A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency’s ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony “investigations” into ABC — including the unprecedented early ownership review of the company’s broadcast licenses.

In the filing, former FCC officials allied under the banner of the Protect Democracy Project outline how the early “ownership review” of ABC’s eight broadcast licenses is really just a pretense to punish ABC and Disney for broadcasting speech the Trump administration doesn’t like, the coalition calling it “a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution.”

A companion announcement features numerous FCC officials lining up to express their disgust at Brendan Carr and his often-illegal assault on the First Amendment.

“Chairman Carr seems to be laboring under the ill-conceived notion that broadcasters have only partial
rights to free speech under the First Amendment,” said Mark Fowler, a Republican who served as
Chairman of the FCC from 1981 to 1987. “Just because the FCC issues licenses doesn’t make it the
speech police. With this senseless early renewal proceeding, Carr is demonstrating that he has
completely lost touch not just with the role of the FCC, but also with his own job description.”

Earlier this year, Trump Republicans were upset that The View hosted Texas Democratic hopeful James Talarico. That triggered an entire fake “investigation” and a threatened revocation of ABC’s broadcast licenses by Carr, who falsely claimed the show had violated the FCC’s dated and irrelevant “equal time” rule requiring that TV stations give equal time to political candidates from both parties.

It apparently didn’t matter that Carr’s threats were empty, that any legal case would be laughed out of court on First Amendment grounds, that Carr actively avoids enforcing such laws for right wing radio, that Carr had worked with Trump-friendly broadcasters to concoct a conspiracy to make ABC look guilty, or that The View had clearly been exempt from the FCC’s “equal time” rules since 2002.

The FCC has been engaged in several other simultaneous phony investigations of ABC, hoping to punish the company for journalism and comedy critical of the president. The efforts are legally unsupportable assaults on free speech and the First Amendment designed not really to go to court, but to signal to media companies that there are costly legal headaches in store if they joke about, criticize, or simply just platform journalism that’s honest about Trump.

Several of the same former FCC officials participating in this coalition filed a petition with the FCC late last year, urging it to rescind the agency’s news distortion policy, a tool Chairman Carr has abused to try and trample free speech and journalistic freedom.

“This proceeding is an effort to punish ABC and Disney for poorly disguised political reasons,” said
Rachelle Chong, a Republican who served as Commissioner of the FCC from 1994 to 1997. “The early
review and the allegations are unusual in a typical FCC license review which suggests it is more about a
desire to silence speech.”

While the effectiveness of these threats have waned in parallel with Trump’s sagging health and political power; they’ve still been embarrassingly effective at times. The View, for example, has shied away from hosting any politicians at all to avoid further agitating the kakistocracy. And ABC in late 2024 paid Trump $15 million to settle a baseless lawsuit the company would have likely won.

This latest filing was signed by other former FCC officials including Kathryn C. Brown, Rachelle B. Chong, Jerald N. Fritz, Rosemary Harold, William T. Lake, Ruth Milkman, Dennis R. Patrick, Peter Pitsch, Alfred C. Sikes, Gloria Tristani, Tom Wheeler, and Christopher J. Wright.

The filing and complaint are curiously lacking in statements from Democrats, who have been a feckless no show when it comes to competent media reform for the better part of a quarter century. At the same time, many Republicans who have proven solid on free speech issues during authoritarianism, have quietly supported the administration’s assault on the regulatory state and what’s left of competent corporate oversight, the impact of which will have very different, but very fatal, reverberations for decades.

A broad array of other Republican-leaning groups, including the Center for Individual Freedom, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Americans for Tax Reform, also filed complaints this week at the FCC over its ongoing harassment of ABC, showing just how ideologically alone Brendan Carr has become as he wages a sad and desperate war on the First Amendment at the behest of a bumbling tyrant.

Sony’s decision to stop producing PlayStation discs starting in 2028 was met with a ton of initial backlash, especially in the wake of Sony reminding its customers yet again that a digital purchase of content isn’t actually a purchase of content at all and what you’ve bought can be ripped away from you with the barest of notice. But for some, including this writer, there was an assumption that the initial backlash is where this would all end. After all, the anti-consumer nonsense around digital products has been happening for over a decade now and little if anything has been done about it. Some others assumed that feckless gamers would end up just accepting the fate that Sony has planned for them.

And maybe they still will, but it seems that some folks are at least attempting to put up a fight first. Some activists have organized what they are calling the PSBlackout, attempting to get PlayStation owners to not make a purchase or even log into their consoles for a full calendar week in August, all in protest of Sony going disc-less.

As spotted by Push Square (via Eurogamer), the “PSBlackout” protest was announced by the game preservation and consumer rights group DoesItPlay last night on July 26, and it’s already starting to pick up some steam on social media. 

DoesItPlay has scheduled the protest to run from August 23 to August 30, and asks that those who take part refrain from logging into, playing, or purchasing any content on PlayStation-related platforms during the week-long blackout. 

“Whether it’s closing beloved studios like Bluepoint, pursuing a misguided live-service strategy, cancelling fan events, leaving PS VRS2 to die, or being completely out of touch with the franchises players want to see return, PlayStation has never felt more disconnected from its community,” reads DoesItPlay’s statement on X. “Ending physical discs in 2028 feels like the last straw.”

Now, Sony’s strategy for dealing with online and customer backlash in the past has been to simply wait it out. The company has also very clearly decided to employ that strategy in this case as well. Given enough time, Sony believes the anger will wane and be replaced by complacency, ultimately allowing the company to have its way.

A week long non-participation protest by PlayStation gamers, even if gets wide participation, is not going to cripple Sony. It’s not going to cripple any of its first-party or secondary studio partners. But it will make a statement at the very least, which might just be enough to make Sony’s ostrich routine no longer tenable.

And it’s not as though PSBlackout is the only form of backlash brewing over all of this.

Plus, provided news of the planned protest reaches enough ears, there’s certainly a sizable enough contingent of pissed-off fans out there ready to mobilize. The “Don’t Kill The Disc” Petition has continued to gain momentum over the last few weeks, having shot up from roughly 120,000 signatures on July 6 to just over 345,000 signatures on July 27.

Physical media shouldn’t go away. Not entirely, at least. The current consumer rules around digital purchases aren’t good enough to protect customers. There’s too much risk in non-preservation of gaming culture if everything is digital, thanks largely to copyright laws. And there’s still a sizable percentage of customers that want their shiny discs.

Now we’ll see if this protest gains momentum, or if the feckless gamer cliche is true.

For a long time, cell site simulators, a.k.a. “Stingrays” made headlines on nearly a daily basis. Then they just kind of fell off the map.

L3Harris — the manufacturer of cell site simulators that commanded enough market share to see its flagship product become the victim of genericide — saw the writing on the wall and exited the market. Part of this was due to cell tech advances that made it more difficult to obtain the information these faux cell towers were meant to collect. Part of that was also Supreme Court precedent that made the tech inherently less popular with US law enforcement.

Riley raised questions about cell site simulator use by requiring warrants for cell phone searches. And spoofing a cell tower was definitely a search, as the devices forced every cell phone in the area to connect to the Stingray and cough up identifying info about the device. Carpenter arrived a few years later and made it clear long-term tracking via cell site location was no longer something covered by the Third Party Doctrine.

But the biggest contributor to the decline in Stingray device usage were the warrant requirements instituted by both federal and local law enforcement agencies. What used to be a Wild West free-for-all was now something that required judicial approval. Apparently, a lot of cops decided this tech they once claimed was so useful to investigations it couldn’t be discussed in open court was useless now that it was subject to oversight.

We’re seeing a bit of an anomaly here. Not only is the use of cell site simulators being discussed in open court, but the federal officers have been denied their unusual — and outrageous — request to basically go wardriving for a month in Akron, Ohio. Here’s This Week in Security with more details:

A U.S. magistrate judge last month denied to issue a search warrant allowing federal agents to snoop on the phones of “thousands of uninvolved, unsuspecting individuals” across Ohio in an effort to identify a suspected criminal’s device, a rare rebuke by a court blocking the use of a cell-site simulator.

In the ruling, the judge said the federal government wanted to deploy a cell-site simulator that would have allowed “access to the information of thousands of individuals in the Akron, Ohio area,” but refused the warrant on grounds that it would have allowed federal agents to “gain unbridled discretion to examine the movements of private citizens at all times for thirty days.”

The ruling [PDF] by the magistrate doesn’t name the federal agency seeking the warrant, nor does it give any details about the alleged criminal activity that might help narrow the list down. The rest of the docket remains sealed so it may be weeks, months, or never before we learn anything else about this incident.

Here’s what it does say about the events leading up to this severely deficient warrant:

On June 15, 2026, the government sought approval of a warrant for use of CCSS for up to 30 days, 24 hours a day, to identify the cellular device(s) used by a suspect involved in criminal activity in Akron, Ohio. The affidavit to the warrant application established probable cause to believe that a specific individual is using one or more unknown cellular devices in criminal activity. The affidavit also suggested that there is probable cause to believe that uncovering the identity of the cellular device(s) would unveil more evidence of criminal activity.

The problem is right there in the first sentence. The government appeared to think the only thing it had to do to satisfy the particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment was to suggest it might limit this roving, 24/7 surveillance to a few areas in Akron.

Moreover, in an attachment to the warrant application, the government described five different locations at which a CCSS could be used to identify the suspect’s cellular device(s) “when the officers to whom it is directed have reason to believe that [the suspect] is present” and “in the
vicinity of” the following locations:

the suspect’s residence;
the suspect’s overnight location;
the suspect’s daytime location; and
two other densely populated locations the suspect frequently visited.

That’s wild. This is basically telling the court the government wants to force thousands of devices to connect to its cell site simulator at multiple locations for a period of 30 days. That the agency said it would “take no further investigative steps” until it had gathered enough info to make sure it had found its preferred suspect is hardly comforting. The fact that it claimed it would delete any irrelevant information (at an unspecified time) following its 30 days of wardriving doesn’t help much either.

The court says this is obviously impermissible under any interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, especially given Supreme Court precedent handed down in recent years. It also cites geofence warrants that have been recently rejected by magistrates for pretty much the same reason: wholesale surveillance of hundreds or thousands of people attempting to present itself as a legitimate search under the Fourth Amendment.

The court reminds the government that the Fourth Amendment says this about warrants:

[N]o Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The court says this warrant is no better than the geofence warrant rejected by an Illinois federal court back in 2023: searching for a suspect by searching everyone officers encounter isn’t “particular,” and the use of warrant doesn’t make it more acceptable.

There, just as here, the proposed warrant allowed the government access to thousands of identifiers and location data in an undetermined geographic area. Id. at 715–16. The court found the CCSS [canvassing cell site simulator] “akin to a warrant application to search an entire apartment building—or an entire city block—where the government has probable cause only that evidence of a crime will be found in one specific apartment unit, for up to 30 days.” As that court recognized—and as this Court now concludes—the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement bars this sort of “rummaging” through the proverbial home.

That much should have been obvious to the investigators seeking to have this warrant approved. Either this was ignored in hopes investigators could slip one by the judge or the government thought this might somehow be more constitutional than a geofence warrant with the same parameters. Either way, the government was wrong.

Despite cops relying on Google location data more than cell tower dumps or Stingray devices these days, it’s clear they’re still relying on tech that has completely fallen out of favor over the past several years. I guess if you’ve already bought it, you may as well use it. Sunk cost meets diminishing returns. Fortunately for the Fourth Amendment, blowing the dust of a cell site simulator hasn’t changed the way courts view these warrants.

Just as Larry Ellison and Paramount executives had worried, the state antitrust challenge to their $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers has resulted in significant delays that could prove terminal.

Two weeks ago California and eleven other states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, resulting in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and product quality hits as the merged company attempts to pay down a massive debt load. This isn’t hard to predict or prove given that every single merger that Warner Brothers has been involved with in the last quarter century has been a disastrous dud.

The judge overseeing the case granted a 14-day restraining order pausing the deal. But Paramount has now agreed to suspend the merger for far longer in the apparent belief that this could speed up the looming trial:

Paramount framed the agreement as a “significant win” that would help it close the deal. The company said the move would speed up the legal process by pushing the case to a trial sooner. It will also help avoid prolonged back-and-forth over some legal issues, like the merits of a court-ordered delay.

So as it stands, the Paramount merger will simply expire if they can’t win or dismantle the antitrust trial by June 4, 2027. That’s a problem for all sorts of reasons, the biggest being that the terms of the agreement involve Paramount being forced to pay a ticking fee of about $7 million per day (or $650 million per quarter) to investors starting in October until the deal closes (or doesn’t).

As mentioned previously, Larry Ellison and Oracle are also hugely over-leveraged on the AI bubble and data center investment; if that bubble pops during this window (which is broadly expected since nobody but Nvidia is making any money), that could heavily complicate his financial backing for the already very debt-heavy deal. At the same time, broadcast television isn’t magically getting more popular anytime soon.

And even if this deal does ultimately succeed, there’s been very little evidence that Paramount, much like the Trump administration that rubber-stamped the superunion, has any idea what they’re doing.

On Friday this week the FTC’s open comment period regarding its “Policy Statement Addressing AI Accuracy” will close, which means that a bunch of very smart, very busy people are wasting a ton of time this week writing up comments that will mostly be ignored by the FTC — but still matter for the record. The whole thing is so ridiculous that a former FTC lawyer has sarcastically requested that the FTC publish a quarterly “schedule of values” so AI companies at least know which ideologies they’re required to support to keep Donald Trump happy.

It’s an unconstitutional sham from an FTC whose chairman, Andrew Ferguson, quite openly sees his job as putting his thumb on the scale of speech to favor the MAGA worldview. Ferguson has been doing this since the very start of his tenure and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down now.

He couches his policy and investigatory efforts in the language of legitimate FTC authority, but nobody’s really fooled about what’s going on. Here, when he talks about “objectivity and accuracy” in responses from AI engines, everyone knows what he’s actually doing is crafting a policy that will let the FTC punish AI systems for giving “woke” answers that the MAGA world disagrees with.

The mechanism at work is blatantly obvious: the FTC is taking its Section 5 authority over “unfair and deceptive” practices — generally meant to go after companies engaging in outright fraud or deception to trick consumers — to claim that if an AI’s output is deemed to be too woke or not pro-MAGA enough, then the FTC will accuse the company of being “unfair or deceptive” in its marketing.

The draft policy statement builds its whole case on the idea that users trust what AI tools tell them — which conveniently becomes the hook for worrying that those trusting users might get fed something MAGA world doesn’t like. Thus making it “deceptive.” Yes. Really. In the actual world, the FTC’s Section 5 deception authority requires that a company make a representation that’s actually false, and materially so. Here, the Commission simply asserts — with no evidence at all — what consumers “reasonably expect,” and then appoints itself the judge of whether any given output matches.

As they have marketed their remarkable breakthroughs to the public, AI companies have spent years representing explicitly and implicitly that their systems aim to produce the best output—output that faithfully and accurately achieves users’ stated objectives and the built-in objectives that users expect in the AI system—that is possible within their technological and resource constraints. Because of these representations and the inherent nature of the products and services in question, consumers have a reasonable expectation that AI systems aim to give truthful and accurate outputs. Consumers have no basis to believe that AI systems aim to produce outputs that are distorted by undisclosed ideological objectives.

Nonetheless, an AI company might be tempted to alter or steer the output of its systems contrary to consumers’ reasonable expectations for various reasons, including attempted compliance with a state law, such as Colorado’s recently revised Artificial Intelligence Act. But steering an AI system in this manner may deceive consumers in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. That is true even if the deceptive steering is done in an effort to comply with state laws. Of course, a company may be able to avert potential deception by making truthful, non-misleading representations about the aims of its model. But such representations would need to make clear that the AI company is prioritizing objectives different than those consumers requested or would otherwise expect.

This is all a bit of shadow puppetry, where the FTC wraps its “AI outputs should never be too woke” argument in language that pretends to fit a traditional FTC mandate.

But this is all wildly unconstitutional, as even a cursory reading of how the First Amendment works would show. As the Supreme Court recently highlighted in Moody v. NetChoice, internet companies have clear First Amendment protections in their editorial decision making regarding what they choose to show — or not show — users of their services. From that ruling:

…this Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to “un-bias” what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.

Yet, that’s exactly what this proposed FTC policy is setting up: if AI tools don’t produce properly MAGA-fied outputs, the FTC might go after them, claiming that the outputs are not in line with “consumers’ expectations” (as determined by the MAGA FTC) and thus, “unfair and deceptive.”

And while a “policy statement” from the FTC is not binding law, it’s clearly designed to publicly state what kinds of views will get you investigated by the FTC, in an attempt to create chilling effects that pressure AI companies to pre-censor their bots. This is also why the comment period is basically a formality. Ferguson has no obligation to do anything regarding the comments, as there’s no official rule being promulgated.

And don’t sleep on the FTC’s statement regarding Colorado’s (admittedly questionable) law, which seems to serve no real purpose other than to try to backdoor its way into Trump’s desire to magically block state AI laws, which is something he cannot unilaterally do. Remember, while there have been efforts in Congress to preempt state laws, that has not come to pass. But here the FTC is telling companies, in writing, that complying with an enacted state law creates federal liability exposure, entirely because the FTC policy (not even a full rulemaking) says so.

Last week we had former FTC lawyer Keith Fentonmiller lay out how obviously unconstitutional all of this is. It’s the FTC trying to dictate editorial policies of private companies. The First Amendment does not allow that. Aaron Rieke, another former FTC lawyer, put it even more starkly (and hilariously) in a recent LinkedIn post, designed to look like a letter in response to this open comment period, but which cuts through all the bullshit and says, in effect, “look, if you want us to only push the preferred ideology, can you at least tell us which talking points we should bless, and which we should suppress”:

Dear Commissioners:

I write in enthusiastic support of the proposed policy statement, and with one modest request for clarification.

The statement wisely prohibits steering AI outputs toward undisclosed “ideological objectives” while preserving companies’ freedom to implement “prudent guardrails.” As a consumer who relies daily on these systems — having been assured, deceptively it now seems, that they are “helpful” — I confess I cannot always tell these apart. The distinction appears to reside not in companies’ conduct but in the values they pursue.

I therefore respectfully request that the Commission publish, and update quarterly, a schedule of values, each designated either “Ideology” (deceptive if undisclosed) or “Common Sense” (no disclosure required). The proposed statement offers a promising start — “equity” is evidently Column A, while cybersecurity occupies Column B — but leaves substantial compliance uncertainty regarding, e.g., deference to law enforcement, patriotism, and politeness.

Absent a complete schedule, companies must simply guess which viewpoints the government currently disfavors and speak at their peril. I assume the Commission has already concluded that a federal schedule of approved and disapproved values raises no First Amendment concerns. Publishing the schedule would helpfully memorialize that conclusion.

Such a schedule would also generate efficiencies for future administrations, who would need only swap the column headers.

Thank you for your leadership in ensuring that American AI remains free from government influence over its viewpoints, as determined by the government.

Respectfully submitted,

A Consumer, Acting Reasonably in the Circumstances

While sarcastic, it makes the point better than any of the earnest comments will. An FTC that can punish AI tools for failing to parrot the administration’s ideological preferences is an FTC acting as a censor, and we’d all be a lot better off coming out and saying so, rather than pretending there’s some legitimate intent or purpose behind this effort.

Ferguson’s FTC has been focused almost exclusively on abusing the power of the Commission (remember, Donald Trump fired the Democratic Commissioners and has made zero effort to replace them despite the law requiring two commissioners from the minority party) to win culture war arguments and punish those deemed insufficiently loyal. The new policy and comment period is just more of the same. It’s entirely about Trump & Ferguson setting the sloppy groundwork for them to whine and complain about AI tools accurately calling bullshit on MAGA propaganda as being “unfair and deceptive.”

None of this should be happening. It’s an attack on the First Amendment so obvious that the FTC isn’t even bothering to disguise it well. But, because of the political world we live in today, everyone has to pretend to take it seriously, to pretend that the FTC will read their comments carefully, weigh the pros and cons of various approaches on this policy, and come out with some final policy that people should take seriously.

The FTC has no business investigating the editorial judgments of companies, and its facade about consumer expectations and deceptive practices is a joke. People and organizations ought to still submit comments, if only to establish opposition to this farce on the record. But what a waste of time and brainpower from people who have approximately a thousand more productive things to do.

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The always-invaluable 404 Media has scored another minor coup. We all know ICE is heavily invested in surveillance tech, ranging from its purchases of cell location data from data brokers to throwing money at Clearview AI, the most notorious of facial recognition tech firms.

But there’s so much more to it than that. On top of the Trump administration trying to force other government agencies to share sensitive data with immigration enforcement agencies, ICE, CBP, and other DHS agencies have access to a plethora of tools, databases, and aggregation services that make it extremely easy to monitors peoples’ lives and movements, whether or not they’re actually the target of enforcement efforts.

Here’s an extremely brief (and, consequently, incomplete) recounting of what’s contained in the document obtained by 404 Media:

A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someone’s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.

The full document [PDF] lists everything accessible by CBP and ICE. As 404 Media notes, the information may be out of date, since it was apparently generated in 2024. For instance, it doesn’t mention either of the DHS’s newest mobile tech tools (ELITE, ImmigrationOS). And some of the products/services listed may have been phased out, replaced, or dropped entirely.

Still, it’s as disheartening as it is comprehensive. For instance, it shows ICE has access to something called ISO Claimsearch, which “contains information on property and casualty insurance claims, as well as vehicle information.” It also mentions its nationwide shared database of license plate/location data gathered and compiled by Vigilant Solutions and its partners.

For some reason, ICE also has access to the FTC’s database of customer complaints. While any US resident is capable of requesting this same information from the FTC, the FTC will redact the complainant’s personal information. One assumes this doesn’t happen when ICE/CBP ask for it.

It also mentions Clearview as an option for facial recognition. It says access is controlled by “CIEU,” an acronym that isn’t defined anywhere in the document. According to the line item, access is “given out under specific circumstances.” This phrase also goes unexplained. But one of the names listed to contact for access links to a DHS official.

There’s also Insight, which functions like WHOIS, but also mixes in “geo-location data” as well as the “ability to get around privacy registrars” to identify website owners.

ICE also has access to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) Hate Symbols Database, but apparently has no interest in other databases detailing hate groups/symbols that might be a bit more focused on groups that support Trump and his administration (SPLC, for instance, which the government considers to be a criminal organization).

There’s plenty to dig through here, but it’s kind of amazing to see just how much info your average ICE officer has access to. It seems like way more than what’s necessary to do this job, especially since most of the people being ejected from the country these days are residents who’ve made no secret about their country of origin and are simply trying to negotiate the now nearly-nonexistent path to permanent residency.

And what’s in here is the best case scenario: a list of everything ICE has access to, along with contact info for access privileges. What’s not in here is everything else: the abuses, the utilization of local agencies to route around federal restrictions, and the tech that’s being deployed without proper authorization or required Privacy Impact Assessment in place. This leak is comprehensive, but as always, one has to wonder if this is just the stuff the government feels comfortable putting down in writing.

Last year the Trump administration announced it would ban Chinese-made drones from the U.S. As I noted at the time, the plan had several problems, not least of which being the Trump administration is a racist, corrupt, dysfunctional mess filled with weirdos and lazy incompetents, primarily interested in assorted personal investment grifts and protecting less popular U.S. companies from having to compete.

Many of the banned drones from companies like DJI are better, cheaper, and more popular among consumers, resulting in a 70 percent market share. Given Trump’s sons are personally invested in drone manufacturing, this has less to do with national security and privacy than it does grift.

The Trump administration has made numerous claims of security risks related to products by companies like DJI, but offered absolutely no hard evidence at any point supporting the claims. We’ve repeatedly seen similar factually challenged policy rhetoric surrounding electric cars, AI, and telecom more broadly (remember how we had to do everything AT&T wanted or risk losing the “race to 5G?”).

As expected, the Trump admin’s plan to ban popular overseas drones isn’t going that well. Consumers are incredibly annoyed that they’ve been cut off from the best and cheapest products on the market. And numerous companies have just changed the labels on Chinese drones and cameras to sneak by the ban in a U.S. market absolutely swimming in Chinese tech imports of all kinds.

It’s created a complicated game of whac-a-mole at the FCC, who first tried to fine offenders, and is now eyeing a broader retroactive ban of these companies as well:

“Two Fridays ago, the FCC had already proposed a $25,000 fine on eight of those “front companies,” including the ones behind the Skyrover drones and Xtra cameras. But now, the FCC is proposing a lot more than a slap on the wrist — it’s planning to ban those same companies from continuing to import, distribute, market, and sell their existing drones and cameras.”

While folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr are saying they’re doing this to protect U.S. consumer privacy and national security (something often parroted by lazy press outlets), none of these folks have any credibility on these subjects, and have actively, repeatedly, made both issues indisputably worse.

The U.S. is too corrupt to pass a meaningful privacy law, which threatens both privacy and national security. I’d also argue that Trump administration corruption is every bit as bad, if not worse, than anything China could do to us at this point. And you’ve seen for yourself how most of the Trump administration’s cybersecurity policies are indistinguishable from a foreign attack.

There’s the added irony that the Trump admin likes to dismantle governance and lobotomize regulators, then try to impose massive new policy plans that require competent governance and regulatory oversight. The press generally adds to the dysfunction by lending the administration policy credibility it didn’t earn in policy areas it clearly doesn’t understand.

In this case, DJI urged lawmakers to conduct audits of its devices for years, and was ignored. The normal comment period for public input was ignored. Folks in the aerospace industry say they were neither consulted, nor given any advance notice of the quick ban. Drone and RC hobbyist organizations are annoyed and dismayed, and state the ban was shadow dropped last Christmas to lessen scrutiny.

I think there’s something to be said for allowing Chinese competitors (in EVs, drones, AI, and everything else) into the country, but also properly funding and staffing your regulators to police labor, competition, NatSec (when they actually arise), and consumer rights abuses.

Greedy zealots in corporate America and the Trump administration don’t want to do that, because it would result in competition and accountability, eroding precious quarterly returns.

So instead you get this sort of incoherent and xenophobic game of whac-a-mole, run by bad faith weirdos like Brendan Carr. Fully supported by many U.S. corporations — whose execs will talk your ear off over cocktails about their love of free market competition and competitive entrepreneurial innovation — right up until better overseas tech arrives and they’re forced to actually try.

Expect more and more of this dumb, xenophobic, pointless protectionist bullshit, especially in AI as the biggest U.S. tech companies, slowly drowning in debt and enshittification, begin to struggle with cheaper and better overseas alternatives in a country now waging open war on science and sound policy.

Persuasion plays a key role in society. Whether it is political or financial decisions, workplace or family choices, or simply reading a book or article (like this one), often someone is trying to persuade someone else to agree with them, possibly by changing their mind. This raises an interesting question: if persuasion is such an important part of life, how good are the latest AI systems in this domain? Are they, for example, better than humans? That is what a research project has just investigated, and on an impressively large scale:

in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters.

The results were unequivocal:

We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI’s advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments.

An arguably more demanding test found that AI systems were not just persuasive when it came to opinions, but also in terms of real-world actions: they managed to elicit substantially more real-money donations to charity than well-paid professional canvassers. The researchers were able to pin down the two key factors that helped AI to out-perform the best human persuaders in all these tests:

We found converging evidence that AI’s advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages.

That is, AI systems were more persuasive largely thanks to the range of knowledge they could demonstrate, and the speed with which they could present it — precisely those aspects of AI that are improving all the time. Which means that frontier AI systems are likely to become even more persuasive in the future. That sounds a rather bleak prospect, but a commentary from Tom Stafford, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, points out that things may not be as bad as they seem:

fact-based persuasion may indeed be effective, but that is good news for human reasonableness, not bad. The way the AI works isn’t some sinister magic; if it produces more facts, it is more persuasive. The constraint that persuasion requires evidence means that what anyone can be persuaded of will ultimately ground out on what can reasonably be claimed about reality. If AI is a tool which produces better-informed citizens and more respect for facts, that can be a positive thing.

That may be true in general, but the original researchers note that there are other factors at play here. For example, access to resources is clearly important:

power could flow to whoever can most readily access and deploy the most capable systems. In practice, that could mean the actors who already command the most resources, such as large private corporations, political campaigns, or nation states. These actors spend heavily to influence public opinion and consumer behaviour, and although the per-message effects of such efforts can be modest, such AI could raise their effectiveness, deepening existing imbalances in who can sway the public.

Another issue is that the persuasive power that comes with the deployment of leading AI systems could increase the clout of top AI companies:

in persuasion contests where both sides can secure access to the most capable systems, such AI could consolidate power by giving significant leverage to the actors that build and control those systems. These actors could tilt the outcome of such contests by, for example, deciding which positions their models will, and will not, argue for. In this case, power would flow not to the users of persuasive AI but to its suppliers, and consolidation of their influence would occur even when access among users is perfectly equal.

More positively, the researchers point out that as constant improvements in technology push down the cost of using persuasive AI

it could help under-resourced actors (e.g., pro se litigants and public defenders, small charities, grassroots activists) compete against more established and better-funded rivals, narrowing long-standing gaps in access to justice and assisting civic advocacy more broadly.

In his blog post, Stafford mentions another factor to consider:

In a world where every surface becomes filled with persuasive text, I don’t think it is inevitable that people will open themselves to being pulled in every direction. Not only do people have a significant degree of native scepticism, tending to resist persuasive efforts as they seek to maintain stability in their existing views, but they also have agency to open themselves, or not, to persuasive effects. The studies reported in this paper asked for an average of 14 minutes of conversation from participants. 14 minutes of sincere engagement might be a lot more than most of us give to alternative points of view in our daily lives.

In other words, we don’t really know yet what impact these highly-persuasive AI systems will have on politics, business, and everyday life. But given their superior ability to convince it seems likely that we will be encountering them more frequently in their role of indefatigable persuader, whether we want that or not.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

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

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

We all know this administration is more than willing to reward “red” states and punish “blue” states. There will always be an administration official on hand to claim the incredibly transparent vindictiveness of this administration is actually just regular government business devoid of animus.

No one believes these officials, of course. And the officials mouthing these words — as Kristi Noem did while pretending ICE surges in blue states weren’t politically motivated — don’t believe them either. All that matters is that they make the correct noises when being questioned in public. Everyone knows. No one really puts much effort into pretending otherwise.

But, every so often, an admission is made that manages to pierce through the numbing effect of this administration’s daily bludgeoning of the Republic’s norms.

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The filing [PDF] by the Department of Energy doesn’t sugarcoat what happened here. This is from the DOE’s own stipulation, filed ahead of the release of documents related to its clean energy. I cannot stress this enough: this is the DOE telling everyone that it’s actions are politically motivated.

With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (“Blue State” grants).

[…]

The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated. All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator (“non-Blue State”).

That is fucking wild. Even when presenting sworn statements, the government likes to try to maintain its pretenses. In this case, it would have been the handy catch-all of “government waste,” aided and abetted by a bunch of barely pubescent incels who were given the keys to the government vault via their employment by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”

But the pretense is completely gone here. Instead, the Energy Department has issued a giant middle finger of a stipulation, telling not only the court, but the American public, that everything it did in terms of grant awards was politically motivated.

And, as if the preceding paragraphs weren’t clear enough about this, here’s what follows one paragraph later:

DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State. DOE will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.

DOE accepts that the differential treatment resulting in the October 2025 termination of Blue State grants and the non-termination of non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the recipient’s location and/or place of performance and DOE’s past or current agency priorities.

The administration red-painted itself into a corner. When litigation push came to shove, the DOE was forced to admit its grant program is nothing more than a slush fund for red states and an instrument of deprivation for blue states. Sickening. And it’s all there in black and white, delineating the haves and have-nots based on their voting preferences. No wonder the administration is demanding states turn over voter registration info. It’s not just about rigging elections and suppressing voters. It’s also about giving the administration the tools it needs to be vindictive on a granular level.

Back in December we called out Google for filing a DMCA 1201 lawsuit over companies scraping Google’s results. Almost everything about the lawsuit seemed problematic, not the least of which is that Google’s entire business was built on scraping the web. To sue another company for scraping Google just felt… obnoxious. And now a judge has dismissed the lawsuit, though leaving it open for Google to refile.

Some background: now that we’re in the age of AI, access to all kinds of data has become more precious, which means we’re seeing more and more attempts to put a toll booth on parts of the open web, primarily aimed at AI companies. But the rest of us get locked out along the way. SerpAPI is one of the players in the space which (as its name implies) basically tries to create an unauthorized API for search engine result pages.

Last fall, Reddit sued SerpAPI and some others (including search AI company Perplexity), claiming that because SerpAPI was allowing others (like Perplexity) to access Reddit content via its scrape of Google, it was violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention (DMCA 1201) clause. We found the whole thing to be an attack on the principles of the open web. It really seemed weird. Reddit had no copyright interest in its users’ posts (the users hold the copyright) and SerpAPI was scraping Google, not Reddit. Reddit has an API deal with Google, but none of the parties being sued were parties to that deal. The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.”

Google’s case came a few months later and was quite similar, focused on SerpAPI. And while at least in this case (unlike Reddit) they could point out that SerpAPI was scraping their own site, it still makes no sense to claim that scraping an open website can be a 1201 anti-circumvention violation, no matter what “technological protection measures” you throw up to try to block scraping. The Reddit case continues to move forward with the defendants filing motions to dismiss, but the Google case has lapped them a bit, with the judge already dismissing the complaint, and pointing out (correctly!) that Google has no legitimate copyright claim to make here.

While SerpAPI tried a variety of different ways to kill the lawsuit, what seemed to stick is that Google was clearly stretching the way the DMCA 1201 is supposed to work. Remember, 1201 is the “anti-circumvention” part of the DMCA, and was initially written to protect DRM so that if people broke DRM (or even talked about how to break DRM) they could still be held liable for copyright infringement just for the act of circumventing the “technological protection measure.” This very broad and poorly worded law has created huge messes in its wake, including blatant abuses like companies arguing that you can’t use third-party printer ink or third-party garage door openers because of flimsy “technological protection measures” put into those devices, even though the underlying circumvention had nothing to do with copyright.

The court also looks at one of those earlier cases (regarding Lexmark’s printers), but concludes it doesn’t apply here — long story, not worth the detail, except to note that the precedent that mattered against Lexmark came from trademark law, not the DMCA, even though Lexmark had also tried (and failed) to use Section 1201 itself.

However, SerpAPI (rightly) also pointed out that Google is overclaiming what “SearchGuard” — the “technological protection measure” — actually protects here. As the court explains it, SearchGuard is basically a kind of CAPTCHA:

SearchGuard works by sending a JavaScript “challenge” to search queries that Google receives from unrecognized sources to confirm that they come from real users as opposed to automated software. Id. ¶ 29. Google’s computer system transmits JavaScript code that calls upon the user’s browser to send Google a “solve” for the challenge, i.e., to send Google specific information regarding the browser and user generating the request. Id. ¶ 29. For human users, the “solve” is relatively straightforward; their browsers run the JavaScript code and send back the required information seamlessly, without disrupting the user experience. Id. ¶ 29. However, automated systems that submit automated queries at a massive scale typically cannot solve the SearchGuard challenge. Id. As a result, SearchGuard denies them access to Google’s Search results.

But, as SerpAPI highlighted, SearchGuard has little to do with copyright. And that, at least, gets the court’s attention:

SerpApi contends that Google’s claims under the DMCA are subject to dismissal because SearchGuard is designed and functions to control access to and prevent the scraping of Google Search results regardless of whether they contain a copyrighted component, and because SearchGuard is not reasonably tailored to control access only with respect to any copyrighted component that may be included in Google Search results.

The Court agrees with SerpApi in part. To the extent that Google Search results do not contain any copyrighted content, SearchGuard cannot be said to effectively control access to a work protected under the Copyright Act. Here, Google alleges that SearchGuard controls access to Google Search results, which are compilations of publicly-available information that Google obtains from the internet and organizes for presentation to users on google.com based on relevance. See Compl. ¶¶ 13, 14, 27. SearchGuard controls access to Google Search results because its “purpose” is “to prevent unauthorized third parties from automatically accessing Google’s Search results” to scrape them, as such scraping activities impose a “deadweight loss” on Google. See id. ¶¶ 24, 26-27, 29. However, Google does not allege that google.com or the Google Search results displayed therein are protected under the Copyright Act. Importantly, Google alleges that Google Search results are “often” accompanied by a “Knowledge Panel” that may contain some copyrighted content that Google licenses from third parties, such as copyrighted images. Google does not allege that the “Knowledge Panel” is always included in Google Search results, or that the Knowledge Panel, if included in the Search results, always contains copyrighted content. See id. ¶¶ 14-16. Accordingly, Google’s allegations indicate a mix of content, some with copyrighted material and others without.

And that cuts against Google’s argument here:

Thus, because the DMCA does not apply where the work controlled by a technological measure is not protected under the Copyright Act, Google’s claims under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) are subject to dismissal as a matter of law to the extent that they are premised on instances where SearchGuard controls access to Google Search results that do not contain any copyrighted content.

Even more damning for Google is that when it’s using SearchGuard, that has literally nothing to do with “effectively controlling access to a [copyright-protected] work.” And that’s the entire point of 1201.

SerpApi argues that Google’s claims under the DMCA fail because it does not allege that it implemented SearchGuard to protect a copyrighted work with the “authority of the copyright owner” as required under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(B)….

The Court agrees. The plain language of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(B) makes clear that, for a technological measure to “effectively control[] access to a work” it must, among other things, “require[] the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.” See 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(B). The Ninth Circuit has interpreted the “with the authority of the copyright owner” element as requiring a plaintiff to allege and later prove that the technological measure in question was implemented and functioned with the authority of the copyright owner.

Google tried to argue that it somehow has the support of copyright holders to protect their work with SearchGuard, but the court is not impressed.

Google’s arguments do not compel a different conclusion. It contends that it is not required to allege facts indicating that it had the authority of the copyright owners to implement SearchGuard because the phrase “with the authority of the copyright owner” defines who may circumvent a technological measure to gain access to protected work and does not define who may deploy a technological measure to control access to a protected work…. This argument is unavailing. Google’s authorities interpret a different provision of the DMCA, namely 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(A), which defines what it means to “circumvent a technological measure.” See Disney Enters., Inc. v. VidAngel, Inc., 869 F.3d 848, 863 (9th Cir. 2017) (“Section 1201(a)(3)(A) exempts from circumvention liability only those whom a copyright owner authorizes to circumvent an access control measure, not those whom a copyright owner authorizes to access the work.”) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 444 (2d Cir. 2001) (“[S]ubsection 1201(a)(3)(A) frees an individual to traffic in encryption technology designed or marketed to circumvent an encryption measure if the owner of the material protected by the encryption measure authorizes that circumvention.”). These authorities do not address the issue here, which is whether a technological measure must function “with the authority of the copyright owner” in order to “effectively control[] access to a work” under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(B).

Some of SerpAPI’s other arguments fail, but for now all the DMCA claims are dismissed, though Google can (and almost certainly will) refile regarding some more narrow claims. Specifically, Google cannot file claims regarding search results for which it does not hold the copyright, but could file more narrow claims regarding content where it does (such as the Knowledge Panel). That’s much more limited, and about the only reason to keep the case going is to be a nuisance to SerpAPI.

That might be worth it to Google, which really seems to dislike SerpAPI being out there and scraping their results. But it would be a much narrower case, and (in theory) SerpAPI could simply change its scraping to avoid Google-produced content. Either way, all of this remains quite silly. Google’s entire business was built on scraping the web. Suing someone else for scraping Google sure feels like pulling up the open internet ladder up after themselves.

SerpAPI’s comments on the dismissal make this point explicitly:

We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet’s founding principle – open access to usable information – is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information.

One would hope that this initial dismissal from the court gets the company to rethink this anti-open-internet strategy, but somehow I fear the old adage of “young companies innovate, old companies litigate” is starting to seep into Google.

Atlanta, Georgia’s attempt to erect a law enforcement officer training center in Atlanta was met by months of concerted protests. As the months stretched into years (the center was announced in 2021 but did not complete construction until 2025), opposition efforts ranged from peaceful protests to heated exchanges during public comment sessions to attacks on construction equipment by people seeking to shut the project down.

The government has been pursuing criminal charges against protesters since 2023 — efforts that included the state of Georgia ringing up 61 protesters on RICO charges. That case stalled out last spring, but both state and federal prosecutors are still hoping to ring up a few headline-making arrests that might make it easier to depict anti-government protests as terrorism when engaging in prosecutions.

The desire to turn protesters into terrorists is generating collateral damage. With the prosecution of Cop City protester Sam Tunick, the federal government is apparently hoping to convert a cell phone operating system into de facto evidence of criminal intent.

Here’s how this fucked up turn of events began:

Sam Tunick was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

What happened next was even more fucked up (from Tunick’s motion to suppress evidence):

The two CBP officers conducting the initial interrogation of Mr. Tunick never read him his Miranda rights and, further, Mr. Tunick stated early in the interview that he did not want to continue speaking without a lawyer. Yet the officers repeatedly ignored Mr. Tunick’s requests to speak with his lawyer, continued to question him, and declared: “because you’re refusing to talk, which is your right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we’re looking for.” [Timestamp 20:00:40].

After the officers requested Mr. Tunick’s cell phone password a second time, Mr. Tunick asked again why he was not allowed to call his lawyer, and the officers responded: “when it comes to immigration and customs, right, it’s a whole different ballgame. . . and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.” [Timestamp 20:05:09].

The CBP officers explained that Mr. Tunick would have to give the officers access to his phone, whether it was done with his cooperation or not and, eventually, Mr. Tunick provided a password to his cell phone and e-reader.

Also this:

The interrogation, including the questions about child sexual abuse images, was “a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr Tunick’s connections” to the movement against Cop City, according to the motion.

The officers made it clear they would either seize Tunick’s phone or return it to him after they’d searched with the aid of his provided passcode. Either way, the officers were going to search his phone.

So, Tunick gave the officers what they asked for: a passcode. And then this happened:

Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.

What the agents were witnessing (and were apparently unaware was a third option they hadn’t considered) was the triggering of cell phone operating system GrapheneOS responding to a “duress mode” passcode entry.

GrapheneOS users have this option…

GrapheneOS provides users with the ability to set a duress PIN/Password that will irreversibly wipe the device (along with any installed eSIMs) once entered anywhere where the device credentials are requested (on the lockscreen, along with any such prompt in the OS).

The wipe does not require a reboot and cannot be interrupted.

…which somewhat mitigates the deleterious effects of this government option:

Officers demanded a passcode. Tunick provided them with one.

This did not involve Tunick physically interacting with his phone at any time. And while we’re going to have to wait to see how this plays out in court, it seems like compliance (however malicious that compliance might be) is still compliance. It seems extremely vindictive to punish someone for the end result of the government’s actions.

At any point, the officers could have dropped the CSAM pretext and/or given Tunick access to his constitutional rights. Instead, the government leveraged its “Constitution-free zone” privileges in an attempt to intimidate someone into full cooperation, all while pretending this was about illicit images, rather than Tunick’s activism against the government.

And the government knows its case against Tunick is weak. It’s not charging him with destroying evidence or obstruction. Instead, it’s relying on a seldom-used statute that criminalizes destroying property the government wants to seize.

That is some weak sauce. But it’s the sauce the government wants to use. If the court allows this to proceed without suppression, the government will be allowed — and encouraged! — to consider the mere existence of GrapheneOS on a person’s phone as evidence of criminal intent.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

This is the DOJ trying to open the Overton Window while simultaneously trying to convert a lot of protected speech into acts of terrorism.

I would hope the court rejects any counteroffers from the government. Agents demanded a passcode and a passcode was provided. That it didn’t provide them access to the phone’s contents is on them. And it’s pretty clear the government knows it barely has a case here. If it thought it could connect the legal dots convincingly, it would have gone for an obstruction charge, rather than the bullshit it’s pulling here. The government could still seize the “property.” That it now contains nothing it might use to generate more charges against Tunick is on the officers who decided to abuse the “border” privilege to cheat an American out of his constitutional rights while pretending to give a fuck about CSAM.

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Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) broadband service in minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Big ISPs like AT&T have long been caught not only refusing to upgrade or repair broadband access in minority areas of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, but charging minority neighborhoods more money for slower service than their less diverse, more affluent counterparts.

Here’s the thing: the Digital Equity Act barely mentions race; it simply included some vague language stating that deployments and broadband grants must be even and non-discriminatory. The law identified minority status as one of eight nonexclusive indicators of barriers to digital access, while separately prohibiting discrimination in programs receiving funds.

As it has done with numerous other programs of this kind aimed at lowering broadband bills, the Trump administration clumsily — and quite illegally — tried to dismantle the whole law last year, insisting it was somehow racist against white people.

Last week, the DC District Court issued a ruling that allowed the Act to survive, but stripped out the already modest race-based components of the law, declaring them unconstitutional.

Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which had done a lot of good studies on broadband redlining, celebrated the decidedly mixed bag:

“We are proud to have pushed to keep the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program alive. This crucial program provides communities across the country not just with access or technology, but the skills, confidence, and pathways necessary to fully participate and thrive in our digital age. We fundamentally object to the government’s position that empowering Black and Brown communities is unconstitutional.“

So the competitive grant program at the heart of the law will continue, but there’s no real consensus on what that will look like or how helpful it will be under a federal government too racist and corrupt to function in the public interest. And there’s not much left to address the very real issue of broadband digital discrimination, which runs parallel with racial discrimination in other U.S. infrastructure sectors like energy.

The Infrastructure Act not only featured $42.5 billion to expand broadband access, it featured a lot of included (and adjacent) legislation intending to address racism in broadband and broadband affordability more generally. Most of that’s been brutally stripped away by the Trump administration, which is instead funneling billions of dollars to Elon Musk for costly Starlink service, then declaring the problem solved.

It’s a lovely bundle of corruption, racism, and regulatory/court capture all thrown into a stew by a bunch of zealots keen to pretend they’re engaging in policy reform and serious legal analysis.