In its press release announcing the final Consent Order, the FTC stated that it revised the order “in response to public comments.” But the only public comments advocating such censure came from Newsmax and groups it funds…

The complaint notes, somewhat dryly, that First Amendment scholars and free speech organizations had also submitted comments pointing out how the proposed order was unconstitutional. But somehow, Ferguson and the FTC ignored those. The only change they made seemed to be the one Newsmax and friends demanded: the punishment of NewsGuard for its First Amendment-protected speech.

So let’s be clear about what happened here: A news organization that gives ratings to other news organizations gave a bad rating to Newsmax based on its own criteria. (Shocking, I know, given Newsmax’s sterling commitment to journalistic standards.) Newsmax complained to the government. The government then used its regulatory power to (1) launch a burdensome fishing expedition designed to bleed NewsGuard financially, and (2) literally prohibit a major potential customer from doing business with NewsGuard.

This is textbook First Amendment retaliation. The government is using its regulatory power to punish a private company for expressing opinions it disagrees with.

And Chairman Ferguson hasn’t exactly been coy about his intentions. Even before becoming FTC chair, he was publicly stating that the FTC should use its “tremendous array of investigative tools” and “coercive power” to get companies to “Do what we say.” As the complaint notes:

In an April 2025 interview, Chairman Ferguson explained how the FTC could use its “tremendous array of investigative tools” and “coercive power—formal and informal” to demand compliance to its views about supposed online “censorship.” Ferguson laid out a roadmap of the tactics his FTC would ultimately use against NewsGuard: “The regulators can show up, they can audit, they can investigate, they can cost you a lot of money, and the path of least resistance is: ‘Do what we say’.”

And:

Ferguson’s comments are similar to not-so-veiled threats by FCC Chairman Carr about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night comedy monologue mentioning Charlie Kirk, which the administration found objectionable. Carr stated that ABC and its affiliates had to “find ways to change conduct and take action … on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” and “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

This is the “free speech” party. This is what they mean by free speech: the freedom to agree with them, or face the consequences, brought to you mob-style.

The legal case here seems pretty straightforward. The DC Circuit already ruled last year, in the somewhat similar Media Matters case, that the FTC’s similar investigation of that organization was “a government campaign of retaliation” that was “infringing exercise of their First Amendment rights.” The district court in DC has already granted a preliminary injunction halting the FTC’s investigation of Media Matters.

NewsGuard’s case involves basically the same playbook. Government officials publicly expressed hostility to NewsGuard’s speech. Then they launched an investigation with demands far beyond any legitimate regulatory purpose. Then they used their merger review authority to directly prohibit companies from doing business with NewsGuard.

The Supreme Court was unanimous in the Vullo case in 2024 that government officials can’t “coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.” Using merger conditions to blacklist a company because you don’t like its journalism is exactly that.

It’s genuinely good to see NewsGuard fight back here. I’ve been somewhat critical of NewsGuard’s methodology in the past, but their right to express their opinions about news sources is protected speech, full stop. The government doesn’t get to punish them because some of those opinions hurt the feelings of conservative media outlets. (Also, as I always point out, NewsGuard was founded by the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the idea that he’s some “woke leftist” trying to suppress “conservative” news orgs is silly on its face).

And, honestly, this case reveals just how absurd the whole “censorship industrial complex” narrative has always been. The actual censorship happening here isn’t NewsGuard expressing opinions about news quality. It’s the government using its regulatory power to punish NewsGuard for expressing those opinions.

As the complaint aptly notes:

By accusing NewsGuard of providing “biased” evaluations of news sites, Chairman Ferguson has inverted the relationship between the government and the First Amendment. NewsGuard is a private business that offers assessments of the quality of news sites based on disclosed journalistic criteria. As a matter of law, NewsGuard cannot be a censor. But by asserting FTC control over the market for NewsGuard’s services, Chairman Ferguson has embraced the censor’s role

That’s exactly right. The government using its power to punish private companies for expressing opinions is censorship. Private companies expressing opinions is not.

One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it.

It happened again this week, when the Department of Education (DOE) was forced to back off of their illegal effort to permanently enshrine intolerance and ignorance across U.S. education standards.

More specifically, the DEO was forced to suspend their “Dear Colleague” directive that sought to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in schools and higher education. That directive, initially implemented in February of 2025, threatened to cut funding for institutions practicing “DEI,” (falsely) claiming it violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action.

One of its core claims, as we’ve seen at other agencies like the FCC, is that even acknowledging well documented systemic racism and sexism is somehow unfair to white men. It’s just the dumbest, lamest bullshit, from some of the shittiest human beings to ever govern (and if you’re well-versed in American history, that’s really saying something).

The American Federation of Teachers filed suit against the administration shortly thereafter, alongside an ACLU FOIA lawsuit forcing disclosure of documents highlighting the Education Department’s flimsy legal reasoning. Numerous court rulings subsequently found the Trump administration ignored the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and tried to rewrite federal civil rights policy illegally.

While the Trump administration realized they’d been beaten and had given up the fight late last month, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland put the final nail in the coffin this week. As a result the DOE has been forced to formally shut down the initiative, a significant victory for Americans who aren’t ignorant assholes:

“Upon the U.S.’s concession that the directive and subsequent certification requirement are vacated – meaning they are formally nullified – the district court issued a final ruling today, permanently invalidating the directive and preventing the government from enforcing, relying on, or reviving it. As a result, the challenged guidance is no longer in effect and cannot be enforced against anyone, anywhere nationwide.”

It’s worth reiterating that a lot of University administrators were abject cowards (or avid supporters of intolerance) and immediately threw minority and marginalized populations under the bus at the first indication of a stiff breeze, causing no manner of disruption to grants and scholarships. I’m not sure it’s even possible to functionally calculate the read harm caused to people.

It’s something you’d like to think they might be held actually accountable for by their colleagues:

Despite the win, much of the harm is likely permanent. And there are certainly other avenues where the administration has done very similar things and hasn’t yet been held to account; such as Trump’s illegal dismantling of the Digital Equity Act — which stifled all manner of rural broadband investment to marginalized neighborhoods and Trump voters alike because the word “equity” gave a few idiots a sad.

Any way you slice it, the sheer hubris of believing you can permanently eliminate equality, kindness, and diversity through illegal mandate by a dim, half-insane king remains historically stupid and deserves bottomless historic ridicule and derision.

But as we keep seeing, if people want to organize and meaningfully challenge this pathetic and increasingly unpopular administration, they usually win. As Trump’s health and influence fades, hopefully we’ll see a corresponding jump in courage.