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With RFK Jr. and his version of HHS entirely out to lunch on the ongoing measles issue in America, it’s been left to states and local medical professionals to try to figure out how to do combat with one of the most infectious diseases on the planet. In a sane world with a real, big boy executive branch, HHS would be taking the lead on this sort of thing. Since Kennedy’s eugenics-lite belief system promotes a “survival of the fittest” mentality instead, we get to examine how different states and local governments react to measles outbreaks. South Carolina, for instance, appears to be largely uninterested at the governmental level in doing anything at all about the failure in data-sharing, case-reporting, and combating the bullshit religious exemptions to vaccinations that led to a loss of herd immunity to begin with.

New Mexico, which suffered its own measles outbreak last year, went the opposite route. And when you compare that state’s response specifically to Texas’, as they were both part of the same outbreak, the lessons learned are even more instructive.

Texas declared the outbreak within its borders over on August 18, with an end tally of 762 cases. In New Mexico, officials declared its outbreak, which began in February, over on September 26, with a total of just 99 cases.

One of the key differences, according to a new study, was that in New Mexico, the rapid spread of the highly infectious virus spurred a massive surge in measles vaccinations among children and adults. Overall, shots of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine increased 55 percent statewide from January to September compared to the same period in 2024.

This is all based on a recent CDC study. I simply must point out that it’s quite interesting to see this uptick in vaccinations. It’s what I’ve advocated for, of course, but it certainly calls into question the reasoning for having not vaccinated before the reports of the outbreak. If these were more religious exemptions, did people suddenly become less religious? If it was fear of all the nonsense dangers RFK Jr. warns about with the MMR vaccines that kept them from vaccinating before, are they suddenly less afraid now? Or was all of that performative excuse making for people not wanting to get a simple shot in their arm?

Regardless, it was a coordinated effort by New Mexico government groups and local doctors to be transparent about the outbreak, its dangers, and mobilize for mass vaccinations.

In the MMWR report, officials explained that they had a data-driven response effort that assessed local vaccination coverage and real-time vaccine inventories and targeted mobile vaccination delivery. They went all out on communication, releasing 12 health advisories to clinicians, 26 press releases to the public, and 184 social media posts. They also launched a regularly updated measles outbreak data page with information in English and Spanish. Finally, they set up a measles helpline, which got over 2,000 calls during the outbreak. The officials noted that their response to the outbreak was built on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In all, “the strategies implemented in New Mexico could serve as a model for other states that are addressing measles cases or outbreaks,” they concluded.

Or, gee, I don’t know, how about it being a model for the federal fucking agency with a charter that centers on keeping Americans healthy and combating infectious diseases? Why is this left to the states to figure out? States can be laboratories for democracy all we like, but infectious diseases don’t respect state borders.

Instead of spending time licking his wounds from his recent losses in federal court, it sure would be nice if Kennedy could spend that time actually getting involved in combating measles, a disease that could only be resurrected thanks to the misinformation he spewed for decades.

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

“I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously broad—broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law. 

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

In fact, this backlash proves her point. Beyond attempting to silence queer voices and to scare other legislators from speaking up against these laws, it reveals how age-verification mandates are part of a larger effort to give the government much greater control of what young people are allowed to say, read, or see online. 

Rep. Finke was also right that these proposals are bad policy; they prevent all young people from finding community online, and that they violate young people and adults’ First Amendment rights.

Why FSC v. Paxton Matters

Rep. Finke was similarly right to bring up the Paxton case, because beyond the troubling Supreme Court precedent it produced, Texas’s age-verification law also drew eager support from an extraordinary number of amicus briefs from anti-LGBTQ organizations (some even designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center). 

In FSC v. Paxton, the Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to require age verification for sites where at least one-third of the content is sexual material deemed “harmful to minors,” which generally means explicit sexual content. This ruling, based on how young people do not have a First Amendment right to access explicit sexual content, allows states to enact onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize their data security and privacy. These are real and immense burdens on adults, and the Court was wrong to ignore them in upholding Texas’ law. 

But laws enacted by other states and Minnesota HF 1434 go further than the Texas statute. Rather than restricting young people from accessing sexual content, these proposals expand what the state deems “harmful to minors” to include any speech that may reference sex, sexuality, gender, and reproductive health. But young people have a First Amendment right to both speak on those topics and to access information online about them.

We will continue to fight against all online age restrictions, but bills like Minnesota’s HF 1434, which seek to restrict young people from accessing speech about their bodies, sexuality, and other truthful information, are especially pernicious.

EFF and Rep. Finke are on the same page here: age verification mandates create immense harm to our First Amendment rights, our right to privacy, as well as our online safety and security. These proposals also fully ignore the reality that LGBTQ young people often rely on the internet for information they cannot get elsewhere. 

But the Paxton case, and the coalition behind it, illustrates exactly how these laws can be weaponized. They weren’t there just to stand up for young people’s privacy online—they were there to argue that the state has a compelling interest in shielding minors from material that, in practice, often includes LGBTQ content. Ultimately, these groups would like to age-gate not just porn sites, but also any content that might discuss sex, sexuality, gender, reproductive health, abortion, and more.

Using Children as Props to Enact Censorship 

The coalition of organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of Texas’s age verification law tells us everything we need to know about the true intentions behind legislating access to information online: censorship, surveillance, and control. After all, if the race to age-gate the internet was purely about child safety, we would expect its strongest supporters to be child-development experts or privacy advocates. Instead, the loudest advocates are organizations dedicated to policing sexuality, attacking LGBTQ+ folks and reproductive rights, and censoring anything that doesn’t fit within their worldview.

Below are some of the harmful platforms that the organizations supporting the age-gating movement are advancing, and how their arguments echo in the attacks on Rep. Finke today:

Policing sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights

Many of the organizations backing age-verification laws have spent decades trying to restrict access to accurate sexual health information and reproductive care.

Groups like Exodus Cry, for example, who filed a brief in support of the Texas AG in the SCOTUS case, frame pornography as part of a broader moral crisis. Founded by a “Christian dominionist” activist, Exodus Cry advocates for the criminalization of porn and sex work, and promotes a worldview that defines “sexual immorality” as any sexual activity outside marriage between one man and one woman. Its leadership describes the internet as a battleground in a “pornified world” that has to be reclaimed. Another brief in support of the age-verification law was filed by a group of organizations including the Public Advocate of the United States (an SPLC-designated hate group) and America’s Future. America’s Future is an organization that was formed to “revitalize the role of faith in our society” and fiercely advocates in favor of trans sports bans. 

These groups see age-verification laws as attractive solutions because they create a legal mechanism to wall off large swaths of content that merely mentions sex from not only young people but millions of adults, too.

Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights

Several of the most prominent legal advocates behind age-verification laws have also led the crusade against LGBTQ+ equality. The internet that these groups envision is one that heavily censors critical and even life-saving LGBTQ+ resources, community, and information. 

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), for instance (which is another SPLC-designated hate group), built its reputation on litigation aimed at rolling back LGBTQ+ protections—including  allowing businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples, criminalizing same-sex relationships abroad, and restricting transgender rights. 

Then there’s other groups like Them Before Us and Women’s Liberation Front, both of which submitted amici in support of the Texas Attorney General and are devoted to upending LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Them Before Us says it’s “committed to putting the rights and well-being of children ahead of the desires and agendas of adults.” But it’s also running a campaign to “End Obergefell,” the 2015 Supreme Court case that upheld the right to same-sex marriage, and has been on the cutting edge of transphobic campaigning and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. The Women’s Liberation Front, on the other hand, is an organization that has a long track record of supporting transphobic policies such as bathroom bills, bans on gender-affirming healthcare, and efforts to define “sex” strictly as the biological sex assigned at birth. 

Through cases like FSC v. Paxton, groups like these three continue to advance a vision of society that creates government mandates to enforce their worldviews over personal freedom, while hiding behind a shroud of concern for children’s safety. But when they also describe LGBTQ+ people as “evil” threats to children and run countless campaigns against their human rights, they are being clear about their intentions. This is why we continue to say: the impact of age verification measures goes beyond porn sites.

Expanding censorship beyond the internet into real-life public spaces

As we’ve said for years now, the push to age-gate the internet is part of a broader campaign to control what information people can access in public life both on- and offline. Many of the same organizations advancing these proposals claim to be acting on behalf of young people, but their arguments consistently use children as props to justify giving the government more control over speech and information.

Many of the organizations advocating for online age verification have also supported book bans, attacks on DEI policies and education, and efforts to remove LGBTQ+ materials from schools and libraries. Two of the organizations who supported the Texas Attorney General, Citizens Defending Freedom and Manhattan Institute, have led campaigns around the country to “abolish DEI” and ban classical books like “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison from school libraries. These efforts are not different from the efforts to restrict access to the internet—they reflect a broader strategy to restrict access to ideas or information that these groups find objectionable. And they discourage free thought, inquiry, and the ability for people to decide how to live their lives. 

These campaigns rely on the same core argument, that certain ideas are inherently dangerous to young people and must therefore be restricted. But that framing misrepresents an important reality: if lawmakers genuinely want to address harms that young people experience online, they should start by listening to young people themselves. When EFF spoke directly with young people about their online experiences, they overwhelmingly rejected restrictions on their access to the internet and came back with nuanced and diverse perspectives. Once that principle—that certain ideas are inherently dangerous—is accepted, the internet, once a symbol of free expression, connection, creativity, and innovation, becomes the next logical target. 

This also wouldn’t be the first time a vulnerable group is used as a prop to advance internet censorship laws. We’ve seen this playbook during the debate over FOSTA/SESTA, where many of the same advocates claimed to speak for trafficking victims/survivors and sex workers, while pushing legislation that ultimately censored online speech and harmed the very communities it invoked. It’s a familiar pattern: you invoke a vulnerable group, frame certain speech as a threat, and use that as a way to expand government control over the flow of information. And as we said in the fight against FOSTA: if lawmakers are serious about addressing harms to particular communities, they should start by talking to those communities. This means that lawmakers seeking to address online harms to young people should be talking to young people, not groups who claim their interests. 

Rep. Finke Was Not Radical. She Was Right.

The Paxton case, and the coalition backing age verification laws in the U.S., shows us exactly why the messaging around these laws draws superficial support from parents and lawmakers. But we’ve heard the quiet part said out loud before. Marsha Blackburn, a sponsor of the federal Kids Online Safety Act, has said that her goal with the legislation was to address what she called “the transgender” in society. When lawmakers and advocacy groups frame queer existence itself as a threat to young people, age-verification laws become ideological enforcement instead of regulatory policy.

In defending free speech, privacy, and the right of young people to access truthful information about themselves, Rep. Leigh Finke was not radical—she was right. She was warning that broad, ideologically driven laws will be used to erase, silence, and isolate young people under the banner of child protection. 

What’s at stake in the fight against age verification is not just a single bill in a single state, or even multiple states, for that matter. It’s about whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law. 

And more people in public office need the courage of Rep. Finke to call this out.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Last June, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld a lower court’s ruling declaring a Louisiana law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools to be a violation of the Constitution.

This decision made immediate sense, given that courts elsewhere in the nation (including the US Supreme Court) had repeatedly ruled that laws like these destroyed the separation of church and state. These laws were extremely obvious violations of the First Amendment that elevated one particular religion to a position of prominence with the backing of government power.

That hasn’t stopped MAGA legislators from creating similarly unconstitutional laws around the nation. These opportunists are hoping to convert their Trump coattail-riding into local iterations of Trump’s white Christian nationalist efforts.

Last June may as well be a lifetime ago. In that ruling, the Fifth Circuit made it clear the law was nothing more than an unconstitutional way for the state government to shove its preferred deity down students’ throats.

The statute does not require that the Ten Commandments be integrated into a curriculum of study. On the contrary, under the statute’s minimum requirements, the posters must be indiscriminately displayed in every public school classroom in Louisiana regardless of class subject-matter. See La. R.S. § 17:2124(B)(1). Louisiana insists, however, that unlike Kentucky, its Legislature has a valid “secular historical and educational purpose” for displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which is reflected in the statute.

[…]

Louisiana’s purported legislative purpose states:
It is the Legislature’s intent to apply the decision set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005), to continue the rich tradition [of including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children] and ensure that the students in our public schools may understand and appreciate the foundational documents of our state and national government.

[…]

It is also unclear how H.B. 71 ensures that students in Louisiana public schools “understand and appreciate the foundational documents of [its] state and national government” when it makes displaying those “foundational” documents optional, and does not require that they also be printed in a large, easily readable font. La. R.S. § 17:2124(A)(9). When the Ten Commandments must be posted prominently and legibly, while the other “contextual” materials need not be visible at all, the disparity lays bare the pretext.

That was the court refusing to let Louisiana lawmakers have their cake and eat it too by pretending the Ten Commandments were both “optional” and essential to students’ instruction.

The en banc opinion [PDF] — released in late February — goes in a completely different direction. The majority somehow reaches the conclusion that the lawsuit is premature. It lifts the injunction preventing the law from taking effect. The court contorts itself to give Louisiana a free pass to post the Ten Commandments prominently in public schools by pretending it doesn’t know how this mandate will actually look in practice.

While H.B. 71 sets certain “minimum requirement[s]” regarding the text, size, and accompanying “context statement” of the displays, it leaves “[t]he nature of the display” entirely to the discretion of local school boards. La. Rev. Stat. § 17:2124(B)(1)–(3). That delegation and those minimum requirements—necessarily leave numerous essential questions unanswered. We do not know, for example, how prominently the displays will appear, what other materials might accompany them, or how—if at all— teachers will reference them during instruction. More fundamentally, we do not even know the full content of the displays themselves. Although the statute requires inclusion of the Commandments and a context statement, it expressly permits additional content—such as “the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance”—to appear alongside them. Id. § 2124(B)(4).

Simply put, we cannot evaluate “how the text is used,” Van Orden, 545 U.S. at 701 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (emphasis omitted), because we do not yet know—and cannot yet know—how the text will be used.

But we do actually know all of these things. And the Court does too, even if it has conveniently chosen to ignore the law to give the GOP what it wants yet again. (See also: this, this, this, this, etc.) As Rachel Lager — one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in this case — points out in her article for The Hill, the state’s lawyers and the bill’s proponents have already answered the questions the Fifth Circuit is now pretending are in need of further examination.

This law intends for the government (public schools) to convey that the words of the Ten Commandments — including “I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” — are mandates for all children, regardless of whether they and their families are Hindu and believe in many gods or nonreligious and believe in none.

Lest there be any doubt that this law was written to proselytize students, state Rep. Dodie Horton (R), the law’s sponsor, told us so when she proposed the bill: “I’m not concerned with an atheist. I’m not concerned with a Muslim, I’m concerned with our children looking and seeing what God’s law is.” Judge James Dennis was on point in his dissent when he called the court’s reasoning “procedural artifice.”

That vast gap between the Fifth Circuit’s “narrow” holding and the facts on the ground likely explain why there’s only a single published concurrence and several dissents. The sole concurrence was written by Judge James Ho, who boldly, baldly declares Supreme Court precedent on the subject is “no longer good law,” despite the Supreme Court never having said so itself. Ho also says the lawsuit isn’t just premature, but entirely without merit.

Multiple dissents disagree. The first, written by James Dennis and co-signed by three other judges — says James Ho and the rest of the majority are wrong. Pretending Supreme Court precedent regarding the mandated posting of the Ten Commandments (via a Kentucky state law) is no longer relevant because the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a coach who was fired for engaging in post-game prayers with his players is deliberately ignoring the difference between state action and personal action in order to reach the conclusion these pro-Bible-down-your-throat judges had already decided was the correct ruling.

Bound by Stone v. Graham and its progeny, and mindful that we are not the Supreme Court, I conclude that permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom, without curricular incorporation and with compulsory attendance, violates the Establishment Clause. Our court avoids confronting that conclusion only through procedural artifice. I dissent.

Another dissent points out what the state, its legislators, and the majority of Fifth Circuit judges have also chosen to ignore: that religious leaders don’t even want the state to do what it’s doing.

Indeed, every faith-based organization before us—on behalf of thousands of members—and every clergy and devout plaintiff agree that Louisiana must not pick and post specific scripture that the state commands will confront children in state classrooms. All religious voices submitted to us, barring one individual, oppose Louisiana’s attempt to select, inculcate, and enforce this version of gospel text in compulsory public education.

The only people left arguing for this are arguing in bad faith. Parents and religious leaders who pretend any instruction in anything they’re opposed to (gender issues, evolution, socialism, etc.) is a form of indoctrination are more than willing to sign off on literal government indoctrination so long as it’s the sort of indoctrination they like.

Even if the en banc court felt this might need more discussion, it should have erred on the side of plaintiffs. In choosing to do otherwise, it’s basically telling plaintiffs in the Fifth Circuit that their rights need to be violated first because they can start questioning the constitutionality of enacted laws. That’s insane. But it’s the sort of insane the Fifth Circuit is known for. The only question now is whether the Supreme Court still has enough honest justices left to reverse this obviously unconstitutional decision by the Fifth.

We’ve been covering Australia’s under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realized it was a total mess, and then documenting how the ban was actively harming kids with disabilities by cutting them off from critical support communities.

None of this was even remotely surprising. Critics around the world warned about all of it. The government went ahead anyway because doing something tends to poll better than doing something that actually works, especially when the thing that works is harder to explain. And government officials insisted (incorrectly) that the only ones who were complaining were the big tech companies or their proxies.

Now, three months in, the data is starting to arrive, and it confirms what should have been obvious from the start. New data from parental monitoring company Qustodio, provided to Crikey, shows that the ban has barely moved the needle:

While TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat all saw a decrease in use by Australians aged 10-15, the majority of teens who had been using the social media platforms pre-ban remained on the services afterwards.

That’s according to a new snapshot of data provided to Crikey by parental monitoring company Qustodio, adding to early evidence that there’s widespread circumvention of the government’s flagship tech policy.

The usage drop was only marginally larger than the normal seasonal dip that happens every year. In other words, the “world-first” ban achieved roughly the same effect as summer ending. There was definitely a drop, but it’s just not a particularly big one:

For what it’s worth, others are reporting the same thing. The Courier Mail found that the majority of teens who were using these apps before the ban were still using them afterwards.

Defenders of the ban will usually say something along the lines of: “We had to do something. Children were at risk. Even if it’s imperfect, at least we tried.” That argument might hold some water if the ban merely failed — if it just didn’t work and left things roughly where they were before. A swing and a miss. You dust yourself off and try something else.

But that’s not what happened. The ban didn’t leave things where they were. It made things actively worse, through a mechanism that was entirely predictable.

The ban is basically a test of technical sophistication, rather than a test of vulnerability. The kids who can’t figure out how to get around it — or who don’t have friends or older siblings to help them — are the kids who are already isolated or lack the technical skills to bypass a block. Those are the kids with disabilities who lost their support communities, the ones we wrote about last month. Those are the kids in rural areas or difficult home situations who relied on these platforms for connection. The ban selected for vulnerability and filtered against resourcefulness.

That’s a hell of a result for a child safety measure.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of kids — the ones the ban was supposedly protecting — just learned to route around it. Rather than learning responsible usage and digital literacy, they learned that age verification systems are obstacles to be defeated… which, congratulations, is probably the single least useful lesson you could teach a teenager about their relationship with technology.

Actually, it’s worse: Australian adults now have a false sense of security — the comfortable belief that they’ve magically protected kids from the evils of the internet.

When you pass a ban and declare the problem solved, you eliminate the political pressure to do the things that would actually help. Why fund digital literacy programs when kids aren’t supposed to be on social media at all? Why push platforms to develop better age-appropriate tools and experiences when under-16s are “banned”? Why have conversations with kids about healthy usage of something they’re not supposed to be using?

The ban creates a fiction — kids are off social media — that every politician and regulator has an incentive to maintain, even though the data says the fiction is exactly that. Kids are still using these platforms. They’re just doing it without guidance or access to real safety tools, and with the realization that the adults in charge don’t actually understand how any of this works.

So you end up with the worst possible outcome: nearly universal continued usage combined with policy complacency and zero institutional incentive to teach kids how to use these platforms safely. Kids using social media without supervision or education, while the government pats itself on the back for a ban that exists only on paper.

This was all foreseeable. It was all foreseen. Critics said so publicly, repeatedly, before the law passed. And the Australian government did it anyway, because “ban the thing” is a satisfying political narrative, even when — especially when — it doesn’t work.

And now that it’s failed, rather than admit that the plan was bad and dangerous… they’re doubling down by blaming the tech companies:

An eSafety spokesperson said that social media platforms need to take “continuous action” to find underage users on their platforms, including those who’ve created new accounts.

“eSafety is aware of reports some under-16s continue to access social media accounts and is actively engaging with platforms and their age assurance providers to probe weaknesses and encourage continuous improvement of implementation and settings while continuing to monitor for any systemic failures that may amount to a breach of the law,” they said.

The spokesperson foreshadowed further announcements in the coming weeks, adding: “We will provide further updates on age restricted platforms’ progress in meeting their obligations when it is appropriate to do so but we must be careful to not compromise the regulatory process currently underway or prejudice any enforcement action we may undertake in future.”

The blame will keep flowing toward the platforms. The kids will keep routing around the ban. And the adults will keep congratulating themselves for solving a problem they made worse.

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Black Lives Matter. All Cops Are Bastards.

These are not temporary catchphrases. These are universal and forever.

And leave it to a cop to ensure we never forget either of these concepts. A foot pursuit that ended in the shooting of Connecticut resident Dyshan Best would otherwise just be a footnote in cop history if some cops hadn’t decided to be the bastards they wanted to see in the world and make it extremely clear they felt a Black life didn’t matter.

The internal investigation of the shooting of a Black man by Bridgeport PD officers delivered unsurprising results:

Dyshan Best, 39, was shot in the back last year as he fled from officers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A report released Tuesday by the state’s inspector general found that the shooting was justified because Best had a gun in his hand and the officer pursuing him had reasons to fear for his own safety.

All the stuff we expect to see in these reports is here, beginning with the assumption that a gun is a threat even if it’s not pointed at officers to the de rigueur “fear for my safety” justification for shooting a fleeing person.

What’s somewhat expected — but still somehow surprising — is what happened after the apparently justified shooting:

The first ambulance called to take Best to the hospital arrived at the scene at 6:02 p.m., about 14 minutes after the shooting. However, at the urging of other officers, that ambulance was used to take away a white police officer, Erin Perrotta, who had been involved in the foot chase, the report said.

Paramedics reported that Perrotta declined treatment in the ambulance.

“I am fine, I just needed to get out of here,” she said, according to the report. Another officer described Perrotta at the time as “visibly hysterical (crying and breathing rapidly) and had blood all over her uniform,” the report said.

That’s right. The ambulance sent to pick up the person police officers had just shot was instead handed over to Officer Erin Perrotta, who — as the Inspector General’s report notes — was enduring the relative hardship of a “mild anxiety attack.”

The second ambulance didn’t show up for another ten minutes. The person with actual bullet holes in him didn’t hit the ER until 14 minutes after Officer “Anxiety Attack” Perrotta arrived at the hospital. The officer who was never in any danger of dying got nearly a 15-minute head start on her medical treatment.

The person they’d shot didn’t make it.

Best died at 7:41 p.m. as he was undergoing treatment for the gunshot wound, which damaged his liver and right kidney.

Meanwhile, Officer Perrotta’s employer only seems interested in outlasting this news cycle:

A spokesperson for Bridgeport police, Shawnna White, declined to comment Wednesday when asked about Perrotta taking the first ambulance. She said in an email that the police department’s Internal Affairs Division would conduct its own investigation.

Sometimes the lack of direct response says more than a direct response would. Perrotta is apparently currently on administrative leave “due to an unrelated matter.” That either means Perrotta does bad stuff often enough she’s already given the department another reason to sideline her or that the department has found other stuff to add to this headline-generating “#mefirst” effort by the officer to grease the wheels for the inevitable firing.

Whatever happens now won’t budge the needle for US law enforcement agencies. But for the rest of us not standing on the inside of the Thin Blue Line, this incident says the quiet part loud: Black lives don’t matter… not when it’s a cop claiming they can’t breathe.

When he’s not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps.

Carr recently began circulating plans for something he claims will restrict U.S. telecom companies’ ‌use of foreign call centers and require foreign-based customer service workers to be proficient in American Standard English. The plan is vague, but Reuters unskeptically frames it as a good faith effort to protect U.S. consumer privacy, improve customer service, and protect Americans from the scourge of foreign accents:

“Carr noted that nearly 70% of U.S. businesses outsource at least one ‌department, ⁠including customer service and call center operations, to overseas locations.

“As a result, too many Americans have struggled to resolve an issue with a representative due to cultural and language barriers,” Carr said, adding foreign customer ​service centers “also raise ​concerns about ⁠protecting consumers’ personal information.”

What is Carr really up to here? I suspect he’s working closely with U.S. telecoms to craft pseudo-patriotic/nationalistic cover for another brutal round of layoffs. Some of which will be caused by AI, but a huge amount of which will have been caused by Carr’s love of rubber stamping harmful telecom industry consolidation.

For one, there’s no real evidence that overseas customer service centers create serious cybersecurity issues. As he did with his recent effort to remove phone unlocking rules, Carr likes to use cybersecurity as a bogeyman when convenient to something unpopular he’s trying to help industry sell.

Then, with his other hand, Carr is busy making U.S. consumers less safe and secure by gutting functional oversight of giant telecoms (despite the recent massive Salt Typhoon hack by China).

It’s also not really clear the FCC even has this authority. Especially in the Trump era, which has involved the Trump courts taking an absolutely brutal hatchet to regulatory independence. This sudden micromanagement of telcom support runs contrary to Carr’s “light regulatory touch” rhetoric. It’s also worth noting that a lot of telecoms, like Charter, already have mostly U.S. support agents.

But here’s the more important thing. I’ve covered Brendan Carr probably longer and more extensively than pretty much anybody alive. And I can tell you, with 100% certainty, that Carr doesn’t do anything that’s just inherently in the public interest. That’s simply not who he is.

He’s always working an angle for industry or large companies, usually media and telecom giants. There’s just no evidence that he’s a good faith operator in any of the arenas Reuters gives him unearned credibility for, and his ethics and principles, as we’ve seen repeatedly, are not consistent.

So I really doubt this has anything to actually do with improving customer service, or holding telecoms accountable for shoddy overseas support. I suspect he’s cooking up a stage play.

We’ve long noted how these consolidated regional telecom monopolies have some of the worst customer service ratings of any industry in America (which is truly saying something). Maybe AI will improve some aspects of that, but as we’ve seen in other arenas where AI is layered on top of very broken sectors (journalism, health insurance) by unethical executives, the end result isn’t particularly great.

If you don’t fix the underlying monopolization, you can’t fix the symptoms of monopolization, which generally are high prices, spotty service, slow speeds, and abysmal customer service. Layer AI on top of a broken industry, and you usually get a badly automated broken industry.

It will be worth keeping an eye on Carr’s final proposed plan. But I suspect it mostly involves him working closely with telecom giants to put a nationalistic, racist veneer on looming plans to dramatically accelerate layoffs in a telecom sector that’s already seen massive workforce reductions, largely due to the mindless consolidation Carr regularly rubber stamps.

There is an old axiom you will have heard of before: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we wanted to boil this down to a math equation, it might be described as something like: 0 < any positive integer. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, typically, until you add in a dash of near-religious ideology into the equation. And that’s where the anti-AI crowd comes in.

Dustin Hubbard heads up Gaming Alexandria, a site dedicated to the preservation of obscure corners of video game history. Focused less on the actual games themselves, Gaming Alexandria instead focuses its efforts on media surrounding those games, such as manuals, box art, and old gaming journalism outputs. To that end, Hubbard’s group has amassed an impressive number of Japanese magazine scans throughout the years. To make this content useful to researchers elsewhere, he built a low-footprint app to make those scans searchable and, more importantly, to translate them. A Patreon page and subscriptions partially funded all of this.

And that’s what had Hubbard issuing apologies over this past weekend.

A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours.

“I sincerely apologize,” Hubbard wrote in his apology post. “My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we’ve never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI.”

And this is where we enter the realm of the silly. I’m not some AI evangelist. I fully recognize that there are error and other problems with AI… and I imagine there always will be, to some extent. AI is not always, or perhaps even mostly, the right tool to use. Nor will it always have benefits that outweigh problems it creates for we human beings.

But a positive number is greater than zero. This was a tool that suddenly made all of this culture content accessible to a wider range of people. Before it was not available to anyone that didn’t have a high-level of knowledge on the Japanese language. Translation errors also happen with human translators, too. We need only look at the ancient religious texts, and the very real wars started over their translations, to understand that.

Hubbard himself attempted to make this point over the weekend.

Writing on Patreon this weekend, Hubbard said he has long been tinkering with an improved automated OCR and translation process that could help turn more of those magazine scans into useful tools for Western researchers. And when he put Google Gemini AI model to the task recently, he said he was “blown away” by the results. While he still recommended using a professional human translator before citing these magazines in any scholarly research, he said the output from the Gemini AI tool “gets you a large percentage of the way there quickly.”

Inspired by those results, Hubbard set to work on a self-described “vibe coded” interface to view the original PDF scans alongside their AI-generated text translations for easy comparison and editing. The result was the Gaming Alexandria Researcher tool, posted to GitHub on Friday and shared with the site’s Patreon backers as a “beta” on Saturday. The tool, which runs locally on Windows, Mac, or Linux, can search, download, and edit Gaming Alexandria’s files from the cloud or sort through local files stored on your own machine.

“This app has been something I never would have dreamed could exist,” Hubbard enthused. “Now I can finally read and enjoy these Japanese magazines I’ve been scanning for years. A large part of that is due to your believing in my work and funding me so thank you so much for that.”

The negative responses he got for all of this are wild. There were calls to boycott the project. Calls to rescind Patreon subscriptions. Max Nichols, a game designer, cancelled his own Patreon membership and decried the project as “worthless and destructive”, likening any output generated using AI-based translations as “looking at history through a clownhouse mirror.”

I would argue that I’d rather get that look than get no look at all. I’d also argue that we need to see very specific examples of AI-created translation errors to understand just how grounded these criticisms are in reality, versus all of this being a case of overstating the case.

Some fans of the site, at least, managed to understand the context here.

For some supporters, though, using machine translations—including ones aided by AI models—is a practical necessity given the size of the task at hand. “There’s no world in which they could ever get hundreds of thousands of pages translated by hand,” game preservationist Chris Chapman wrote on social media. “Error-prone searchability is more useful to more people than none at all.”

“Famitsu alone is over 1,900 issues, each with [a hundred-plus] pages,” journalist and author Felipe Pepe noted. “That’s one magazine from one country. [Human translation] would be ideal, but it’s impossible.”

On the Gaming Alexandria Discord, user asie wrote that people who use tools like Google Lens or DeepL are already using AI-powered OCR and translation tools. At this point, these kinds of tools are “just a fact of reality,” they added.

Again, any positive number is greater than zero. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something is better than nothing.

I don’t know how to explain the negative responses here as anything other than a ideological commitment to disliking anything that even remotely touches upon artificial intelligence. Absolute moral stances certainly have their place, but they sure ought to be used sparingly.

And this particular stance is silly.

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story (Times of Israel)
• Maybe Turning War Into a Casino Was a Bad Idea? (The Atlantic)
• French music streamer Deezer battles deluge of AI fraud (Financial Times)
• I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes (BBC)
• US to Receive $10 Billion Fee for TikTok Deal, WSJ Reports (Bloomberg)
• ‘AI Is African Intelligence’: The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back (404 Media)
• ‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ (The Guardian)

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s 2026 Bingo Card and get in touch if you win!

We’ve all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You’re right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples’ locations, new reporting has confirmed.

For years, the internet advertising industry has been sucking up our data, including our location data, to serve us “more relevant ads.” At the same time, we know that federal law enforcement agencies have been buying up our location data from shady data brokers that most people have never heard of.

Now, a new report gives us direct evidence that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used location data taken from the internet advertising ecosystem to track phones. In a document uncovered by 404 Media, CBP admits what we’ve been saying for years: The technical systems powering creepy targeted ads also allow federal agencies to track your location.

The document acknowledges that a program by the agency to use “commercially available marketing location data” for surveillance drew from the process used to select the targeted ads shown to you on nearly every website and app you visit. In this blog post, we’ll tell you what this process is, how it can and is being used for state surveillance, and what can be done about it—by individuals, by lawmakers, and by the tech companies that enable these abuses.

Advertising Surveillance Enables Government Surveillance

The online advertising industry has built a massive surveillance machine, and the government can co-opt it to spy on us. 

In the absence of strong privacy laws, surveillance-based advertising has become the norm online. Companies track our online and offline activity, then share it with ad tech companies and data brokers to help target ads. Law enforcement agencies take advantage of this advertising system to buy information about us that they would normally need a warrant for, like location data. They rely on the multi-billion-dollar data broker industry to buy location data harvested from people’s smartphones.

We’ve known for years that location data brokers are one part of federal law enforcement’s massive surveillance arsenal, including immigration enforcement agencies like CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE, CBP and the FBI have purchased location data from the data broker Venntell and used it to identify immigrants who were later arrested. Last year, ICE purchased a spy tool called Webloc that gathers the locations of millions of phones and makes it easy to search for phones within specific geographic areas over a period of time. Webloc also allows them to filter location data by the unique advertising IDs that Apple and Google assign to our phones.

But a document recently obtained by 404 Media is the first time CBP has acknowledged the location data it buys is partially sourced from the system powering nearly every ad you see online: real-time bidding (RTB). As CBP puts it, “RTB-sourced location data is recorded when an advertisement is served.” 

Even though this document is about a 2019-2021 pilot use of this data, CBP and other federal agencies have continued to purchase and use commercially obtained location data. ICE has purchased location tracking tools since then and recently requested information on “Ad Tech” tools it could use for investigations. 

The CBP document acknowledges two sources of location data that it relies on: software development kits (SDKs) and RTB, both methods of location-tracking that EFF has written about before. Apps for weather, navigation, dating, fitness, and “family safety” often request location permissions to enable key features. But once an app has access to your location, it could share it with data brokers directly through SDKs or indirectly (and often without the app developers’ knowledge) through RTB. Data brokers can collect location data from SDKs that they pay developers to put in their apps. When relying on RTB, data brokers don’t need any direct relationship with the apps and websites they’re collecting location data from. RTB is facilitated by ad companies that are already plugged into most websites and apps. 

How Real-Time Bidding Works

RTB is the process by which most websites and apps auction off their ad space. Unfortunately, the milliseconds-long auctions that determine which ads you see also expose your information, including location data, to thousands of companies a day. At a high-level, here’s how RTB works:

1. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. 
2. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a “bid request” and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. 
3. The bid request may contain information like your unique advertising ID, your GPS coordinates, IP address, device details, inferred interests, demographic information, and the app or website you’re visiting. The information in bid requests is called “bidstream data” and typically includes identifiers that can be linked to real people. 
4. Advertisers use the personal information in each bid request, along with data profiles they’ve built about you over time, to decide whether to bid on the ad space. 
5. The highest bidder gets to display an ad for you, but advertisers (or the adtech companies that represent them) can collect your bidstream data regardless of whether or not they bid on the ad space.   

A key vulnerability of real-time bidding is that while only one advertiser wins the auction, all participants receive data about the person who would see their ad. As a result, anyone posing as an ad buyer can access a stream of sensitive data about billions of individuals a day. Data brokers have taken advantage of this vulnerability to harvest data at a staggering scale. For example, the FTC found that location data broker Mobilewalla collected data on over a billion people, with an estimated 60% sourced from RTB auctions. Leaked data from another location data broker, Gravy Analytics, referenced thousands of apps, including Microsoft apps, Candy Crush, Tinder, Grindr, MyFitnessPal, pregnancy trackers and religious-focused apps. When confronted, several of these apps’ developers said they had never heard of Gravy Analytics. 

As Venntel, one of the location data brokers that has sold to ICE, puts it, “Commercially available bidstream data from the advertising ecosystem has long been one of the most comprehensive sources of real-time location and device data available.” But the privacy harms of RTB are not just a matter of misuse by individual data brokers. RTB auctions broadcast the average person’s data to thousands of companies, hundreds of times per day, with no oversight of how this information is ultimately exploited. Once your information is broadcast through RTB, it’s almost impossible to know who receives it or control how it’s used. 

What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

Revelations about the government’s exploitation of this location data shows how dangerous online tracking has become, but we’re not powerless. Here are two basic steps you can take to better protect your location data:

1. Disable your mobile advertising ID (see instructions for iPhone/Android). Apple and Google assign unique advertising IDs to each of their phones. Location data brokers use these advertising IDs to stitch together the information they collect about you from different apps. 
2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to. Apps that have access to your location could share it with other companies, so make sure you’re only granting location permission to apps that really need it in order to function. If you can’t disable location access completely for an app, limit it to only when you have the app open or only approximate location instead of precise location. 

For more tips, check out EFF’s guide to protecting yourself from mobile-device based location tracking. Keep in mind that the security plan that’s best for you will vary in different situations. For example, you may want to take stronger steps to protect your location data when traveling to a sensitive location, like a protest. 

What Tech Companies and Lawmakers Must Do

Legislators and tech companies must act so that individuals don’t bear the burden of defending their data every time they use the internet.

Ad tech companies must reckon with their role in warrantless government surveillance, among other privacy harms. The systems they built for targeted advertising are actively used to track people’s location. The best way to prevent online ads from fueling surveillance is to stop targeting ads based on detailed behavioral profiles. Ads can still be targeted contextually—based on the content people are viewing—without collecting or exposing their sensitive personal information. Short of moving to contextual advertising, tech companies can limit the use of their systems for government location tracking by:

• Stopping the use of precise location data for targeted advertising. Ad tech companies facilitating ad auctions can and should remove precise location data from bid requests. Ads can be targeted based on people’s coarse location, like the city they’re in, without giving data brokers people’s exact GPS coordinates. Precise location data can reveal where we work, where we live, who we meet, where we protest, where we worship, and more. Broadcasting it to thousands of companies a day through RTB is dangerous.
• Removing advertising IDs from devices, or at minimum, disabling them by default. Advertising IDs have become a linchpin of the data broker economy and are actively used by law enforcement to track people’s location. Advertising IDs were added to phones in 2012 to let companies track you, and removing them is not a far-fetched idea. When Apple forced apps to request access to people’s advertising IDs starting in 2021 (if you have an iPhone you’ve probably seen the “Ask App Not to Track” pop-ups), 96% of U.S. users opted out, essentially disabling advertising IDs on most iOS devices. One study found that iPhone users were less likely to be victims of financial fraud after Apple implemented this change. Google should follow Apple’s lead and disable advertising IDs by default.

Lawmakers also need to step up to protect their constituents’ privacy. We need strong, federal privacy laws to stop companies from spying on us and selling our personal information. EFF advocates for data privacy legislation with teeth and a ban on ad targeting based on online behavioral profiles, as it creates a financial incentive for companies to track our every move.

Legislators can and must also close the “data broker loophole” on the Fourth Amendment. Instead of obtaining a warrant signed by a judge, law enforcement agencies can just buy location data from private brokers to find out where you’ve been. Last year, Montana became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law blocking the government from buying sensitive data it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. And in 2024, Senator Ron Wyden’s EFF-endorsed Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act passed the House before dying in the Senate. Others should follow suit to stop this end-run around constitutional protections.

Online behavioral advertising isn’t just creepy–it’s dangerous. It’s wrong that our personal information is being silently harvested, bought by shadow-y data brokers, and sold to anyone who wants to invade our privacy. This latest revelation of warrantless government surveillance should serve as a frightening wakeup call of how dangerous online behavioral advertising  has become.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.