News

Wednesday 2025-12-03

12:00 PM

Justice Alito Makes The Most Sense, Or This Week At The Supreme Court In The Cox-Sony Copyright Case [Techdirt]

One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words “First Amendment” are not uttered even once—unless, of course, someone like Justice Alito has something to say about it, because he was basically the only justice whose questions addressed the practical effect on people’s ability to speak online should Sony’s arguments prevail. (“That doesn’t sound workable to me,” he said at one point, recognizing how many people would effectively end up losing their Internet access if Sony were right and providers were required to terminate accounts upon receiving an infringement notice.)

This case is one where Cox—and, by extension, EVERY Internet platform and provider—faces showstopping liability for how its users are alleged to use their Internet service. As we pointed out in the Copia Institute’s amicus brief, the rule that comes out of this case, governing whether Cox can be secondarily liable for its users’ alleged wrongdoings, is by no means limited to just copyright liability. But that was the form of liability at issue here, because Cox’s users were alleged to have fileshared works infringing copyrights Sony claimed the right to enforce. Sony has argued that Cox should share in that liability because it did not do anything to stop those users from filesharing, and, indeed, let these users keep using their service even after allegedly being told they were infringing—although, as Cox argued, it’s not clear that Cox actually had enough knowledge of actual infringement to act on, because there were never any notices alleging that any specific person had committed any specific wrongful act (and, as we also noted in our brief, there was never any judicial finding that such wrongfulness had indeed been committed; at most there were accusations, which, as this overall litigation revealed, were often unfounded).

Cox, for its part, opted to litigate this case essentially as a pure tort case: what are the rules for when a third party can be liable for the actions of another? And it’s possible that this strategy might pay off because the justices did not seem comfortable with the idea that secondary liability could be picked up too casually, in any context. What they will wrangle with is whether knowing that someone they are providing a tool to is using it for bad purpose is enough to share in liability, or whether there needs to be something more, like an intent that the tool be used for that bad purpose. (“Intent” and “purpose” were terms that came up a lot; expect the decision to invoke them, even if the result is a remand back to the Fourth Circuit to reconsider Cox’s liability under a standard referencing them.) Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh also expressed concern that because the copyright statute itself did not create a cause of action for secondary liability the Court should be wary about creating such liability itself when the decision whether or not to do so, or how, should be in Congress’s purview.

But it also was a big risk to be so singularly focused on this argument, because it obfuscated what’s really at stake.

Part of the problem with Cox’s strategy is that this was a copyright case, and copyright tends to make otherwise reasonable people lose their minds. Which is how the Supreme Court managed to produce a decision in the Warhol case where even though it was a fair use case, and fair use is all about protecting expression from copyright’s power, the decision never even mentioned, let alone grappled with, how the First Amendment and copyright law need to play together. That decision was written by Justice Sotomayor, who seemed to have the coldest reception to Cox’s arguments here. After all, she seemed to think, Cox had reason to know their users were filesharing! How can it be fair they escape trouble for that???

The answer: because of what would happen to all their user expression if they had done what Sony wanted and terminated the accounts it had accused, or if it could even have been liable for simply having provided a service all their users needed for all their online activities—including their completely innocent and expressive ones. As we pointed out in our brief, there are a number of threats to free expression if Sony’s legal theory could succeed: it would (1) leave online expression subject to prior restraint, which the First Amendment forbids, by giving an un-adjudicated infringement notice the power to cause speech (and speakers) to be removed; (2) make online speakers subject to being kicked off the Internet, which the Supreme Court said was not Constitutional in the earlier Packingham v. North Carolina case; and (3) make it possible to censor speakers by pressuring the intermediary providers they depend on, which the Court itself quite recently pointed out is not something the First Amendment allows in the NRA v. Vullo case.

Yet, strangely, none of these issues really made it into the oral argument, save for a bit mumbled by the Solicitor General, also arguing on the side of Cox, who tried to point out (before largely being cut off by Justice Sotomayor) that it would be inequitable to ban someone from using the Internet as a penalty for filesharing. But, for some reason, Cox itself steered clear of these issues, even though it made Cox stand alone, and despite the fact that its fate here will shape the fate of every other Internet platform, and even though making the stakes so apparent would be likely to help Cox, especially if some of the justices do not like some of the facts specific to Cox (like its infamous “f__ the DMCA” email produced during discovery in an earlier round of this litigation). The more the Court thinks this case is just about Cox, the worse off everyone will be, because it is a case that impacts everyone who uses the Internet, for any purpose, including all those that are expressive and innocent.

And even though these free speech issues provide the antidote to the very copyright exceptionalism that prompts people to want to throw the book at them for what their users allegedly had done. How dare people disrespect the rights of others, that thinking goes. But that’s exactly the problem: it’s the rights of others, including their constitutionally-protected rights to express themselves, that are what is truly being threatened by law that unduly protects the power of others to silence them.

It was important to make clear to the justices that what is at stake is not just a run-of-the-mill tort case. No, providing Internet access is not just like providing someone a gun, as Justice Sotomayor analogized. We’re talking about the very ability for the Internet to work as a communications medium by making it legally and practically possible for platforms to provide the technical ability for users to express themselves online, in any of the infinite ways they might do so. That the fundamental ability of the Internet to continue to operate was at stake should have been the headline in this case, but it was barely an afterthought, if that.

Instead we got to see Justices Sotomayor and Jackson display a very dubious grasp of the statutory history of the DMCA. They seemed to read it as a law that was designed to ensure that platforms would have liability for what their users did, instead of as a statute designed to do the exact opposite and make sure we didn’t crush the nascent Internet by making it legally impossible for platforms to provide services to their users. They also couldn’t seem to understand what incentive platforms would have to respond to infringement notices if they couldn’t be liable for secondary liability anyway. But as we also noted in our amicus brief, the Shelter Capital case illustrates the incentive, because there the Veoh Network platform got financially bled into bankruptcy in the process of successfully winning its liability case. The DMCA is intended to protect platforms from obliteration-by-litigation because when they disappear, so do the avenues people need to speak online. Wouldn’t it be nice if we still had Veoh Networks as an alternative to YouTube? Too bad, the copyright industry sued them out of existence, even though it turned out they weren’t liable after all.

What the DMCA is for, and why it needs to not be stripped from platforms like Cox (or Veoh) so easily, is to make sure such injustice doesn’t happen and online expression isn’t harmed as a result. Because that is what is at stake in this case: if Cox can be held liable for its users’ online activities by simply having provided them the means for engaging with them, or even simply have to answer a case raising the prospect of liability, then it will not be possible for any platforms to ever provide anyone the means to engage online, no matter how expressively and innocently. That silenced future is what will arise if Cox were to lose, and we can only hope at least five justices see it and choose for us all another path.

Something’s Been Bugging Me… [The Status Kuo]

I’m writing for The Big Picture substack today about something that’s been nagging at me. It started a while back but really tugged at my brain over the past 48 hours. We all witnessed the White House and Pentagon go into spin mode over what I’m calling Double-Tap Gate: the illegal order to strike and kill survivors from an attack upon an alleged “drug smuggling” vessel in international waters. But we need to take a closer look at that spin.

I put “drug smuggling” in quotes above deliberately. I just don’t buy our military’s justifications for the strike, and nobody really should. But that gets to the heart of what’s bothering me about our present public discourse, exemplified in the case study of Hegseth and Double-Tap Gate. We need to step back and assess the White House strategy more widely and break free of the false constructs it has spun. It turns out, the White House’s gaslighting fits a familiar pattern.

If you’re already a subscriber to The Big Picture, you’ll receive my piece later this afternoon in your inbox. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up for free. Of course, if you believe in rewarding good content, we invite you to become a voluntary paid supporter of our work!

Sign Me Up For The Big Picture

See you later this afternoon—

Jay

10:00 AM

Firm Tied To Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts [Techdirt]

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

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” 

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee. 

“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.

Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”

“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.

In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.” 

Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.

This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.

The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)

The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”

“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”

Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore

The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.

The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million. 

But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.

Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.

How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases. 

The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year. 

In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.

Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.

Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.

Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.

Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.

Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.

The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)

Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.

Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups. 

As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)

The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.

07:00 AM

Our Founders Would Abhor What The USPTO Is Doing With The Patent System [Techdirt]

Last week I wrote about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is pushing a rule change that would effectively neuter the inter partes review (IPR) system that reviews already granted patents to make sure they weren’t granted by mistake. Patent tolls and other abusers of the patent system have been screaming about this system ever since it started actually helping stop the flood of patent trolling over the last decade and a half. They’ve now convinced the USPTO to change the rules without congressional approval.

The comment period for the USPTO to consider this change closes today, so I wanted to share the comment that I submitted to the proceedings (the full PDF has footnotes, which I’m not bothering to repost here):

The Copia Institute is the think tank arm of Floor64, Inc., the privately-held California small business behind Techdirt.com. As a think tank the Copia Institute produces evidence-driven articles and papers as well as other forms of expressive output such as podcasts and games that examine the nuances and assumptions underpinning technology policy. Armed with its insights it then regularly submits advocacy instruments such as amicus briefs and regulatory comments, such as this one.

We write to oppose the US Patent & Trademark Office’s proposed rule changes for inter partes review (IPR) found in Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. We oppose the rule changes for three broad reasons:

  1. The policy change would directly oppose the reason and intent of the patent system, doing real damage to American innovation.
  2. The current IPR system, though imperfect, has been a tremendously helpful tool in stopping poor quality patents from limiting innovation.
  3. Such changes should only be directed by Congress, not the agency

The US Patent System must guard against abuse

Both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson spoke out frequently against the very idea of monopolies, including patents. And when it came time to draft the intellectual property clause of the Constitution, there was a discussion between the two founders. Jefferson apparently worried about Madison’s decision to include patent monopolies in the Constitution, writing to him in 1788:

[I]t is better to … abolish … Monopolies, in all cases, than not to do it in any …. The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression.

Madison responded, agreeing that such things are “among the greatest nuisances in government,” but convinced Jefferson that they should not be “wholly renounced” so long as they were very limited and had safety valves to protect against their abuse.

The IPR system is just such a safety valve, allowing anyone to make sure that patents that have been granted truly deserve to be. Years later, Madison summed up his thoughts on patents by saying:

Monopolies though in certain cases useful ought to be granted with caution, and guarded with strictness against abuse.

Once again, the IPR system is just such a system that helps guard against abuse.

As both Jefferson and Madison recognized, government-granted monopolies are prone to abuse without strict systems to guard against abuse. As the US learned in the late 90s and early 2000s, our patent system was being widely abused by non-practicing entities, often single lawyers who would buy up useless, overly broad patents that never should have been granted, and demanding large sums of money from companies who were actually innovating, and actually building successful products.

Congress recognized this problem and how the system of government granted monopolies must be “guarded with strictness against abuse” and created the current IPR system with the America Invents Act in 2011, creating the IPR process.

The concept is simple and straightforward. Patent examiners are already overworked, and there is evidence that mistakenly granted patents make it through our system. No system is perfect. So to make sure that patents are valid, Congress, in its wisdom created a process that enabled those who came across an improperly granted patent to challenge it, and a process to review that patent to make sure it should have been granted.

If the patents are valid, then the IPR process reinforces that, strengthening the quality of the patent. If the patent is invalid, then the IPR process does what Madison believed necessary: strictly guarding the system against abuse.

The system has worked

Over and over again, the IPR system has successfully guarded American innovators against the abuse of government granted monopolies. Over and over again, patents that were mistakenly granted, which Jefferson and Madison warned would limit innovation, have been successfully challenged, and invalidated, protecting actual innovators from having their work halted by a lawyer holding a bad patent.

A bad patent that was used to claim that all podcasting was infringing was thankfully invalidated via the IPR process. Prior to that, many of the top podcasters were sued or threatened, and some even considered stopping their podcasts. Today, we’ve seen that podcasts are an essential part of our media ecosystem. They were not actually invented by the patent holder. Indeed, prior art was found that showed the claims in the patent (which was about audio cassettes, not podcasting) was predated in practice by others.

That patent never should have been granted, and actual innovators in the podcasting space were spared thanks to the IPR process.

And this is not a rare result. In the first decade, patents reviewed by the PTAB using IPR resulted in approximately 40% of the patents challenged being ruled invalid. In other words, when the USPTO had a chance to look closely at those patents, and related prior art, in many cases, they realized that the patent never should have been granted in the first place, and then corrected that mistake.

The IPR process works. It fulfills the important function that Madison insisted any patent system needed: to zealously guard against abuse of those monopoly grants.

Only Congress can change the system

Finally, it is important to note that this move by the Patent Office exceeds its authority. Just last year the Supreme Court made clear in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that agencies cannot reinterpret statutes to reach outcomes Congress did not authorize. The America Invents Act created IPR with specific parameters. The proposed rules would fundamentally alter that system—limiting when IPR can be used, forcing petitioners to forfeit other legal rights, and making patents effectively unchallengeable after a single review—changes that go far beyond the USPTO’s role in implementing the statute Congress actually passed.

If the USPTO believes the IPR system needs this kind of overhaul, the proper path is to ask Congress to amend the law. There have been multiple bills proposed in Congress to restrict IPR, and none has passed. Congress has repeatedly declined to make these changes through legislation. The USPTO cannot accomplish through rulemaking what Congress has refused to do through law.

This alone should end the discussion. The agency is attempting to rewrite a statutory framework that Congress deliberately chose not to change, despite years of lobbying pressure to do so. That is precisely the kind of administrative overreach that Loper Bright was meant to prevent.

Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison worried about a patent system that would be subject to abuses. Madison felt that the system must be guarded carefully against such abuses. After seeing the harm those abuses created, Congress wisely established the IPR process, which has worked well for over a decade.

It would be a massive mistake to reject that, and return us to a world in which the IPR process was limited, and abuse of the patent system against actual innovators was rampant.

Please reject this proposed rule change in order to protect innovation.

06:00 AM

Arti 1.8.0 released: Onion service improvements, prop 368, relay development, and more. [Tor Project blog]

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 1.8.0.

This release introduces a new, usage-based, timeout for strongly isolated circuits, as specified in proposal 368.

Arti now has experimental tokio-console support for development and debugging purposes. To use this feature, you will need to build Arti with the experimental tokio-console cargo feature and --cfg tokio_unstable, and enable the tokio_console option in the config.

This release also brings some of quality of life improvements for onion services, with the new experimental arti hsc ctor-migrate command for migrating C Tor client restricted discovery keys (previously known as "client authorization keys") to Arti's keystore, and a configuration option for controlling which onion services to launch.

Behind the scenes, we have continued development of functionality required to support relays and directory authorities. This development has focused on the routing architecture and protocol implementation (circuits and channels), parsing and generating Tor network documents, directory cache support, and on implementing the OR port listener and the associated configuration.

For full details on what we've done, including API changes, and for information about many more minor and less visible changes, please see the CHANGELOG.

For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README, and the documentation for the arti binary.

Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including Dimitris Apostolou, hashcatHitman, hjrgrn, Mynacol, Neel Chauhan, nield, Nihal, NoisyCoil.

Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!

Trump Follows Up Murdering Dozens In ‘Drug’ Boat Strikes By Pardoning Ex-President Involved In Drug Trafficking [Techdirt]

For weeks, we’ve been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to “kill” Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting cartel would ever engage in. Obviously, he’s lying, as are those who speak for him.

But those lies are being used to buttress something even more awful than our usual War on Drugs: the extrajudicial murders of people only suspected to be moving drugs from Venezuela to… well, anywhere else but Venezuela. There are plenty of people between the United States and Venezuela who might be interested in purchasing/trafficking drugs. To insist that these drugs (if they exist at all) are headed to the US border with the intent of “killing” cartels’ customer bases is a lie so stupid it shouldn’t be given the dignity of a one-sentence debunking.

Trump is playing hardball in international waters, straight up murdering people simply because their boats have departed from Venezuelan shores. And while he keeps constructing his “Savior of America” facade, he’s so self-interested he can’t stop himself from undercutting his own narratives.

The man is a blend of involuntary muscle movements and brain stem-level thinking. “DRUGS ARE KILLING US” he screams into the bullhorn he owns (TruthSocial). Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, he’s letting the drug dealers he personally likes off the hook.

President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.

As several current and former government officials noted in that preliminary reporting, Trump’s actions were not only harmful to foreign relations and ongoing anti-drug trafficking efforts, but also made a mockery of Trump’s other statements about going hard on drugs.

A day later, nothing had changed but the status of Juan Orlando Hernandez’s pardon, which was now a fact, rather than a threat. And, of course, it was Classic Trump™, all the way down to the New York Times’ coverage of it.

Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.

The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.

Oh NYT, that’s not “remarkable dissonance.” And it certainly isn’t the “display” of “contradictions” claimed in the headline.

The word the NYT is looking for (in both cases) is “hypocrisy.” These are hypocritical acts performed by a president who resolutely does not care that he’s the embodiment of hypocrisy. There’s no “contradiction” or “dissonance.” This is how Trump operates. His “shut down the borders” yelling obviously clashes horribly with his decision to pardon a foreign drug trafficker, but everything about it is entirely consistent with all known Trump actions/statements to date. It may look like dissonance to someone who just emerged from a 12-year coma today, but it looks exactly like Trump business as usual to everyone else.

This doesn’t mean this hypocrisy should be ignored. It absolutely shouldn’t. It just means we shouldn’t use nicer words that suggest an error of judgment might have taken place, because that just gives a deliberately hypocritical act (one of several!) by Trump a veneer of plausible deniability it certainly goddamn doesn’t deserve.

Trump will continue to engage in baseless fraud prosecutions of political opponents while simultaneously pardoning the fraudsters he likes. He’ll demand the FBI investigate Democratic representatives for sedition while pardoning hundreds of MAGA true believers who engaged in a literal insurrection attempt back in January 2021. Pardoning a politician with ties to drug cartels while murdering Venezuelans in international waters is so on brand it may as well be backed by Trump trademark applications. This is just Trump being Trump. To suggest it’s merely “dissonant” is to miss the point entirely.

Daily Deal: The Ultimate Microsoft Excel Training Bundle [Techdirt]

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Congress Is Finally Going To Look Into Trump’s Boat Strike Killing Spree [Techdirt]

It was never enough to simply expel migrants as quickly as possible for the Trump administration. A massive conglomerate of federal officers was incapable of hitting Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, no matter how many rights it violated. Any pretense of only going after migrants with criminal records was discarded during Trump’s previous administration, even though every administration spokesperson is guaranteed to repeat the lie in defense of every act of brutality.

For a few months now, the administration has been killing people in international waters. The supposed justification is that the people killed are transporting drugs destined for the United States. Maybe some of those killed were engaged in drug trafficking, but prior to Trump’s second term, the accepted approach was to intercept these boats and arrest their occupants.

That’s apparently unacceptable to Trump and the ex-Fox News commentator he elevated to the top position in the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Our country is now engaged in extrajudicial killings (more accurately: murders) in international waters under the pretense that the trafficking of drugs is the equivalent of engaging in actual war against the United States.

The zero due process executions in open waters would be distressing enough. But it’s even worse than that. The US military — under the direction of Hegseth and Trump — is making sure no one survives the initial attack.

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

This is America. We kill what we have no desire to save. Land of the Free (but for MAGA faithful only) and home of the people so brave they’re willing to circle back around to murder people clinging to life after an initial military strike.

If not war crimes, why war-crime shaped, one might ask. No one in the administration cares. It’s what the regime wants to do. Nothing else matters other than it getting done.

The consolation prize in the middle of this murderous race towards authoritarianism is this: some people — even some Republicans — are extremely uncomfortable with this operation, which definitely sports a war crime silhouette.

Republican-led committees in the Senate and the House say they will amplify their scrutiny of the Pentagon after a Washington Post report revealing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea several weeks ago.

[…]

Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.” The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

These two lawmakers have since been joined by Rep. Mike Rogers (a Republican) and Rep. Adam Smith (Democratic Party), who have stated they’re interested in a “full accounting” of Trump’s international waters-based boat strike program. That brings the House in alignment with the Senate, ensuring both branches of Congress involved in US military oversight are involved.

While this is a positive development (given the political affiliation of everyone involved), we won’t know what this actually means until this investigation is well underway. On one hand, this could just be Republicans playing nice with Democratic party members in hopes of finding some way to justify these strikes after the fact.

On the other hand, even MAGA Republicans are probably upset they’ve been left out of the loop on this. The administration has steadfastly refused to allow congressional reps to directly interact with the OLC lawyers who couldn’t be bothered to reverse engineer a justification for extrajudicial killings until well after several killings had already taken place. Whether or not these Republicans agree with Trump, it’s becoming clear they’d like to be considered part of the process, rather than simply expected to cheer from the sidelines.

Blowing up boats the administration claims (after the fact) were filled with drug traffickers is one thing. (And what a fucking thing it is.) Sending in another strike to ensure no one survives the attacks is quite another. Never mind the moral obligations. The United States has legal obligations to survivors of military strikes, especially when it’s clear (as it is here in the case of people clinging to wreckage) they pose no danger to anyone.

A group of former military attorneys who have scrutinized the Trump administration’s military activities in Latin America released an assessment Saturday outlining relevant international and domestic laws, and said that regardless of whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict, conducting law enforcement or other military operations, the targeting of defenseless people is prohibited.

Under the circumstances The Post reported, “not only does international law prohibit targeting these survivors, but it also requires the attacking force to protect, rescue, and, if applicable, treat them as prisoners of war,” the group said in a statement circulated to news media. “Violations of these obligations are war crimes, murder, or both. There are no other options.”

While this may seem not all that different from the drone/military strikes authorized by the Obama administration — some of which involved several passes to ensure anyone merely wounded would be completely dead — it definitely isn’t the same thing. The extrajudicial killings authorized by Obama involved people in areas where the US was already engaged in military conflicts. The boat strikes, on the other hand, involve people from a country we’re not occupying or invading (Venezuela) and people who the administration openly admits are doing nothing more than moving drugs from one place to another.

Claiming these drugs are headed to the US is an allegation without basis in fact. And the killing of people suspected of nothing more than acts that could only be prosecuted if the traffickers and their drugs attempted to cross the US border while they’re still in international waters hundreds of miles away from the United States is nothing more than straight up murdering people just because you think you can get away with it. So far, the administration has. Maybe what’s happening now will bring this to a halt. But until it does, the Trump administration will continue to ensure every American has blood on their hands, whether they voted for him or not.

04:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 探 [Kanji of the Day]

探

✍11

小6

grope, search, look for

タン

さぐ.る　さが.す

探す   (さがす)   —   to search for
探る   (さぐる)   —   to feel around for
探偵   (たんてい)   —   detective
探索   (たんさく)   —   search
名探偵   (めいたんてい)   —   great detective
探検   (たんけん)   —   exploration
探査   (たんさ)   —   probe
探しに   (さがしに)   —   in search of
探訪   (たんぼう)   —   searching
探り   (さぐり)   —   sounding

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days [Let's Encrypt]

Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028.

This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.

We are also reducing the authorization reuse period, which is the length of time after validating domain control that we allow certificates to be issued for that domain. It is currently 30 days, which will be reduced to 7 hours by 2028.

Timeline of Changes

To minimize disruption, Let’s Encrypt will roll this change out in multiple stages. We will use ACME Profiles to allow you control over when these changes take effect. They are configured in your ACME client. For more information, see our blog post announcing them.

Changes will be deployed to our staging environment approximately one month before the production dates below.

  • May 13, 2026: Let’s Encrypt will switch our tlsserver ACME profile to issue 45-day certificates. This profile is opt-in and can be used by early adopters and for testing.
  • February 10, 2027: Let’s Encrypt will switch our default classic ACME profile to issuing 64-day certificates with a 10-day authorization reuse period. This will affect all users who have not opted into the tlsserver or shortlived (6-day) profiles.
  • February 16, 2028: We will further update the classic profile to issue 45-day certificates with a 7 hour authorization reuse period.

These dates are when the change takes effect for new certificates, so Let’s Encrypt users will see the reduced certificate validity period at their next renewal after these dates.

Action Required

Most users of Let’s Encrypt who automatically issue certificates will not have to make any changes. However, you should verify that your automation is compatible with certificates that have shorter validity periods.

To ensure your ACME client renews on time, we recommend using ACME Renewal Information (ARI). ARI is a feature we’ve introduced to help clients know when they need to renew their certificates. Consult your ACME client’s documentation on how to enable ARI, as it differs from client to client. If you are a client developer, check out this integration guide.

If your client doesn’t support ARI yet, ensure it runs on a schedule that is compatible with 45-day certificates. For example, renewing at a hardcoded interval of 60 days will no longer be sufficient. Acceptable behavior includes renewing certificates at approximately two thirds of the way through the current certificate’s lifetime.

Manually renewing certificates is not recommended, as it will need to be done more frequently with shorter certificate lifetimes.

We also recommend that you make sure your systems have sufficient monitoring in place to alert appropriately if certificates aren’t renewed when expected. There are many available options, some of which are documented on our Monitoring Service Options page.

Making Automation Easier with a new DNS Challenge Type

For many of our users, the hardest part of automatically issuing certificates is proving domain control. Reducing certificate lifetimes and the authorization reuse period will make users need to demonstrate control more often.

All validation methods today require that the ACME client have live access to your infrastructure, either to serve the correct HTTP-01 token, perform the right TLS-ALPN-01 handshake, or update the right DNS-01 TXT record. For a long time, people have wanted a way to run an ACME client without granting it access to these sensitive systems.

These challenges are why we are working with our partners at the CA/Browser Forum and IETF to standardize a new validation method called DNS-PERSIST-01. The key advantage of this new method is that the DNS TXT entry used to demonstrate control does not have to change every renewal.

This means you can set up the DNS entry once and begin automatically renewing certificates without needing a way to automatically update DNS. This should allow even more people to automate their certificate renewals. It will also reduce reliance on authorization reuse, since the DNS records can stay unchanged without any further ACME client involvement.

We expect DNS-PERSIST-01 to be available in 2026, and will have more to announce soon.

Keep Up to Date

Additional updates, reminders, and other changes will be shared on our technical updates mailing list. Subscribe to keep up-to-date with these and all other upcoming changes. If you have any questions, please ask on our community forum. If you want to read more about the work happening at Let’s Encrypt and our other projects, check out our Annual Report, which was published today.

Quickies [The Stranger]

Got problems? Yes, you do! by Dan Savage 1. Is Donald Trump a gay man? I can’t think of anything that screams “closeted gay” louder than building a golden ballroom. Donald Trump has been married to three different women (two of whom were immigrants), he’s been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault by dozens of women, and he was found liable — by a jury of his peers — for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. I don’t care if his golden ballroom has a line of gilded slings, Goldschläger in the lube dispensers, and waiters running around in gold lamé Rocky shorts, that man is not one of mine. 2. You’ve talked about how urine is sterile but also switched to calling it “mostly” sterile. Is it safe to use in a neti pot? Sterile is binary — something either is or isn’t sterile (sterile is not a spectrum!) — so it wouldn’t be accurate to describe…

[ Read more ]

02:00 AM

Supreme Court: Can ISPs Be Liable For Piracy By Doing Nothing? [TorrentFreak]

supremecourtThe Supreme Court case between several major record labels and Internet provider Cox Communications is one of the landmark copyright battles of this decade.

The outcome will determine how Internet providers should deal with pirating subscribers on their networks.

The Supreme Court must decide whether an ISP can be held liable for failing to disconnect repeat copyright infringers. In addition, it must determine if this ‘inaction’ amounts to willful copyright infringement, even if the ISP wasn’t aware that its specific conduct was illegal.

Supreme Court Hearing

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, grappling with these questions for nearly two hours. The justices critically questioned all sides in their effort to form a final opinion.

Cox’s attorney, E. Joshua Rosenkranz, began by arguing that it would be a dangerous expansion of the law to hold an ISP liable for the actions of its subscribers.

He argued that under the “purpose” standard, liability should only apply if an Internet provider takes “affirmative steps” to facilitate copyright infringement. For example, by advertising piracy services.

Cox Communications’ key arguments

  • The “Purpose” Standard: Liability requires proof of “affirmative intent” to foster piracy (e.g., advertising illegal uses), not just knowledge that it is happening.
  • Passive Utility: An ISP shouldn’t be liable for “passive non-feasance” (doing nothing). Treating them as “Internet Police” would force them to disconnect innocent users, including schools and hospitals, to avoid risk.
  • The “Twitter” Defense: Relies on the Supreme Court’s Twitter v. Taamneh ruling, arguing that providing general services to bad actors isn’t aiding and abetting.

Rosenkranz added that, under the record labels’ theory, Cox would be liable for failing to take action against alleged crimes. That would essentially turn ISPs into the “Internet police” with devastating consequences.

“[T]he consequences of Plaintiffs’ position are cataclysmic,” Rosenkranz said, noting that universities, hospitals, and entire towns would risk being disconnected from the Internet.

“Turning Internet providers into Internet police for all torts perpetrated on the Internet will wreak havoc with the essential medium through which [the] modern public engages in commerce and speech,” Rosenkranz added.

The “Gun Dealer” Analogy

At the hearing, several justices seemed skeptical of Cox’s claim that inaction is fine. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was particularly aggressive, stressing that Cox could know exactly which subscriber accounts were infringing but simply opts to do nothing.

To illustrate her point, Justice Sotomayor challenged Rosenkranz with a vivid analogy.

“If I’m a gun dealer and I’m selling to someone who says to me, ‘I’m going to kill my wife with this gun,’ I think the common law would say you knew what he was going to do with the gun; you joined in. Why isn’t your continuing to provide Internet service the same?”

Cox’s attorney responded by noting that, unlike a murder weapon, an internet connection has substantial legal uses. However, the challenges were not over yet.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continued to test Cox’s theory that “inaction” does not create liability. She presented an even more extreme hypothetical scenario featuring an addicted infringer.

“Suppose I come to you and I want to buy your services. I tell you that I as a customer am addicted to infringing on the Internet. I’ve been sued before. I know what I’m doing is illegal, but I just keep doing it. And not only that, Cox, based on where I live, is my only option.”

Rosenkranz replied that even in that extreme scenario, selling internet access would not create liability for Cox, adding that the music companies or other rightsholders could sue this hypothetical piracy addict instead.

The “Meaningless” Safe Harbor

Representing the record labels, attorney Paul Clement stressed that Cox was not an innocent bystander but a “willfully blind” party that profited from piracy. He pointed to Cox’s internal communication, in which employees expressed contempt for the law, including a now-infamous “f*** the DMCA” email.

The attorney, backed by Justice Kagan, argued that Cox’s legal theory is fatally flawed. If an ISP can never be liable without taking affirmative steps to encourage piracy, then the DMCA’s “safe harbor” would be unnecessary.

“Why would anybody care about getting into the safe harbor if there’s no liability in the first place?” Justice Kagan asked. And after follow-up questioning, Cox’s attorney agreed that the safe harbor is not doing anything under their suggested liability rule.

The Record Labels’ key arguments

  • Willful Blindness: Cox isn’t neutral; it knew specific subscribers were “habitual abusers” and continued profiting from them.
  • The Safe Harbor Paradox: If ISPs are never liable without affirmative intent, the DMCA’s “Safe Harbor” (which protects ISPs only if they terminate repeat infringers) would be legally meaningless.
  • Material Contribution: Providing the essential means (internet access) to a known infringer with “substantial certainty” of future infringement constitutes liability.

“Mass Evictions” & “BitTorrent Throttling”

While Cox was grilled on the ‘inaction’ vs. ‘intent’ issue, the record labels faced tough questions over the requested Internet disconnections. Justices Alito and Gorsuch appeared concerned that the record labels’ liability standard would force ISPs to disconnect thousands of innocent people.

Justice Alito specifically asked attorney Clement how an ISP is supposed to respond to repeated piracy notices if their customer is a university with 50,000 students.

Clement argued that ISPs and rights holders could simply “have a conversation” to resolve such issues, a suggestion Cox’s attorney later dismissed as a “terrible answer” for a company facing “crushing liabilities”.

Since it is impractical for a university to be disconnected from the Internet, or for a university to disconnect thousands of students, the record labels’ attorney suggested that bandwidth throttling could also be a viable anti-piracy measure.

“I don’t think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn’t allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent. I could live in that world,” Clement answered.

U.S. Government Backs Cox

The U.S. Government appeared as an amicus curiae and largely supported Cox’s legal interpretation. Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart urged the Court to adopt a strict “purpose” requirement, arguing that unless an ISP provides “targeted assistance” specifically to pirates, it shouldn’t be liable for the actions of subscribers.

Stewart warned the Justices that expanding liability beyond this “purpose” test would be dangerous. He argued that forcing ISPs to disconnect allegedly pirating subscribers would clash with the essential role the internet plays in society.

“The approach of terminating all access to the Internet based on infringement… seems extremely overbroad given the centrality of the Internet to modern life and given the First Amendment,” Stewart told the Court.

The U.S. Government’s key arguments

  • Supports Cox: Urges the Court to adopt a strict “purpose” requirement.
  • Limited Liability: Argues that unless an ISP provides “targeted assistance” specifically to pirates, it shouldn’t be liable for the general misuse of its network by the public.

What’s Next?

The Supreme Court now has to decide whether the $1 billion verdict will stand, or if the case will get a do-over at the lower court.

If the court sides with the record labels, ISPs across the United States will continue to need strict “repeat infringer” termination policies to avoid legal liability. If Cox wins, rightsholders will have a hard time holding ISPs liable for pirating subscribers.

The justices are expected to cast their preliminary votes in a private conference later this week, but a final written opinion is not expected before the summer of 2026.

—

A copy of the oral arguments hearing transcript and the audio is available at the Supreme Court’s website.

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

12:00 AM

White House Launches Worthless And Whiny Taxpayer-Funded ‘Media Bias’ Tracker [Techdirt]

Not content with just filing baseless lawsuits against media companies who say mean things about our historically unpopular president, the Trump administration has unveiled a new lazy wrinkle in its war on journalism and free speech.

The White House unveiled a new section of its website last week that claims to be tracking media outlets for “bias.” And by “bias,” in traditional right wing fashion, we of course mean news organizations that sometimes say true things our increasingly authoritarian government doesn’t like.

The website casually throws around words like “biased” and “exposed,” crying about various media reporting on subjects like the president’s death threats against elected officials for reminding the military that they serve the Constitution, for example.

It’s adorable to watch some MAGA-pilled White House intern pretend to do journalism and fact checking. There’s a list of stories that upset Trump, then a cute list of classifications trying to claim news reports aren’t true, with labels like “bias,” “left-wing lunacy,” and “malpractice” (?).

The great irony is that most of the feckless U.S. corporate press generally already covers Trumpism quite favorably. Even their stories and headlines about Trump’s threats against Democratic lawmakers were couched through the lens of Donald Trump’s claims of innocence (see this NBC News story), downplaying the insanity of the president’s often-illegal behavior.

CBS is now owned by Trump’s billionaire buddy Larry Ellison, who is busy turning the already Republican-friendly news outlet into a right wing propaganda mill with the help of Bari Weiss. But even CBS can’t avoid the grumbly whining of the White House and shows up repeatedly on the naughty list:

A cornerstone of lazy right wing ideology around the world for fifty-plus years has been to accuse fact-based journalism and science of having a “bias” if it reveals absolutely anything the right wing doesn’t like. It’s an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it’s been on display for longer than many of us have been alive:

The claims of “media bias” by the right wing comes simultaneously as the U.S. right wing builds arguably one of the biggest and most effective right wing propaganda machines ever constructed (Fox News, The New York Post, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair, CBS, etc.). The right wing’s propaganda efforts routinely take second stage to the false claims of widespread “liberal media bias.”

The U.S. press is, indisputably, center-right and corporatist. As it consolidates, it increasingly serves billionaire and corporate ownership, not the public interest. Layer on fifty years of bullying over nonexistent “liberal bias,” and you get the kind of journalistic fecklessness that was on proud display last election season as the country stared down the barrel of authoritarianism.

These billionaire-owned outlets enjoy doubling or tripling down on their bias claims with “solutions” to the nonexistent “liberal bias” problem that almost always make the problem worse (see billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s make believe effort to “fix bias with AI,” Bari Weiss’ efforts to “fix CBS bias” by… making it more biased, or Jeff Bezos firing of all the columnists he personally disagrees with).

There are a ton of existing “bias monitors” out there claiming to fix the problem as well, and most of them aren’t particularly reliable, and like Newsguard, have a history of giving unearned credibility to right wing outlets like Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. And even they are quick to face “investigations” by Republicans for, you guessed it, bias.

The only people allowed to identify and criticize media bias are, ironically, the most biased and non-credible people America has to offer.

That said, it’s not clear who this bullshit White House website is supposed to be for. The kind of folks trapped in the MAGA delusion bubble aren’t the type who are going to head to the White House website to fact check a story. The entire taxpayer-funded gambit smells of little more than sad desperation in the face of sagging poll numbers and increased media criticism of unpopular, unhinged Trump policies.

And now that most corporate media outlets have gotten their massive tax cuts and mergers approved, they’re likely to show slightly more backbone over the next year or two — especially as the president’s health, influence, and political power wanes. This weird little performance art isn’t going to help.

Tuesday 2025-12-02

11:00 PM

Mediocre means average [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Two different ways to consider this:

First, in the marketplace, where most people, most of the time, want the thing that most people want. The average one. Exceptional is the exception.

Second, in the committee meeting, where the easiest way forward is to sand off interesting edges, eliminate unknowns and challenge as little as possible.

When you put these together, you see the relentless slide toward banality.

For people who care enough to develop skill and bring bravery to the work, this is a huge opportunity. Not an easy or an obvious one, but perhaps one worth chasing.

      

Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.

All the books I reviewed in 2025 (permalink)

I read as much as I could in 2025, but as ever, I have finished the year bitterly aware of how many wonderful books I didn't get to, whose spines glare daggers at me whenever I sit down at my desk, beneath my groaning To Be Read shelf. But I did write nearly two dozen reviews here on Pluralistic in calendar 2025, which I round up below.

If these aren't enough for you, please check out the lists from previous years.

Now that my daughter is off at college (!), I have a lot fewer kids' books in my life than I did when she was growing up. I miss 'em! (And I miss her, too, obviously).

But! I did manage to read a couple great kids' books this year that I recommend to you without reservation, both for your own pleasure and for any kids in your life, and I wanted to call them out separately, since (good) books are such good gifts for kids:

  • Daniel Pinkwater's Jules, Penny and the Rooster (middle-grades novel)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

  • Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works (graphic novel nonfiction)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

NONFICTION

The cover of Half Letter Press's edition of 'Cooking in Maximum Security,' featuring a line-art drawing of a moka coffee pot.
I. Cooking in Maximum Security, Matteo Guidi

Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/24/moca-moka/#culinary-apollo-13

The Drawn & Quarterly cover for Raymond Biesinger's '9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off.'
II. 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Raymond Biesinger

A masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me

The Abrams' Books cover for Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks.'
III. Three Rocks, Bill Griffiths

What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip? Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/27/the-snapper/#9-to-107-spikes

The Grove Atlantic cover for Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers.'
IV. The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé

A brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison/#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year

The cover for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition of Ellen Ullman's 'Close to the Machine.'
V. Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman

Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

The Simon and Schuster cover for Ronald J Deibert's 'Chasing Shadows.'
VI. Chasing Shadows, Ron Deibert

Deibert's pulse-pounding, sphinter-tightening true memoir of his battles with the highly secretive cyber arms industry whose billionaire owners provide mercenary spyware that's used by torturers, murderers and criminals to terrorize their victims.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group

The Penguin Random House cover for Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere.'
VII. Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read

Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the multi-level marketing "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who founded companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The Crown Books cover for Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People.'
VIII. Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams

Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook's upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election. I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make them out to be beyond despicable. There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). There's Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

The Basic Books cover for Adam Becker's 'More Everything Forever.'
IX. More Everything Forever, Adam Becker

Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

The cover for the Harpercollins edition of David Enrich's 'Murder the Truth.'
X. Murder the Truth, David Enrich

A brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics. In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

FICTION

The Tachyon Books cover for Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country.'
I. Letters From an Imaginary Country, Theodora Goss

Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories and she slides you into them like they were a warm bath. Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're that good. Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA. She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of Dracula. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/athena-club/#incluing

The cover for the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness edition of Margaret Killjoy's 'The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice.'
II. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, Margaret Killjoy

A collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world. Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

The Penguin Random House cover for Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach.'
III. Fever Beach, Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon. Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

The cover for the Tachyon edition of Daniel Pinkwater's 'Jules, Penny and the Rooster.'
IV. Jules, Penny and the Rooster, Daniel Pinkwater

Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins. Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes.

On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years.

Nominally this is a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up. The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

The Farrar, Straus, Giroux cover for Ray Nayler's 'Where the Axe is Buried.'
V. Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler

An intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by "rational" AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics. It's a birchpunk tale of AI skulduggery, lethal robot insects, radical literature, swamp-traversing mechas, and political intrigue that flits around a giant cast of characters, creating a dizzying, in-the-round tour of Nayler's paranoid world. A work of first-rate science fiction, which provides an emotional flythrough of how Larry Ellison's vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our "best behavior" would obliterate the authentic self, authentic relationships, and human happiness.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

The Tor Books cover for Charlie Jane Anders' 'Lessons in Magic and Disaster.'
VI. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders

A novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device.

It's the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces

The cover of the Tachyon edition of 'The Adventures of Mary Darling.'
VII. The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy

The titular Mary Darling here is the mother of Wendy, John and and Michael Darling, the three children who are taken by Peter Pan to Neverland in JM Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird, which later became Peter Pan. After Mary's children go missing, Mary's beloved uncle, John Watson, is summoned to the house, along with his famous roommate, the detective Sherlock Holmes. However, Holmes is incapable of understanding where the Darling children have gone, because to do so would be to admit the existence of the irrational and fantastic, and, more importantly, to accept the testimony of women, lower-class people, and pirates. Holmes has all the confidence of the greatest detective alive, which means he is of no help at all.

Only Mary can rescue her children. John Watson discovers her consorting with Sam, a one-legged Pacific Islander who is a known fence and the finest rat-leather glovemaker in London, these being much prized by London's worst criminal gangs. Horrified that Mary is keeping such ill company, Watson confronts her and Sam (and Sam's parrot, who screeches nonstop piratical nonsense), only to be told that Mary knows what she is doing, and that she is determined to see her children home safe.

What follows is a very rough guide to fairyland. It's a story that recovers the dark asides from Barrie's original Pan stories, which were soaked with blood, cruelty and death. The mermaids want to laugh as you drown. The fairies hate you and want you to die. And Peter Pan doesn't care how many poorly trained Lost Boy starvelings die in his sorties against pirates, because he knows where there are plenty more Lost Boys to be found in the alienated nurseries of Victorian London, an ocean away.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS

The First Second cover for 'Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works.'
I. Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye

Legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. The authors take pains to show the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

he Farrar, Straus, Giroux cover for Tessa Hulls's 'Feeding Ghosts.'
II. Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls

A stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of Hulls's Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant. It tells the story of Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police.

Each of the intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space.

Feeding Ghosts has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience).

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/#great-leap-forward

The cover for 'The Murder Next Door.'
III. The Murder Next Door, Hugh D'Andrade

Hugh D'Andrade is a brilliant visual communicator, the art director responsible for the look-and-feel of EFF's website. He's also haunted by a murder – the killing of the mother of his childhood playmates, which cast a long, long shadow over his life, as he recounts in his debut graphic novel. It's a haunting, beautiful meditation on masculinity, trauma, and fear. Hugh is a superb illustrator, particularly when it comes to bringing abstract ideas to life, and this is a tale beautifully told.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/10/pivot-point/#eff

The cover for the Pantheon cover of Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity.'
IV. Simplicity, Mattie Lubchansky

Simplicity is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the US has dissolved and its major centers have been refashioned as "Administrative and Security Territories" – a fancy way of saying "walled corporate autocracies." Lucius Pasternak is an anthropology grad student in the NYC AST, a trans-man getting by as best as he can, minimizing how much he sells out.

Pasternak's fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They've been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak's mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire's vanity-project museum of New York State.

This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/01/ecosexuality/#nyc-ast

The Drawn and Quarterly cover for 'The Weight.'
V. The Weight, Melissa Mendes

A book that will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out. Again.

A story of cyclic abuse, unconditional love, redemption, and tragedy, the tale of Edie, born to an abusive father and a teen mother, who is raised away from her family, on a military base where she runs feral with other children, far from the brutality of home. This becomes a sweet and lovely coming-of-age tale as Edie returns to her grandparents' home, and then turns to horror again.

The Weight is a ferocious read, the sweetness of the highs there to provide texture for the bitterness of the lows.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass

TWO MORE (BY ME)

This was a light reading year for me, but, in my defense, I did some re-reading, including all nine volumes of Naomi Novik's incredible Temeraire:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon

But the main reason I didn't read as much as I normally would is that I published two international bestsellers of my own this year.

The first was Picks and Shovels, a historical technothriller set in the early 1980s, when the PC was first being born. It's the inaugural adventure of Martin Hench, my hard-fighting, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant crimefighter, and it's designed to be read all on its own. Marty's first adventure sees him pitted against the owners of a weird PC pyramid-sales cult: a Mormon bishop, an orthodox rabbi and a Catholic priest, whose PC business is a front for a predatory faith-based sales cult:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels/

The other book was Enshittification, the nonfiction book I'm touring now (I wrote all this up on the train to San Diego, en route to an event at the Mission Hills Library). It's a book-length expansion of my theory of platform decay ("enshittification"), laying out the process by which the tech platforms we rely on turn themselves into piles of shit, and (more importantly), explaining why this is happening now:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

I've got a stack of books I'm hoping to read in the new year, but I'm going to have to squeeze them in among several other book projects of my own. First, there's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, which drops in June from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I'm also *writing a new book, The Post-American Internet (about the internet we could have now that Trump has destroyed America's soft power and its grip on global tech policy. There's also a graphic novel adaptation of Unauthorized Bread (with Blue Delliquanti), which Firstsecond will publish in late 2026 or 2027; and a graphic novel adaptation of Enshittification (with Koren Shadmi), which Firstsecond will publish in 2027.

But of course I'm gonna get to at least some of those books on my overflowing TBR shelf, and when I do, I'll review them here on Pluralistic for you. You can follow my Reviews tag if you want to stay on top of these (there's also an RSS feed for that tag):

https://pluralistic.net/tag/reviews/

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Man flies 1MM miles on a 60 day unlimited ticket, wins 10 more flights https://web.archive.org/web/20051203031434/http://au.news.yahoo.com/051201/15/x0z4.html

#20yrsago Schneier: Aviation security is a bad joke https://web.archive.org/web/20060212060858/http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69712,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

#20yrsago David Byrne gets RIAA warning https://web.archive.org/web/20051223160922/http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2005/12/12105_rant_abou.html

#20yrsago Sam Buck sued for naming her coffee shop after herself https://web.archive.org/web/20051231144818/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/12/01/financial/f132605S26.DTL

#20yrsago Eek-A-Mouse jamming with Irish pub musicians https://web.archive.org/web/20051211095248/http://www.alphabetset.net/audio/t-woc/eek_trad.mp3

#15yrsago Bowls made from melted army men https://web.archive.org/web/20071011212754/http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/388073/how_to_make_a_bowl_from_melted_army.html

#15yrsago TSA recommends using sexual predator tactics to calm kids at checkpoints https://web.archive.org/web/20101204044209/https://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/airport-patdowns-grooming-children-sex-predators-abuse-expert/

#15yrsago University of Glasgow gives away software, patents, consulting https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2010/november/headline_181588_en.html

#15yrsago Judge in Xbox hacker trial unloads both barrels on the prosecution https://web.archive.org/web/20101203054828/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/xbox-judge-riled/

#10yrsago Scholars and activists stand in solidarity with shuttered research-sharing sites https://custodians.online/

#10yrsago Mesopotamian boundary stones: the DRM of pre-history https://web.archive.org/web/20151130212151/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/before-drm-there-were-mesopotamian-boundary-stones

#10yrsago Canadian civil servants grooming new minister to repeat Harper’s Internet mistakes https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/11/what-canadian-heritage-officials-didnt-tell-minister-melanie-joly-about-copyright/

#5yrsago Distanced stage plays https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#xanadu

#5rsago Ohio spends tax dollars to destroy Ohio https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

07:00 PM

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 25 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
"Plate Dance" (Tari Piring) performance from Sumatra (Indonesia) that may include dancing on broken plates and 'face washing' with plate shards.

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

Picture of the day
Two wood knots which resemble two eyes, a simple example of pareidolia. Detail of a wooden fence in Beilstein, Germany.

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

Picture of the day
A shattered ceiling light fixture on a bamboo floor mat. The lamp was a semi flush mounted light fixture with a shallow glass dome of clear glass coated with white glass on the inside. In the fixture are LED light bulbs with E27 Edison screw. The hook in the ceiling suddenly came lose one day and the lamp crashed to the floor in an apartment in Brastad, Lysekil Municipality, Sweden. Photographed in natural light from the window. Focus stacked from 10 photos.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for December 2 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
Fortified city of Carcassonne during the blue hour, France. Founded during the Gallo-Roman period, the citadel derives its reputation from its 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) long double surrounding walls interspersed by 52 towers. The medieval citadel, situated on a hill on the right bank of the river Aude, was restored at the end of the 19th century by the theorist and architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In 1997, it was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites because of its exceptional testimony to the architecture and planning of a medieval fortress town.

05:00 PM

Operation 404: 3,000+ Pirate Domains Blocked, USDOJ & USDOC Get to Watch [TorrentFreak]

4040404After years of uncontrolled piracy, in 2019 authorities in Brazil teamed up with ICE and the US Department of Justice to launch Operation 404.

Described as a “milestone” for Brazil’s momentum in the fight against piracy, it was revealed that with assistance from overseas, 136 websites and 100 apps had been put out of action, either by domain suspension or site blocking measures.

Local agencies and anti-piracy groups including ANCINE (National Film Agency) and the National Council for the Fight Against Piracy (CNCP), were pleased with their work, although it was far from done.

Operation 404.1 Was Only the Beginning

Named after the well-known HTTP error indicating a currently unavailable website, Operation 404 would need to build on its early momentum. To understand the scale of the challenge, one only has to look at one of the earliest targets, Futemax, which remains active today despite years of blocks.

More domains would be needed to remain online

For the past six years, authorities and rightsholders in Brazil have continued to add Futemax-branded domains to Brazil’s secretive blocklist.

Whether Futemax, FutemaxHD, FutemaxBR or FutemaxTV variants, the domain-blocking Whac-A-Mole has seen commitment from both sides. At the time of writing, over 360 of these domains appear on the list, presumably at least some in connection with subsequent waves of Operation 404, which have generally taken place on an annual basis since 2019.

Ministry of Justice Announces 404.8

Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) announced that phase Operation 404.8 was ‘carried out’ November 27, without clarifying that only a relatively small number of events and achievements presented to the media actually took place on that day. This approach to presentation has persisted from 404.1 to the present day but the volume of work as reported only really makes sense as part of a longer timeline.

In common with 404.5 (March 2023), 404.6 (November 2023) and 404.7 (September 2024), this year the Ministry reported an international effort in which local authorities collaborated with partners from Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and the United Kingdom.

Operation 404 (Phase 8)404-8

This was Ecuador’s first direct appearance within Operation 404 but for the United States government, which has provided significant support right from the very beginning, there was no direct involvement.

The Ministry says that along with representatives from Mexico, the role of the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Commerce was to observe, in order to “learn about the methodology used in combating digital piracy.”

Much to Observe

The MJSP said a total of 44 search and seizure warrants were executed, which includes four preventive arrest warrants and three arrests in flagrante delicto in various Brazilian states. The Ministry says the aim was to identify and hold accountable the operators and various individuals behind an unspecified number of “pirate platforms.”

“Audio and video content, such as games and music, were removed,” the Ministry continued. “There was also the blocking and suspension of 535 websites and one illegal streaming application, in addition to the removal of thousands of pirated materials from repositories and social networks. In this phase, the focus broadened to reach the financing and monetization structures of these illegal services.”

Operation 404.8404-8-stat

In common with previous phases, the Ministry reported collaboration with local federal agencies. They include the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) and the National Film Agency (Ancine), both of which are actively involved in having pirate websites blocked by local ISPs.

That raises questions over Brazil’s broader site-blocking regime that receives very little attention.

Operation 404 Blocking is a Fraction of Overall Blocking

On face value, the number of pirate domains blocked under Operation 404 is publicly reported. Given tendencies seen in the past, that include conflating the number of sites blocked with the number of domains, the overall figures may or may not provide a reasonable account of events on the ground.

Refusal to reveal exactly which platforms have been targeted are compounded by the secrecy surrounding Brazil’s primary blocklist, which is restricted and certainly not open for scrutiny. The same applies to the many orders handed down by judges that provide it with constant fuel.

The table below covering Operation 404.1 to 404.8 inclusive, suggests that since 2019, just over 3,000 ‘pirate’ domains have been blocked on copyright grounds as part of Operation 404.

Yet the country’s master blocklist currently contains over 30,000 entries. Since it also contains gambling site domains, the full list can’t be attributed purely to pirate sites.

operation404-waves1-8

Nevertheless, the number of sites/domains publicly declared as blocked is clearly just a drop in the ocean. Or, rather, it appears to be; for the last six years no domains have been mentioned in connection with Operation 404 blocking, which effectively rules out fact checking.

Even access to the list of blocked domains is quickly of limited use. Without all-important context, it’s ultimately just a big list of domains.

—————–

Operation 404 receives cooperation from the following agencies, organizations, rightsholders, and anti-piracy partners:

[UK] City of London Police – Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU)
[UK] Intellectual Property Office (IPO),
[USA] U.S. Department of Justice
[USA] Department of Commerce
[Peru] National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI)
[UK] English Premier League
[Spain] LaLiga
[International] Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)
[Brazil] Brazilian Association of Pay Television (ABTA)
[LATAM] Alliance against Audiovisual Piracy (ALIANZA)
[Brazil] National Council to Combat Piracy (CNCP)
[Brazil] Association for the Protection of Intellectual and Phonographic Rights (APDIF)
[International] International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)
[International] Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
[USA] Motion Picture Association (MPA)
[Paraguay] National Directorate of Intellectual Property (DINAPI)
[Japan] Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA)
[S.Korea] Copyright Overseas Promotion Association (COA)
[Ecuador] National Intellectual Rights Service (SENDI)
[Ecuador] National Police
[Argentina] Specialized Fiscal Unit for Cybercrime Investigation (UFEIC)
[Argentina] Federal Police of Argentina (PFA)
[Paraguay] Specialized Unit for Punishable Acts Against Intellectual Property
[EU] European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO)

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

03:00 PM

Victory! Court Ends Dragnet Electricity Surveillance Program In Sacramento [Techdirt]

A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents.

The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents’ electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.

EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms—including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community.

The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation.

“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute.

Granular electrical usage data can reveal intimate details inside the home—including when you go to sleep, when you take a shower, when you are away, and other personal habits and demographics.

In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police “developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement.” Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity “consumption patterns.” SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police.

While this is a victory, the Court unfortunately dismissed an alternate claim that the program violated the California Constitution’s search and seizure clause. We disagree with the court’s reasoning, which misapprehends the crux of the problem: At the behest of law enforcement, SMUD searches granular smart meter data and provides insights to law enforcement based on that granular data.

Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers’ electricity data to law enforcement without any “evidence to support a suspicion” that a particular crime occurred.

EFF, along with Monty Agarwal of the law firm Vallejo, Antolin, Agarwal, Kanter LLP, brought and argued the case on behalf of Petitioners.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

10:00 AM

Pluralistic: Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from hurting Meta's feelings (01 Dec 2025) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A 1950s image of a cop with a patrol car lecturing a boy on a bicycle. Both the cop's head and the boy's head have been replaced with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The ground has been replaced with a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The cop's uniform and car have been decorated to resemble the livery of the Irish Garda (police) and a Garda logo has been placed over the right breast of the cop's uniform shirt.

Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta (permalink)

"Regulatory capture" is one of those concepts that can seem nebulous and abstract. How can you really know when a regulator has failed to protect you because they were in bed with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and when this is just because they're bad at their job. "Never attribute to malice," etc etc.

The difficulty of pinning down real instances of regulatory capture is further complicated by the arguments of right-wing economists, who claim that regulatory capture is inevitable, that companies will always grow to the point where they can overpower the state and use it to shut down smaller companies before they can become a threat. They use this as an argument for abolishing all regulation, rather than, you know, stopping monopolies from growing until they are more powerful than the state:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Despite this confusion, there are times when regulatory capture is anything but subtle. Especially these times, when the corporate world, spooked by the pandemic-era surge in antitrust enforcement, have launched a gloves-off/mask-off offensive to simply take over their governments, abandoning any pretext of being responsive to democratically accountable processes or agencies.

You've got David Sacks, Trump's billionaire AI czar, who is directing American AI policy while holding (hundreds of?) millions of dollars worth of stock in companies that stand to directly benefit from his work in the US government:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.Nb2d.3L204EF4nliq

Sacks has threatened the New York Times, demanding that they "abandon" the story about his conflicts of interest:

https://protos.com/david-sacks-sends-silly-legal-threat-to-the-new-york-times/

And he's hired the law-firm that is at the center of a decades-long open conspiracy to end press freedom in America, bankrolled and overseen by the same people who planned and executed the destruction of American abortion rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

This isn't a strictly US affair, either. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer rang in 2025 by firing the country's top competition regulator and replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, whose tax evasion, labor abuses, and anticompetitive mergers and tactics had been on the Competition and Markets Authority's agenda for years:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Today, this same swindle is playing out in Canada. Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell – recently endowed with the most sweeping enforcement powers of any competition regulator in the world – has resigned early. Now, Canada's monopolists are openly calling for one of their own top execs to take over the office for the next five years, citing a bizarre Canadian tradition of alternating between civil servants and revolving-door corporate insiders in turn:

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/competition-commissioner-matthew

However, there is one country that always, always brings home the gold in the Regulatory Capture Olympics: Ireland. Ireland had the misfortune to establish itself as a tax haven, meaning it makes pennies by helping the worst corporations in the world (especially US Big Tech companies) hide billions from global tax authorities. Being a tax haven sucks, because tax havens must also function as crime havens.

After all, the tech companies that pretend to be Irish have no loyalty to the country – they are there solely because Ireland will help them cheat the rest of the world. What's more, any company that can hire lawyers to do the paperwork to let it pretend that it's Irish this week could pay those lawyers to pretend that it is Cypriot, or Maltese, or Dutch, or Luxembourgeois next week. To keep these American companies from skipping town, Ireland must bend its entire justice system to the facilitation of all of American tech companies' crimes.

Of course, there is no class of crime that American tech companies commit more flagrantly or consequentially than the systematic, ruthless invasion of our privacy. Nine years ago, the EU passed the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a big, muscular privacy law that bans virtually all of the data-collection undertaken by America's tech companies. However, because these companies pretend they are Irish, they have been able to move all GDPR enforcement to Ireland, where the Data Protection Commissioner could always be relied upon to let these companies get away with murder:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

If you have formed the (widespread) opinion that the GDPR is worse than useless, responsible for nothing more than an endless stream of bullshit "cookie consent" pop-ups, blame the Irish DPC. American tech companies have pretended that they are allowed to substitute these cookie popups for doing the thing the GDPR demands of them (not spying on you at all). This is an obvious violation of the GDPR, and the only way an enforcer could possibly fail to see this is if they served a government whose entire economy depended on keeping Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai happy. It's impossible to explain something to a regulator when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

Incredibly, Ireland has found a way to make this awful situation even worse. They've appointed Niamh Sweeney, an ex-Meta lobbyist, to the role of Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Her resume includes "six years at Meta, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was head of public policy, Ireland for Facebook before becoming WhatsApp’s director of public policy for Europe, Middle East and Africa":

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-tech-lobbyist-named-to-data-protection-commission/

In their complaint to the European Commission, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties lays out a devastating case against Sweeney's fitness to serve – the fact that she has broad, deep, obvious conflicts of interest that should automatically disqualify her from the role:

https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/complaint-v-ireland-to-european-commission-re-process-appointing-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-data-protection-commissioner/#_ftn11

Among other things, Meta execs – like Sweeney – are given piles of stock options and shares in the company. The decisions that Sweeney will be called upon to make as DPC will have a significant and lasting negative effect on Meta's stocks – if Meta is banned from surveilling 500m affluent European consumers, they will make a lot less money.

But that's just for starters. Meta execs also sign contracts that bind them to:

  • Nondisparagement: ex-Meta executives are permanently barred from "making any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta's] products, services or programs; its business affairs, operation, management and financial condition…"

  • Nondisclosure: ex-Meta executives are broadly prohibited from discussing their employment, or disclosing the things they learned while working at the company.

  • Forced arbitration: if Meta believes that a former exec has violated these clauses, they can order the former exec to be silent, and bill them tens of thousands of dollars every time they speak out. Former executives sign away the right to contest these fines and orders in front of a judge; instead, all claims are heard by an "arbitrator" – a corporate lawyer who is paid by Meta and is in charge of deciding whether Meta (who pays their invoices) is right or wrong.

We know about these contractual terms because they have been applied to Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former top Meta exec who published a whistleblower memoir, Careless People, which discloses many of Meta's most terrible practices, from systemic sexual harassment at the highest echelon to a worldwide surveillance collaboration with the Chinese government to complicity in the Rohingya genocide, to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg cheats at Settlers of Catan and his underlings let him win:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Meta dragged Wynn-Williams in front of Meta's pet arbitrator over the statements in her book (without disputing their truthfulness). The arbitrator has fined Wynn-Williams $111,000,000 for speaking out ($50,000 per violation), and has barred her from promoting her book in any way. The company has ordered her not to testify before the US Congress or the UK Parliament. The clauses in Wynn-Williams contract are very similar (if not identical) to the clauses that the US National Labor Relations Board ruled unenforceable:

https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/employment-law/nlrb-rules-metas-7200-confidentiality-agreements-unlawful/499180

Wynn-Williams appeared on stage with me last month at London's Barbican Centre, in a book-tour event moderated by Chris Morris. Whenever we talked about Meta or Careless People, Wynn-Williams would fall silent and assume a blank facial expression, lest she make another statement that would result in Meta seeking another $50,000 from her under the terms of her contract.

In their complaint to the EU, ICCL raises the extremely likely probability that Sweeney is bound by the same contractual terms as Wynn-Williams, meaning that Meta's top regulator in Ireland, the country where Meta pretends to be based, will be contractually prohibited from saying anything that makes Mark Zuckerberg feel bad about himself.

This isn't just a matter for Ireland, either. Given the nature of European federalism, most of Meta's violations of European privacy laws will start with the Irish DPC – in other words, all 500,000,000 Europeans will be forced to complain to someone who is legally barred from upsetting Zuck's digestion.

Tax havens are a global scourge. By allowing American tech companies to evade their taxes around the world, Ireland is complicit in starving countries everywhere of tax revenue they are properly owed. Perhaps even worse than this, though, is the fact that these cod-Irish American companies can always out-compete their domestic rivals all over the world, because those companies have to pay tax, while Meta does not. Ireland has been every bit as important in exporting US Big Tech around the world as the US has been.

But Ireland has another key export, one that is confined to the European Union. Because every tax haven must be a crime haven, and because Big Tech's favorite crime is illegal surveillance, Ireland has exported American tech spying to the whole European Union.

That's how things stand today, and how they've stood since the passage of the GDPR. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said that this is as terrible as things could get. But now that Ireland has put an ex-Meta exec in charge of deciding whether Meta is invading Europeans' privacy, without confirming whether this dingo babysitter is even allowed to criticize Meta, it's clear that things could get much worse than I ever imagined.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Custom M&Ms: just don’t mention the war, your hometown, or nouns https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/28/custom-mms-just-dont-mention-the-war-your-hometown-or-nouns/

#20yrsago Sony CD spyware installs and can run permanently, even if you click “Decline” https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/28/mediamax-permanently-installs-and-runs-unwanted-software-even-if-user-declines-eula/

#20yrsago Programmers on Sony’s spyware DRM asked for newsgroup help too https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.sdk/c/kWKbc54lLxo?hl=en&pli=1#cf2c1677c4ce5138

#20yrsago Vacuum-bag dust houses sculpted by former house-cleaner https://web.archive.org/web/20051127031640/http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/001661.php

#20yrsago Sony knew about rootkits 28 days before the story broke https://web.archive.org/web/20051202044828/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051129_938966.htm

#20yrsago How the next version of the GPL will be drafted https://gplv3.fsf.org/process-definition/

#20yrsago No Xmas for Sony protest badge https://web.archive.org/web/20051203044536/https://gigi.pixcode.com/noxmas.gif

#20yrsago HOWTO defeat Apple’s anti-DVD-screenshot DRM https://highschoolblows.blogspot.com/2005/11/take-screenshot-of-dvd-player-in-os-x.html

#20yrsago EFF: DMCA exemption process is completely bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20051204031027/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004212.php

#15yrsago Paolo Bacigalupi’s SHIP BREAKER: YA adventure story in a post-peak-oil world https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/30/paolo-bacigalupis-ship-breaker-ya-adventure-story-in-a-post-peak-oil-world/

#15yrsago Walt Disney World employees demand a living wage https://thedisneyblog.com/2010/12/01/disney-world-union-takes-offensive/

#15yrsago Hotel peephole doctored for easy removal and spying https://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/5221903189/

#15yrsago DC-area county official says TSA patdowns are “homosexual agenda” https://dcist.com/story/10/11/30/loudoun-county-official-tsa-pat-dow/

#15yrsago Dmitry Sklyarov and co. crack Canon’s “image verification” anti-photoshopping tool https://web.archive.org/web/20110808200303/https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/113010-analyst-finds-flaws-in-canon.html

#15yrsago TSA scans uniformed pilots, but airside caterers bypass all screening https://web.archive.org/web/20101125095532/https://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots/index.html

#15yrsago BP sued in Ecuador for violating the “rights of Nature” https://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/headlines/bp_sued_in_ecuadorian_court_for_violating_rights_of_nature

#15yrsago Four horsemen of the information apocalypse: Cohen, Fanning, Johansen and Frankel https://web.archive.org/web/20101126191152/https://time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html

#15yrsago Winner-Take-All Politics: how America’s super-rich got so much richer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/29/winner-take-all-politics-how-americas-super-rich-got-so-much-richer/

#15yrsago EFF on US domain copyright seizures https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seizes-82-websites-draconian-future

#15yrsago Where’s Molly: heartbreaking reunion with developmentally disabled sister institutionalized 47 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20101129193304/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/28/sunday/main7096335.shtml

#15yrsago “Death-row inmate” seeks last meal advice on Amazon message-board https://web.archive.org/web/20101130212132/http://www.amazon.com/tag/health/forum/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1EO24KZG65FCB&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx3FNFNI6N592DI

#10yrsago You’re only an “economic migrant” if you’re poor and brown https://historyned.blog/2015/09/09/the-wandering-academic-or-how-no-one-seems-to-notice-that-i-am-an-economic-migrant/

#10yrsago Pre-mutated products: where did all those “hoverboards” come from? https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/29/pre-mutated-products-where-did-all-those-hoverboards-come-from/

#10yrsago Millennials are cheap because they’re broke https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/millennials-arent-saving-money-because-theyre-not-making-money/383338/?utm_source=SFFB

#5yrsago Attack Surface in the New York Times https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#times

#5yrsago RÄT https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#honey-morello

#5yrsago Open law and the rule of law https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago Twitter is more redeemable than Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#epistemic-superiority

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Visible Minorities: Karen Hill Anton’s Willful Ignorance of History [SNA Japan]

A prominent spokesperson within Japan’s foreign community won’t admit racism happens in Japan unless it rises to the level of racism in America.

SNA (Tokyo) — If you haven’t heard of Karen Hill Anton, she is well known as a commentator on life in Japan. Living in Japan’s countryside since 1975 with an American husband and raising several interracial children, Anton has written and spoken widely on cross-cultural communication, her most famous work being the award-winning memoir The View from Breast Pocket Mountain (2020).

Anton’s accomplishments are impressive. Her LinkedIn lists diversity training consultancies at corporations such as Shinsei Bank, Corning Japan, Eli Lilly, and Citigroup. A Freeman Foundation Fellow and Plenary Speaker at JALT 2022, Anton has also been a member of the Jun Ashida Educational Foundation, the Shizuoka Human Rights Association, and the Board of Overseers at Temple University, Japan. Her gigs include fourteen years writing the “Crossing Cultures” column for the Japan Times, and another 15 writing the “Another Look” column for the Chunichi Shinbun.

She has even advised the highest levels of the Japanese government, serving on the Internationalization in Education and Society Advisory Councils of Prime Ministers Ryutaro Hashimoto and Keizo Obuchi.

I respect this mightily, and said so when I met her at her home in 2024. But I’ve recently discovered her time-honored platform willfully ignores, minimizes, or outright dismisses the experiences of other Non-Japanese (NJ) residents. That’s what this column is about.

Flawed Methodology towards Racism in Japan

In a recent Substack essay, “What Racism is–and isn’t–in Japan” (November 12), she offered herself as an example of a “visible minority,” citing her experiences dealing with people as an African-American woman in Japan.

Despite the essay’s title, Anton notes that Japan does distinguish between people based upon their physical appearance, such as a Japanese shopkeeper who grabbed her dreadlocks and asked if they were real. But for Anton, in Japan it’s more a matter of stupidity, rudeness, or poor behavior in individual interactions, not racism. Defining racism as a systemic, institutionally enforced exclusion from social, educational, or economic participation (as opposed to modern definitions involving the process of differentiation, “othering,” and subordination), Anton concludes that racism is not present in Japan like in the United States.

This sounds plausible until it becomes clear she is working backwards from a conclusion. She claims, “Any foreign child can go to any public school anywhere in Japan.”

That’s manifestly untrue. As reported on Debito.org and in Japanese media for decades, foreign children have been denied entry to Japanese schools. Even visible minorities, e.g., international children with Japanese citizenship, get bullied out of the system, as they are a frequent target of Japan’s self-appointed “hair police”—school officials who force children to cut, straighten, or dye their hair or be suspended. That’s why there are ethnic schools in Japan—so these children can somehow get an education.

How can this happen? Because, even using Anton’s definition of something systemic and institutionally enforced: Japan’s Fundamental Law of Education (Kyoiku Kihon Ho) only guarantees primary and secondary education to citizens (kokumin), and has expressly been cited by authorities to deny foreign children entry.

This should not be news to Anton, since there is, for example, an underclass of now-grown undereducated South American workers less than an hour’s local train ride from her.

Regardless, Anton narrates a story about her fourth-grade daughter dealing with a classmate who “said something mean” to her. In Anton’s telling, all it took was her husband reporting it to the principal and the very next day the boy’s mother visited the Anton household offering cakes, a flower bouquet, and an apologetic son. Anton concluded, “As far as I was concerned, the matter was finished. There was no victim here.”

Good that all was resolved so well, what with the school administration and the classmate’s parents being so cooperative, and that scars from the experience did not seem to linger in Anton’s child. But this experience is hardly universal. Debito.org has catalogued many cases where the parents of visible minorities weren’t so lucky in their experiences either administratively or interpersonally. Some have even resulted in lawsuits with damages awarded, or in suicides. This is all available with a quick Google search, but those facts would spoil Anton’s story.

Anton instead places the onus on NJ residents to avoid being treated this way: “In the places I’ve called home in Japan, if you follow the rules for putting out your garbage, and participate in community obligations like cutting roadside weeds, it could be said your outward appearance causes no particular problems.”

This is reasonable advice, but not a panacea. It also “could be said” there are systemic barriers (such as “Japanese Only” signs and establishments, legally exclusionary government policies, and even bullying neighborhood associations) to visible minorities, harassed and excluded no matter how much effort they put into community effort and assimilation. Plenty of journalistic and government surveys evidence the effects of this.

But the biggest flaw in Anton’s essay is her constant minimizing of discrimination in Japan by comparing it to Jim Crow America of the 1950s.

A commenter to Debito.org responded best: “As a black European in Japan, this habit of American activists to hold racism in the US up as some kind of yardstick is frustrating to say the least. ‘Bad things that happened in the US don’t happen here, therefore there’s no problem,’ is a terrible method of evaluation, not least because the conversation is supposed to be about issues in Japan, no need to drag a different country into it. I’m not the only one whose daily life is a series of frustration and (mostly small) humiliations caused by Japan’s ethnocentrism and resulting racism. ‘At least you’re not getting lynched’ offers no reassurance, it’s only a bizarre way to shift the focus of the conversation to a different, unrelated, topic. It’s like telling a homeless person that they should be glad that at least they’re not terminally ill. Not helpful.”

A Willful Ignorance of History

What spurred me to write this column was the essay’s conclusion, where Anton discounts a famous 1999 lawsuit by a Brazilian journalist named Ana Bortz. Refused entry into a jewelry store in nearby Hamamatsu, Bortz won in Shizuoka District Court on the grounds of “racial discrimination” (jinshu sabetsu). It was the first court decision acknowledging that discrimination in Japan is in fact racial.

Anton’s take? “The woman, who filed a discrimination lawsuit, and won—as well she should have—was described by a foreign journalist as ‘the Rosa Parks of Japan.’ Rosa Parks? Surely not the same Mrs. Rosa Parks, revered by Americans and people of conscience worldwide, for her courage and principled stance in literally sitting down while standing up to injustice. She succeeded in galvanizing a nation in challenging hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized racism, protected by law, in the most powerful country on earth. That Rosa Parks? I don’t think so.”

That was the last sentence of Anton’s essay: a straw-man argument that because some lazy journalist compared Bortz to Parks, it’s somehow… not racism… enough?

Two issues: One, I worked with Ana Bortz, and she never compared herself to Parks. Two, Anton here commits an egregious sin of omission. She neglected to mention the subsequent Otaru “Japanese Only” Public Baths Case, which my friends and I took all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, and where lower courts unanimously upheld the Ana Bortz precedent.

Or the subsequent Steve McGowan Case, where an African and African-American were refused entry to an eyeglass shop, and we caught the manager on tape expressly saying he refused McGowan because he is black and he personally hates black people.

Or the Yener Case. Or the Aigi Golf Club Case. Or the umpteen other lawsuits, many successful, regarding racial discrimination. This is disrespectful to the people who toiled for years at great personal cost to fight discrimination.

The Damage Done

I blogged a paragraph-by-paragraph critique of Anton’s essay at Debito.org and notified her via her Substack comments. She responded to say, “Anyone who wants to take me down, scold me, disagree with my experience, perspective, and opinion, is free to.” Hours later she deleted my comment. When I followed up to ask why, she wrote, “I do not want to clutter my site.”

When counterarguments are treated as “clutter,” it’s clear that what’s going on here is a willful ignorance of history on a complex topic.

But given her prominent position, Anton’s antics are hurting people.

Another person texted me to say, “Thank you for calling Karen Anton Hill out. I felt the same after her plenary at JALT a few years ago… The few people I have mentioned this to have not liked me pointing this out about her work. As a darker skinned minority whose kids were brutally bullied, who has experienced real racism, her platform and narrative allows real concerns to be dismissed. Good luck though, she is great at ingratiating herself… and is great at self-promotion. I have learned that I can’t overtly criticize her.”

So I will, with this SNA column. It’s about time.

But why me? Because this denialism goes against all our work. Let me establish some credibility here:

I know about racial discrimination in Japan, particularly towards Japan’s visible minorities, to the point where I was awarded a PhD on it in 2014 from Meiji Gakuin University. My doctoral dissertation became the monograph Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books, 2015, 2nd Ed. 2022). My other books include “Japanese Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination (Akashi Shoten, Inc: English and Japanese 2004, updated 2006 and 2013), and Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, Immigrants and Immigrants to Japan (coauthored with Akira Higuchi; Akashi Shoten 2008, updated 2012).

I have also maintained Debito.org, an active archive of human rights issues in Japan, since 1995, offering more than thirty years of research and historical record. This includes fifteen years of direct fieldwork cataloging “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide in Japan.

My point is this isn’t just my personal experience; I speak with peer-reviewed authority on this subject. That’s why Anton’s column is such a shock—it overwrites a history that people like me have curated over decades to combat the natural revisionism of time.

Granted, we could merely put it down to the shortcomings of a memoirist’s methodology—in other words, “If it didn’t happen to me, it’s not part of my life memoir.” But the blind spot in this methodology is that it dismisses other people’s cases. How many times have you heard naysayers argue something like, “I personally haven’t seen it, so did it really happen? It’s not the Japan I know.”

But there’s ignorance, and then there’s willful ignorance. Even when I presented facts and a historical record counter to her narrative, Anton refused to address any of them. Her retort: “I do not want to engage with you.”

She can, of course, disagree with the case as I presented it, or offer other facts to counter mine. Instead, she chose to just delete it and not engage.

Anton is entitled to her worldview, of course. But if she’s speaking on how to live life in Japan as a self-described “visible minority” advising Japan’s corporate world on issues of diversity and inclusion, even meeting policymakers at the highest levels of Japan’s government, she needs to get it right. She’s not. Instead she promotes a dangerous denialism of how NJ and visible minorities experience Japanese society.

Denialism as a Marketing Gimmick

When I followed up some more, Anton did respond briefly to say, “I do not hold myself ‘as a template about how to live in Japan’ or anything else. That’s your interpretation. I write about my experience. I do not seek agreement. Ever.”

Yet in public press releases, she has been marketed not only as an “author, columnist, and consultant,” but also as “a model of successful cultural adaptation,” “lecturing widely” as a “bridge between cultures.”

That’s what makes Anton’s approach a business. Her whole mindset of, “Just get out there and contribute more to your communities and your skin color won’t matter,” is more gimmick than fact. But it sells well.

A Japanese policymaker will especially like hearing it’s the foreigners’ fault they aren’t trying hard enough to be accepted. It’s a lot easier than calling for the government to legally guarantee equal treatment and access, or for the dismantling of systems that perpetually differentiate, “other,” and subordinate minorities.

And it’s especially appealing when, even in the clearest cases of discrimination in Japan, a long-term foreigner dismisses them because it’s not like America. Even if this process excuses racism here because it’s worse over there.

It’s classic “whataboutism.” But it works. It’s gotten Anton a seat at the table at even the highest levels of government.

It’s also one reason why it’s been difficult to get “newcomer” visible minorities to unite and speak with one voice in the form of, for example, domestic anti-defamation leagues. (The “oldcomer” ethnic Koreans and Chinese do it much better.) Because spokespeople within the minorities’ own ranks undermine any potential social movement and self-disempower—by saying all we have to do is cooperate and behave. After all, it worked for these spokespeople. They made a life out of it.

For those who think I’m unduly picking on Karen Hill Anton, let the record show I have similarly called out others who pander: Kyoto Seika University President Oussouby Sacko, who similarly denies there is racism in Japan by the dumbfounding claim he is treated differently in Japan not because he is black, but because he does not “look Japanese.” Or Japan Times columnist Gregory Clark, who sells Japan’s uniqueness myths in his nationwide speaking tours. Or journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, who staved off late-life penury by putting his name to books ghostwritten by Japan’s far right denying Japan’s wartime atrocities. Or Tony Laszlo, protagonist of the bestselling “My Darling is a Foreigner” manga series, who completely deleted the online history of our pre-Debito.org activist organization, Issho.org, before it had an impact on his wife’s book sales. I’ve even criticized sacred cows like famed translator Donald Keene, who, on the day of his naturalization into Japan, denigrated NJ residents during a press conference by joking he, unlike them, was not a criminal.

There are lots of people like this in Japan: ideologues proffering snake-oil narratives that are popular and profitable. Pandering pays. Why wait for Japanese society to toss you a few crumbs from the table? Say what people want to hear and they’ll even give you a seat at it.

Plight of the Columnist: Whether to Pander?

One more point: Like Anton, I too have been a columnist for forty years, including seventeen years at the Japan Times, eleven years under the “Just Be Cause” byline. I understand that having a clear and consistent perspective sustains an audience.

But over time the question becomes: How do you keep that audience as you age? Do you continue with the topics that attracted your audience in the first place? Or do you pursue new avenues of inquiry and hope your readers follow?

Either way, you should be open to learning new information, or you’ll just have stale columns running on retreads. But as you absorb new things and get new data, you should be intellectually honest enough to change your mind.

Old stale columnists can fall into a trap of relying on personal experience as a source in itself. After all, the province of the elderly is the sanctity of their memory. Your past is yours to recall and portray. In your own mind, nobody can assail your impressions of what happened to you. Only you witnessed it all.

And memoirists by definition make this their methodology. But you still have to be responsible with your platform, especially if you’re going to talk about a subject as complicated as racism. Be aware of your own limitations. How you’re remembering things. How you’re gathering information. How you’re interpreting the world.

Stories not grounded in history and social science are merely extended anecdotes. A sample size of one.

Yes, memoirists are entitled to their own world. It’s their memoir, after all. But I have a problem when they go outside their world and try to overwrite history (especially one I’ve painstakingly curated) as a marketing gimmick. When they minimize, ignore, deny, or even delete facts and cases because they don’t fit their narrative, that’s not just dogmatism. That’s dishonesty. And when it’s hurting people, it needs to be called out.

Look at the big picture here: Denialism may be Karen Hill Anton’s survival strategy in Japan, but it’s not going to help Japan’s visible minorities, the very group she claims to speak for.

Remember that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently rose to power in part by blatantly lying about foreigners kicking park animals. Now watch as Cabinet minister Kimi Onoda (who herself was a dual citizen of Japan and the United States until she too was called out) finds new ways to scapegoat NJ residents for Japan’s ills.

All this pandering by NJ spokespeople will mean little in the end. The powers-that-be will still treat you as second-class citizens and residents no matter how hard you try to assimilate. The onus is not on NJ to scrape for acceptance. The onus is on Japanese society and legal structures to treat all of its legal residents, regardless of citizenship, as human beings with equal rights.

Karen Hill Anton’s methodology doesn’t lend itself to pushing for that. It’s certainly been an effective survival strategy for her, as she’s accomplished a lot for herself. But it should be seen for what it always has been: an isolated sample size of one. Not a template. And as she keeps on keeping on, vigilance: She should not be permitted to minimize, ignore, dismiss, or overwrite the history of other NJ in Japan.

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Under the Trump Garbage Truck [The Status Kuo]

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has tumbled into a political garbage compactor. And his career could get crushed as a result.

Reporting on Friday by the Washington Post, backed by two sources familiar with the operation, stated Hegseth ordered SEAL Team 6 to “kill them all” after the U.S. military destroyed an alleged drug smuggling vessel off the coast of Venezuela in early September. That order included two survivors who reportedly were still in the water, clinging to the wreckage of their craft.

There aren’t many things that people on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, let alone the entire civilized world, agree on. But the immorality and illegality of firing upon defenseless people floating in the ocean after you’ve sunk their ship, giving them “no quarter” in their time of greatest distress, is one. And there is no one, outside of lawless or fascist regimes, who would defend it today.

This is where we now find ourselves. The prohibition on “no quarter” orders is such a bright line that even the increasingly lawless and fascist Trump regime won’t be able to stand behind it. And that has Hegseth’s opponents eager to press the crush button on his garbage leadership.

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Any way you slice this bread, Hegseth is toast

If the reporting is accurate—and as I’ll discuss below, there is strong reason to believe it is, and the specifics will soon become clear—this presents quite a conundrum for the ”War Secretary.”

If we are at war, as Hegseth claims, then his order was a war crime. A “Former JAG Working Group,” comprising officials that Hegseth conveniently pushed out of their military legal oversight roles just before the illegal strikes began, “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”

Here’s why. If the U.S. military operation to destroy vessels suspected of narco-trafficking is in fact a “non-international armed conflict” as the White House claims, then Hegseth’s orders to “kill them all” can “reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors”—something that is “clearly illegal under international law.”

“In short,” the Former JAG Working Group concludes, “they are war crimes.”

If we want a clear textual statement of this, we need look no further than the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, which explicitly cites “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked” as a “clearly illegal” act.

It will be quite hard for Hegseth to get around that example.

But if we’re not at war, as many argue, because Congress has not authorized this military action, then per the Former JAG Working Group, “orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.”

In sum, it was either a war crime or it was murder. Time to choose your poison, Pete. (Ironically, Hegseth is probably better off trying to argue that the U.S. is not actually at war, because as I’ll explain below, war crimes are much harder to escape than murder charges.)

Fox News’ chief legal analyst, Andy McCarthy, was equally unforgiving. He penned an OpEd for the National Review entitled, “We Intended the Strike To Be Lethal” Is Not A Defense. McCarthy was referring to Hegseth’s initial response to the reporting, in which he failed to deny the reporting and instead doubled down, citing the “lethal kinetic” intent of the operation (whatever that means).

The Washington Post had reported that Adm. Mitch Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, in compliance with Hegseth’s command, gave the order for the second strike. Ostensibly, this was to ensure the survivors couldn’t call on other traffickers to come to their aid.

Wrote McCarthy, “Neither Hegseth’s statement nor the explanation attributed to Bradley...makes legal sense.” Indeed, Hegseth’s argument is entirely circular: “It cannot be a defense to say, as Hegseth does, that one has killed because one’s objective was ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor, conservative legal expert on executive action and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, published a piece on Saturday concluding the same:

[T]here can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today: That U.S. Special Operations Forces killed the survivors of a first strike on a drug boat off the coast of Trinidad who, in the Post’s words, “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”

Goldsmith cited the DoD Law of War Manual as well, noting Section 5.4.7’s clear prohibition on “No Quarter” orders:

Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.

Goldsmith observes that this prohibition is a foundational principle of modern war, going back to the Hague Regulations of 1907 and even to the Civil War era 1863 Lieber Code: “Whoever intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled, or kills such an enemy, or who orders or encourages soldiers to do so, shall suffer death, if duly convicted, whether he belongs to the Army of the United States, or is an enemy captured after having committed his misdeed.”

As Just Security’s Ryan Goodman observed, the World War II Peleus War Crimes Trial is also on point. The trial was named after a Greek frigate used by the British and sunk by a German U-boat, where the commander ordered survivors fired upon while they were still in the water. The case is familiar to international and military lawyers alike. At the conclusion of the case, which kicked off the Nuremberg trials in Germany, the Nazi commanders who gave the “no quarter” order were convicted along with those who carried it out, with three of the defendants sentenced to death for their war crimes.

No quarter from Congress

We’re so accustomed to the GOP-led Congress doing nothing in response to the criminal excesses of the Trump regime that any movement in the opposite direction makes headlines. Over the weekend we were treated to such a surprise. Both the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees issued bipartisan statements promising thorough investigations and a “full accounting.”

The bipartisan part is key. Because the GOP controls both of those committees, that means subpoenas will actually issue, followed by hearings, under oath, for everyone in the chain of command. That includes Defense Secretary Hegseth.

So far, Hegseth is getting little love from his own party, signaling that he is in for some rough questioning. Rep. Don Bacon (D-NE), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that if the Washington Post reporting is true, that would be “a clear violation of the law of war.” And Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), another senior member of that committee, remarked on the double-strike to comply with Hegseth’s reported order:

“If that occurred, that would be very serious and I agree that would be an illegal act…This is completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress and there is an ongoing investigation.”

As Goodman notes, that short statement contains two distinct points. First, Turner agrees that the order would be an “illegal act”—something nearly everyone agrees on. Second, and critically, Turner implied that the true purpose of the double-strike was something not disclosed to Congress.

In fact, as the Washington Post reported, the Joint Special Operations Command later told the White House a different story: that the “double-tap” was intended to sink the boat and remove a possible hazard to other ships and not to kill survivors. A similar explanation was provided to Congress in closed-door briefings.

But that never sat well with more experienced veterans in Congress. “The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran serving on the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”

A mini-Nuremberg?

While Hegseth and whoever else participated in the killings won’t initially be on trial, congressional hearings could rise to the level of high international drama. After all, the question will be whether the U.S. Secretary of Defense is either a war criminal, a murderer or both.

A few key things to watch for. The former Southern Command leader, Admiral Alvin Holsey, announced back in mid-October that he was resigning from his office not even a full year into his term. That raised alarms over what could be driving such a move, but now we have more clues—and more questions. What did Admiral Holsey know about Hegseth’s orders? Was his resignation in connection with the second strike? The timing certainly suggests a link.

Then there are the two sources cited within the Washington Post’s reporting who confirmed that Hegseth gave the no quarter kill order, as well as everyone under Hegseth who carried out the illegal instruction. Those under Hegseth may be justifiably concerned about their own criminal liability, particularly those who ultimately pulled the trigger. Depending on the circumstances, it might be possible for Congress to offer limited immunity to those in the know in order to overcome their Fifth Amendment assertions.

Hegseth himself will likely be called and placed under oath, where he might also assert his right against self-incrimination. But if he does so, two things to consider: 1) demands for Hegseth’s resignation, if he hasn’t quit or been forced out already, will grow deafening, and 2) this still doesn’t mean he can’t later be convicted of murder or of a war crime.

On the latter charge, Hegseth will need to consider his position carefully, especially over whether the U.S. is legally at war. After all, per the Justice Department’s Guide To Human Rights Statutes, there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, per 18 U.S.C.§ 3281 (if the commission of a war crime results in death, prosecution is not barred by the statute of limitations.) Nor does the President’s pardon power under the Constitution extend to violations of international law when prosecuted under the laws of another country. (The U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court, so this gets into murky questions of jurisdiction and venue.)

Hegseth’s past writings and actions will come back to bite him

During upcoming hearings, congressional questioners will have a wealth of material. Much of it will come from Hegseth himself, who graciously wrote an entire book in 2024 containing his thoughts and disdain for things like the Geneva Conventions and legal oversight of military actions. As Anna Bower of Lawfare observed, there’s an entire chapter in the book entitled “More Lethality, Less (sic) Lawyers.”

In his writings, Hegseth showed open disdain for international laws and norms regarding warfare. He stated,

Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to the hogs.”

And continued,

Makes me wonder, in 2024—if you want to win—how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict? Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance. Maybe instead, we are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it.

Hegseth’s past actions also reflect his writings. He once openly and successfully lobbied Trump to pardon soldiers accused and convicted of war crimes. The move was highly controversial within the military, and no doubt many opposed to his efforts have not forgotten the stain it left on the reputation of our armed forces.

Trump sees the writing on the dumpster

There’s a key unanswered question still looming. If Hegseth gave the double-tap kill order, did he clear it first with his boss? The gravity of the circumstance would suggest that Trump was in the know about the attack. After all, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted, Trump gave the initial order to fire upon the alleged drug smuggling vessel.

Shortly after it happened, Trump posted an edited version of the attack that showed the first strike. But he did not post footage of the double-tap lethal strike.

So why wouldn’t Trump have approved, or at least know about, the second strike?

Trump is already moving to distance himself from such a claim. Asked about Hegseth’s second order while on board Air Force One, Trump said, “He said he didn’t do it.” When pressed if he would be okay if Hegseth had done it, Trump answered, “He said he didn’t do it, so I don’t have to make that decision.”

For a man of his size and age, that’s pretty good dodgeball.

Trump also insisted, when asked by a reporter whether a second strike would be legal in his view, “I don’t know that that happened.” He added, “Pete said he did not even know what people were talking about.” Trump said he himself “wouldn’t have wanted a second strike” because “the first strike was very lethal. It was fine.”

So we are to believe Hegseth ordered the second strike without consulting Trump? That’s quite a war crime to commit without the cover of the Commander-in-Chief’s blessing. As Sam Stein of The Bulwark observed,

The WH a bit shifty on this Venezuela double strike story.

Hegseth two days ago: “Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them.”

Trump tonight: “I wouldn’t have wanted a second strike... Pete said that didn’t happen.”

Bottom line? Trump is now hiding behind what Hegseth supposedly told him. That way if and when the evidence shows otherwise, that Hegseth indeed gave an illegal double-tap kill order, Trump can claim Hegseth lied to him.

From there, Donald can back his big garbage truck right over Pete.

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