This Week in 2016

• Whether Or Not Russians Hacked DNC Means Nothing Concerning How Newsworthy The Details Are
• Verizon Buys Yahoo In $4.8 Billion Attempt To Bore The Internet To Death
• Declaring Cyberwar On Russia Because Of The DNC Hack Is A Bad Idea
• IP Lawyers Tell Copyright Office To Stop Screwing The Public By Opposing Cable Box Reform
• Intellectual Property Fun: Is Comedy Central Claiming It Owns The Character Stephen Colbert?
• The Selfie-Taking Monkey Who Has No Idea He Has Lawyers Has Appealed His Copyright Lawsuit

This Week in 2011

• The Absurdity Of Comparing Copying To Stealing
• New Study: Piracy Increases The Quality Of Content
• Getting Past The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Produce Content
• Writer Explains How Copyright Has Prevented Her From Ever Seeing TV Shows She Wrote
• UK Appeals Court Agrees That Clicking A Link And Opening A Website… Is Infringing
• Why People Pay More For Access To Infringing Content

This Week in 2006

• ‘Pirates’ Thriving, In Spite Of Pirates
• Add Amazon To The Long Long Long List Of Video Download Providers
• Mobile Phones’ Impact On Sexual Relations
• User Generated Content Goes To War
• Metallica Finally Realizes That Some People Like To Get Music Online
• The Big Karaoke Crackdown

RFK Jr. has a lot on his plate at the moment as the head of HHS. America is currently dealing with a record breaking outbreak of the measles, for instance. His agency has had a very hard time getting people confirmed for key roles. There’s that whole cyclosporiasis thing going around, which you’ll know you’ve caught it by the simple fact that you won’t be able to stop shitting yourself. There’s a huge self-inflicted talent vacuum at HHS and its child agencies. Pertussis cases are on the rise. Court orders keep blocking Kennedy’s committees.

With all of these crises and chaos, Kennedy became very angry at news reports that he was mostly checked out of the HHS work he should be doing to address all of this. It’s hard to take that anger all that seriously, though, given that Kennedy also became the very first sitting cabinet secretary to host a podcast while in office. And I have to assume it is also a first time a sitting cabinet secretary will — checks notes — host a cooking show with celebrity chefs.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a show geared toward teaching Americans how to cook healthy, inexpensive meals.

“Thanks to President Trump, we flipped the food pyramid and put real food back where it belongs: at the center of the American plate,” Kennedy said in a video he posted Wednesday to YouTube touting “The Real Food Show.”  “I’m traveling across America, connecting with renowned chefs to show families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients, and all at affordable prices,” the HHS secretary added. “America, it’s time to eat real food. Let’s get cooking.”

Cute. How about instead you travel the country on a mass vaccination campaign for measles? Maybe some lower level member of HHS can rub elbows with celebrity chefs while you, oh, I don’t know, do literally anything concrete when it comes to cyclosporiasis. Maybe you could fill the open roles in your agencies with competent people you can get confirmed by Congress. Or maybe you could get your agencies running smoothly and with high morale.

It’s not that cooking isn’t important. It’s not even that all of Kennedy’s thoughts on food and health are wrong, because they certainly are not. But there is other, real, important work that needs to be done, leadership that needs to be demonstrated, and confidence building that needs to happen with the public. All of that is a better place for the Secretary of HHS to be spending their time, compared with cosplaying as a daytime cooking show host.

Kennedy told USA Today his new cooking show aims to convince Americans that eating healthier does not cost more.

The price of food at home and away from home both rose by 0.2 percent from May to June, according to the consumer price index, a popular measure of inflation. 

It’s actually worse than that and looking at the CPI for food on a monthly basis doesn’t tell the whole story. Year over year CPI for food is up by roughly 3%. All of that is to say that if Kennedy wants to focus on the affordability of fresh food, part of the solution would be for him to get his current boss to not play stupid games with tariffs and to stop starting the very foreign wars that he promised to keep us out of.

So, as you continue to see headlines for the very real health issues the country is currently facing, just remember that RFK Jr. is hard at work baking crab cakes and getting his plating skills just right.

On a laptop screen in a dimly lit tent near the Donetsk front, a Ukrainian drone team steers its aircraft into the turret of a Russian T-72 and glimpses the start of an explosion before the picture dissolves into static. The strike is uploaded, verified, and scored against the point value assigned to the tank. The unit climbs a public leaderboard that ranks hundreds of drone teams, and the points are currency: a higher score buys better equipment, faster, from an online marketplace the warfighters compare to Amazon.

Washington is about to decide how the federal government will parcel out access to the most powerful AI, and it is drifting toward concentrating that capability in a few chosen hands, rationed by criteria no one outside the process can see. A country with foreign invaders on its own soil has spent the past year learning to do the reverse—and winning back ground as it does. From Luhansk to Lviv, Ukraine puts its best tools in the hands of whoever can use them and shares what it knows about the enemy as fast as it safely can, openly and by rule.

Behind the leaderboard sits a set of arrangements Ukraine built under fire. A marketplace lets frontline units order drones directly from hundreds of manufacturers, most of them small shops scattered across Ukraine. A procurement cycle that once ran months now takes days, and new designs reach the trenches within about a month of leaving the workbench, because the units doing the fighting, not a distant acquisition office, decide what they need in the field. Furthermore, their feedback goes straight back to the manufacturer, sometimes the same day. Because the manufacturing is dispersed rather than massed, no single Russian strike could ever change much.

Ukraine has been just as willing to share what it learns. Late last month its defense ministry opened a platform called TrophyLab that hands the technical anatomy of captured Russian weapons—schematics, known vulnerabilities, even physical samples—to a deliberately wide circle: allied militaries and intelligence services, and hundreds of Ukrainian and partner-country firms. Access is vetted and revocable, governed by published criteria. The premise is that knowledge of a threat is worth more shared than hoarded. This should be a rule everyone can see, rather than the whims of a distant official.

That combination, wide but rule-bound, is exactly what the executive order the White House issued in June fails to deliver. Faced with AI systems that can now find software flaws faster than any human team, the order promises early access to the most capable models to a few “trusted partners”—a phrase it never defines, routed through a classified process. It calls the arrangement voluntary. In practice it has not been: under national-security and commerce authorities the administration has already restricted, suspended, and then cleared frontier models, with no published criteria anyone outside the process can point to. Ukraine’s leaderboard may be a crude way to run a war, but it is at least a rule—public, legible, the same for every unit. 

The deeper problem is what that opacity does. Ukraine found that capability does the most good spread widely, that a defense holds because it has no single point of failure, and that threat intelligence should travel by rule rather than favor. A trusted-partner tier governed by undefined discretion inverts all three: it concentrates the best tools among those already best equipped, builds the very chokepoint Ukraine works to avoid, and turns shared knowledge into something rationed by judgment no one can inspect. The United States already runs sector-based centers for sharing threat intelligence; the question the framework raises is not whether to centralize but whether the flow reaches the defenders who need it or stops at a favored few.

And there are real lessons for the United States. Ukraine’s openness may look like the underdog’s strategy, and the United States is the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth—but national strength does not mean every system is strong. The defenders who most need help are not the money-center banks and wealthy university hospitals; they are smaller institutions that, despite non-specific promises they’ll be helped, seem unlikely to benefit from this system as it’s set up. For them, a head start reserved for the already-strong is no help at all.

Ukraine did not arrive at any of this by design. It was forced into it, and used a mix of openness and clear rules to stop a much larger power in its tracks. Washington has the luxury of choosing on purpose but may be drifting towards a system governed by whims and favoritism rather than clear rules and standards.  

Eli Lehrer is president and co-founder of the R Street Institute. 

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• The U.S. Is About to Design an AI Regulator. Here’s How to Get It Right (Council on Foreign Relations)
• Mark Zuckerberg Says U.S. Should Accelerate AI Development, Not Restrict It (WSJ)
• Want AI you can trust? Start by building the right institutions (Atlantic Council)
• Anthropic Says It’s Against A Ban On Open Weight Models. It Just Wants To Ban Everything That Makes Them Good (Techdirt)
• The High Stakes Behind the EU’s €890M Google DMA Fine (Tech Policy Press)
• Europe bears its teeth, political panic about OpenAI hack and YouTube refines partner policy (Everything in Moderation)
• Trump vows new tariffs on the E.U. after Brussels fines Google $1 billion (Qz)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over law banning ‘nudification’ technology (The Guardian)
• The Worst Person You Know Just Filed A Good First Amendment Lawsuit Against A Very Badly Drafted Nudify App Ban (Techdirt)

Our fun links this week are a replica of Scooby Doo’s Mystery-Machine and the Saltburn cricket scandal because we need more satire right now.

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

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

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”

“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.

In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.

“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.

In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.

Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.

“Breakdown” of a Presumption

The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.

It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.

About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.

Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.

“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.

Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.

But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.

In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.

In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.

News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”

Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.

“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.

In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.

“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”

Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.

“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.

Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries

The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.

Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”

That dynamic is gone, he said.

“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”

Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.

Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.

This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.

The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.

In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.

“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”

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Donald Trump swore he could turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something he could use to bask in his own reflected glory. Instead, it turned out to be everything we expect from Trump: braggadocio followed by abject failure.

Trump hired some guys he used to do some stuff to his personal pool(s) back in the day. It was a no-bid contract — one that was immediately extolled by Trump as Great Stuff. According to Trump, his personal cabana boys could get the job done right, on time, and under budget.

None of that happened. His boys took to the pool repair, doing their level best to behave like government contractors. Trump then did a Glory Roll across the unfinished sealant with his motorcade to show off for the boys back at the White House. A week or so later, the pool was refilled. For a brief moment, it showed off the “American flag blue” Trump thought was missing from the original fixture. Then it turned into a blend of algae and peeling sealant.

Instead of pulling out his receipts and asking his pool boys whether this reflecting pool refurb was still under warranty, Trump claimed the floating chunks of blue sealant bobbing around in the green muck was the work of vandals. And, of course, he had political appointees willing to press this point on his behalf. Jeanine Pirro — the US Attorney for the District of Columbia — got right on it, arresting former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on felony vandalism charges.

Pirro alleged Hearn had damaged “two square feet of sealant.” Well, it takes $1,000 to make vandalism charges a federal felony. While this damage estimate is subject to federal no-bid contract markup, taking someone down for doing two square feet of damage is insane, especially when Trump is still out there claiming vandals cut a 150-350 foot gash into the pool sealant.

Trump also promised there was proof of his wild allegations — something that would presumably show up as the DOJ attempted to turn vandalism arrests into federal indictments.

Well, the DOJ managed to secure an indictment against David Hearn. And it managed to do this despite its own witness stating the pool was already fucked before Hearn decided to put his hands on end results of this damage:

A key grand jury witness in a case against a former Olympic canoeist accused of tampering with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool testified that the area was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless, lawyers said in a court filing Monday.

[…]

The witness, who is not identified, was the only person who testified about damages, and said that the property had already been damaged before, authorities say, Hearn stuck his hands in the water, according to Hearn’s team.

Now, for those of you unaware of how grand jury proceedings work (and especially for those MAGA folks who like to show up and be deliberately ignorant), we’ll break this down quickly. A grand jury is not like a regular jury. Its sole purpose is to decide whether or not the government has enough evidence to support an indictment. The accused person is not there, nor are they represented by the lawyers. This is completely non-adversarial. And YET, the government’s witness testified to the grand jury that the pool was already damaged before the accused even arrived on the scene of the alleged crime.

What’s absolutely wild is that the DOJ still got its indictment despite this damning testimony from its own witness. Welcome to Trump Town, I guess. But we’ll see how long this indictment lasts. Hearn’s legal reps have filed a motion demanding copies of grand jury documents because it’s pretty fucking clear some bullshit must have been pulled to get Hearn indicted even though a government witness testified that the pool was already in shambles.

Lawyers for David Hearn, a 67-year-old who represented the United States at three Olympic Games, submitted a court filing seeking access to transcripts of the grand jury testimony as well as the instructions given to the panel that ultimately indicted Hearn, claiming that there were “irregularities” in the proceedings that led to the indictment. 

[…]

In the filing, Hearn’s legal team suggests that the jury was not “properly instructed” on the crime Hearn stands accused of, noting specifically that felony destruction of property requires the perpetrator to have caused $1,000 or more of damage. The attorneys pointed to the testimony of the federal government’s own witness, an official from the National Park Service, who suggested that the pool was damaged long before Hearn interacted with the pool and that repairs were already being sought.

The full filing [PDF] by Hearn’s legal team is embedded below. It’s worth a read. And I certainly hope the judge grants this motion because if it contains the sort of stuff these accusations suggest it the documents might contain, this won’t be the first time the Trump administration has been caught cheating even though the process already allows the government to put its prosecutorial thumb on the scales.

Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration’s unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president’s sons’ drone investments than it does protecting national security or consumer privacy.

Right on queue, The Verge has an interesting feature on just how easy it has been for some companies to bypass the FCC restrictions. The Trump ban was supposed to encourage drone makers to create devices here in the U.S.; but instead companies are simply setting up the laziest fake companies in the U.S, and the Trump FCC appears too short-handed or incompetent to notice.

So the over-arching impact of the ban has been to create a flood of new companies selling popular DJI-made Chinese drones under a litany of new names. They don’t try very hard to disguise them:

“When software developer and journalist Konrad Iturbe began watching FCC databases for those frequencies, he realized that DJI was preparing to play a grand game of Whac-A-Mole in the United States. Well ahead of the December 2025 drone ban, a host of new companies had suddenly appeared selling barely disguised versions of DJI technology. He dubbed them “DJI front companies.”

To pretend these drones are made in the U.S., the companies use fake U.S. front locations to pretend that the drones are assembled here. Again, they’re not trying very hard to disguise them, and most could have been unearthed with basic Google searches:

“But it’s easier than that. Odyssey Robot declared that its drone was designed, developed, and manufactured at 21 Miller Alley Suite 210 in Pasadena, California. Even a basic Google search can show you that’s not the address of a factory — it’s a coworking space called Industrious that explicitly prohibits members from manufacturing anything onsite.

Odyssey Robot also declared that its drones are assembled at eTak Worldwide Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas. With 80,000 square feet of warehouse space and 15 loading docks, you could theoretically build drones there. But again, a basic Google search would show you that eTak isn’t an assembler; it’s a recycling company that collects e-waste, including old batteries, then sorts and dismantles them.”

Like most of what Trump does, none of this appears thought out very well, and the administration isn’t competent enough to even do basic investigations to enforce its own restrictions. And like elsewhere in the administration, Trumpism rejoices at the idea of dismantling regulators; then throws these weird sorts of complicated demands in their lap expecting productive outcomes.

Again, in a functional world, you’d allow Chinese companies to do business in the United States, but you’d fund, staff, and legally empower your regulators to strictly enforce competition, labor, environmental, and consumer protections. Because that would result in U.S. companies making less money and having to try harder, we instead get this weird jumbled tangle of corruption and buffoonery.

The primary justification for the Trump Chinese drone ban is that these devices pose meaningful privacy and national security risks. But there’s been absolutely no evidence presented by the administration supporting this allegation. There is, however, ample proof that administration greed, corruption, and incompetence has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.

I will admit it’s always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I’m not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew!

Readers here will recall that I’ve spent the last year or so pointing out that famed gas station and/or supermarket chain, Buc-ee’s, has become the trademark bullying Monster Energy of gas stations. This is a company that doesn’t seem to understand what parody is, and which somehow believes that it alone owns the right to use a cartoon animal, or sometimes human, in a circular logo for any kind of related business to its own.

Well, Oliver dedicated a segment to Buc-ee’s bullying ways on his show this past week and he did not disappoint.

In recent years, it sued Super Fuels in Dallas, whose logo was a brown dog sporting a red cape, a drive-through liquor store in Missouri named Duckees featuring a cartoon duck wearing sunglasses, Choke Canyon Travel Center in Texas over its cartoon alligator wearing a cowboy hat, and Nut Huggers, an Oklahoma-based underwear company with a mascot of a squirrel.

Oliver accused the chain of “outright bullying,” noting that most of the stores have changed their logos because they do not have the resources to fight the Texas giant, which operates more than 50 stores.

And that’s where the real fun starts.

Now, it would be absolutely stupid for Buc-ee’s to actually sue Oliver and HBO over this. The PR would be terrible, it would only give Oliver more attention and generate more headlines about the company being a trademark bully, and it would make the company look very thin-skinned and childish. I’m also relatively certain that’s exactly what will happen.

After all, any such lawsuit wouldn’t even rank in the top 3 of stupid trademark suits that Buc-ee’s has filed. And since they’ve demonstrated that they just can’t help themselves, I imagine we’re going to get more segments about this on Oliver’s show.

It’s not that AI can’t be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can’t take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch.

The problem with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself. It’s that far too many tech companies are pitching AI as a one-size-fits-all solution to pretty much everything. And far too many entities are taking tech companies at their word, with disastrous results.

Axon (formerly Taser) has cornered the body cam market and is now trying to sweep up everything else. While it still hasn’t made a foray into facial recognition tech, it’s pitching products (Draft One and Form One) that use AI to automate report writing for police officers. Draft One has been pitched as a time-saver — one capable of transcribing body cam audio to generate police reports. The company’s CEO Rick Smith thinks this add-on to its body cam products with “potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time.”

Considering a lot of officers spend most of their time engaged in pretextual stops, this isn’t really good news. It just means officers will be able to violate rights more frequently with no perceivable benefit to public safety.

Then there’s the problem AI companies just can’t seem to solve, like extremely vivid hallucinations:

An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

However, the truth behind that so-called magical transformation is simple.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” Sgt. Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

Weirdly, this anecdote comes from the same law enforcement agency that claims AI-generated police reports keep this Utah city “safer.” The report doesn’t explain how this is being accomplished. Sgt. Keel simply says the tech saves him “6-8 hours a week.” Sgt. Keel does not explain what’s being done with these extra hours.

The other problem with relying on AI to generate police reports is that officers are generating a new layer of plausible deniability. If errors are found, cops can blame it on the algorithm. Beyond that, there are problems cops pretend don’t exist, like making any testimony reliant on AI-generated reports instantly suspect. If cops aren’t writing their own reports, they can’t possibly claim these statements are their own under oath.

But even if you ignore all of that and choose to focus on the things companies like Axon would prefer you to direct your focus to, we’re still not seeing the sort of improvement that would theoretically offset the downsides of relying on AI. Trial runs of Axon’s new Form One AI product haven’t exactly been a resounding success, as Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes.

[A]fter seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn’t save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.

That’s just the experience of a single town of 70,000 people in Indiana. Imagine having this amount of routine failure applied to departments with hundreds of officers and thousands of daily reports. What’s worse is that Form One is far less sophisticated than Draft One, which is used to transcribe body cam footage. The software is only expected to accurately add names and addresses to relevant sections of police reports. If it can’t be trusted to do this, there’s little reason to believe Draft One can provide an accurate accounting of a police stop by transcribing audio.

Axon claims these are not indicative of whatever the final product will be. According to the Axon spokesperson, Lafayette was granted “early access” to an (apparently) unfinished AI tool. Axon implies the final product will be better, but neither the Lafayette PD or Axon itself were willing to provide any info that might allow critics to move this from implication to inference.

Manchester, New Hampshire’s police department had roughly the same experience with Draft One.

Ian Adams, a former police officer and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, studied the Manchester Police Department in New Hampshire’s use of Draft One. Adams analyzed time stamps for when officers started a report and when they filed it. Only some had access to the software. The study found that there was no improvement in how long it took for cops to file reports because they spent a significant amount of time editing the AI system’s work: removing irrelevant information, fixing inaccuracies and adding important facts it missed. “It was just easier to type the report themselves,” says Manchester’s Lieutenant Matthew Barter, who participated in the research.

Weirdly, most officers still thought Draft One sped up report writing, despite data showing otherwise. And even if officers were convinced Draft One was more efficient that simply writing reports themselves, the PD apparently decided the data was more accurate than a bunch of subjective opinions. And it wasn’t the only beta tester (so to speak) to do so:

Even though it was the first agency to test Axon’s Draft One, Manchester ditched it in 2024. The same year, the Anchorage Police Department in Alaska also decided to stop using it, citing zero time savings.

Presumably, these agencies weren’t required to pay for this subpar tech. And while it’s safe to say the tech will continue to improve, the question is whether it will ever be worth it. With fewer courts willing to accept AI-generated court filings and becoming increasingly skeptical of the tech in this context, cop shops are going to be paying for a product that generates reports they can’t submit as testimony or evidence.

Beyond that, the tech apparently needs so much human backstopping that the job of writing reports may as well just be handed back to the humans. Even if it does improve to the point that it can actually reduce the paperwork load on officers, no police department enthused about the tech has specified what will be done with all of this new free time. If it’s just going to be more of the same old policing, the public gains nothing but additional chances to have their rights violated. If the free time is going to be used to build community relationships and route more officers to investigations that might contribute to overall public safety, some sort of trade-off might be acceptable. But from what’s been demonstrated so far, AI is just compounding errors without providing any real usefulness to the communities these law enforcement agencies serve.

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There’s been a bunch of news this week regarding Minnesota’s new law that purports to prohibit “nudification” technology, and the fact that xAI has sued to have the law blocked as unconstitutional. A few things need to be said upfront, because it’s very, very easy to just say the tech is terrible, that Elon Musk and Grok are terrible, and that of course Minnesota should ban it. But it’s also possible that, in the rush to attack very problematic apps built by very problematic people, Minnesota drafted a bad law that is ridiculously overbroad and pretty clearly unconstitutional. And… that is exactly what appears to be the case.

Let’s start with the basics: apps (mostly powered by various AI tools) that are used to produce modified imagery, especially stripping people of their clothes are… bad. They should be socially shunned. People using them to objectify or sexualize others are doing bad things, and people should judge those who use those apps accordingly. This is not a defense of those apps. Similarly, Elon Musk’s Grok and its widely promoted use of putting people (including children) in bathing suits definitely deserves social shunning as well. Norms take time to form, and the shunning here is still catching up to the technology.

But passing a badly drafted, obviously unconstitutional law does not help form those norms. Nor does it punish Elon Musk. Instead, it allows him to act like a First Amendment martyr.

It’s also worth clearing something up early, because a lot of the coverage has gotten it wrong: this is not a law about child sexual abuse material. CSAM is already quite illegal under both state and federal law, and nothing in HF 1606 is limited to images of minors. Had Minnesota drafted a law narrowly targeting AI-generated CSAM, it might have survived a constitutional challenge. That’s not what it did.

And if you want to pass a law to ban technology like this, there are rules under the First Amendment. And, in Minnesota, we even know what some of those rules are. After all, a decade ago, the state also passed a law criminalizing the dissemination of “nonconsensual private sexual images.” After some back and forth in the courts, the Minnesota Supreme Court finally blessed the law as constitutional in late 2020, but made it quite clear that the law went right up to the First Amendment line. It first noted that while the state wanted to claim there’s an entirely new category of unprotected speech (in this case, “substantial invasions of privacy”), the court refused to do so, citing the famed US v. Stevens case (about an attempt to outlaw animal “crush” videos) in which the Supreme Court made it quite clear that it wasn’t open to creating new categories of unprotected speech:

The United States Supreme Court has emphatically rejected “freewheeling” attempts “to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 472; see also Jorgenson, 946 N.W.2d at 604 (“The United States Supreme Court has been reluctant to expand these traditional categories of unprotected speech.”). It is possible, however, there are “some categories of speech that have been historically unprotected, but have not yet been specifically identified or discussed.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 472.

To successfully argue for a new unprotected category of speech, the proponent must present “persuasive evidence that a novel restriction on content is part of a long (if heretofore unrecognized) tradition of proscription.” Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 792 (2011). This is a heavy burden to bear, and the Supreme Court has recently rejected creating new categories of unprotected speech for animal cruelty, Stevens, 559 U.S. at 472, depictions of excessive violence, Brown, 564 U.S. at 791–93, and false statements, Alvarez, 567 U.S. at 722–23.

In this case, we conclude that the State has failed to carry the heavy burden required to provide a basis to establish a new category of unprotected speech.

And yet, the law was still deemed constitutional, but not because it created a new category of unprotected speech, but rather because it passed strict scrutiny, in which the law is narrowly tailored to use “the least restrictive means” of addressing a compelling government interest. That is the test by which a law can still be deemed viable under the First Amendment, despite suppressing speech. In the case of the nonconsensual imagery bill, the law passed strict scrutiny because it focused very narrowly on a category of speech that is very likely to cause harm, and put in place a law that was narrowly tailored to only target that speech, and on top of that included clear exemptions for edge cases that likely wouldn’t be harmful.

Indeed, the court leaned hard on the fact that the law only reached images disseminated without consent, and only when the disseminator knew or reasonably should have known the subject expected privacy. Those two limits — consent and intent — are what kept the statute from sweeping in vast amounts of protected speech. Some quotes from the court which list out all the factors necessary to pass strict scrutiny.

First, the Legislature explicitly defined the type of image that is criminalized…. Furthermore, the image has to be “obtained or created under circumstances in which the actor knew or reasonably should have known the person depicted had a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Id., subd. 1(3). Images that do not clear each of these hurdles fall outside the scope of the statute.

Second, a defendant must “intentionally” disseminate the image. … This mens rea requirement means that a defendant must knowingly and voluntarily disseminate a private sexual image; negligent, accidental, or even reckless distributions are not proscribed. This specific intent requirement further narrows the statute and keeps it from “target[ing] broad categories of speech.”

Third, the statute has seven enumerated exemptions…. The statute allows for private sexual images to be distributed “in the course of seeking or receiving medical or mental health treatment.” Id., subd. 5(3). Advertisers, booksellers, and artists are protected because images “obtained in a commercial setting” for legal purposes fall outside the statute’s reach. Id., subd. 5(4). Journalists cannot be prosecuted because there are exemptions for the dissemination of private sexual images that involve matters of public interest and “exposure[s] in public.” Id., subd. 5(4)–(5).8 Educators and scientists are protected because there is an exemption for private sexual images disseminated for “legitimate scientific research or educational purposes.” Id., subd. 5(6). Accordingly, even if protected speech falls within the ambit of subdivision one and a disseminator acted with the requisite mens rea, that person may still be exempt from prosecution under these precise exceptions.

Fourth, to be prosecuted under the statute, a disseminator must act without consent…. This provision provides additional protection for commercial advertisements, certain adult films, artistic works, and other creative expression outside the statute’s scope.

Finally, this statute only encompasses private speech…. Unlike the overly broad statutes at issue in our recent decisions in In re Welfare of A.J.B. and Jorgenson, this statute covers only private sexual images and does not prohibit speech that is “at the core of protected First Amendment speech.”

It was all of that combined that allowed the law to pass strict scrutiny — something that is incredibly difficult to do. Most laws that have to clear strict scrutiny don’t. Here, this law survived with a careful roadmap from the court of how to do so.

One would think that Minnesota legislators would be aware of this ruling and the clear reasons why the law was deemed to pass strict scrutiny and then write an equivalent law with the same elements in trying to ban nudify apps.

But for reasons known only to the Minnesota legislators, they basically ignored every single one of those points.

Minnesota’s anti-nudification tech law is not limited to non-consensual content. This means, as legal commentator Kathryn Tewson noted, that if she uploaded a picture of herself and asked Grok to put her in a bikini, she could by her own hand, cause Grok to break this law. That… seems like a very problematic law.

And, again, the Minnesota Supreme Court has already told the state pretty much exactly how to make this law constitutional: focus on nonconsensual imagery, narrowly tailor it to just the deeply harmful content, include an intent requirement, and include clear delineated exemptions for things that should be allowed.

Minnesota legislators did none of that. Indeed, even the definition of “intimate parts” in the law borrows its definition of ‘intimate parts’ from an earlier statute, covering: “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being” — not much of which is inherently sexual, let alone harmful. Tewson offers another example: an edit of a Taylor Swift photo that changes the texture of her fishnet stockings to look more like skin. Whatever tool made that edit just violated Minnesota law.

This is, by definition, an overly broad, non-narrowly tailored law.

Another example: last year the TV show South Park did a deepfake parody of Donald Trump, showing a photorealistic version of him wandering naked through the desert, including his “intimate parts.”

Under this law, that video could violate HF 1606. That’s not narrowly tailored. That’s not dealing with intent or focused just on truly harmful content.

One lawyer I spoke to, after reading through the statute, wondered out loud whether the Minnesota legislature had deliberately drafted it in the dumbest way possible just to guarantee a successful challenge. That’s how poorly the law was drafted.

Of course, no one wants to hear that the law is badly drafted. Lots of people want to ban nudify apps and to yell about how ridiculous it is that Elon Musk has gone to court to challenge this law.

But… it’s the sort of thing he should be doing. Otherwise anyone can have Grok put themselves in a bikini and… Minnesota’s Attorney General can demand $500,000 for each such image created, even when the image was created deliberately, by the person in it, of themselves.

xAI (now a division of SpaceX) is right to challenge the law, not because nudify apps are a good thing, but because the law is terribly drafted and pretty clearly exceeds what’s allowed under the First Amendment. The complaint itself is worth a read. For one thing, it explains why xAI last week sued one of its own users for producing CSAM with Grok (which I had found perplexing at the time). It reads a lot like the company wanted a concrete example to put in this filing of how it fights back against those who use Grok in such ways (leaving out, of course, that Elon himself used the app to put himself in a bikini, thereby encouraging others to do the same).

It also explains why that complaint was focused on triggering the indemnity clause in X’s terms of service, which makes the user liable for any legal costs associated with their use of the product. What Musk is really signalling with that lawsuit is if Minnesota’s AG sues us under this law for your usage of the product, we’re going to sue you to cover our costs (which could include the $500,000 fine for any images created).

As the lawsuit notes, the law is just terribly written:

HF 1606 punishes AI platforms that allow users to alter images of real people to depict an “intimate part.” But the statute contains no knowledge, intent, or purpose requirement. It is a strict-liability statute keyed solely to whether a user succeeded in creating a covered image using the AI provider’s platform—regardless of whether the provider prohibits users from using its tool for such a purpose, regardless of how many mitigations the provider has in place, and regardless of how diligently the provider polices such conduct using its tool. There is no safe harbor for good-faith efforts of the provider of general-purpose AI creative tools to avoid harms. Liability attaches even if the depicted persons consented—or created the image themselves—and even if the image is never shared. Liability also attaches even if the image has artistic, scientific, political, satirical, educational, medical, or religious value, and (again) even if the company has deployed near-perfect, state-of-the-art technical controls to prevent the generation of nude images.

Additionally, the law’s definition of “intimate part” is exceptionally broad. Although the federal government and various states have enacted statutes that clearly define nudity for the specific context of AI-generated images, Minnesota rejected such a precise definition. Instead, it borrowed the definition of “intimate part” from a criminal sexual-contact statute. That definition was drafted for nonconsensual touching and thus covers the inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a man or woman, as well as the groin and primary genital area. HF 1606 accordingly bans ordinary depictions of men without shirts, people in shorts or swimsuits, and other body parts routinely displayed in public—far beyond what an ordinary person would consider “nudification.”

Even worse, as the lawsuit states, the bill’s “principal sponsor” admitted that the law was designed to apply to consensual imagery:

A service used by an adult to edit a photograph of him or herself or a consenting individual is covered on the same terms as a service used to create an image of an unwilling stranger. The statute’s text draws no distinction among them. And this was by design. When a staff member of the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee pointed out that the Act’s “prohibition applies to consensual images,” Senator Maye Quade (the bill’s principal sponsor) explained “that is intentional.”

That is the bill’s main sponsor stating, on the record, that she deliberately chose to leave out one of the very features Minnesota’s own Supreme Court had identified as necessary for a law like this to survive constitutional scrutiny.

That is legislative malpractice.

Since the lawsuit was filed, Maye Quade and other legislators have publicly defended the bill:

“I don’t see this as a free speech issue. This does not regulate content; it does not regulate art. It regulates conduct,” Maye Quade said. “Prompts are not art, and we protect art specifically in this law. It’s pretty audacious to sue to prevent a law that protects children from being turned into child sexual abuse material.”

She’s describing a law she could have written, but didn’t.

Notice what’s missing from that defense: any explanation of why the consent and intent elements the Minnesota Supreme Court specifically identified as saving the 2016 law were left out of this one. Also, she’s just simply incorrect that the law does not regulate speech. Again, if she simply read what the Minnesota Supreme Court said about the nonconsensual intimate imagery law, it spent pages analyzing the nonconsensual imagery statute — a law covering narrower material than this one — as a content-based restriction on speech that had to pass strict scrutiny to survive.

Similarly, the law does not actually “protect art.” Its one and only exemption is if the work “requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video.” That could protect some art, but not all. And it defines art only in a case where a level of skill is needed, which itself potentially creates First Amendment issues in defining what is, and what is not art. There is plenty of modern art that people regularly complain takes no “technical skill” to create.

The complaint itself includes some other examples of what would violate the law, including this (gross) AI-generated image that Trump posted of a slimmed down version of himself, some of his cabinet members, and a randomly generated woman in a bikini sitting in a gleaming blue reflecting pool. Under the law, whatever tool was used to generate that image pretty clearly violated Minnesota’s law:

In this viral snapshot—which President Trump posted publicly— President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum all are portrayed shirtless in the Washington Mall’s reflecting pool, along with an unknown (possibly fictitious) woman.19 An “intimate part” (the breast) of at least the President, Vice President, Secretary of the Interior, and the woman are “depict[ed],” with the Secretary of State also at least arguably included as well. The President posted this image on his personal account, presumably to make light of the public controversy surrounding repairs to the reflecting pool on the National Mall.

Nudify apps are gross. Musk’s encouragement of people to use Grok to de-clothe people is gross. People who use AI tools to “nudify” people are gross. But that doesn’t mean all laws targeting such things are good laws or constitutional.

In this case, despite having clear instructions from its own Supreme Court on how to write a constitutional law, Minnesota’s legislature deliberately chose to write an unconstitutional one. And thus, this lawsuit is the proper thing for SpaceX/xAI/Musk to do.

Supporting the lawsuit is not supporting Elon or Grok or nudify apps. It’s telling every legislature in the country the same thing: if you want the law to survive, learn to draft it in ways that aren’t unconstitutional.