News

Wednesday 2026-05-06

09:00 AM

NYPD Union Sues Oversight Board For Letting People Know How Awful Some Cops Might Be [Techdirt]

The NYPD’s biggest union is back in lawsuit mode. As usual, the impetus is accountability and transparency — things the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and NYPD have been opposed to since their respective inceptions.

A law put on the books 50 years ago was finally erased 40 years after its enactment. “50-a” allowed the NYPD to withhold information about officers who had been accused of misconduct. It did not forbid the NYPD from releasing this information, however. And, because it didn’t, the NYPD often shared certain info with the public.

But in 2020, someone in the NYPD re-read the 1976 law and found a loophole. Well, it wasn’t actually a loophole. It was just an option the NYPD didn’t bother considering until the public had turned on cops in general following an impossible-to-ignore stream of unjustified killings of Black people by white cops, culminating in the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Less than two months after that murder, the NYPD realized that while the law did not forbid the release of police misconduct information to the public, it also didn’t compel it. So, the NYPD demonstratively sat on its hands, forcing the NY legislature to finally write this law out of existence.

During this same time period, the city was seeking NYPD oversight that might be independent enough to actually be worthy of the term “oversight.” The Civilian Complaint Review Board” (CCRB) has existed in one form or another since 1953. Its effectiveness has been closely tied to whoever’s in the mayor’s office, its fortunes rising and falling with city leaders’ actual interest in police accountability. The result of nationwide protests was an actual effort to keep the CCRB from being controlled by the NYPD.

Now that Eric Adams is gone — along with his embrace of political and police corruption — the Police Benevolent Association is back in action, claiming (in court!) the CCRB should not be allowed to release misconduct files the CCRB is legally allowed to release. Samantha Max has more details for Gothamist:

New York City’s largest police union is suing the watchdog agency that investigates allegations of officer misconduct, saying the Civilian Complaint Review Board has stigmatized officers by sharing “inflammatory” records related to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, bias-based policing and lying.

The Police Benevolent Association is urging the CCRB to redact officers’ identifying information when it turns over records related to these three categories of misconduct, if the officers were not found guilty of wrongdoing.

There’s a lot of stuff to get into here, but let’s start with the final sentence. At the time the CCRB turns over records to public records requesters (most notably, 50-a.org, which is named after the now-dead law that used to prevent this sort of accountability), it may not know the final results of internal investigations. If that’s the sticking point the PBA chooses to stake its claim on, it’s just going to keep losing in the actual court and the court of public opinion.

It’s also notable that the PBA only considers “three categories” to be worthy of court-enforced secrecy. It implies that the cops the PBA most wants to protect are those most inclined to engage in these particular activities.

The PBA seems extremely upset by 50-a.org’s searchable database of police misconduct, but it has chosen to use the CCRB which normally obscures the nature of offenses it might be taking a look at.

CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche said at a board meeting in October that the agency does not specify in its public datasets when unsubstantiated abuse of authority complaints pertain to sexual misconduct, racial profiling or untruthful statements, because those types of allegations are “very prejudicial to the character of the officer.”

The guidelines that cover the CCRB’s reporting do not apply to public records requests, however.

But he said the agency does not take those same privacy measures when releasing data pursuant to a court order or public records request.

Nor should they! The CCRB may be limited in its own reporting, but if the legislature wanted to limit what public records requesters could access, it would have done so when it overturned the law that previously made most police misconduct records inaccessible. And if the legislature wanted the CCRB’s internal guidelines to apply to its public records request releases, it has had more than seven decades to do so.

And that means the PBA should be headed for a swift loss in court. If the PBA doesn’t like what’s happening, it should take it up with state legislators, rather than ask the court to rewrite the law in its favor. I doubt the PBA will try to take it up with legislators because legislators are the reason it can no longer use a 1976 law to separate NYPD officers from accountability.

It’s too early to tell how this will all play out, but I want to highlight something else before we retire to the anteroom known as the comment section:

[CCRB Director Darche] said criminal defendants and prosecutors, for instance, should be allowed to know if an officer involved in a trial has been accused of lying.

The PBA, on the other hand, argues that disclosing these types of unsubstantiated allegations is “defamatory” and makes them available to “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks and the public at large,” without giving officers a process to challenge or remove them.

Seriously? Every arrest is a presumptive public record. Police agencies willingly share these with local newscasters, many of which treat these as part of their regular reporting. Mugshots and arrest records are shared everywhere and no one in the NYPD or the PBA gives a single fuck whether or not these “defamatory” assertions result in adverse reactions from “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks, and the public at large.”

But when it comes to cops, no amount of secrecy is secret enough. They’re somehow owed absolute secrecy until these investigations have been closed. And even then, they’ll go to court to argue that substantiated claims are unfairly “prejudicial” during criminal trials.

Fuck these guys and their union reps. If they want to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to unsubstantiated allegations, they should extend this privilege to the people they’re supposed to be serving. Until they’re willing to do that, they have no legitimate complaint to raise.

I know I don’t expect Joe Whoeverthefuck from two blocks away to steer clear of sexual misconduct, lying, or being a racist. But I goddamn well expect that minimum level of competence from the people whose paychecks are reliant on my tax dollars. The PBA clearly believes the public owes everything to the cops it represents. And the people paying the PBA’s paychecks owe nothing to anyone.

06:00 AM

Someone Ask Alito: If December Was Too Late To Fix Unconstitutional Gerrymandering For The 2026 Midterms, Why Is May Okay? [Techdirt]

Last December, Justice Alito told Texans they had to vote under an unconstitutional gerrymander because changing maps in December would deprive them of “certainty” before the 2026 midterms. Yesterday, with voting already underway in Louisiana, he rushed the certified copy of the Calais ruling out the door so Southern states can hurry up and redistrict before that very same election.

It seems like a hypocrisy worth pointing out, even as Alito and the MAGA faithful will studiously look the other way.

I covered some of this on Friday after the Calais ruling first came out, but with Justice Samuel Alito rushing the certified copy of the decision to help speed up the redistricting of Southern states to wipe out Democratic districts, I feel like we need to make this point even clearer.

To briefly backtrack, in November, a Trump-appointed judge wrote an incredibly detailed ruling on why Texas’ attempt to gerrymander away Democratic districts was clearly unconstitutional. The ruling was 160 pages of incredibly thorough argument and analysis.

The ruling went to the Supreme Court where, on the shadow docket, it was overturned with a five paragraph explanation with little detail. Justice Alito added a concurrence, in which he talked up the importance of “certainty” for Texans on which map would be used for the 2026 election (still months away, and ignoring that if the lower court ruling held, the maps would remain as they were for the 2024 election, which everyone was used to). But, no, can’t interfere with the election map in December before an election year claims Samuel Alito:

I join the order issued by the Court. Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections, so I will not delay the Court’s order by writing a detailed response to each of the dissent’s arguments.

Ah yes, certainty.

About that. On Monday, Alito agreed to rush making last week’s Calais ruling official. While normally there’s a 32-day waiting period, Alito said we needed to jump the gun… because he knows that a bunch of Southern states want to speed up their redistricting plans, even though some have already begun voting. In a pissy response to Justice Jackson’s dissent (which Alito calls “baseless,” “trivial,” and “insulting”) he also argues:

The dissent would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.

Um. Yes. But the Texas map was also held to be unconstitutional. In great detail. And you said it was too late to change it for this year’s election.

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s voting has already started. And you’re now rushing this decision, allowing Louisiana to try to claim a state of emergency to stop the voting, and ignore the will of the people… because you think it’s “insulting” that Louisiana might have to vote on districting that you’ve just declared unconstitutional.

Can some journalist please ask Alito why December was too late to fix Texas’s unconstitutional map — when voters there needed “certainty” — but May isn’t too late to halt an in-progress Louisiana election to fix theirs?

Literally the only consistent throughline is that both decisions favor the election of more Republican candidates.

Reddit Reports Resurgence in User Bans over Copyright Infringement [TorrentFreak]

With over 120 million daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented social sharing platform, founded twenty years ago, has since transformed from a hobby project to the publicly traded multi-billion-dollar company it is today.

This growth also brought added responsibility. In addition to the billions of casual, insightful, and heartwarming messages, Reddit’s popularity was also embraced by those who color outside the lines of the law, including copyright infringers.

Reddit’s Transparency Report

To show the public how it responds to copyright complaints, takedown notices, and other removals, it publishes a biannual transparency report. The latest version, covering the second half of 2025, shows some interesting new trends.

Overall, the transparency report reveals the massive volume of content that’s added to the site. In just six months, Redditors shared over 2.2 billion posts and comments. More than 150 million of these were removed by moderators and site admins for various reasons.

In addition, Reddit received 69,154 DMCA takedown notices from rightsholders, identifying 425,471 pieces of allegedly infringing content. Reddit removed 217,787 of those, which is an actionability rate of 51% on all reported content.

Reddit’s H2 2025 takedown overview

These DMCA takedown numbers are roughly on par with previous years and down significantly from the 2022-2023 period, as seen below.

Copyright takedown notices trend

Bans Shift From Subreddits to Users

While the overall takedown volume remains relatively steady, the number of accounts and communities banned for repeat infringement reveals a notable change.

In the second half of 2025, Reddit banned 1,595 user accounts for repeat copyright violations. That’s a 90% increase compared to the first half of the year, when 837 user accounts were terminated.

The number of subreddits banned for repeat copyright violations went the other way. Reddit banned 563 subreddits in the second half of 2025, down 25% from the 709 subreddits removed in the first half.

The pattern flips the picture from six months ago, when subreddit bans more than doubled year-over-year while user bans grew at a more modest pace. This time, it’s the user bans that surge while subreddit takedowns are lower.

Reddit doesn’t explain the divergence in its transparency report, but today’s user and subreddit bans remain well below the 2022 peak. In the first half of 2022, 3,859 user accounts and 1,543 subreddits were banned for repeat copyright violations. That’s more than double the current numbers in both categories.

Notable Refusals and Fair Use

In addition to these headline figures, Reddit’s transparency report flags several takedown requests it declined to act on.

For example, someone representing an Indian religious leader filed a takedown notice targeting an AI-animated video that showed them being showered with money, paired with a post title hinting at greed. Reddit didn’t take action, characterizing it as fair use.

Another fair use call involved a mobile app developer who tried to take down a post sharing a screenshot of the app’s source code. Since the post was meant to warn that the app was quietly sharing user data without permission, Reddit refused to remove it.

Notable Examples

The examples Reddit shared are meant to illustrate that the company doesn’t take down content blindly, but that it makes fair use calls when it sees fit.

Some of the granted removals are also worth a callout. Reddit highlights, for example, that it removed multiple posts that shared social media recruitment videos for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These posts were taken down because they used music from MGMT without the band’s permission, as was widely reported in the media last year.

Reddit’s full breakdown, including notable government and law enforcement requests, is available in the report linked below.

—

A copy of Reddit’s H2 2025 transparency report is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Horizontal Stabilizers [xkcd.com]

04:00 AM

Flock’s Sales Pitch Included Recordings Of Kids’ Gymnastic Classes [Techdirt]

Flock Safety’s reputation is in tatters, thanks in large part to its own actions. First sold as a high-tech add-on for homeowners’ associations and gated communities, it soon spread to law enforcement agencies and the cities that employ them. Promising plenty of access to an existing network of privately-owned cameras, Flock insinuated — if not actually stated as much — that cities buying its systems would have access to recordings and ALPR records gathered elsewhere in the nation.

That has largely proven to be true. Law enforcement officers with access to Flock’s camera network have used it to do things like track the movements of a Texas woman who was seeking an abortion and allowing federal officers to hunt down migrants to detain and deport.

Flock has been so bad on the PR front that national surveillance powerhouse Ring pulled the plug on its fledgling partnership with Flock following backlash to its heartwarming-except-for-all-the-dystopia Super Bowl ad.

Even before the Big Game debacle, Flock had been shedding customers. The private sector still seems as interested as ever, but cities were either turning down Flock’s overtures or terminating their contracts with the surveillance camera company.

Flock still can’t get out of its own way, as Jason Koebler reports for 404 Media:

Residents of an Atlanta suburb have been rocked by the revelation that sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.

While I can understand parents might appreciate cameras being used to protect their kids, they likely never expected that footage of their kids (sometimes clad in revealing clothing) would be used as a sales tool by Flock Safety.

In addition to Flock employees having access to these cameras and recordings, Flock (and its local law enforcement partners) have apparently been sharing this with hundreds of other government agencies. That’s what Dunwoody, Georgia resident Jason Hunyar discovered via records requests and an examination of information made available by Flock itself.

At the 3/23 city council meeting, Lt. Fecht told the public and the city council that only two external agencies (Brookhaven and Chamblee) can view our liveview cameras and that ‘anything liveview is definitely strictly reviewed and on a case by case’ basis’.

The city’s own audit logs prove otherwise. From the data in this file, just since the start of 2025, 1,271 external agencies have been granted permission to view live streams. 358 external agencies have been granted access to record these streams.

We don’t know who else has been accessing this footage, but the data makes it clear certain Flock sales reps and officials are extremely interested in footage of people in pools, gymnastic classes, and fitness centers.

One Flock employee, Randy Gluck, who lives in Raleigh and is a business development manager for their 911 products, was granted live-view access to our cameras. He looked at 54 cameras, with very strange patterns such as clicking through 5 traffic cameras on July 21st last year before settling on the Dunwoody Library camera. The Flock data does not tell us when he stopped watching that footage, but he didn’t look at anything else for two hours.

Two days later, Randy clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.

[…]

This brings me to Bob Carter – Vice President of Strategic Relations and Business Development for Flock. Bob spends a lot of time looking through both our live footage and recorded footage. Just since the beginning of last year, he has done this 185 times.

Bob also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 – Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC [Jewish Community Center].

A lengthy apology for all of this was given to the Jewish Community Center by none other than Flock CEO Garrett Langley. And while it’s nice to see an apology being offered, the apology doesn’t include any promises not to do this same sort of thing elsewhere, much less address the very real concerns that a number of Flock Safety employees have unfettered access to live cameras and recorded footage.

“You may have seen that questions have been raised about Flock employees’ access to security cameras near MJCCA property. While there is a lot of misinformation propagated by some of the voices making these allegations, I want to be direct and apologize for our poor judgement.”

[…]

“Because of our relationship with Dunwoody PD as a development partner–meaning we had explicit permission from Dunwoody to use their Flock system for both testing (for product improvement) and demonstration–Flock employees did occasionally access Dunwoody’s devices for those purposes,” Langley added. “I recognize that the choice to use MJCCA, rather than parts of the city, was a poor one on our part. I am cognizant of the additional, well-founded sensitivity of the Jewish community to security concerns at this time. Therefore, I would like to extend a formal apology to you and the entire MJCCA community for this poor decision. Candidly, it is because of the very real security concerns the MJCCA community is feeling that I am so proud of our partnership, and those with Jewish organizations across the country.”

While Flock management is apparently angry that some of its employees are now being called “child predators” following the publication of these access logs, it’s apparently uninterested in curbing access or installing guidelines that might deter questionable viewing habits in the future.

As for the city itself, it doesn’t seem to care that many residents are opposed to further Flock camera use based on what’s been uncovered here. The state’s attorney general took time from his busy running-for-governor schedule to praise Flock and the mayor of Dunwoody for their continued partnership.

When something like this can’t deter cities from continuing to do business with Flock, it makes the allegedly heartfelt apology issued by the company’s CEO look a lot less heartfelt. This isn’t someone offering contrition and promise to do better to a potential customer. This is someone saying the sort of stuff that sounds like contrition but is ultimately meaningless because neither Flock nor the city government actually care what the general public thinks of them.

Daily Deal: Adobe Lightroom 1-Year Subscription [Techdirt]

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Trump’s AI Oversight Plan Is Everything VCs Claimed To Hate About Biden’s Plan — Only Worse [Techdirt]

A key takeaway of the Trump II admin is that they came in declaring a whole bunch of things to be stupid and worth ripping apart, only to later realize how important and structurally necessary those things were, and then rush to recreate them in a much sloppier, worse version. Now they’re doing it with AI policy.

As you may recall, under Biden, there was a push to get the frontier AI model companies to agree to do some voluntary testing in association with the government, to make sure that at least someone was looking over how some of the most powerful models might do bad things. Eventually, the administration worked out an agreement with OpenAI and Anthropic to give the newly established U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (USAISI) (a part of NIST) early access to frontier models for some basic standardized testing. You can see an example of the testing results on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 released a few months after that model was already on the market.

Not really a huge deal, but there was some grumbling and concerns among some that the U.S. government really shouldn’t be in the business of reviewing AI models. But some folks completely lost their minds about this. Notably, some of the top VCs in Silicon Valley, such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Andreessen suggested that the Biden approach to regulating AI (which, again, was incredibly light touch and the product of many, many months of negotiations between AI supporters and skeptics) “would impose tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”

Around that time, both Andressen and Horowitz went all in for Donald Trump, citing Biden’s supposedly awful approach to AI (and cryptocurrency) as a key reason. To this day, if you hear either of them talk about this (as they seem to do on every podcast they can join), they repeatedly make extreme claims about how the Biden administration was out to destroy American AI innovation and (phew!) only Donald Trump has brought back sane policies.

Indeed, one of Trump’s first orders of business on Day 1 was to revoke Biden’s policy on AI safety reviews.

However, as we’ve been chronicling, it’s not as if the Trump administration has had any real coherent policy plan on AI. He sure claimed to have a plan, but much of it seemed to actually be focused on culture war bullshit about stopping “woke” AI from existing (which sure sounds like a suppression of speech, but alas). And then, when Pete Hegseth’s lackeys started throwing a shit fit that Anthropic wouldn’t let them use its tools to do mass surveillance on Americans, the admin declared Anthropic woke, and sought to destroy the company.

As we keep warning, the tech bros and VCs who embraced Trump’s version of MAGA fascism in the belief that through him they’d get the regulatory utopia they were hoping for were so obviously going to have the rug pulled out from under them.

And now we’re at that time for the latest rug pull. According to the NY Times, the Trump administration is planning to demand that they get to pre-vet all new AI models:

The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.

Oh. A formal government review process for new AI models? That seems more stringent and compliance-oriented than the voluntary setup that the Biden admin had created.

Also, with the Biden admin, the process involved a lot of careful deliberation and building out the capabilities within USAISI within NIST (a widely-trusted agency involved in setting technical standards). It appears the Trump admin version will be… a bit different and less well thought out:

Officials said that if the administration moved ahead with vetting A.I. models, the working group would help determine the agencies that would help with that effort. With no federal agency responsible for all government cybersecurity work, some officials said having the N.S.A., the White House Office of the National Cyber Director and the director of national intelligence oversee the model review was the best way to proceed.

So, we went from a voluntary, fairly light touch program under the Biden admin, where a bunch of tech standards nerds do a pretty straightforward safety review of models, with no further enforcement mechanisms… to one in which potentially the NSA and the intelligence community now gets early access to AI models with some sort of ability to approve or reject them.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters: everything.

Meanwhile, just recently Marc Andreessen was going on podcasts talking about how happy he is that Biden’s “ruinous” federal attacks on AI are now gone and unlikely to return. Want to try again, Marc?

Look, this was always going to be the result. This is not to say that Biden’s AI policies were good. They weren’t. In typical Biden fashion there were too many competing voices in the room and so the eventually policy outcome was kinda meh. It would not have been my preferred approach. But it was hardly ruinous, let alone a kind of “tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”

But, as we’ve pointed out over and over again, even if you’re able to get on Trump’s good side, MAGA-style fascism is never good for you for very long. Sure you can try to cash out while the getting is good, but eventually that kind of fascism always fails. It’s simply unsustainable, and in the hands of a bunch of incompetent Trump courtiers, eventually it was always going to turn into some sort of effort to control and mold companies towards Trump and his cronies’ interests.

The end result here: we have a way worse version. Just as some of us have been warning about and predicting all along.

Amusingly, the author of Trump’s original AI policy, Dean Ball, wrote in his newsletter just before the NY Times released their article that:

the current trajectory of federal frontier AI governance is worse than the direction of AI policy under the Biden administration…

Gosh. Who could have possibly predicted that an administration full of incompetents, hangers-on, and power-hungry, mediocre, ignorant bros who want to pretend they’re the masters of the universe would fuck this one up?

Yeah, look, maybe next time, instead of embracing obvious fascism, just deal with the fact that sometimes within normal democratic structures you get bad policies you disagree with, rather than deciding we need to set fire to the constitutional order and the institutions that made American innovation so successful.

Hopefully, we can bring some of that back before it’s too late, so that next time, people like Marc Andreessen don’t set American innovation on fire just because the Biden admin hoped that people would check to make sure AI models were a bit safe.

12:00 AM

The best year [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that you would be reincarnated into the soul and body of someone on Earth, 25 years old, at random.

You won’t know what you know now, you’ll simply live their life.

What year would you choose?

Since it’s random, it’s not about picking the best year to be among the wealthiest 1% (only a hundred-to-one chance) or even to be a US citizen (3% chance).

You might pick an era long ago, knowing that you would likely live half as long, but without a drumbeat of media stress and anxiety…

Or you could pick a year without the black plague or civil war, and with useful medical and community innovations…

What year gives you the best odds of living what you think of as a good life? Not just that year, but the years that follow…

It forces us to consider entitlement, hope, possibility and what matters. And it’s not a bad way to set an agenda.

Congrats Everyone: U.S. Now Ranked 64th In Global Press Freedom [Techdirt]

Good news if you really enjoy corporatism, autocracy, propaganda and a violently misinformed electorate!

The U.S. has fallen to sixty-fourth place (now below Ukraine) in the annual Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. As corrupt, oligarch-coddled authoritarians the world over continue to enjoy their moment in the sun, journalism (aka the “enemy of the people”) continues to be violently disassembled by a lazy coalition of fascist ideology and corporatism.

From the latest report (see the full interactive index):

“For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.”

The study notes that in 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorized as “good.” A quarter century later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.

In the U.S., Trump-friendly oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are gobbling up the remnants of dying traditional media and newer social media platforms alike, keen on turning both into oligarch and autocrat friendly agitprop machines. All while Trump destroys whatever was left of public media, and endlessly harasses companies that platform basic journalism and comedy.

At the same time, journalism layoffs continue to be rampant at the hands of corporate media giants dead set on destroying whatever was left of media consolidation limits, public interest reporting, and even archival and journalistic history. The result is a lazy, ad-driven, badly automated engagement ouroborus where anything serving the public interest is a distant and fleeting consideration.

The better performers in the index include Norway, Finland (where they teach kids media literacy and how to identify propaganda starting at the age of three), Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. While decidedly smaller with vast differences, such countries have strange perks like functional public media and an operational social safety net not yet hollowed out by grotesque levels of corruption.

From the study:

“In the United States (which ranks 64th out of 180 countries and territories) journalists who were already fighting against economic headwinds and dealing with a crisis of public trust—among other challenges—now also contend with President Donald Trump’s systematic weaponisation of state institutions, including funding cuts to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting disfavoured journalists and media outlets.”

It can, of course, always get worse. Autocracies start by consolidating media and turning established outlets in to autocratic agitprop bullhorns, but ultimately move on to dominating or destroying whatever’s left of independent journalism through legal harassment and ultimately murder.

There are paths out from under this, but it requires a lot of coordinated efforts the U.S. has historically had an allergy to. Including restoring antitrust reform and imposing not just consolidation limits but diversity ownership requirements. It would also help to drive creative new funding models for journalism, dramatically reshape media literacy policy, and aggressively support real publicly-funded media freed from corporate influence, historically a close ally to maintaining a functioning democracy.

Pluralistic: The three armies fighting for the post-American world (05 May 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

The three armies fighting for the post-American world: Hippies, investors and hawks.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: NK dictator's son v Tokyo Disneyland; Mainstream press and Bushies v Colbert; Taliban v Pakistan's first McDonald's; Norwegian sovereign wealth fund v exec compensation; Copyright v cheerleader uniforms; Dishwashers are Iphones.
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Colophon: All the rest.

The three armies fighting for the post-American world (permalink)

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.

Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.

This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.

But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations – the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies – are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.

But I'm much more interested in the international coalitions that are forming to fight Trump. It started with my longstanding fight for a good internet, free from surveillance, extraction and manipulation, the three evils inherent to the business models of America's shitty, enshittifying tech companies.

Under normal circumstances, you'd expect tech companies in other countries to capitalize on the fact that America exports its obviously defective tech products around the world. As Jeff Bezos often reminds his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." Whether it's Apple taking a 30% margin on iPhone payments, Apple and Meta creaming 51 cents off every ad dollar, Amazon harvesting 50-60% from every platform seller, or inkjet printer companies marking up the colored water you use to print your grocery list by 25 quattuordecillion percent, there's a ton of opportunities to disrupt these comfortable ex-disruptors.

But no one does that, because the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into enacting an "anticircumvention" law that makes it a crime to modify America's tech exports. The quid pro quo for this? Free trade with the USA – and tariffs for any country that didn't fall into line. Well, they all fell into line, and Trump tariffed them anyway.

That means that America's tech giants' margins are now everyone else's opportunity. The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers. A year ago, no country could afford to allow a company headquartered in its borders to get into this business, lest they be clobbered with tariffs. Today, any country that isn't thinking about this is a sucker that will end up buying these tools from another country that gets there first.

This means that digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum for 25 years), suddenly have a new ally in the fight against enshittified tech products. Today, there are people who want to help you protect your pocketbook and your privacy, but not because they believe in human rights – rather, because they want to get really, really rich. They see Big Tech's margin as their opportunity.

But it's not just entrepreneurs and activists who want a post-American internet – we have a third member of our coalition: national security hawks. Trump wants to steal Greenland. He wants to steal Alberta. He wants to steal all the oil in Venezuela. He wants to interfere in foreign elections to keep his dictator cronies in office, lest they lose power and find themselves facing prison. And when Trump's allies do face justice, he wants to fire the judges who dare hold these corrupt, powerful men to account.

So when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address.

The ICC was just a warmup: Trump did the same thing to the Brazilian high court judge who sentenced the dictator Jair Bolsonaro to prison for attempting a coup after he lost his re-election bid, having presided over a term of gross misrule.

All of this has inflamed concerns within every (former) US ally's national security establishment. These people all understand that Trump doesn't need to roll tanks to take over their countries: he can just brick their key ministries, major firms, and households. He doesn't need to send an army to steal Greenland, he can just shut down Denmark and cut off the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic and ferociously strong black licorice.

Combine the natsec hawks; the economic development wonks, entrepreneurs and investors; and the privacy and digital and human rights activists, and you've got a hell of an anti-Trump coalition around the world, all pulling together to build the post-American internet, a disenshittified and enshittification-resistant internet built on international digital public goods and running on servers outside of the USA:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

But this coalition isn't limited to the post-American internet – you'll find a coalition much like it in every place where Comrade Trump is calling forth a post-American world. That's the shape of the coalition that's winning Trump's war on fossil fuels: climate activists (hippies), electrification manufacturers and installers (businesses) and national security hawks who don't want to get hormuzed:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

I'm not as plugged into the other areas where Trump has dismantled US hegemony, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a coalition much like this one is popping up in the countries where Trump and Musk doged the public health system into oblivion. The global south is full of countries that signed up to enforce US agricultural and pharmaceutical patents and US restrictions on birth control and abortion in exchange for the food-aid and health-aid that Elon Musk and his merry band of broccoli-haired brownshirts killed. It's easy to imagine that reproductive rights and health justice advocates in those countries are now on the same side as investors who'd like to get into business selling generic pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs, and that they're being backed by people worried that their country's food and health sovereignty are at risk unless they hasten the transition to a post-American world.

I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Can Investors Trust AI Sales Figures? https://archive.is/20260502194551/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-investors-trust-ai-sales-figures-c60c46bf#selection-562.0-562.1
Hysteresis and Selection in the Rise of Fascism: The ‘Ordinary Men’ of the Nazi Party https://www.nber.org/papers/w35120
The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/
Unauthorized Bread graphic novel cover https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55248071321/in/dateposted/
Aftermath: Oil Execs Thrill to Higher Profits From War https://prospect.org/2026/05/04/aftermath-oil-execs-thrill-to-higher-profits-from-war/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago North Korean dictator's son arrested trying to sneak into Tokyo Disneyland https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/japan-is-said-to-detain-son-of-north-korean-leader.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on good design https://memex.craphound.com/2001/05/03/great-illustrated-bruce-sterling-rant/

#20yrsago Mainstream press: Colbert wasn’t funny at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, so we ignored him https://web.archive.org/web/20070207014019/http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/03/correspondents/index_np.html

#20yrsago Bush and cronies livid about Colbert’s White House gig https://web.archive.org/web/20060615113045/https://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060501/1whwatch.htm0

#20yrsago Identity thief rips off 3-week-old baby https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=155878&page=1

#20yrsago Network neutrality – why it matters, and how do we fix it? https://web.archive.org/web/20060507215106/http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/

#15yrsago Federal judge: open WiFi doesn’t make you liable for your neighbors’ misdeeds https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/after-botched-child-porn-raid-judge-sees-the-light-on-ip-addresses/

#10yrsago Taliban condemn Pakistan city’s first McDonald’s: “we don’t even consider it as a food.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mcdonald-s-opens-quetta-pakistan-taliban-isn-t-lovin-it-n564651

#10yrsago Norway’s titanic sovereign wealth fund takes a stand against executive pay https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36185925

#10yrsago TSA lines grow to 3 hours, snake outside the terminals, with no end in sight https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/business/airport-security-lines.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

#10yrsago Inside a Supreme Court case on cheerleader uniforms, a profound question about copyright https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/supreme-court-to-hear-copyright-fight-over-cheerleader-uniforms/

#5yrsago Dishwashers have become Iphones https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/
Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Tuesday 2026-05-05

02:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 殺 [Kanji of the Day]

殺

✍10

小5

kill, murder, butcher, slice off, split, diminish, reduce, spoil

サツ　サイ　セツ

ころ.す　-ごろ.し　そ.ぐ

殺害 (さつがい) — killing
自殺 (じさつ) — suicide
殺人 (さつじん) — murder
殺し (ころし) — murder
殺到 (さっとう) — rush
必殺技 (ひっさつわざ) — killer technique
殺人事件 (さつじんじけん) — murder case
殺人未遂 (さつじんみすい) — attempted murder
殺傷 (さっしょう) — killing and wounding
殺す (ころす) — to kill

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 偏 [Kanji of the Day]

偏

✍11

中学

partial, side, left-side radical, inclining, biased

ヘン

かたよ.る

偏見 (へんけん) — prejudice
偏り (かたより) — deviation
偏頭痛 (へんずつう) — migraine
偏重 (へんじゅう) — attaching too much importance to
偏食 (へんしょく) — unbalanced diet
偏在 (へんざい) — uneven distribution
偏る (かたよる) — to lean (to one side)
偏屈 (へんくつ) — narrow-minded
偏愛 (へんあい) — favoritism
偏向 (へんこう) — propensity

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

01:00 PM

Trump Does An RFK Jr.: Fires Entire 22 Member Board Of The National Science Foundation [Techdirt]

The Trump administration’s war on science has been a furious one. Be it deep cuts to scientific research, policies that ignore scientific research, or the appointment of deeply unscientific people to lead scientific cabinet positions, it seems that Trump thinks that knowledge is the enemy.

You will recall how RFK Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP vaccination panel last summer. It became obvious in the aftermath why he did so, after installing a cadre of anti-vaxxers to replace them and moving to shift immunization policy away from vaccines at the federal level. Trump appears to have taken a page from Kennedy’s playbook, as he recently terminated the entire board of the National Science Foundation days ago.

All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email on Friday. The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the president and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.

Members received a two-sentence email saying that, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.”

The post is filled with commentary from the board members and others pointing out that this leaves America with a gaping hole of leadership from a scientific advisory standpoint. The NSB advises both the Executive and Legislative branches. Trump has also nominated Jim O’Neill, an investor, to be the next Director of NSF. There is speculation that this move was done as a way to clear the field for O’Neill to replace them with hand-picked members that will further his tech bro agenda. He also already works for the federal government as Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of HHS.

But maybe the explanation for the timing here is much more simple: Trump may have caught wind of a forthcoming NSB report about America falling behind in scientific research.

Multiple dismissed members believe the timing was deliberate, as the board was finalizing a report highlighting a widening U.S.–China gap in research and development spending. The report addresses areas central to Trump’s stated priorities, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the Moon race, but underscores lagging U.S. investment. Critics suggest the administration may seek a board more aligned with short-term political goals rather than long-term, exploratory research.

Now that sounds more like the Donald Trump I’ve come to know. This is less likely to be 4D chess at work then he simply didn’t want to be embarrassed by this report. There’s a simple test for whether that was part of the impetus here. If that same report does get finalized eventually and gets released, then it wasn’t. If we never get that report, it probably was. Simple.

But wasn’t isn’t simple is going to be digging ourselves out of the scientific debt that Trump is placing upon the country. If knowledge is power, as the saying goes, then America is less powerful today than it was before this administration.

11:00 AM

“Let the States Decide Abortion!” My Ass [The Status Kuo]

On Friday, a Fifth Circuit panel ruling from Louisiana ordered that mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication, can no longer be prescribed by telehealth or delivered by mail anywhere in the country. That includes states that have moved to protect abortion access since the Dobbs decision came down in 2022. Patients who want mifepristone must now show up in person to receive it, even in areas where abortion is fully legal and telehealth has been the standard of care for years. That is particularly burdensome for patients without easy access to clinics.

The panelists themselves acknowledged that their ruling would have “as a practical matter, a nationwide effect.”

The Supreme Court and the GOP have long insisted that overturning Roe was about returning the question of abortion to the states. Critics have argued that this was just a ploy, and their real target was always a nationwide ban. The Fifth Circuit’s mifepristone ruling takes a big step toward that.

This morning, in a single sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito without further context, the Supreme Court paused, at least temporarily, the effect of the ruling until at least May 11 while it considers the arguments of the parties.

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What the panel did

On Friday, the panel issued an order reinstating a requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person at a clinic by blocking the 2023 FDA rules that had allowed the medication to be prescribed via telehealth and delivered by mail. The telehealth and mail delivery of mifepristone has been in place since 2021.

The impact of the order would be significant. Medication abortion now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. More than one in four abortions nationwide were provided through telehealth in the first half of 2025. That’s up from fewer than one in ten in 2022. While mifepristone itself remains approved, the distribution system has been effectively shut down.

The panel opinion was written by Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee who was previously general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt (Trump) and Judge Leslie Southwick (George W. Bush).

The Dobbs promise and what became of it

Duncan’s opinion is a dangerous one. It opens by quoting Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, for the proposition that the Supreme Court had “returned the regulation of abortion to the states.”

He then spends 18 pages imposing a nationwide rule that overrides the abortion policies of states across the country.

The ruling effectively would impose Louisiana’s position that “every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception” on the entire country. This is from a court whose jurisdiction covers only Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. California’s laws on the subject are beside the point, as are New York’s and other blue states. The Fifth Circuit has resolved the question for them.

In her Civil Discourse newsletter, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance challenged the “let the states decide” point directly when Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district judge in Texas, first launched an attack on medication abortion in 2023. “That’s not the legal landscape the Supreme Court said it was creating when it ended 50 years of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case,” Vance observed. “When the Court decided Dobbs, it said decisions about whether and under what circumstances abortion should be legal would be left up to each state.”

Friday’s ruling is the clearest illustration yet of the distance between that promise and the current reality.

Meet Kacsmaryk: the judge the right always shops for

The jurist responsible for creating much of the legal infrastructure that led to Friday’s ruling is U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas.

Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee and former lawyer for the conservative First Liberty Institute. He was confirmed in 2019 over Democratic opposition citing his poor record on LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive access. Because of how the Northern District of Texas is set up, litigants who file in the Amarillo division are virtually guaranteed to draw Kacsmaryk as their judge. It’s a feature, as Joyce Vance observed, that anti-abortion legal strategists have deliberately exploited.

In April 2023, Kacsmaryk issued a 67-page ruling purporting to void the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, effective across the entire nation. The opinion drew criticism from legal analysts for its factual errors and ideological framing, including the use of medically inaccurate terminology and a false claim that abortion dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

The Supreme Court stayed Kacsmaryk’s ruling and, in June 2024, unanimously rejected the underlying case. But it did so only on so-called “standing” grounds (more on that later), holding that the plaintiffs—an anti-abortion medical coalition called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—had no legal right to bring the suit. The merits of the arguments were never reached.

As Vladeck observed, the Court’s unexplained 2023 stay “left room for the Fifth Circuit to hold that there was standing” in a future case brought by different plaintiffs with a more direct injury claim.

It turns out, Louisiana was already preparing one.

The lawsuit reloaded

With Judge Kacsmaryk’s case kicked aside on standing grounds, the movement filed again, this time with better plaintiffs. As legal journalist Chris Geidner reported, in January 2025 Kacsmaryk allowed conservative states to file an amended complaint that dropped the most legally vulnerable arguments while preserving their core demand requiring in-person dispensing of mifepristone.

Louisiana had also filed its own federal lawsuit against the FDA in October 2025. The state’s theory was that under the Biden administration, the FDA had “attempted to undermine Dobbs by facilitating the mailing of mifepristone into every pro-life state.” The federal government’s decision to ease access to a drug with a 25-year safety record was, in the state’s view, a political act requiring judicial correction.

The district court judge assigned to the Louisiana case, U.S. District Judge David C. Joseph, another Trump appointee, agreed that Louisiana was likely to succeed on the merits. That was alarming, but in the end, he declined to immediately block the FDA rule, citing the agency’s ongoing safety review and the nationwide “reliance interests,” discussed below, that had built up over years of the policy being in effect. Judge Joseph wrote that given “the length of time the 2023 [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies] has been in effect, reliance interests on that scheme throughout the nation, [and] the sweeping effect any remedy would have across states with differing abortion laws,” he would defer to the agency’s review process.

Louisiana appealed. And on Friday the Fifth Circuit declined to share Judge Joseph’s restraint.

What the Fifth Circuit ignored about nationwide bans

As Geidner noted, the Fifth Circuit opinion quotes Joseph’s own acknowledgment of the ruling’s scope and the impact it would have: “It is true, as the district court noted, that a § 705 stay ‘would, as a practical matter, have a nationwide effect.’” But then it issued an order with no meaningful analysis of what it would mean for the tens of millions of people living in states where the policy had been operating without incident.

The “reliance interests” of patients refer to the fact that millions of people have in good faith believed the law allows the use of telehealth and mail delivery of mifepristone and acted on that understanding. This includes not only patients, but providers, pharmacies, and manufacturers across all 50 states. These reliance interests appeared briefly in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling—and were summarily thrust aside.

The opinion was at pains, however, to address Louisiana’s “sovereign interest in its laws protecting the unborn.” It treated the state’s desire to extend its abortion ban’s reach beyond its own borders as a recognizable constitutional interest. As Vladeck observed, the ruling “pays no attention to the other side of what lawyers call the “equities.” Addressing that side would require the court to consider the harm, not just to the state of Louisiana, but to people in states where abortions are generally legal, from an order that suddenly imposes an in-person dispensation requirement.

The ruling also addressed the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in CASA, which had limited the use of nationwide injunctions. But its response raises more questions. Yes, CASA restricted what courts could order on a nationwide basis, but this order was issued under the Administrative Procedure Act, making it a different category of remedy in the panel’s view.

That creates an exception wide enough to drive a garbage truck through. And as Vladeck noted, the distinction “just leaves nationwide relief available; it does nothing to explain why nationwide relief is appropriate in this case.”

Danco goes to the Supreme Court

Within hours of the Friday ruling, mifepristone manufacturer Danco Laboratories filed an emergency motion asking the Fifth Circuit to pause its own order while the company appealed. The Fifth Circuit did not respond. So on Saturday, Danco went directly to the Supreme Court, joined by another mifepristone manufacturer, GenBioPro. This morning, on Monday, the Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling while it considers the case.

Danco’s filing argued that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling “is not an application of neutral principles” but rather “an abdication of lower courts’ duty to adhere to decisions of” the Supreme Court itself. It then posed three practical questions about the disruption the ruling had already created: What happens to patients who arrived at pharmacies this weekend with prescriptions written before the ruling? What should a patient do who cannot secure an in-person appointment immediately? What are Danco’s legal obligations as the drug’s sponsor?

“The resulting chaos for patients, providers, pharmacies, and the drug-regulatory system,” the lawyers wrote, “is a quintessential irreparable harm.”

Danco’s lawyers also raised a threshold legal question that could end the case before the merits are ever reached—the very same question that ended the last one. Under the Constitution, a party can only sue in federal court if it can show a concrete, direct injury from the thing it’s challenging. This requirement is called “standing,” and it exists to prevent courts from becoming venues for policy disputes by parties who aren’t actually harmed.

In the first mifepristone case, the Supreme Court noted that the anti-abortion medical groups who brought the challenge consisted of doctors who allegedly objected to the drug on moral grounds. But it unanimously held that these doctors had no actual injury. They were not required to prescribe mifepristone. They were not required to do anything differently because of it. They simply didn’t like it, which the Court found was not enough.

Louisiana’s claimed injury is different, but Danco’s lawyers argue it has the same problem. The Fifth Circuit grounded the state’s standing partly in an “injury” of $92,000 in Medicaid costs it attributed to emergency care for two women who had complications from out-of-state mifepristone in 2025. Louisiana argued that easier access to the drug causes more abortions in the state, which in turn causes more complications, which in turn costs Louisiana money.

Danco’s filing pointed out that the Supreme Court had already rejected this kind of “chain of causation” reasoning when it reviewed Kacsmaryk’s original ruling. The idea that “FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone may cause downstream economic injuries“ does not satisfy the constitutional requirement of a direct, traceable harm. Louisiana, Danco argued, is not required to “prescribe or use mifepristone“ or to “do anything or refrain from doing anything“ as a result of FDA’s actions, just as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine plaintiffs were not. Whether the Supreme Court agrees will determine whether this case survives at all.

“It bears emphasis how unprecedented the Fifth Circuit’s order is,” Danco noted. “Never before has a federal court purported to immediately enjoin a several years’ old drug approval; restrict a distribution system for that drug that manufacturers, providers, patients, and pharmacies have all been using for years; or reinstate conditions that FDA determined do not meet the mandatory statutory criteria.”

What comes next

The case is now before the Supreme Court, which, as discussed, preserved mifepristone access in 2024, but only by ruling that the challengers in that case lacked standing to sue. At the time, it passed on reviewing the underlying restrictions, meaning the Court never answered the central question of whether the FDA’s actions were legal and authorized.

That question is now back. Can a federal court override the FDA’s scientific judgment about drug safety to enforce one state’s abortion ban across the entire country?

Vladeck offers a specific caution about what the Supreme Court should do differently this time. In 2023, when the Court paused Kacsmaryk’s original ruling, it did so without explanation. It never actually said anything about whether the challenge to mifepristone had any legal merit. That silence, Vladeck argues, left the door open for Louisiana to file a new case with different plaintiffs and run the same play again. “The Court will be impelled to say more than nothing,” he writes, “so that the message doesn’t get lost again.” A ruling that simply dismisses this case on standing grounds, without addressing whether these restrictions are legally valid, risks the same thing happening a third time.

The Trump White House’s posture makes this harder. Throughout this litigation, the regime has declined to affirmatively defend the FDA’s 2023 rule that allowed mifepristone to be mailed, even while simultaneously conducting its own review of the drug’s regulations. That review was widely understood to be laying the groundwork for imposing further restrictions. In this upside-down world, the executive branch responsible for defending the FDA in court has little apparent interest in winning.

This brings us back to Dobbs. The majority in that case held that abortion was a matter for democratic resolution at the state level and insisted that the Court was returning the question to the people and their elected representatives. Three years later, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit has issued a ruling on medication abortion access that governs all 50 states, on the basis of a lawsuit brought by one of them. The justices who wrote Dobbs said the Court was getting out of the business of setting national abortion policy. But now the Fifth Circuit has stepped right back into it.

It will be worth watching whether the justices who decided Dobbs acknowledge how national abortion policy is now being set by federal panels bent on protecting the interests of anti-abortion red states.

08:00 AM

The Open Social Web Needs Section 230 To Survive [Techdirt]

If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshittified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off one by one without the protections offered by 230.

The internet as we know it is built on Section 230, a law from the 90s that generally says internet users are legally responsible for their own speech — not the services hosting their speech. The purpose of 230 was to enable diverse forums for speech online, which defined the early internet. These scattered online communities have since been largely captured by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies that found profit in controlling your voice online. While critics are rightly concerned about this new corporate influence and surveillance, some look to diminishing Section 230 as the nuclear option to regain control.

The thing is, that would be a huge gift to Big Tech, and detrimental to our best shot at actually undermining corporate and state control of speech online.

Dethroning Big Tech

We’re fed up with legacy social media trapping us in walled gardens, where the world’s biggest companies like Google and Meta call the shots. Our communities, and our voices, are being held hostage as billionaires’ platforms surveil, betray, and censor us. We’re not alone in this frustration, and fortunately, people are collaborating globally to build another way forward: the Open Social Web.

This new infrastructure puts the public’s interest first by reclaiming the principles of interoperability and decentralization from the early internet. In short, it puts protocols over platforms and lets people own their connections with others. Whether you choose a Fediverse app like Mastodon or an ATmosphere app like Bluesky, your audience and community stay within reach. It’s a vision of social media akin to our lives offline: you decide who to be in touch with and how, and no central authority can threaten to snuff out those connections. It’s social media for humans, not advertisers and authoritarians.

Behind that vision is a beautiful mess of protocols bringing the open social media web to life. Each protocol is a unique language for applications, determining how and where messages are sent. While this means there is great variety to these projects, it also means everyone who spins up a server, develops an app, or otherwise hosts others’ speech has skin in the game when it comes to defending Section 230.

What exactly is Section 230?

Section 230 protects freedom of expression online by protecting US intermediaries that make the internet work. Passed in 1996 to preserve the new bubbling communities online, 230 enshrined important protections for free expression and the ability to block or filter speech you don’t want on your site. One portion is credited as the “26 words that created the internet”:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

In other words, this bipartisan law recognizes that speech online relies on intermediaries — services that deliver messages between users — and holding them potentially liable for any message they deliver would only stifle that speech. Intuitively, when harmful speech occurs, the speaker should be the one held accountable. The effect is that most civil suits against users and services based on others’ speech can quickly be dismissed, avoiding the most expensive parts of civil litigation.

Section 230 was never a license to host anything online, however. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims.

What Section 230 has enabled, however, is the freedom and flexibility for online communities to self-organize. Without the specter of one bad actor exposing the host(s) to serious legal threats, intermediaries can moderate how they see fit or even defer to volunteers within these communities.

Why the Open Social Web Needs Section 230

The superpower of decentralized systems like the Fediverse is the ability for thousands of small hosts to each shoulder some of the burdens of hosting. No single site can assert itself as a necessary intermediary for everyone; instead, all must collaborate to ensure messages reach the intended audience. The result is something superior to any one design or mandate. It is an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts, resilient to disruptions, and free to experiment with different approaches to community governance.

The open social web’s kryptonite though, is the liability participants can face as intermediaries. The greater the potential liability, the more interference from powerful interests in the form of legal threats, more monetary costs, and less space for nuance in moderation. And in practice, participants may simply stop hosting to avoid those risks. The end result is only the biggest and most resourced options can survive.

This isn’t just about the hosts in the Open Social Web, like Mastodon instances or Bluesky PDSes. In the U.S., Section 230’s protections extend to internet users when they distribute another person’s speech. For example, Section 230 protects a user who forwards an email with a defamatory statement. On the open social web, that means when you pass along a message to others through sharing, boosting, and quoting, you’re not liable for the other user’s speech. The alternative would be a web where one misclick could open you up to a defamation lawsuit.

Section 230 also applies to the infrastructure stack, too, like Internet service providers, content delivery networks, domain, and hosting providers. Protections even extend to the new experimental infrastructures of decentralized mesh networks.

Beyond the existential risks to the feasibility of indie decentralized projects in the United States, weakening 230 protections would also make services worse. Being able to customize your social media experience from highly curated to totally laissez-faire in the open social web is only possible when the law allows space for private experiments in moderation approaches. The algorithmically driven firehose forced on users by antiquated social media giants is driven by the financial interests of advertisers, and would only be more tightly controlled in a post-230 world.

Defending 230

Laws aimed at changing 230 protections put decentralized projects like the open social web in a uniquely precarious position. That is why we urge lawmakers to take careful consideration of these impacts. It is also why the proponents and builders of a better web must be vigilant defenders of the legal tools that make their work possible.

The open social web embodies what we are protecting with Section 230. It’s our best chance at building a truly democratic public interest internet, where communities are in control.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Section 702 Vote Pushed Back Another Six Weeks Following GOP’s ‘But With Cryptocurrency Ban’ Failure [Techdirt]

The administration isn’t exactly winning here. The GOP has been opposed to a clean reauthorization since its first brush with warrantless surveillance back during the Biden administration. GOP members weren’t upset that the FBI routinely abused the NSA’s Section 702 collections to access US persons’ communications… unless those communications happened to be theirs.

Despite their mostly-performative opposition, Section 702 was again given a clean reauthorization. This time around, the GOP seems even more reluctant to give these powers a pass, despite it being clear President Trump would like this to happen.

Trump’s interest is more selfish than most. While he too has been performatively critical of the surveillance that swept up some of his MAGA buddies during Biden’s term in office, he’d definitely like for his FBI and DOJ to be able to warrantlessly surveil Americans he doesn’t like. Since both entities are nothing more than willing enablers of Trump’s vindictive whims, allowing the FBI to warrantlessly access US persons’ communications probably sounds wonderful. And since it appears he doesn’t believe there will ever be a regime change, he has no qualms about extending these spy powers in perpetuity with zero modifications, including those ordered by FISA court judges.

Somehow, even his party loyalists are reluctant to appease him. Section 702 has been on the verge of expiration multiple times, with only the periodic placement on temporary life support keeping these powers from being relegated to history.

With the powers set to expire at the end of April, the GOP offered up something halfway between a Hail Mary and deliberate sabotage, as Politico reports. While the House did manage to pass a three-year extension of Section 702, GOP House members added a rider that ensures this particular version wouldn’t be greenlit by the Senate.

The Senate is unlikely to clear the House-passed extension, which will be sent over with an unrelated, permanent ban on the Federal Reserve’s ability to issue a digital currency attached.

That provision was included at the behest of ultraconservatives, but it is so divisive across the Capitol that it has stalled a major affordable housing package for months. Senate Majority Leader John Thune earlier this week warned that the digital currency ban was “not happening” as part of spy law renewal.

Whether this clause was meant to keep the government from competing with Trump’s private sector offerings or just there to deter the Fed from paying closer attention to cryptocurrency market hardly matters. When John Thune is giving it a preemptive thumbs down, it’s a non-starter.

The Senate, however, received this GOP-spiked can and has only managed to kick it a bit further down the road. While some cynicism is warranted, it also buys time for surveillance reform advocates to gather the information they need to push back against yet another clean re-authorization.

The Senate approved the punt by a voice vote Thursday afternoon before the House passed it under fast-track procedures on a 261-111 vote.

As part of a deal Senate leaders cut with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to speed up the extension’s passage ahead of the midnight deadline, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will send a letter telling the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the Justice Department to declassify an annual 702 court opinion within 15 days so it can be used as part of the negotiations.

This is not an unreasonable ask. The public has a right to know what the government thinks it can get away with under this surveillance power. What has always been pitched as a foreign-facing collection has been shown, for years, to be routinely accessed by Intelligence Community agencies for the sole purpose of accessing US persons’ communications without a warrant or even direct FISA court approval.

That an aggrieved Republican party may actually result in Section 702 reform is something that was never on anyone’s bingo card, especially since it’s usually been the same handful of Democratic party senators who have pushed back against these spy powers — something they have consistently done even when their own party has occupied the Oval Office.

Will reform actually happen this time? If history is any indication, a majority of Congressional reps will find some way to talk themselves out of their objections just in time to make it a problem for the next administration to solve. But there seems to be enough bipartisan opposition to a clean re-up to give reform a fighting chance.

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05:00 AM

The $16 Million Question: If Editing Harris Was ‘Election Interference,’ What Was Editing Trump? [Techdirt]

In late 2024, Donald Trump sued CBS for $10 billion claiming “election interference” because 60 Minutes had the audacity to (*gasp*) edit a Kamala Harris interview down for broadcast. The lawsuit was, on its face, ridiculous — editing interviews is protected First Amendment activity, the kind of editorial discretion that has been the entire premise of magazine-format television since the format existed. But CBS’s owners at Paramount needed FCC approval for their Skydance merger, and Trump controlled the FCC, so they paid $16 million to make the lawsuit go away. We covered that institutional cave at the time and called it what it was: a bribe dressed up as a legal settlement.

Now here we are, in 2026, and 60 Minutes has done an interview with Trump that they edited down from 40 minutes to 13. Sure enough, the editing made Trump sound way more coherent than he actually was.

Decoding Fox News did the tedious work of comparing what aired against the full transcript that CBS published, and the results are wild. When asked why so many people seem to want to kill him, Trump went on a meandering rant about transgender athletes and “men playing in women’s sports” — the kind of free-association nonsense that makes you wonder who’s actually running the country. CBS edited that out. You can read it here, though:

60 Minutes: Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?

Trump: So, I’ve said it and I’ve said it numerous times, and I actually, because of the position I’m in, I’ve done quite a bit of research into the word assassination. Terrible word. And they go after consequential presidents. They go after presidents that, do things. If you look at what I’ve done, we’ve turned this country around. We’ve taken a country that was actually a dead country. It was dying very rapidly, and it’s the hottest country anywhere in the world. We had a skirmish, a war, whatever you want to call it. With Venezuela, we won that very decisively. And we now have a great relationship with Venezuela. And it’s been a very profitable relationship. And we’re in Iran right now. Other presidents should have done it, but they never chose to do it. They should have. They made a terrible mistake by not doing it. It’s tougher now than it would have been ten years ago or even five years ago because, you know, thousands and thousands of missiles and everything else. And we didn’t do the B-2 bomber attack. That alone was a big deal. The killing of Soleimani, which I did in my first term, was a big deal. But when you’re a consequential when you do things, a lot of things and things that work out very well for our country. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, McKinley was assassinated. McKinley made the country very rich. People don’t realize it. Then Teddy Roosevelt went out and spent the money that was made by McKinley. But it was very consequential, actually. But he was assassinated. So,

60 Minutes: You mentioned, Mr. President, consequential. And your policies are also controversial. Is that part of it?

Trump: Well, I don’t think that way. I don’t think in terms of what they are. I just think of what they are for the country. For instance, I inherited the worst border we’ve ever had in the history of a country where 25 million people came in, 25 million people at least, and many of them were from hardcore criminals, and they were drug dealers, and they were from prisons. They emptied our prisons into our country. They have, mental institutions, insane asylums into our country. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say we have to move those people out, but we have and but it is from the standpoint you’re doing something and you’re doing something that’s good. Things like, men playing in women’s sports, I’m against it. Things like transgender for everyone. I’m against that. There’s so many things that I’m against. I don’t think they’re controversial. I think the other side is controversial, but I do a lot of things and I get things done. And, you know, we’re respected now as a country all over the world. And some people love that, but some people probably don’t.

That word salad that we’ve all become used to is mostly nonsense. It remains absolutely incredible that no one points out to the President of the United States that “migrants pleading asylum from violence” is not “coming from insane asylums.” He doesn’t seem to understand that.

60 Minutes… cut that entire segment out.

When asked about Cole Allen (who breached a first layer of security with weapons at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with the alleged intent to assassinate Trump) attending a “No Kings” protest, Trump’s actual answer included this gem:

Well the you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you. You know I’m not a king, I get it, I don’t laugh, I don’t, I, I see these No Kings which are funded just like the southern law was funded. You all that southern laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the southern law. That was a southern law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was, a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your ‘60 Minute’ episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on southern law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.

That’s the President of the United States repeatedly calling the Southern Poverty Law Center, against whom his DOJ has filed a highly questionable lawsuit, “southern law” and then just going pure word salad based on not even remotely understanding what SPLC did (or even what his own DOJ has accused them of doing). And, no, the bigoted “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville were not “funded by the southern law.”

This is a man who can’t understand basic concepts.

What part actually aired?

Well the, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.

Crisp, almost witty. A real “zinger.”

The rest of that word salad clipped to the dustbin of history.

And, of course, immediately after that he starts whining about 60 Minutes again. He goes on like this (none of which airs):

Trump: Do you think it’s pretty sad Norah?

60 Minutes: The allegations and the indictment.

Trump: There’re not just allegations.

60 Minutes: But it’s an indictment.

Trump: These facts okay. These are facts. I mean, they have checks to the two Klux Klan and many others, and then they’re saying how bad they are and blaming the Republican Party and Republicans. These are not just allegations, but go ahead.

60 Minutes: Well as you know sir, you’ve been accused of things and were able to go to a court of law and adjudicate them.

Trump: So yeah, it’s after five years. It’s it’s it takes you about five years.

60 Minutes: I do want to talk about that also.

Trump: I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening. And you paid me a lot of money, and you tried to pull one off. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing that you did. And you know, when you say, can we all get along? You can. But when people do things like that, or how about the BBC where the BBC has me? Actually, AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do. They’ve admitted they’re wrong. They just don’t know what to do. They actually have me making a major statement. And it wasn’t me. It was my face. It was my lips. My lips were perfectly in sync with the words I said. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. So

60 Minutes: I hear you Mr. President.

Trump: So then when you say, can you get along? I can get along with anybody. But if people are going to cheat, if people are going to be fake, you sort of don’t want to get along.

60 Minutes: On that. What do you say to people who are encouraging political violence or even cheering it on?

Trump: Well, I think the ones that are doing that are much more far left than far right, much more. When you see again, southern law, when you see some of the statements that are made there. So even when you say No Kings, that’s, that’s encouraging. You’re saying one of the things this guy said in his manifesto, what you didn’t read, you should have, is that he attended a No Kings rally along with not too many people, and probably it had an impact. You know, they get up and they say whatever they want. No, I’m against it. I think it’s terrible.

Did you get all that. It’s a bit confusing because everything he says is confusing, but when 60 Minutes’ Norah O’Donnell points out that the claims against SPLC (which, yes, Trump keeps calling “Southern Law”) are simply allegations, Trump insists they’re not. O’Donnell points out what Trump himself should recognize, given how often he’s been charged with crimes, that charges in a criminal case still have to be proven in a court, and Trump denies that (which is shocking on its own).

And then he shifts to the nonsense vexatious censorial SLAPP suits he files, including the one against CBS and 60 Minutes, and falsely claims that CBS paid him $38 million (it was $16 million) and says “because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening.”

Which, um, is literally the exact thing that 60 Minutes is doing here. In this interview. In not airing that part! The part that includes a demonstrably false claim about how much CBS paid.

Oh, and his claims about the BBC (also not aired!) are equally ridiculous and factually absurd. He is suing them, but nothing in the lawsuit is, as he claims, about AI. In the interview he says the following:

AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do.

But that’s not what the lawsuit says, and literally no one has accused the BBC of using AI. They simply showed two separate quotes, and the claim in the lawsuit was that doing so gave a false presumption that the two statements were said one after another when they were actually separated by many minutes.

In other words, it’s also a lawsuit about not liking the way a speech was edited. Not about AI. At all.

And 60 Minutes edited out him lying about it.

The editorial pattern is consistent throughout: 60 Minutes’ producers cut the parts where Trump sounded unhinged and kept the parts where he sounded like a slightly more normal politician answering questions.

This is, of course, exactly what 60 Minutes has always done with every politician they’ve ever interviewed. It’s the entire format. You sit someone down for 40 minutes or an hour, then you edit it down to ten to 15 minutes to fit the broadcast window, and you try to focus on the parts that actually make sense for television. This is television journalism, and it has worked this way since 60 Minutes premiered in 1968.

When CBS did this with Harris, plenty of people — including us — pointed out that this was just how the show works. The lawsuit was, as we noted at the time, a “blatant attack on free speech and the First Amendment, as editorial discretion is a protected right of news organizations.” Any first-year law student could tell you that. Hell anyone familiar with the First Amendment could tell you that. Trump’s own lawyers presumably knew it. The judge who would have eventually ruled on it would have known it.

But Trump didn’t need to win the lawsuit. He just needed CBS to care more about making the headache disappear than standing on principle. And because Paramount’s owners wanted their Skydance merger approved by Trump’s FCC and DOJ, they paid him $16 million to make it disappear.

60 Minutes edited Trump exactly the way they edited Harris — actually more aggressively, given how much rambling they had to compress — and they did it for exactly the same reason: because that’s what television journalism is. The full transcript exists. CBS published it themselves. Anyone can verify that the editing was extensive and that it consistently made Trump sound more coherent than he actually was.

So, it’s one of two things:

Either editing political interviews for broadcast is just part of how these shows work — protected by the First Amendment (in which case the Harris lawsuit was the frivolous nonsense we always said it was, and CBS paid $16 million to settle a baseless claim) — or it’s “election interference” worth $20 billion in damages (in which case CBS just committed it again, even more egregiously, and the DNC should be filing a similar suit).

You don’t get to have it both ways. Unless, of course, you’re Trump, MAGA media, or — apparently — CBS News itself.

Brian Beutler, over at Off Message, makes the case that the DNC should actually sue CBS for $20 billion, settle for $16 million, and force the network to confront its own hypocrisy:

What if [DNC boss] Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than it interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?

Beutler’s broader point — that Democrats consistently refuse to impose costs on bad-faith actors and thereby teach those actors there are no consequences for bad faith — is largely correct. And yes, there’s something satisfying about the thought experiment.

But the actual lawsuit would be a total disaster — because it would lose. Badly. Easily. Obviously. Just like Trump’s lawsuit should have lost. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion. A judge would dismiss it, probably quickly, and Republicans would immediately spin that dismissal as proof that the original Trump lawsuit had merit. “See? When the Democrats tried it, the courts saw right through it. But Trump’s case was so strong, CBS settled for $16 million.” The fact that this framing would be exactly backwards — that Trump’s case was settled because of regulatory extortion, not legal merit — would be lost in the noise.

You can’t fight a bad-faith propaganda operation by feeding it more propaganda fuel. The DNC suing would hand the GOP a winning narrative for free.

What CBS should be doing — what any media organization with a spine would do — is loudly defend the editing of the Trump interview as exactly what it is: standard journalism. They should be pointing to the published transcript and saying “yes, we edited this, here’s why, this is what we do, this is what we have always done, and it’s what we did with the Harris interview too. This is what the First Amendment protects us in doing.”

They should be using this moment to show everyone just how ridiculous the Harris lawsuit really was, and to make clear that the $16 million payment was a business decision driven by merger pressures, not an admission of journalistic wrongdoing. Otherwise Trump is just going to keep insisting, to CBS’s own reporters, that he has proof that they somehow treated him unfairly.

But they won’t. Because CBS, under its new ownership, has thoroughly learned the coward’s lesson that resistance is costly and capitulation is cheap. Bari Weiss now runs CBS News. The network that paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit about editing a leading politician is now in the business of editing Trump’s interviews to make him sound presidential — and the total silence from everyone who pretended to care about journalistic integrity during the Harris episode is telling.

Where is the Free Press exposé on this clear-cut case of “news distortion”? Where is the Ted Cruz hearing demanding accountability? Where is FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening to revoke CBS’s licenses for “election interference” or “news distortion” ahead of the 2026 midterms? Where is the $20 billion lawsuit from anyone, anywhere, claiming that CBS is putting its thumb on the scale by making the president sound less like a man losing his grip on reality?

We all know where they are. The only “principle” at play here was always, transparently, about leverage. Trump had leverage over CBS via the FCC. CBS folded. Now CBS uses that same editorial discretion to flatter Trump, and suddenly editorial discretion is fine again, actually.

This is institutional capitulation under an authoritarian government. CBS has editorial discretion. It’s well within their First Amendment rights to edit 60 Minutes in ways that flatter the person they paid the bribe to. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t call out the rank hypocrisy.

The reality is that the editing of this interview was, on its own merits, fine. Editing a 40-minute interview down to 13 minutes is what 60 Minutes does, even though I would argue cutting out much of his rambling hid parts that were genuinely newsworthy in favor of sanewashing the president. But that’s CBS’s editorial discretion. Bari Weiss and 60 Minutes are free to trash their own reputation by burnishing the President’s.

What’s not defensible is doing this now, after paying $16 million on the premise that doing this for Harris was somehow corrupt. CBS has put itself in a position where it cannot honestly defend its own editorial choices without acknowledging the settlement for the cowardice it was. In both cases CBS had perfectly defensible arguments for its edits. But in one case it capitulated. CBS should be forced to explain why.

But they’ll just say nothing. And Trump will say nothing, because he knows the editing helps him. And MAGA media will say nothing, because they only care about “news distortion” when it’s politically useful. And the rest of us will watch yet another major American institution demonstrate that it has no principles, only prices.

The $16 million was a down payment on every future editorial decision CBS makes about Donald Trump. And we just saw what that buys.

DSA-6247-1 lxd - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6247-1

04:00 AM

FL House GOP Roadblocks DeSantis’ Childhood Vaccine Requirements Repeal [Techdirt]

The anti-vaccine sugar rush that has infected some portions of the country, largely thanks to the profane appointment of RFK Jr. to head HHS, is incredibly frustrating. That makes it all the more important when the movement receives not just pushback when trying to enact absurd policy based on conspiracy theories, but specifically when that pushback comes from the same party engaging in the absurdity.

Earlier this year, flanked by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, announced that the state government was seeking to end all vaccine requirements for school children in the state. And, because Ladapo is a hack, he postured this move in the silliest way possible.

Ladapo said the Florida Department of Health would be working with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office to end all mandates in state law, at the event at Grace Christian School in Valrico, located just east of Tampa.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said of vaccine mandates.

Equating vaccine mandates to slavery may well be one of the dumbest analogies a human being has ever come up with. Vaccines save lives, prevent illness, and go a long way toward staving off the long term effects of many infectious diseases. Suggesting that any of that is akin to the slave trade reveals far more about the person making such a silly accusation than it does about our vaccination programs.

DeSantis, for his part, stated that some vaccine requirements could be removed immediately, while others would require state legislation. But the legislation drawn up to achieve that has hit a major roadblock, and that roadblock is Florida’s House GOP.

Just minutes into a special session on Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez announced that the Republican-led chamber would not take up a proposal from DeSantis to allow children to opt out of certain school vaccination requirements. The move effectively killed the proposal, which had been backed by the Senate.

Perez, a father from Miami with three young children, said he was concerned by the idea of “children being in school without measles and mumps and polio and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades,” according to The New York Times, which reported from the State Capitol. “That was something that I was uncomfortable with.”

Thank the universe for sane, thinking members of the GOP, in this case. Perez is precisely correct: vaccines have worked for a long, long time and removing their requirement in public schools serves to only make more children more sick. It ignores our collective responsibility for the health of those around us, some of which have underlying conditions that mean they can’t get vaccines they would otherwise desire. Why in the world should someone in that unfortunate situation have to literally risk their lives in order to go to school? What are those kids supposed to do, just because someone bought into the vaccine misinformation?

None of these anti-vaccine goobers ever seem to want to answer that question. Instead, they retreat to their “Don’t Tread On Me” slogans, or other talking points. As for DeSantis, sane questions like this are pure political games, apparently.

On social media, DeSantis responded to the House’s rejection by calling it “typical political shenanigans.”

Ladapo also responded, saying: “The governor’s agenda to defend freedom, whether from medical tyranny or tech oligarchs, is something Floridians and Americans everywhere want and value. Members of the Florida House should be leading that effort, not standing in the way.”

Those House members are representing their districts, Mr. Surgeon General. Better than you are, I would argue. And does anyone actually read these boot-licking comments from Ladapo and conclude that any of it represents sincerely held beliefs, rather than a sincere desire to remain in power?

Certainly not this writer, I can tell you. This is more pandering for politics on the part of Ladapo. And he will eventually have the blood of children on his hands if he gets his way.

12:00 AM

Paramount Reveals Company Will Be 49.5% Owned By Foreign Investors If Warner Bros Merger Approved [Techdirt]

FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent much of the last five years on cable TV whining incessantly about foreign entanglement with U.S. companies. Even companies he doesn’t regulate.

He was positively apoplectic about China’s ownership of TikTok, which you may recall they “fixed” by offloading the social media company to Trump’s billionaire friends (while curiously maintaining Chinese co-ownership). He’s also been endlessly whiny about Chinese entanglement in U.S. hardware, recently imposing a “ban” on foreign routers (which is actually more of a lazy extortion scheme).

But when it comes to a Trump-allied right wing billionaire buying up the entirety of U.S. media companies with Chinese and Middle East autocratic help, Brendan Carr is suddenly nowhere to be found.

A new filing from Paramount related to its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers reveals the finalized deal will result in a company that’s 49.5% owned by foreign interests (including the Chinese), and 38.5% owned by a a trio of Middle Eastern funds, including the journalist-butchering folks over in Saudi Arabia:

“In a petition for declaratory ruling to the FCC signed by Paramount legal chief Makan Delrahim, Paramount asks the Brendan Carr-led commission to sign off on the deal involving Saudi Arabia’s PIF (public investment fund), L’Imad, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and a Qatar Investment Authority fund.”

If you’re playing along at home, that’s the same Makan Delrahim who used to be Trump’s DOJ “antitrust enforcer” during his first term. Delrahim “enforced antitrust” at the time by helping Sprint and T-Mobile gain rubber-stamp approval for their job and competition eroding merger. He even used his personal phones and computers to give the companies advise on how to bypass regulatory scrutiny.

Normally the FCC wouldn’t have any say in this deal because no local broadcast stations or public airwaves are directly involved, but it does have some say in how the deal is financed. The Communications Act of 1934 restricts foreign entities from holding more than a 25% indirect equity or voting interest in a U.S. company that holds broadcast licenses. Obviously, 49.5% bypasses that.

Paramount and Brendan Carr have already insisted this is all irrelevant and Carr has openly signaled to a top GOP donor (Larry Ellison) that he won’t object to any part of the foreign financing. Paramount’s filing continues to insist the deal (and its massive debt) will be great for consumers, creatives, and everybody in between. From a Paramount statement:

“When the transaction and equity syndication close, the Ellison family and RedBird will collectively hold the largest equity stake in the combined company and continue to be the sole owners of Class A Common Stock, representing 100% of the voting shares, with no other equity syndication party having any governance rights, voting shares, or Board representation. The combination of Paramount and WBD’s complementary assets will enhance competition while creating a strong champion for creative talent and consumer choice.”

There is, as we’ve explored, nothing that supports this last claim. That massive level of debt will inevitably result in mass layoffs, corner cutting, and price hikes. This is what always happens. And this is before a potential AI bubble pop impacts the Ellison family financials even more. There’s a very good chance this deal implodes in a giant fireball regardless of who is financing it.

Still, it’s curious that a GOP that spends so much of its time engaged in xenophobic and racist tirades about foreign investment in U.S. free market innovation goes so quickly silent when they stand to personally benefit. In this case both financially via Larry Ellison’s patronage, and ideologically via Larry Ellison’s conversion of CNN, TikTok, and CBS into (global) autocrat-friendly propaganda machines.

Monday 2026-05-04

10:00 PM

Trained equanimity and a bias toward action [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Pay attention to what’s in front of you.

Don’t let fear contaminate your understanding of the situation.

Act with commitment.

Notice the gap between event and reaction.

Embrace the resources that are available to you.

Optimism is a belief about possible outcomes, but equanimity adds a bias toward action, regardless of what happens.

There’s enough noise, don’t create more. Simply take right action without comment or second-guessing. We can avoid a dark side driven by fear and grievance. And we don’t need a light saber.

While it’s nice to share the annual greeting, it’s unnecessary. The fourth is always with you if you choose.

Pluralistic: Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure (04 May 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene?
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Beck, Scientologist; Citizen journalism; Podcast-killing treaty; US x Kiwi copyright; Apple did a crime; DeCSS v civilian aviation; Navy x SF's queering; Micosoft v FLOSS; Sony-BMG needs a new DRM czar; Lossy copying sculpture; AI and the fatfinger economy.
Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure (permalink)

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis evince a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

(Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff), CC BY 2.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)

A Long and Probably Boring Process Post https://dreamcafe.com/2026/05/01/a-long-and-probably-boring-process-post/
The Supreme Court is Corrupt. This is What We Can Do About It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ
NHS Goes To War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/
An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open https://keepthingsopen.com/
Top 20 Fiction to Inspire Climate Action https://thebookslist.com/20-fiction-books-to-inspire-climate-action/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Beck dumps Winona and becomes a Scientologist https://web.archive.org/web/20010502151355/http://www.suntimes.com/output/zwecker/zp30.html

#25yrsago Fuck San Francisco https://craphound.com/fucksf.html

#25yrsago Desktop Linux rant https://web.archive.org/web/20021204051712/http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3297/1/

#25yrsago History of ASCAP and BMI https://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html

#25yrsago AUSA: If we let you decrypt DVDs, airplanes will start falling out of the sky https://web.archive.org/web/20010504221956/https://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,43485,00.html

#25yrsago Microsoft shits on open source https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/business/technology-microsoft-is-set-to-be-top-foe-of-free-code.html

#20yrsago Dan Gillmor explains “citizen journalism” https://web.archive.org/web/20060512043722/https://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/showPost.cfm?myComm=BA&bid=2271

#20yrsago UN plans a treaty to kill podcasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141428/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php

#20yrsago Sen Stevens tries to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law https://web.archive.org/web/20060505054724/http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/05/breaking-news-broadcast-flag-is-back.html

#20yrago How the US Navy queered San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20060504024636/http://ask.yahoo.com/20060502.html

#20yrago Help wanted: new DRM czar for Sony-BMG https://web.archive.org/web/20060512063724/http://www.paidcontent.org/sonybmg-director-new-technology-content-protection-nyc

#20yrsago Rich Americans as sick as poor Brits https://web.archive.org/web/20060516225807/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9098&feedId=online-news_rss20

#15yrsago Sculpture embodies lossy copying using much-copied house-key https://web.archive.org/web/20110316215804/http://www.danielbejar.com/Visual_Topography_of_a_Generation_Gap.html

#15yrsago Piracy and poor countries: Big Content wants to have its cake and eat it too https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy

#15yrsago Brust’s Tiassa: versatile fantasy in three modes https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/02/brusts-tiassa-versatile-fantasy-in-three-modes/

#15yrsago Why New Zealand was dumb to let the USA write its copyright laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110601173727/http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/7615

#15yrsago Canadian neocon Tories take a slim majority in election, pro-Internet New Democrats form the opposition https://web.archive.org/web/20110503041720/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-political-era-begins-as-tories-win-majority-ndp-grabs-opposition/article2006635/

#15yrsago Will technology make us freer, and if so, how? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/

#15yrsago Wikileaks: America will foot the bill for record company enforcement in NZ if NZ will let America write its laws
https://web.archive.org/web/20110502135002/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5769/125/

#15yrsago Horology considered hazardous: the “German Time Bomb” clock with its deadly mainspring https://web.archive.org/web/20110516102538/https://www.anniversaryclocks.org/aci/haller-gtb.pdf

#5yrsago Political economy vs inflation https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/01/mayday/#inflationary-political-economy

#1yrago Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

#1yrago AI and the fatfinger economy https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/
Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

08:00 PM

New Release: Tails 7.7.2 [Tor Project blog]

This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability in the Linux kernel.

Changes and updates

Update the Linux kernel to 6.12.85, which fixes Copy Fail, a vulnerability that could allow an application in Tails to gain administration privileges.

For example, if an attacker was able to exploit other unknown security vulnerabilities in an application included in Tails, they might then use Copy Fail to take full control of your Tails and deanonymize you.

We are not aware of this vulnerability being used in practice until now.

Fixed problems

For more details, read our changelog.

Get Tails 7.7.2

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.7.2.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.7.2 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions.

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.7.2 directly:

Support and feedback

For support and feedback, visit the Support section on the Tails website.

07:00 PM

U.S. Brands Vietnam as a Rare ‘Priority Foreign Country’ Over Online Piracy Concerns [TorrentFreak]

Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a new update of its Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S. copyright protection standards.

The annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.

The process has shown itself to be an effective diplomatic tool and has helped to kick-start copyright reforms around the globe. Not all governments are equally susceptible to critique, and Canada once described the process as flawed. Still, no country wants to be included in the list.

U.S. Elevates Vietnam to ‘Priority Foreign Country’

USTR’s latest Special 301 Report reiterated much of the critique we have seen in past years. China and Russia, for example, remain on the Priority Watch List, as they were previously. However, for the first time in thirteen years, the rarely used Priority Foreign Country (PFC) category was added.

This year’s designations

The PFC label is reserved for the most serious cases, and according to USTR’s latest report, Vietnam falls into this category. The report flags several IP-related concerns, including counterfeiting, but the country’s failure to combat online piracy is at the top of the list.

These concerns are not new, and over the past years, the U.S. and Vietnam have come together in an attempt to resolve the concerns. The U.S. first proposed an IP Work Plan to Vietnam in 2020, which was revised in 2023, but that didn’t book sufficient results.

The USTR notes that online piracy is not just popular among the country’s own residents; many operators of major pirate sites also reportedly reside in the country.

“Vietnam remains a significant source of online piracy and continues to host popular English-language copyright infringement sites and services that target a global audience,” the report reads, providing various examples.

Megacloud and Myflixerz

As shown above, the USTR report specifically mentions the piracy-as-a-service provider MegaCloud and the popular pirate streaming site MyFlixerz as key problems. Interestingly, these prominent targets went dark in April, just a few days before the USTR released its report.

Whether the sudden disappearance of these pirate services, which have millions of monthly users, is a mere coincidence or if it’s related to the diplomatic pressure is unknown.

U.S. Wants More Deterrent Prosecutions

To address these and other piracy concerns, the USTR would like the Vietnamese authorities to step up their enforcement actions. This includes the subsequent prosecutions, which have lacked a deterrent effect thus far.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because enforcement efforts there historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement,” the report notes.

The USTR specifically mentions the takedown of Fmovies, which once was one of the largest pirate sites. This landmark case resulted in the prosecution of two operators, who received suspended sentences and criminal fines of around $2,700 and $770, respectively.

These sentences lack a deterrent effect, USTR argues, noting that the country could also increase the number of prosecutions.

“Vietnam must provide effective enforcement and take persistent and effective enforcement actions to combat online piracy, including by bringing significantly more criminal prosecutions against online piracy operations; seeking deterrent-level prison sentences, monetary fines, and other criminal penalties; and addressing obstacles to pursuing effective enforcement.”

Recent Shutdowns

USTR report acknowledges a series of recent enforcement actions in Vietnam. In 2025, the music industry group IFPI took action against Y2Mate and 11 other stream-ripping websites, for example.

In March 2026, after the Ministry of Public Security sought feedback on a draft decree on book piracy, several Vietnamese pirated e-book platforms, including TVE-4U, VCTVEGroup, and Ebookvie, ceased operations or stopped sharing copyrighted material.

Interestingly, the report also references the recent shutdown of HiAnime.to, the popular anime streaming site that was widely believed to be operated from Vietnam. However, as far as we know, no authority or rightsholder has publicly claimed responsibility, and no arrests or operator identifications have been announced.

HiAnime went dark in mid-March 2026, posting a brief farewell message, without any clear sign of an enforcement action.

The Clock is Ticking

In addition to addressing online piracy, USTR also flags counterfeiting, border enforcement, use of unlicensed software in the government, and cable and satellite signal theft as key concerns. Together, these put Vietnam in the Priority Foreign Country category.

The PFC label is not symbolic. Within 30 days of the identification, USTR has to decide whether it will launch an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which can result in tariffs and sanctions.

For now, the designation itself sends a strong signal: take action or else.

Vietnam-related piracy concerns have been a recurring item in Special 301 reports for years, but stepping from the Priority Watch List into the Priority Foreign Country category is a rather significant escalation, which no other country has faced in well over a decade.

—

A copy of the U.S. Trade Representative’s 2026 Special 301 Report is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

01:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 羊 [Kanji of the Day]

羊

✍6

小3

sheep

ヨウ

ひつじ

羊水 (ようすい) — amniotic fluid
羊蹄 (ぎしぎし) — Japanese dock (Rumex japonicus)
羊羹 (ようかん) — yokan
子羊 (こひつじ) — lamb
羊肉 (ようにく) — mutton
羊飼い (ひつじかい) — shepherd
羊毛 (ようもう) — wool
山羊 (やぎ) — goat
牧羊犬 (ぼくようけん) — sheepdog
羊の群れ (ひつじのむれ) — flock of sheep

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 姫 [Kanji of the Day]

姫

✍10

中学

princess

キ

ひめ　ひめ-

美姫 (びき) — beautiful maiden
歌姫 (うたひめ) — songstress
お姫様 (おひいさま) — princess
姫君 (ひめぎみ) — daughter of a person of high rank (esp. eldest daughter)
白雪姫 (しらゆきひめ) — Snow White
姫さま (ひめさま) — princess
眠り姫 (ねむりひめ) — Sleeping Beauty (fairy tale)
乙姫 (おとひめ) — younger princess
姫様 (ひめさま) — princess
織姫 (おりひめ) — woman textile worker

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

05:00 AM

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for April 26 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Euganean Hills are a group of hills of volcanic origin that rise to heights of 300 to 600 m in Veneto, Italy.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for April 27 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Blunt-headed burrowing frog (Glyphoglossus molossus). Hua Hin District, Thailand.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for April 28 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Pilot boat outside Öja island (Landsort), Stockholm Archipelago's most southern point.

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