This Week in 2016

• FBI Won’t Tell Me How Much It Paid To Break Into Syed Farook’s iPhone, Saying It Might Jeopardize Its Investigation
• RIAA Demands Takedown Of ThePirateBay.org, But EasyDNS Refuses Over Lack Of Due Process
• Web Sheriff Accuses Us Of Breaking Basically Every Possible Law For Pointing Out That It’s Abusing DMCA Takedowns
• Another Entity Thinks A Random Bundle Of URLs Is A Legitimate DMCA Takedown Request
• Judge Rejects Oracle’s Attempt To Get Court To Reject Jury Verdict Over Java API Copyright
• Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off

This Week in 2011

• Would It Really Be So Bad If The Beatles Were In The Public Domain?
• Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Misuses DMCA To Take Down Video Of Reporter Asking Him Tough Questions
• Homeland Security Appears To Be Stalling On FOIA Requests Concerning Domain Seizures
• Youtube, Creative Commons And Why It’s OK For You To License Your Artwork Any Way You Want
• Feds Ridiculous Prosecution Of Whistleblower Thomas Drake Falling Apart
• Ideas Do Matter, But That Has Nothing To Do With ‘Intellectual Property’

This Week in 2006

• Some 25 Years Later, In-Flight Internet Nearing Reality
• More And More Musicians Seem To Get It
• FCC Chair Trots Out Tired Telecom Trade Show Talk
• Does DRM Impact Democracy?
• Musicians Need Business Models, Not Charity
• MPAA: The Grateful Dead’s Success Was An Abomination Against Nature

As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there’s something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But Donald Trump as president will come to an end in the not too distant future.

The millions and millions of people who have been negatively impacted by him and by those who have decided to bow at his cultish altar, are not temporary. They are not going to go away. And they will remember the actions of many during this time.

And I imagine the American Diabetes Association, and specifically those currently leading it, will be in the memories of its members and many others for a long, long time. It’s been nearly a week since the ADA had five diabetes scientists, including its own former president, involuntarily removed from outside the ADA’s annual conference by police. Their crime? Distributing a copy of an editorial from the April edition of the ADA’s own journal.

The scientists were distributing the editorial outside the conference’s opening speech, which was originally scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute, and senior NIH official Rick Woychik took his place.

Within minutes of beginning to hand out the editorial, police reportedly escorted the scientists out of the conference, which was held in New Orleans. The police reportedly shoved at least one scientist, took all of their conference badges, and threatened to arrest them if they tried to return. Louisiana State Police later told media that they acted at the request of the ADA. The ADA subsequently barred the five scientists from the rest of the conference.

The editorial just so happened to be very critical of the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s funding at NIH and other health agencies and groups. It’s quite obvious that the ADA feared repercussions from the Trump administration if it wouldn’t allow these scientists to hand the article out while members of the administration were speaking and tried to use the police to silence them. And then, when this whole thing went viral, the ADA offered up justifications for its actions. Justifications that kept changing, as it turns out.

In an email to ADA members Saturday, the association said the scientists were removed because they didn’t have prior approval to distribute material at the conference and that it was “not because of the viewpoints expressed in those materials,” according to reporting from Science.

In a statement Sunday, the organization, which is a nonprofit, said it removed the scientists because it was complying with federal regulations for 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which requires “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission.” However, the federal regulations do not restrict leaders of organizations from sharing political views in a personal capacity or from speaking on important public policy issues.

And from there, the Streisand Effect took over. The editorial, which you can find right here, went somewhat viral itself, getting a ton more attention than it had to date. But the real backlash came from the public and from within the medical community itself. There have been resignations in protest of the ADA’s actions. An open letter to the ADA signed by 40 members was written to torch leadership’s actions and treatment of the scientists at the conference. Another open letter was also written, likewise demanding an apology.

And, finally, the ADA did in fact apologize days later.

In the video Wednesday, ADA CEO Charles Henderson personally apologized to the five scientists, including Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota; Justin Ryder of Northwestern University; and Irl Hirsch, also of the University of Washington, in addition to Kahn and Schatz.

“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”

In addition to apologizing to the five ejected scientists, Henderson apologized to the community as a whole, saying that the ADA would commission a “thorough independent review of the events that occurred as well as the policies, procedures, and decision-making process that guided our actions.”

Yeah, no, not good enough. The fish stinks from the head down, as the saying goes, and there have been days worth of attempts to make this stupidity anyone’s fault but leadership at the ADA. This was a clear attempt to lick the Trump administration’s boots, at the very moment when clear leadership from medical groups is so sorely needed, and that’s a bell that cannot be un-rung.

Henderson needs to go. And I have little doubt that he will before too long. Trump and RFK Jr. will eventually be gone, as well.

But we won’t forget how groups like the ADA, and the people leading them, acted during this time.

A couple weeks ago I wrote 6,000 words about the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs LEGO mess and concluded that pretty much everyone involved had made serious mistakes — with the Utah contingent (Bricks & Minifigs corporate, Joshua Johnson, Brandon Best, and the American Fork police) looking the worst of all. That take upset basically everyone: some felt I was too hard on Reckless Ben, some felt I was too easy on the American Fork police, and probably a few people just resented spending that much time reading about legos. Since then, a lot more has come out, and the situation has only gotten murkier. My original read still holds up, but the Utah folks look even worse, and some of the other players are looking sketchier too.

And, I think it’s fair to say, mistakes were made by pretty much everyone involved.

Just as before, many of the new details are in long YouTube videos, but if you want watch just one, start with this one by Stephen Findeisen, who is better known as Coffeezilla and who regularly researches financial and cryptocurrency scams:

That video goes deep — Findeisen gets basically everyone on the phone at some point or another (except the cops), accesses a ton of evidence not previously public, and, unlike most of the earlier YouTube coverage, actually tries to find the truth instead of just stoking outrage.

He makes a few points that are hard to argue with:

• The Lego collection was never actually worth $200k (we had suggested this in our initial post as well). It was probably closer to $100k (and possibly a bit less).
• Some of it was definitely sold before all this, but much of it had not been.
• Plenty of it clearly remained in the store after Brandon Best showed up the night in November 2024 to kick out Law and take over the store.
• Best also showed up with a U-Haul truck, and there are some (slightly conflicting) reports that he subsequently appeared at his other Oregon Bricks & Minifigs store with a bunch of Star Wars Lego sets. Bricks & Minifigs corporate initially insisted this was false and said he showed up in a rental car. But Coffeezilla has visual proof of a U-Haul parked outside that night, which is pretty damning, which led Bricks & Minifigs to revise their story with a complicated one about hauling a camper trailer, which doesn’t make that much sense.
• Coffeezilla dropped this thread, in part because of a disagreement over the timeline, though it’s not clear to me that the timeline doesn’t really line up. It seems entirely possible that Best could have taken a bunch of legos out of the Gormans’ old store and taken them to his other store and then returned the U-Haul truck.
• Law & Gorman appear to have sold some of Mansell’s collection and not paid him for that, and it could be a lot of money. Law admits that she may have been a bit sloppy on the record keeping, saying she hadn’t done an inventory in a while and suggesting employees maybe hadn’t told her when certain sets from the collection were sold. But there’s also a credibility problem regarding sets that were listed as being on layaway, but where the spreadsheet suggests they were actually sold, but not accounted for as sold.
• To her credit, she admits it’s possible she owes Mansell some money and that if she can see evidence of this she will make sure that Mansell is paid what he is owed. But given how quick the Gormans were to insist this was entirely Bricks & Minifigs corporate who were the problem, it’s not a good look.
• Bricks & Minifigs corporate claims that there were about $5k worth of Star Wars legos left. That appears to be bullshit and wouldn’t really help their case, because even if it was just $5k of Mansell’s legos, those are still stolen legos.
• Bricks & Minifigs’ CEO and COO (the McNeff brothers) claim that they never were sent a spreadsheet of the collections, and the best moment in the video is when Coffeezilla points out that the Google Docs spreadsheet he’s been using is owned by their account and has been sitting there since 2024. That really makes the McNeffs look sketchy.

That video also includes dueling photographic and videographic evidence of what was in the store the night Best kicked the Gormans out (as well as a few weeks earlier when Best apparently surreptitiously filmed inside the store to see what was there). There are way more empty shelves the night Best kicked out Law & Gorman, but they say that’s because they had moved the high value consignment items to the safes they had purchased for that purpose, which were in the back. Later in the video Coffeezilla shows the McNeffs additional images from Law that appear to show Star Wars lego sets in what appears to be a safe, and which Matt McNeff (the company’s COO) admits they don’t appear to have listed in their own spreadsheet, which they had originally said was a complete listing of all the Star Wars legos in the store the night they took it over.

The McNeffs still look terrible, and Brandon Best also looks a bit sketchy. But it also appears that Law & Gorman’s record keeping was pretty sketchy as well, and while the McNeffs have gone overboard in claiming that they were responsible for Mansell’s “missing” legos, it does appear likely that Law owes Mansell for a decent number of Star Wars legos her store sold.

As for the American Fork Police department and Brandon Best’s partner, Joshua Johnson, we need a different video, this one from Legal Eagle. It breaks down just how many things they did wrong:

There were a lot of assumptions made about the police department, particularly around how they redacted the footage they released to Schneider. There was plenty of smoke, but no actual fire. As it turns out, beyond possibly being corrupt, the American Fork Police Department might also just be incompetent: they accidentally uploaded all the unredacted bodycam footage, which is now available on the Internet Archive.

Schneider initially claimed a hacker obtained the videos, which raised some questions about provenance. Once the department itself admitted the release was accidental, that question went away — and what’s in the footage is pretty hard to explain away. The police were way too credulous with Johnson. The “refusing to accept service” situation alone is maddening: Johnson claims the lawsuits are fake, the officer calls the court and confirms they’re real, and then… still lets Johnson refuse service. Beyond that, there are the extended traffic stops on no real probable cause, and the arrests on a search warrant instead of an arrest warrant — and they didn’t even find what they were looking for. Legal Eagle walks through all of it, and it’s a long list of failures.

Schneider is a more complicated case. He’s clearly one of the good guys here, and the attention he generated did move the needle when nothing else was. But some of his own claims haven’t held up. He never independently verified the value of the collection — and in the Coffeezilla video, he appears genuinely surprised it’s nowhere near $200k, which is a bad look for someone who made that figure central to his coverage. The small claims court situation is worse: Schneider said Johnson and Best had defaulted on those cases, but they were basically all dismissed for being filed against the wrong defendants, or never properly served. In a followup video, Reckless Ben admits he thought he’d won by default simply because he and his friends filed for default. Which goes back to the original point: talk to a lawyer, even just for an hour.

The Mexico situation is its own category of self-inflicted damage. In multiple videos he’s mentioned that after facing criminal charges he had fled to Mexico and joked about how Utah law enforcement can’t reach him there. Whether or not he actually left the country, publicly bragging about being a flight risk while facing criminal charges is exactly the kind of thing that hands prosecutors an easy argument. He has real defenses available to him. This doesn’t help.

And then there’s Law & Gorman, who aren’t villains, but they aren’t blameless either. It appears Law owes Mansell for a fair number of sets her store sold without paying him out — and the record-keeping problems aren’t fully explained by sloppy bookkeeping. The layaway-versus-sold discrepancy in the spreadsheet is a credibility problem, not just an accounting one. To her credit, Law has said she’ll make it right if shown the evidence. But the Gormans were also quick to frame this entire situation as purely a Bricks & Minifigs corporate problem, and that framing looks increasingly incomplete.

Every side of this story is a disaster. We’ve got a corporation willing to say anything to save face, a police department that accidentally leaked its own bad behavior, franchise owners who likely shortchanged their client, and a YouTuber whose good intentions were undercut by bad execution. About the only thing missing is anyone who actually handled this well.

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

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

• Tech bosses threatened with prison if they fail to protect children (The Times)
• Apple and Google given three months to ban nude images on children’s devices (BBC News)
• Keir Starmer’s social media ban for under-16s could backfire, experts warn (OpenDemocracy)
• Apple previews new child safety features (Apple)
• Apple’s WWDC keynote was very different, but this will be the new normal (9to5mac)
• Ottawa introduces bill to restrict social media for teens, regulate AI chatbots (Globe and Mail)
• Australia builds enforcement layer behind age assurance laws (Biometric Update)
• NCAC Welcomes Meta Oversight Board’s New Account Recommendations (NCAC)

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

• Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 (Anthropic)
• Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concern (The Verge)
• The Rise of the Compliant Speech Platform (Lawfare)
• Policy on the AI Exponential (Dario Amodei)

Our fun links this week are the 7-0 World Cup game (Ben) and Chipotlai Max (Mike).

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).

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

Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that wouldn’t just ban the sales of Chinese-made cars in the The Great Lakes State, it would ban cars with Chinese tags from even visiting. The Protecting America From Chinese Cars Act joins the Connected Vehicle Security Act aiming to protect U.S. car companies from cheaper Chinese EV competition in an election season where every campaign contribution dollar matters.

This new legislation is required, we’re told by Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Haley Stevens, because the country simply cares that much about jobs, consumer privacy, and national security:

“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Stevens said while speaking at a policy conference.

Her partner in the legislation went much further. “They can certainly come across the border, drive up to Selfridge Air Force base, take some video with the car. The car is a traveling surveillance package. And all of that data that the car is collecting is being sent straight back to Beijing,” Slotkin said.”

So, a few things. One, it’s curious how normally very vocal “free market” Libertarian groups always mysteriously get quiet when this sort of obvious anti-competitive pandering to large corporate campaign donors pops up. Two, it’s adorable how Slotkin and Stevens want you to believe that simply banning Chinese cars somehow solves the major privacy issues inherent with modern, connected cars.

For one, U.S. and most of the overseas vehicles sold in the U.S. basically have nonexistent security standards. Carmakers collect an ocean of biometric, location and phone data, and then sell that data to a parade of largely unregulated data brokers, who in turn sell access to that data to any random asshole with money to spend — including domestic and foreign intelligence.

They then lie about it when asked. And if they do openly acknowledge it, they insist it’s okay because the resulting data has been “anonymized” (a term that means absolutely nothing).

Which is to say the Chinese, if they really want access to detailed U.S. street information and public movement data, don’t need to sell their cars in the U.S. to obtain it. Because Congress has been too corrupt to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law any time in the last quarter century. In part because we’re greedy, but also in part because the U.S. government also buys this data to avoid getting warrants.

As a result of this country’s grotesque corruption, we’ve been awash in major privacy and national security scandals for 25 years, including the recent revelation that sensitive U.S. location data obtained by telecoms, apps, and every other device we use (whether it’s made in China or not) is being bought from data brokers by other countries and then utilized to track, target, and kill U.S. troops.

So maybe Stevens and Slotkin actually care about this stuff, but generally privacy is used as a lazy talking point by politicians who have other motivations; in this case making giant U.S. carmakers who don’t want to face meaningful price competition happy ahead of the midterms to ensure the campaign financing funding keeps flowing.

Slotkin was one of numerous Dems who supported the “banning of TikTok,” which really just involved offloading most of the app and its profits to Trump’s billionaire friends, who are as bad, if not worse, on issues like privacy and propaganda than ByteDance ever was. Now Slotkin is going around calling cheaper Chinese EVs “TikTok on wheels,” as if the whole Dem TikTok face plant never happened.

Pretending you’re being extra tough on privacy by going so far as to even ban cars with Chinese tags from visiting from Canada (as if Canadians want to visit the U.S. right now anyway) is particularly weird, performative, and ignores the real problem.

U.S. politicians need to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law and tightly regulate data brokers, or shut up about how much they care about consumer privacy and national security.

The Learn to Code with React Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn more about React, Redux, and JavaScript. Used by the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Imgur, React is an efficient and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Meanwhile, Redux is a predictable state container that helps you manage the data your pages display. Together, these two tools play a key part in building professional, well-functioning apps; and you’ll explore mastering them both in this training. It’s on sale for $25.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Good news! (Maybe?) Federal legislators have introduced a bill that, if passed, would finally guarantee the right to record law enforcement officers. Here’s Reason’s CJ Ciaramella with the details:

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D–Fla.) introduced the “Right to Record Act of 2026,” which they say would create new consequences for individual federal officers who violate a person’s First Amendment right to document and record police.

The legislation would create a right to sue a federal law enforcement or immigration officers who engage in wide range of retaliatory behavior, including threatening and harassing videographers, surveilling them, and seizing and destroying their equipment.

So, there’s a lot to discuss here. First off, the only reason a bill like this is necessary is the current iteration of the Supreme Court. This court has repeatedly shrugged off cases that may have finally established the right to record law enforcement officers (and other public officials). Most (but not all!) lower courts have already established this right.

The Supreme Court is the holdout. Maybe that’s just because it doesn’t feel it’s necessary to step in when the issue seems to have been pretty much settled at the district level. If that’s the case, the excuse is lazy and convenient. It takes the Supreme Court to fully settle an issue when there are outliers bucking against the trend. So far, it has refused to do so.

Next up is the caveat in the introduced law: it only affects federal law enforcement officers.

While it would be nice for the proposed law [PDF] to codify the right to record any law enforcement officer, there are good reasons for introducing the bill with this specific wording.

One of the compelling reasons has been created by federal officers, especially those engaged in Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Not content to simply overreact to protests and friction with violence and actual murders, officers have been witnessed deliberately targeting journalists and observers for the obvious reason of deterring further recordings and seizing/destroying what’s already been captured.

The lawmakers cited recent allegations of federal officers targeting videographers in New Jersey, Memphis, and elsewhere across the country, as well as the importance of video evidence in refuting the false government narratives of several shootings of U.S. citizens by immigration agents.

[…]

[D]epartment of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have repeatedly suggested that [recording officers] is doxing and obstruction of justice. Over the past two years, videos from around the country—from Oregon to Maine to the Florida Keys—have shown federal immigration agents arresting or threatening to arrest people for filming them.

This right needs to be recognized if it’s going to mean anything when federal officers violate it. That brings us back to this same Supreme Court, which in recent years has made it impossible to successfully sue federal officers for violating rights. Part of this is due to this version of court steadily narrowing the Supreme Court’s 1971 Bivens ruling to allow lower courts to immediately reject anything that doesn’t exactly match the facts of the original case.

The rest of it is due to this court’s conservative majority having almost no interest in establishing rights, while being more than happy to eliminate rights that have been recognized for decades.

That’s the other meaningful part of this bill: it creates a cause of action the courts can’t just shrug off. If it is shown the “right to record” has been violated, individual officers and their employer (the US government itself) can be held liable for these violations. The bill’s text also eliminates the federal government’s “sovereign immunity” option, which means it has to take the loss if its employees are ruled to have violated this right.

This is Congress beating the Supreme Court at its own game. The nation’s top court loves to tell citizens whose rights have been violated that if they don’t like the fact federal officers are 99.9% immune from civil suits they should take it up with Congress. Well, Congress is taking it up. And if the bill becomes law (which seems extremely unlikely), the Supreme Court (and lower courts) can’t talk their way around the rights violations by pretending (1) the right isn’t established or (2) the remedy lies elsewhere.

The bill provides a long list of actions that are presumptive violations of the right to record. This includes everything from merely trying to deter recordings to threatening observers, pursuing them to other locations, placing them under surveillance, or demanding to see their identification. That’s not the entire list either. It also covers attempts to seize or destroy recordings and engaging in any actions that appear to be retaliatory.

In the current climate under the current administration, there’s almost zero chance this will be passed by Congress. But this administration won’t last forever (assuming this Republic can be kept). And this effort needs to be made, even if it results in little more than more congressional reps and federal officials going on record expressing their disdain for the public and their rights. As long as this Supreme Court retains its current makeup, the best option may be legislation, rather than litigation. This puts the administration on the defensive and calls the Supreme Court’s bluff.

Back in March I noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Several router manufacturers (like Amazon’s Eero and Netgear) have subsequently received exemptions from the Trump administration, but because there is zero transparency to the process, we have no idea what they agreed to. Did they pay the Trump administration a bribe? Did they agree to surveillance backdoors for ICE operations? Who knows? Great stuff.

Now the cable lobby appears to be balking at the purported foreign router ban. In a petition filed with the FCC last week (spotted by Ars Technica) NCTA (The Internet & Television Association) — the cable industry’s biggest lobbying org — asked for a massive exemption from the restrictions, noting that they’re simply not practical in real-world practice:

“NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose.”

So basically you’ve got a ban on foreign routers that is more about extortion than protecting national security. Which the cable industry says it can’t adhere to because AI hype, tariffs and unnecessary wars have driven up the costs of many internal router components, making adherence expensive if not impossible. Great stuff, very savvy policymaking by people who definitely know what they’re doing.

Part of the “foreign router ban” was supposed to involve forcing hardware manufacturing to return to the states. But because Trump and much of his administration have a fourth-grader-level understanding about how this stuff works (like his desire to suddenly have smartphones built in the U.S.), the cable industry’s filing notes that the “onshoring” of manufacturing and supply chains isn’t realistically possible either:

“Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.”

These companies, many of which supported and enabled Trump, now have to pretend this all makes sense as they navigate a costly minefield of weird bullshit that won’t accomplish any of its purported goals.

This is all exceptionally chaotic and dumb, and it’s unlikely that Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time trying to censor comedians and whining about “wokeness,” is capable of managing the scale of this sort of overhaul — even if it were practical, which it isn’t.

When you read most press coverage of this router ban, they don’t really make it clear to readers that this is all very unworkable and stupid. Trump and his administration are given undeserved credit on competency and policy, as the press, companies, and policymakers all try to trip over themselves to normalize the sheer pointless stupidity and expense of it all.

If the country cared about national security we’d focus on corruption. We’d pass a meaningful modern internet privacy law. We’d shore up, staff, and properly fund cybersecurity regulators. We’d regulate data brokers. Instead we get a giant pile of unworkable extortion slop being overseen by weird zealots.