News

Sunday 2026-07-26

12:00 AM

Pluralistic: Apple's robo-repo (25 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Apple's robo-repo: Privatizing the risk premium, socializing its costs.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Printed batteries; Monopoly credit cards; Mapping airport power outlets; EMI loves pirates; Mexican indigenous phone co-op; Sewer cover textiles; Surge pricing v antitrust; Carbon offsets v forest fires; Charter schools as money laundries.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A 19th century engraving of a family being evicted from their tenement. The family stands, miserable, on the sidewalk, watched over by cops and their curious neighbors, as baliffs carry their worldly goods out of their former home. The image has been altered. It has been tinted sepia. The Apple 'Think Different' wordmark has been matted into the top of the scene. The trunk the baliffs are carrying has been replaced with a blocky Mac SE/30.

Apple's robo-repo (permalink)

It may strike you as weird, but lenders love to lend money to poor people who will have trouble paying back their loans. Obviously, lenders want to be repaid, and obviously the more money you have, the easier it is to settle your debts, but (paradoxically) that means that if you have a lot of money, you expect to pay less to borrow.

In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower.

Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest?

Obviously, the fly in the ointment here is the risK in "risk premium." The reason the risk premium exists is that poor borrowers have a harder time paying their loans. That can be good, up to a point: if you're Klarna and you're originating loans to people Chipotle lunches on the installment plan, you want your borrowers to miss several payments. Klarna loans are free if you pay them back on time, but if you miss a payment, you're hit with a huge penalty charge and sky-high interest (on top of the principle and the penalty). On a small purchase, penalties and interest can quickly add up to a triple-digit APR.

That's where Klarna makes its money: people who miss their burrito installment payments. However: if a Klarna borrower goes bankrupt before they've repaid the principle, Klarna loses money. A successful loan-book of unsecured burrito mortgages depends on the existence of many missed payments and few defaults.

"Financial innovation" is often just a project to decrease the risk in risky loans, but without decreasing the risk premium you get paid for issuing those loans. It's a way to eat your cake and have it too: even though you've reduced the likelihood that you'll have to write off your loan, you still charge the borrower as though that risk is unchanged. As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself.

Remember the subprime crisis? The whole point of collateralized debt obligations and swaps was to offer loans to people with bad credit – even loans they obviously couldn't pay back – without incurring a default risk. Subprime mortgages supercharged the practice of loan origination and resale (where a bank offers you a loan and then sells that loan to someone else, so your default becomes their problem) by splitting the loans into pieces. These pieces were recombined according to complex mathematical formulas that supposedly "proved" that the default risk from poor borrowers had been "offset" by combining them with other borrowers' loans and wrapping them in opaque insurance contracts.

Those subprime mortgages came with cheap "teaser rates" – the interest rate you paid over the first couple years – but then the interest payments "ballooned" to farcical sums that borrowers had no hope of repaying. Those farcical sums were the risk premium. When financier transmuted these high-risk 30-year mortgages into complex derivatives, they were effectively promising their customers a piece of that risk premium for 28 out of the 30 years that the mortgage ran for.

But it wasn't all financial engineering: subprime mortgage salesmen could also promise customers that they wouldn't lose everything even after a wave of borrower bankruptcies and defaults. That's because mortgages are secured: they are backed by deeds for the homes the borrowers own(ed). If a borrower goes bust, the lender can repossess their house or apartment and sell it to recover the loan amount.

Now, the finance sector did repossess a fuckton of houses after the crash. Foreclosure and eviction became official policy: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Obama that a wave of foreclosures was necessary to "foam the runways" for the banks, so Obama encouraged banks to foreclose on their loans, rather than restructuring them so that Americans could keep their homes:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

But even with these foreclosures, lenders and their customers lost hundreds of billions on the subprime crisis. That's because all that subprime lending pushed the price of houses up and up and up, so when the market collapsed, those mortgages were "underwater" – the money from selling the foreclosed homes didn't cover their outstanding loans.

Collateralization – backing loans with legally binding promises to surrender some asset if you default – is a way to reduce risk, but it can't eliminate it. Assets degrade: houses burn, cars get totaled, jewelry is stolen. Assets also devalue: a loan backed by bitcoin at $111,000 on the eve of Trump's election will be underwater today with bitcoin at $64,000. This devaluation can also occur when your house's value plummets because Elon Musk repeatedly bombs your neighborhood with flaming rocket debris, or when your Tesla's resale value collapses after Musk throws a string of Seig Heils on national television.

The point being that risk mitigation is never risk elimination, but markets have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Partly that's because of risk shifting. A lender who can "securitize" their loans (turn them into bonds and sell them off to investors) can insulate themselves from risk, because the people who buy the bonds are now carrying that risk.

So many of our crises come from the intersection of these two phenomena: the promise of reducing loan risks without losing the risk premium and the fact that risk reduction can fail suddenly (or be revealed as nothing more than risk-shifting). The first phenomenon creates vast credit bubbles, the second one pops them.

This leaves would-be usurers on an endless quest for new ways to lend money at a premium to poor people while reducing their own risk. You don't need technology to do this – all you need is a captive audience of broke people whom other lenders won't touch.

When the US government adopted the racist practice of "redlining" (denying government-backed loans to Black borrowers), they created a market for predatory pseudo-mortgages called "contract buying." Contract buying is like a mortgage, but without the equity: miss a payment and you get evicted, and you aren't entitled to any of the sale price of the house, even if it was 99.99% paid off when you got kicked out.

Lenders can tip the scales in their favor by making up arbitrary junk fees, and a smart lender waits until the house is almost paid off before whacking the borrower with a ton of these fees. The borrower misses a payment, the seller repossesses the house and sells it again:

https://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/michigan-wonk-blog/re-emergence-contract-buying-practice-rooted-mid-20th-century

Contract lending never went away. Wherever you find a desperate, disfavored group who are locked out of the credit system, you'll find scumbag contract lenders running this scam. Take long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America. Long before Uber made worker misclassification (treating an employee as an independent contractor) mainstream, the trucking industry was effectively indenturing truckers, exerting more control over their lives than a boss could ever impose on a waged worker, while disclaiming any employer-related responsibilities. Truckers don't get health insurance or sick leave – and they don't get paid if they have to sit at a port for 20 hours waiting to pick up a load.

But the exploitation of truckers doesn't stop with mere wage theft. Truckers also "contract buy" their trucks. Their bosses issue loans that let drivers buy their trucks on terms that allow the company to repo the truck after a single missed payment. And of course, bosses have total control over truckers' wages, so a canny boss can wait until a truck is nearly paid off and then stop the driver's wages, forcing them to miss a payment and lose their truck, which can be sold on to the next victim:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170616120011/https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

Subprime auto-loans bring this same profitable arrangement to regular drivers who just need a car to commute, pick up groceries, and shuttle the kids to and from school. A subprime auto-loan often contains the "teaser" and "balloon" rates at the heart of the subprime mortgage bubble: for the first year or two, your car payments are affordable, but then they shoot up to a sum that you can't possibly pay. The lender then repossesses your car, zeroing out your equity, and sells it to another victim:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

But the subprime car industry puts a decidedly modern spin on the contract lending scam that has been used to profitably rob so many Black home borrowers and long-haul truckers. Subprime lending's risk-reduction relies on repossession. A subprime car lender doesn't just get rich by charging poor borrowers more money that rich borrowers for shittier, older cars. Subprime car dealers repeatedly "sell" that car to many, many poor people, on conditions that all but guarantee that the borrower will default on their loan and lose their car.

This is where tech comes in. Ubiquitous digital networks and computing make it much easier to repo a car. This started with the humble lo-jack, a simple tracker marketed as a way to locate lost or stolen cars. Subprime auto-lenders were early and aggressive lo-jack adopters, because you can't repo a car if you don't know where it is. Installing a lo-jack is much cheaper than paying repo men to drive around looking for the cars you want to claw back, which means that you can sell cars to people who represent worse credit risks, charging a higher risk premium, and still find the car when those high interest rates force your borrower into default.

The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the borrower over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working:

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car – it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

The cheaper the repo, the riskier the loan can be; the riskier the loan, the higher the risk premium. Digital tech makes repo much cheaper, so wherever you find digital tech, you find digital arm-breakers coming up with ways to robo-repo the things you buy.

There's India's subprime phone lenders, who pre-install usury-tech on their phones. This is a tool that spies on the phone's owner, building a dossier of the owner's most frequently used apps. When the owner misses a payment, the phone starts disabling the user's favorite apps, working its way up the list to the most indispensable ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

It's the digital version of the mob loan-shark who breaks a finger, then your hand, then your arm. The more graduated the threat matrix is, the more payments you can capture. A borrower with a broken finger can get to a pawn-broker to sell their wedding-ring; a borrower with two broken legs has a much harder time.

Digital arm-breakers aren't an epiphenomenon of digitization alone. Usury tech only works if the device's owner can't disable it. Remember: a computer is flexible. The only computer we know how to make is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," defined as a device that can compute ever valid program. If your phone is running a program that disables your apps, then you can install another program that disables that program. Same goes for your car's lo-jack; the stereo system emitting ear-splitting complaints about your car note; and the immobilizer hooked up to your ignition.

That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."

DMCA 1201 is the reason you can't neutralize the digital arm-breakers by deleting or blocking the usury-tech in your car, phone or other device:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Here's where it gets interesting. Apologists for DMCA 1201 insist that the law is necessary, because it lets device makers lock malicious parties out of your devices. Apple leads the pack here: they use DMCA 1201 to block independent repair of their devices, insisting that this isn't done to extort high fees from you or to force you to throw away and replace last year's iPhone after you drop it. No, Apple does this to protect you – from unscrupulous repairers who might install malware on your phone:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And Apple says the reason it blocks you from installing apps without using its App Store is to protect you from malicious apps – not to control the app marketplace, where it makes $100b/year on payment processing junk-fees, siphoning off 30% of every dollar you spend in an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Apple's greatest accomplishment isn't technological, it's psychological. Apple managed to convince millions of people that buying products from a multi-trillion dollar corporation with close ties to both Trump and Xi makes them members of an oppressed religious minority, and those members of the "cult of Mac" tie themselves into knots insisting that Apple would only ever use its powers for good:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

But moral behavior doesn't consist solely of resisting the temptation to do bad things – to be truly moral, you must not put yourself in temptation's path in the first place. Morality isn't the strength to resist the siren's song – it's the humility to recognize your own weakness and tie yourself to the mast:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

By giving itself a veto over its customers' choices, Apple deliberately sailed into siren-infested waters, after first putting a gun on every mantelpiece it could find. Now the company is drowning in sin, while spraying gunfire in every direction.

Today, the company is getting into the leasing business. Having monopolized its markets and eliminated the possibility of growth by making and selling things, the company is becoming a lender. As a lender, Apple wants to maximize the risk premiums it can charge, while minimizing its actual risk. That's why the new version of iOS – the operating system for iPhones and iPads – comes with software that lets lenders brick your device if you miss a payment:

https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/ios-27-code-suggests-apple-could-restrict-leased-devices-after-missed-payments/

The code steals a trick from India's subprime phone lenders, giving Apple the ability to "restrict apps and services when payments are missed." It hooks into a "Partner Finance Lock," which allows Apple to sell devices to third-party userers who want to get into the subprime game, promising those customers all the imaginative flexibility a digital arm-breaker could dream of.

This was always the trajectory of Apple's decision to sell you a computer that takes orders from its manufacturer, rather than its owner. Apple didn't invent the subprime gadget. It also didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player or the smartphone. Rather, Apple took those gadgets mainstream – just as it will do with subprime gadgets. Just in time for the affordability crisis, the oil shock, the climate shock, the AI collapse and the tariff shock, the age of the digital arm-breaker has well and truly arrived:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

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)

#25yrsago Shapeable printed batteries https://web.archive.org/web/20011102112023/https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991069

#20yrsago Monopoly replaces play-money with fake credit-cards https://web.archive.org/web/20070220050926/http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,70131-1228653,00.html

#20yrsago HOWTO build a fax out of salmon tins https://web.archive.org/web/20060828010312/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/07/25/build-a-rather-bad-salmon-can-fax-machine/

#20yrsago Power outlets in airports wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060807061721/http://wiki.jeffsandquist.com/default.aspx/AirPower/AirPower

#20yrsago How iTunes is bad for the music industry and the public https://web.archive.org/web/20060813140818/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191000408

#15yrsago Ousted EMI boss: pirates are our best customers, suing is bad for business https://torrentfreak.com/former-google-cio-limewire-pirates-were-itunes-best-customers-110726/

#15yrsago Patent trolls and shakedowns: Intellectual Ventures and the “little guy” https://web.archive.org/web/20160810163346/https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-patents-attack

#10yrsago Textiles printed directly from sewer covers https://raubdruckerin.de/

#10yrsago Mexican indigenous groups form co-op phone company to serve 356 municipalities https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/26/so-long-phone-companies-mexicos-indigenous-groups-are-getting-their-own-telecoms/

#5yrsago Surge pricing violates antitrust law https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#pure-transfer

#5yrsago Oregon's carbon offsets go up in smoke https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#murder-offsets

#5yrsago Charter schools are money laundries https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

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)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • 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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ISSN: 3066-764X

Saturday 2026-07-25

05:00 PM

03:00 PM

Trump Fires Court-Appointed US Attorney One Hour After Appointment, Immediately Gets Sued [Techdirt]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.

If this sounds familiar (and it should), it’s because Trump loves promoting people to US Attorney positions, but absolutely refuses to engage with the nomination process that’s required by law.

This has happened more than once, as the New York Times article notes. The last time we covered it here at Techdirt, it took nearly five hours for Trump to fire a US attorney appointed by the courts.

The firing of court-appointed US attorneys is going to be a thing going forward. The legally approved process for appointment of US attorneys is pretty simple and every president before Trump has somehow managed to respect it. If an administration wants to appoint a US attorney, it needs to run this pick past the Senate for a thumbs up/down. If it doesn’t, the person can only hold that office for 120 days. If that doesn’t happen, the courts get to put someone in that position.

Trump has blown off the confirmation process multiple times and courts have responded by engaging with their legal duty to elevate someone to that position. When that happens, the Trump administration lurches into semi-consciousness and “fires” the actually legally appointed US attorney.

The thing is that it doesn’t matter how fast the administration fires prosecutors appointed by federal judges. Until Trump actually shepherds some prosecutor picks through the confirmation process, this is just going to keep happening every four months or so.

The US attorney dumped by Trump in less than an hour is utilizing the court system the administration chooses to ignore 90% of the time. If Trump wants to ignore the legal process for prosecutor appointments, the administration should be on the hook for wrongful termination.

In his lawsuit filed Tuesday, Rogoff argued that his termination was unlawful because the president lacks the authority to remove judicially appointed judges. 

“By purporting to fire Mr. Rogoff — and apparently committing to firing anyone else a district court appoints without ‘the support of POTUS’ — the President has attempted to negate Congress’s exercise of its constitutionally enumerated power,” the suit alleges. 

Rogoff argued his firing was an unconstitutional separation of powers, noting Congress set up a mechanism to appoint U.S. attorneys until the president nominates — and the Senate confirms — a U.S. attorney. He also alleged that he was denied due process. 

While it’s impossible to tell how this will all play out — especially when our Supreme Court is at least 50% MAGA-cooked — it seems like everything involved here has been established for years and never ignored so completely as it has been since Trump began his second term.

While the administration appears to believe that every firing resets the clock, I don’t think courts should feel obligated to humor this pretense. Instead, courts should simply reinstate their picks if the administration doesn’t have anyone lined up for confirmation. Instead of allowing Trump to pick whoever he wants and fire whoever he doesn’t the moment a court appoints them, courts dealing with this bullshit should appoint the same person over and over again or, at the very least, refuse to recognize the position of US Attorney until one has been properly and legally confirmed.

We’ll see where this lawsuit goes. But even if it ends up the victim of executive privilege, courts still retain the power to enforce the laws this administration willfully ignored.

11:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 勝 [Kanji of the Day]

勝

✍12

小3

victory, win, prevail, excel

ショウ

か.つ　-が.ち　まさ.る　すぐ.れる　かつ

優勝   (ゆうしょう)   —   overall victory
決勝   (けっしょう)   —   decision of a contest
勝ち   (かち)   —   win
勝利   (しょうり)   —   victory
勝負   (しょうぶ)   —   victory or defeat
準決勝   (じゅんけっしょう)   —   semifinal
勝手に   (かってに)   —   arbitrarily
勝つ   (かつ)   —   to win
準々決勝   (じゅんじゅんけっしょう)   —   quarterfinal
初優勝   (はつゆうしょう)   —   first championship win (esp. sumo)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 範 [Kanji of the Day]

範

✍15

中学

pattern, example, model

ハン

範囲   (はんい)   —   extent
範囲内   (はんいない)   —   in range
許容範囲   (きょようはんい)   —   tolerance level
広範囲   (こうはんい)   —   extensive
広範   (こうはん)   —   wide
規範   (きはん)   —   model
模範   (もはん)   —   exemplar
師範   (しはん)   —   instructor
行動範囲   (こうどうはんい)   —   field of activities
範疇   (はんちゅう)   —   category

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

10:00 AM

09:00 AM

DOJ Withdraws NY Times Subpoenas After Judge Notices It Never Bothered To Follow The Rules For Subpoenaing Reporters [Techdirt]

Just last week we had the story of the Trump DOJ issuing very questionable subpoenas of NY Times journalists while trying to track down who leaked information to those reporters regarding the potentially catastrophic security flaws of the “gift” 747 plane he received from Qatar. As we noted in that original post, this appeared to be a wholly abusive use of the government’s subpoena powers, and well outside the norm.

On Thursday, the DOJ agreed to withdraw those subpoenas, but only after a long court hearing in which the DOJ thoroughly embarrassed itself in front of the judge, Arun Subramanian, who noted many, many problems with the subpoenas, which the DOJ tried to tiptoe around, calling them “inadvertent errors.” Most of the media coverage of this is pretty weak, but Matthew Russell Lee of the Inner City Press did a wonderful liveposting of the hearing that suggests just how badly the DOJ fucked this up.

It started out with the DOJ saying they weren’t going to withdraw the subpoenas, and claiming that they believed the subpoenas were “properly” issued. But the court quickly pointed out that there is precedent in the Second Circuit regarding when and how you can subpoena journalists, and the DOJ basically ignored all of that. The DOJ’s Sean Buckley argued that following those rules would amount to conceding the rules applied — something the DOJ apparently didn’t want to admit, leading the judge to say that following the rules wouldn’t be seen as any such admission.

Buckley: If we withdraw it might imply we accept the Gonzalez test.Judge: You're going to go to the Supreme Court?Buckley: It's possible. Judge: I will not understand any withdraw as accepting the Gonzalez test. I'm trying to figure out a practical way here

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T18:19:30.768Z

Judge Subramanian kept pressing Buckley on why the DOJ rushed to issue these incredibly broad subpoenas when there appeared to be much more straightforward ways to obtain the information they were seeking. Indeed, another part of what was discussed is that the DOJ’s subpoenas were so broad that they included phone records of reporters’ relatives who had nothing whatsoever to do with the reporting:

A Justice Department lawyer, Sean Buckley, cast the government’s missteps as inadvertent errors and said: “No one was trying to pull a fast one.” Buckley apologized for other subpoenas that sought records for phone numbers belonging to one reporter’s mother and two of the journalists’ spouses.

“That was an error, judge, which we own,” Buckley said. “It was a consequence of trying to move quickly.”

“These things are starting to pile up,” Subramanian said, becoming increasingly testy.

The judge also explored whether or not the DOJ misled the judge who signed off on the subpoenas, by not letting them know that the subpoenas were for information associated with reporting. He even noted that the Assistant US Attorney who got the subpoenas, Kevin Sullivan, was in the room, but not at the table, asking him to come out of the galley and join the DOJ table (this is not something that usually happens).

Buckley: We would be prepared to immunize these reporters – our focus is on the leakers.Judge: Is Mr. Sullivan here?Buckley: Yes. In the galleryJudge: Why? He is on all the pleadings. Come up- we have extra chairs here. Good afternoon.Sullivan: Good afternoon

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T18:38:00.885Z

Following that was an incredible exchange wherein Judge Subramanian asked Sullivan about whether he told the original subpoena-issuing judge that the subpoenas were for reporters, leading Sullivan to say it “was an oversight” and that later on they “did legal research.”

Judge: You didn't tell the judge that the subpoena was about reporters, about the New York Times?Sullivan: We did not. It was an oversight. Later we did legal research.Judge: Wouldn't it have been relevant to know there had been public reporting? A: Yes

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T18:40:38.738Z

Around that point, a clearly fed up Subramanian said that if this were a normal case, this would be the point where he would issue an order to show cause why the DOJ shouldn’t face sanctions for abusing the subpoena process. There was some more back and forth scolding, including Subramanian pointing out that the “errors” for the DOJ seemed to be “piling up” and asking the DOJ if he should expect to see more mistakes like this moving forward.

Around this point, the DOJ regrouped and changed their stance from earlier in the hearing, saying they were now willing to drop the subpoenas. After the hearing was over, the ever petulant Trump Justice Department quickly whined to the media how unfair it was that federal judges expected them to actually follow the rules and stuff:

After the hearing, the Justice Department lashed out at Subramanian in a statement, saying he “threatened our attorneys with sanctions unless subpoenas were withdrawn, and blocked us from presenting the meticulous process of this investigation.”

“The grand jury has a right to hear testimony from all material witnesses in a federal criminal investigation. This judge’s conduct overrides clear longstanding principles and common sense — blocking the grand jury from receiving core evidence in a national security investigation,” the statement said.

“Make no mistake,” it added, “this investigation remains ongoing, and we will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information, a serious federal crime.”

Once again, we have an overly aggressive, understaffed, and generally incompetent DOJ that seems not to realize that there are significant and important Constitutional limits on what it can do. And when a judge calls them out on it, the fact that their immediate response is to start whining about it like they were the victims here suggests a good reason that the entire DOJ will need a massive overhaul post-Trump.

06:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Live At TrustCon 2026 [Techdirt]

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.

Our third annual Live at TrustCon recording of Ctrl-Alt-Speech! Ben was back this year! Mike and Ben were joined live on stage with Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and Zoe Darme, Director for Trust, Knowledge and Information Products at Google. They cover:

Special thanks to the Trust & Safety Professionals Association (TSPA) and all the work they do each year in putting on TrustCon, and for allowing us to host the live podcast as the closing session again this year.

Election Commission Says Musk Likely Broke The Law By Paying Voters. Will Anyone Do Anything About It? [Techdirt]

Will Elon Musk actually face legal consequences for illegally paying voters in an attempt to interfere in an election? We’re at least one step closer to finding out.

Back during the 2024 Presidential election, he got away with offering $1 million to a “random” (not actually random) voter who would sign his petition in an effort to get out the vote for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

He then tried to run back that strategy a few months later during a special election for judges in Wisconsin. It didn’t work out so well for him. It flopped so badly that Musk said he would no longer get so invested in elections any more. Who knows if he’ll keep that promise. Probably not.

And now the Wisconsin Elections Commission has decided that the whole “we’ll pay you to sign this petition” nonsense likely violates the law.

The motion approved by the elections commission said it found probable cause that Musk broke Wisconsin law by making a social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court election “in order to induce them to vote in that election.”

[….]

Three Wisconsin voters received checks from Musk, including two who got them in person at the Green Bay rally. Two weeks before the election, Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, offered $100 to voters who signed a petition in opposition to “activist judges,” or referred someone to sign it.

And, before you rush out to claim that it was clearly a partisan/biased decision, turns out it really wasn’t. The commission is equally split between Republicans and Democrats:

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, consisting of three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 in closed session on Thursday to refer the complaints to the district attorney, the commission’s spokesperson, Emilee Miklas, said.

Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, a Republican, did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday.

Of course, it is an open question as to whether or not Lasee will actually do anything about this. Some groups are pushing him to act on the referral. And they called out that Lasee had put a stop to other “get out the vote” campaigns, warning them that their actions (offering food, water, and rides to the polls) could violate election bribery laws. Here’s Kristin Lyerly from the Committee to Protect Healthcare:

“The commission did their job. Now it’s time for District Attorney Lasee to do his,” she added. “This isn’t about political outcomes. It’s about whether the law applies to everyone or just everyone except the richest man in the world.”

Others argued the law should be applied fairly, pointing to an April 2024 incident where Lasee warned local get out the vote organizers that an event they planned risked violating state election bribery law. 

The event offered food, water and rides to the polls — as well as cash prizes for social media influencers who got the most people out to vote. The groups canceled the effort after receiving a letter from Lasee questioning its legality.

“When the district attorney’s office believed local organizations may have crossed a legal line, it acted quickly,” said community organizer Christina Thor. “Our community deserves to see that same standard applied today. The same urgency, the same scrutiny, and the same commitment to applying that law fairly.”

So, here we have a very clear opportunity to see whether the law is applied equally to Musk, or whether yet another law enforcement official decides that there can be no consequences for rampant law-breaking.

Should this move forward, I guarantee you that Musk and his hordes of cult-like fans will insist that this prosecution is political. But, again, that seems like bullshit. At some point, those who break the law with impunity have to be held accountable for their actions.

One of the most frustrating things about the last decade has been watching the rich and powerful face zero consequences for doing many, many terrible things — a pattern that breeds exactly the kind of toxic cynicism that lets everyone else assume that the rules don’t apply to themselves either. This is a chance to take a stand and prove that wrong. Those actions should have consequences, and screaming “political prosecution” when it’s clearly not should never be a literal get out of jail free card.

Daily Deal: The Complete Raspberry Pi And Alexa A-Z Bundle [Techdirt]

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

04:00 AM

First take/next take/last take [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Nailing it in the first take is a sign of preparation and professionalism. No need for two tries if you are clear about what you’re doing and how.

The next take is where hope lies. This one was pretty good, but next time, we’ll bring it.

And the last take is good enough. That’s why there are no more takes after that.

      

DOJ Humiliated in Federal Court [The Status Kuo]

Meme image from Chris Geidner of Law Dork

On the afternoon of Friday, July 10, FBI Director Kash Patel had to cancel a planned trip to Chicago, where his girlfriend was performing at a music festival. He was urgently needed at the White House.

Patel spent roughly eight hours there, running a leak investigation from the White House complex rather than FBI headquarters—a break from historical practice. The White House had ordered Patel to oversee the probe after President Trump became enraged by New York Times reporting about his fancy Qatari-donated Air Force One replacement. The paper revealed that the plane lacked some of the defensive countermeasures carried by the older aircraft, forcing a last-minute switch during his return from a NATO summit in Turkey.

That night, federal agents showed up on Times reporters’ doorsteps with subpoenas demanding grand jury testimony. Separate subpoenas sought phone records tied not only to the journalists, but also to one reporter’s mother and two colleagues’ spouses.

Less than two weeks later, the government stood in a Manhattan courtroom and gave it all back. Come enjoy some legal schadenfreude today!

Subscribe now

Grilled for an hour

Judge Arun Subramanian spent nearly the entire hearing grilling Justice Department lawyers over how their subpoenas had come together. He had good reason to be both skeptical and offended.

“Subpoenas issued to reporters for their records, they are not the first thing you do,” he told the government’s lawyers. “They are the last thing you do.” That’s a simple, clear and well-understood principle, but apparently not if you work for this Justice Department.

After the judge identified numerous factual errors, relevant precedent the DOJ had overlooked and potentially misleading representations to the court—raising the prospect of sanctions—the government folded. Ten minutes after asking for a break to confer with the Times’ legal team, prosecutor Sean Buckley returned and told the judge the government would unilaterally withdraw the subpoenas.

The law they were supposed to follow

The “last thing you do” standard for issuing subpoenas to reporters arises from federal regulation and, in the Second Circuit, where Judge Subramanian sits as a U.S. district judge, from a 2006 case also involving the New York Times: New York Times v. Gonzales. Indeed, if you run a basic legal search on “government subpoenas” and “New York Times” in the Second Circuit, that case pops right up.

The regulation traces to 1970, when Attorney General John Mitchell adopted it amid public backlash over a wave of subpoenas seeking to force journalists to reveal their sources. That was two years before the Supreme Court’s Branzburg v. Hayes ruling addressed the same question. The regulation requires the Justice Department to make all reasonable attempts to obtain information from alternative sources before considering a subpoena to a journalist, treating such subpoenas as an extraordinary measure rather than a standard investigative tool. That stands to reason. The regulation protects the press from the very kind of harassment that the Times reporters and their families and colleagues endured earlier this month, which had a chilling effect on all reporting.

The rule was rewritten twice in the years since. The first time was in 2014, after revelations that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records from more than 20 Associated Press lines and a Fox News reporter’s emails. The second time was in 2022 under Attorney General Merrick Garland, who narrowed the circumstances under which prosecutors could seek journalists’ records at all.

That 2006 Second Circuit decision, which any junior lawyer could and should have surfaced, is especially relevant here. It examined whether the government had sufficiently pursued alternative investigative means before subpoenaing journalists’ phone records, even in compelling national-security circumstances.

It’s rather astonishing that any subpoenas to reporters in the Second Circuit would issue as a first step by the government given this precedent and the DOJ’s own regulations. But this is Trump’s incompetent and inexperienced DOJ, and as Chris Geidner of Law Dork reported, the government lawyer told Judge Subramanian that his office hadn’t found the ruling until after the subpoenas had already gone out. (Blink twice moment.) The judge asked him directly whether he’d known about it beforehand. “No,” the lawyer said. (Blink three times moment.)

In the Gonzales case, the government’s justification consisted of a single-line assertion in an affidavit that it had “reasonably exhausted alternative investigative means.” It gave no supporting detail, only a bare assertion the court accepted narrowly, warning it would not suffice “in a case involving less compelling facts.” Two decades later, the government’s own filing in this case admitted it still had “particular investigative steps” left to take when the subpoenas went out.

That sure doesn’t sound like its alternative investigative means had been exhausted. But what the heck, roll the dice and see, right?

Bondi loosened the rule, but it still wasn’t followed

That exhaustion principle survived even the Trump regime’s rewrite of the rule. In April 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Garland’s press protections, once again allowing prosecutors to pursue journalists’ communications in leak investigations. A final rule issued the following month went further still, declaring that Garland’s 2022 amendments had “unduly hindered” the department’s ability to pursue leaks, and returning the department to a looser, pre-2022 standard.

Bondi’s April memo framed the volume of leaks as the justification: “Federal government employees intentionally leaking sensitive information to the media undermines the ability of the Department of Justice to uphold the rule of law... This conduct is illegal and wrong, and it must stop.” (Tellingly, these leaks were occurring everywhere just three months into Trump’s second term.)

But even Bondi’s own policy kept the core exhaustion requirement intact, describing investigative techniques aimed at journalists as “an extraordinary measure to be deployed as a last resort.” Subpoenaed journalists were still entitled to advance notice under her policy, and subpoenas were still supposed to be narrowly drawn.

Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argued that the recent subpoenas sent to Times reporters and their family members broke from the longstanding practice of using journalist subpoenas only as a last resort once every other avenue had been exhausted. They followed none of Bondi’s own stated safeguards, let alone the stricter rule she’d rescinded.

Federal investigators actually have well-established tools for finding leakers without going after a journalist’s records. For example, they can interview officials with access to the information, review internal logs of who accessed classified material and when, narrow the pool of possible sources through security-clearance and access records the government already controls, and even use polygraph tests on employees in leak investigations, as the FBI and Pentagon have done repeatedly in Trump 2.0.

The AP phone-records controversy in 2013-14 set a benchmark for what exhaustion is supposed to look like. Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time that his department had conducted a comprehensive investigation, including more than 550 interviews, before ever subpoenaing a journalist.

The Times argued that the government skipped straight past those alternatives here. Subpoenas went out within a day of the investigation opening, which the paper’s lawyers said in their filing “compels the conclusion that the government did not even try to comply with its own regulations governing media subpoenas.”

A confirmation hearing, eight days earlier

Eight days before the hearing, Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney who authorized the subpoenas and Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing. Reporters Committee president Brown had called on senators of both parties to press Clayton on the subpoenas rather than let him “escape accountability.”

Clayton declined to discuss the investigation’s details, but he offered senators his assurance: “I am confident that the procedures that we have in place to protect the First Amendment and protect the freedom of the press... not result in intimidation of journalists.”

Eight days later, DOJ lawyers would leave federal court with their subpoenas voluntarily withdrawn and their tails between their legs.

Inside the hearing

Inside his federal courtroom in New York City, Judge Subramanian offered the government a binary choice within the first 10 minutes: He could quash the subpoenas himself, or the Justice Department could withdraw them. So, not going well for the DOJ.

DOJ’s Buckley pushed back, arguing that the subpoenas should instead be held “in abeyance” so the government could preserve the records for later use. Subramanian wasn’t satisfied. “Doesn’t that turn the law and regulations on its head?” he asked. “Subpoenas are the last step, not the first step.”

Under questioning, the government’s case began to unravel. Prosecutors acknowledged that they had sought a nondisclosure order from a separate judge without mentioning that the case involved journalists’ records—a fact neither the Times nor Subramanian learned until the government volunteered it days later. Judge Subramanian’s silence spoke volumes.

In a moment that would have made great television, Subramanian then called the prosecutor who had handled that application, Kevin Sullivan, up from the gallery to the government’s table. He pressed Sullivan on why a subpoena application he’d signed had described the investigation as nonpublic days after the Times had already published its story. Sullivan’s answer: “the wording was imprecise.” (That’s lawyer talk for “misrepresentation.”)

Buckley also acknowledged that the subpoenas had swept up phone records belonging to a reporter’s mother and two colleagues’ spouses. “We own it. We used a public source database,” he told the judge, adding that no one had been trying to pull a fast one on the court.

(Narrator: Someone was trying to pull a fast one on the court.)

Subramanian told the government that in a civil case, he’d normally order prosecutors to show cause why they shouldn’t face sanctions for the misstatements.

After a 10-minute recess, Buckley returned and told the judge the government would withdraw the subpoenas outright.

Times attorney David O’Neil told Subramanian the record was “replete with bad faith,” adding that the subpoenas had already produced a chilling effect on the reporters’ ability to do their jobs.

The reaction

As an indication of how seriously the paper took these subpoenas, Times officials had been present throughout the hearing, watching from the gallery. The paper’s managing editor and general counsel, David McCraw, had come to observe the case play out.

McCraw called the outcome an affirmation of the country’s commitment to a free press, adding that the reporters “will continue to report and seek the truth without fear or favor.”

The Justice Department, true to form, was not contrite. A spokesperson accused Subramanian of threatening prosecutors with sanctions and blocking the government from presenting what it called “the meticulous process of this investigation,” insisting that the underlying leak probe remained active. “We will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information, a serious federal crime,” the statement said.

The reporters targeted by the subpoenas were elated. Eric Lipton called it “extraordinary to be in the middle of such an important press freedom argument,” adding he was proud to work at the Times.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression also welcomed the withdrawal but cautioned that the episode had already produced a chilling effect regardless of the outcome.

The government’s retreat was not isolated. The administration had recently withdrawn similar subpoenas seeking testimony from Washington Post and Wall Street Journal journalists in Virginia over separate national security coverage.

Try again?

The Justice Department, for its part, said the investigation into who leaked the Air Force One security details remains open. Under Subramanian’s order, prosecutors are technically free to try again, so long as they come to court first.

But that path must run through the interviews, access logs and other legwork prosecutors completely skipped—a process Buckley told the court the department had bypassed because it was “trying to move quickly.”

“Move fast and break things” may serve as a governing principle in Silicon Valley, but it is not how things are done in the law. Move too fast, skip those pesky procedures, and be wildly “imprecise” about the facts, and the only thing you will break is your ability to practice law in U.S. courts.

03:00 AM

Administration Accelerating Immigration Hearings To Ensure Migrants Miss New Court Dates [Techdirt]

No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible.

Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, many of them from (direct quote right here) “shithole countries.” They blame Biden for this completely imaginary “crisis” and preach the same message to the faithful over and over again: “worst of the worst.”

But it’s not that and it’s never been that. If the administration was simply trying to eject dangerous criminals, ICE wouldn’t be sending officers to immigration courts to pounce on migrants who are following the rules for staying in this country. ICE wouldn’t have set up a fake college to snare foreigners following the visa rules by continuing their education. And the government wouldn’t be telling its lawyers to dismiss ongoing removal proceedings solely for the purpose of making migrants attending scheduled probation check-ins immediately arrestable.

It’s only getting nastier and uglier. The Trump administration is now moving up immigration hearing dates for the sole purpose of generating more unearned “wins” that will, in turn, generate more deportations. Here’s Gwynne Hogan with the brutally nasty details for The City Reporter:

The mass immigration hearings picked up in New York City in early June, The City Reporter reported at the time. They were dubbed mega masters because a single judge could be assigned a docket of more than 100 cases a day, about double a regular master calendar docket before.

In addition to the large number of cases, many of these hearings were scheduled just weeks in advance and replaced hearings people might have had on the books months or years away.

The City Reporter observed one such mega master hearing where, on a docket of 121 cases, 39 people and their family members were ordered removed for failing to show up to court. In some instances, family members’ cases were linked.

As this report notes, for years most hearing dates were generally scheduled 180 days out from the initial hearing. But in the past few months — along with the creation of these so-called “mega masters” — the lead time has dropped precipitously. In May, the average was 98 days. By June, it was 42 days.

This is deliberate. Migrants engaged in the legal process would have no reason to believe their cases would be accelerated. After all, the mass deportation surges the Trump administration has generated tens of thousands of new cases, which would generally result in additional delays, rather than sudden accelerations.

And while the government is required to notify migrants of schedule changes, it’s not as though it’s a push notification via the normally accepted form of human connection these days. It’s a letter sent by snail mail. And it’s not as though this government is going to perform any due diligence to make sure the notification is seen by the intended recipient.

What’s happening here is the administration flooding the docket and ambushing migrants who fail to check their hearing status daily and who would have no reason to do so when they hadn’t seen any changes to hearing dates for several months.

The plan is as ugly as it is shitty: accelerate thousands of hearing dates and send federal officers out to scoop up migrants who are now on the wrong end of in absentia rulings handed down by judges who are deliberately overloaded to prevent them from fully engaging with these cases.

This is all in service to the impossible deportation goals set by the administration. You can’t get 2-3,000 arrests per day without cheating. Here’s how this has been playing out over the past couple of months.

In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the [New York City] “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia. 

The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. 

The real human cost is as incalculable as it is heartbreaking:

On Friday morning, several dozen people managed to make it to a courtroom inside 26 Federal Plaza for their mega master hearing where Immigration Judge Thanos Kanellakos appeared virtually from a courtroom in Maryland, overseeing a docket of 90 cases.

Most of the people who made it to court had traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee, Georgia, North Dakota and Illinois to attend.

[…]

Several people at court told The City Reporter they’d had a court date scheduled months or even years away when they happened to double-check the online portal recently and learned they had a new hearing scheduled a few days away.

There is no legitimate reason for the government to be doing this. There is only the constant desire to hurt human beings this administration considers to be less than human. That’s why it’s trying to eradicate temporary protected status for all but the whitest migrants. And that’s why it’s engaging in barely disguised entrapment to keep its flying rail cars and prison camps loaded with its preferred scapegoats.

12:00 AM

Brendan Carr Lobs More Empty Threats At ABC For Not Airing Trump’s Election Fraud Lies [Techdirt]

Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption.

The details of these investigations really don’t matter at this point. We’ve discussed how they’re legally incoherent, clearly violate the First Amendment, and involve Carr actively manufacturing false claims that ABC violated FCC rules it was long-exempt from. At other points it just involves Carr being incoherently racist on Trump’s behalf; such as claims that ABC didn’t eliminate its “DEI” requirements quickly enough.

Carr’s now dumping additional empty threats into the mix, claiming that his ongoing review of ABC’s local broadcast licenses will take into consideration the network’s refusal to air Trump’s recent prime time speech, which mostly just involved Trump spewing more false election fraud conspiracy theories surrounding his 2020 loss.

ABC and NBC wisely refused to air the speech live, knowing that helping to spread distrust in election integrity in real time would be the opposite of useful journalism. That made Trump mad, so he’s clearly urged Brendan Carr to levy some additional empty threats against ABC:

“I think when you have the President of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying. And so, obviously, this is an issue,” Carr told reporters Wednesday. “There have been lots of concerns raised, including by members of Congress, about whether broadcasters and their decisions there comply with the public interest.”

Carr is somewhat vague here because he knows this is a bunch of bullshit.

Obviously it’s ABC’s First Amendment right to determine what it broadcasts and when. Carr has absolutely zero legal role in determining the scheduling lineup of a private company. Carr’s once again pretending that networks that refuse to pander to our mad idiot king will be subjected to FCC review of their public interest obligations affixed to ownership of public airwaves.

As we’ve mentioned countless times already, Carr doesn’t want any of this to actually head to court because he knows it’s an absolute loser on First Amendment grounds. The real goal remains to threaten U.S. media companies with costly and annoying legal headaches if they challenge Republicans or the unpopular president. It’s typical lazy autocrat stuff by weak men who are afraid of words.

When it comes to ABC, that’s still been embarrassingly effective. The company agreed to pay Trump a $16 million bribe in 2024 to settle a baseless lawsuit the company easily could have won. And more recently, ABC shows like The View have shied away from hosting any political candidates at all for risk of upsetting Trump.

Brendan Carr has openly stated in interviews he fancies himself a tough, pit bull enforcer; but as Trump’s health and political power wane, the threats will hold less and less weight. As a result you’ve already seen ABC execs start to show a backbone in their fight with Carr, openly pointing out how he colluded with local right wing broadcast affiliates to manufacture evidence suggesting ABC broke FCC rules (something I’m sure will play great in court).

Carr’s threats will become weaker and weaker until he’s ultimately booted from office by subsequent administrations, at which point he’ll fail upward to some mid-six figure job at a telecom or media think tank, where he’ll spend the rest of his life helping corporate America dismantle whatever’s left of competition, labor, and consumer protection standards.

One of the ironic things, for Carr, is that his authoritarian censorship and saber rattling often draws press and public attention away from all the other terrible things he’s doing, whether it’s destroying media consolidation limits, making life easier on robocallers, dismantling broadband consumer protection standards, or making it easier for giant shitty companies to run amok.

You’d like to think Carr ultimately faces some sort of meaningful accountability for being one of the most censorial, petty, captured, and authoritarian regulators in U.S. history, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Friday 2026-07-24

10:00 PM

Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

AI solipsists and AI cynics (permalink)

As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.

In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:

https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014

This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.

The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").

None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?

I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics

I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.

This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."

From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:

https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/spacex-stock-index-funds-passive-investing-401k-nasdaq-100-russell/

A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.

This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle.

Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181225035739/https://www.vogue.com/article/goop-jade-yoni-egg-lawsuit-gwyneth-paltrow-vaginal-pelvic-floor-health

AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.

AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

(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)

#25yrsago Stolen, infected computer transmits its location by virus spamming owner's address book https://slashdot.org/story/01/07/25/1510213/tracking-a-thief-via-the-sircam-virusa

#15yrsago Çurface: an industrial surface made from compressed coffee and melted coffee cup https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/25/curface-an-industrial-surface-made-from-compressed-coffee-and-melted-coffee-cups/

#15yrsago Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Android iPad-killer is a poorly thought-through disappointment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh

#15yrsago Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany https://web.archive.org/web/20120621155245/https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hideouts-or-sacred-spaces-experts-baffled-by-mysterious-underground-chambers-a-775348.html

#15yrsago BitCoin alternative: distributed, but not decentralized cash https://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf

#10yrsago Bruce Schneier on the coming IoT security dumpster-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20160725221959/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-things-will-cause-the-first-ever-large-scale-internet-disaster

#10yrsago Our public health data is being ingested into Silicon Valley’s gaping, proprietary maw https://web.archive.org/web/20170917070322/http://www.nature.com/news/stop-the-privatization-of-health-data-1.20268

#5yrsago Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/25/now-youve-got-two-problems-part-iii/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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X and Music Publishers Settle Three-Year Copyright Clash After SpaceX IPO [TorrentFreak]

spacexIn a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of ‘breeding’ mass copyright infringement.

The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacked a proper repeat infringer policy. The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) claimed it had sent over 300,000 formal infringement notices, many of which didn’t lead to immediate removals.

The battle escalated in January, when X Corp. filed a landmark antitrust complaint against the NMPA and a coalition of major music publishers, accusing them of coordinating a “weaponized” DMCA takedown campaign to coerce X into industry-wide licensing deals.

These explosive allegations set the stage for a high-profile legal battle. However, it didn’t get that far.

Last week, both lawsuits ended without any further fanfare. Joint stipulations of dismissal were filed in the Middle District of Tennessee and the Northern District of Texas on the same day, with identical terms. In both cases, all claims dismissed with prejudice, with both sides paying their own fees and expenses.

Dismissed

dismissed x

The coordinated timing and matching language leave little doubt that these cases were resolved as part of a package deal.

From ‘Maximum Pain’ to Package Deal

The settlement ends a legal battle that took several dramatic turns.

In 2024, X scored a partial win when the court dismissed the music publishers’ direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims, and partially dismissed claims of contributory infringement.

Judge Trauger concluded that X can’t be held liable for making it ‘very easy’ to upload infringing material or for monetizing pirated content. These characteristics are not exclusive to infringing material and apply to legitimate content too, she argued.

The reduced lawsuit continued and by June 2025, X filed a heavily redacted motion to compel, alleging that the NMPA had used its takedown notice campaign to inflict “maximum pain” on X’s business, to motivate Elon Musk’s platform to sign music licensing agreements.

This revelation appeared to bring a potential settlement closer last year, but an agreement was not reached at the time.

Evolving Legal Claims

Instead, X responded with a countersuit. In January, it filed an antitrust complaint accusing the NMPA and the major publishers of a conspiracy to weaponize the DMCA, alleging that a flood of “baseless” notices targeted over 200,000 posts and suspended 50,000 users to coerce licensing deals.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony this Spring, the landscape changed again. X argued that the music publishers’ surviving contributory infringement claim now failed as a matter of law.

The publishers responded with a Second Amended Complaint, reframing their case as an inducement claim, but X called this an attempt to “retrofit” the case, without proper backing. Meanwhile, the publishers moved to dismiss X’s antitrust suit, pointing at weak evidence.

With both sides looking at weakened claims, settlement suddenly seemed a rational exit.

SpaceX Subsidiary

While neither party commented in the reason for the settlement, there may be another reason why the timing made sense for X. The breakthrough follows just a few weeks after the company went public again through its new parent company SpaceX.

SpaceX went public on June 12, raising a record $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion valuation. While X may only be a small part of the new conglomerate, the lawsuit posed a serious uncertainty for investors.

In a pre-IPO prospectus filed with the SEC, SpaceX listed the music publishers’ copyright case as one of seven significant litigation matters. Across all cases, SpaceX reported $399 million in accrued litigation losses as of March 2026. These are probable estimated losses that pose a risk to the company’s finances.

From the pre-IPO prospectus

pre-ipo

On August 4, SpaceX will announce its first-ever quarterly earnings as a publicly traded company. That’s also the date when several insiders can start selling stock. With that in mind, it doesn’t hurt to have a major liability resolved.

There is no evidence that SpaceX’s IPO directly caused the settlement. Both sides had other reasons to settle after Cox weakened the publishers’ case and the publishers’ dismissal motion threatened X’s antitrust claims. However, it may have played a role nonetheless.

Explosive Claims Fade Out

With both cases now dismissed, the explosive claims from both sides will never be tested in court.

That applies to the music companies’ mass piracy allegations against X, as well as X’s claim that the NMPA used its takedown campaign to inflict “maximum pain” on the social media company. Both claims remain unproven.

Whether the settlements include any financial arrangements remains unknown too. There is no mention of compensation from either side and no licensing deals have been announced either.

When the NMPA settled a similar dispute with Roblox in 2021, it publicly announced an industry-wide licensing deal. In that light, the silence on the X settlement, after more than a week later, is notable.

For now, the three-year legal war between X and the music industry is over. Whether more details will show up in future SpaceX SEC filings or industry disclosures has yet to be seen.

—

Copies of the joint stipulations of dismissal are available here (copyright claim – pdf) and here (antitrust suit – pdf).

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

02:00 PM

Caleb Williams, George Gervin, An ‘Iceman’ Trademark And Insulated Boots…Oh My? [Techdirt]

If you’re not a particular kind of sports fan, a certain trademark dispute may have escaped your attention. The Chicago Bears quarterback is Caleb Williams and he’s pretty great. He also has acquired a nickname: “Iceman.” This nickname has become so associated with him that it is even referenced on Williams’ appearance on the cover of this years Madden video game.

George Gervin is an NBA legend and he was pretty great. A Hall of Famer who played in the 70s and 80s, Gervin’s on the court demeanor was one of calm and focus. As such, he acquired a nickname: “Iceman.” The nickname became so associated with Gervin that it resulted in then-iconic posters featuring it, such as this one.

And, rounding out our participant list for this particular story, is LaCrosse Footwear. They make boots. I have no idea if they’re pretty great or not. More on them in a moment.

Okay, so here’s the timeline of what happened. After being nicknamed “Iceman,” Williams decided to apply for several trademarks for the term, including both stylized logos and a basic word mark for the term itself. This appears to have pissed off Gervin who never attempted to trademark the term himself. After learning the Williams applied for the mark, Gervin then applied for the same mark afterwards, arguing that because he’d been using it all this time, it was his first.

Williams’ application has been initially rejected by the USPTO, but not due to anything to do with Gervin. Gervin’s application has also been rejected by the USPTO, but not due to anything to do with Williams. Instead, it’s LaCrosse Footwear and their line of insulated boots which are branded, you guessed it, “Iceman.”

LaCrosse, an Oregon-based footwear company, owns the trademark “Iceman” for one of its boots and boot liners. Williams had applied for trademarks in multiple categories, including clothing, and that allowed the USPTO to offer the broad refusal of his application.

“These marks are identical in appearance, sound and meaning,” the USPTO wrote in its refusal letter. “… Additionally, because they are identical, these marks are likely to engender the same connotation and overall commercial impression when considered in connection with applicant’s and registrant’s respective goods and/or services.”

The USPTO on Friday also gave an initial refusal to Gervin’s attempt to trademark “Iceman 44” due to the LaCrosse line.

Now, this may sound absurd, and it sort of is, but these initial rejections are also very common. Well more than half of trademark applications are initially rejected based on the USPTO finding literally anything similar so that they can broadly reject the application. It’s a sort of weeding out process that allows for the applicant to then appeal the decision and argue against any likelihood of confusion. I fully expect that to happen here, because nobody is going to somehow mistake a clothing line for an NFL star, or an NBA legend, with a line of insulated sporting boots.

Which sets up the real question of who gets to be “Iceman,” Williams or Gervin? Josh Gerben chimes in on the ESPN article.

“The registration that they’re citing here is for obviously a very limited product line. Literally insulated boots,” Gerben said. “Look, it might be harder for him to get Iceman registered for a brand of clothing items because of that, but there’s other things in his application that he could possibly still wind up with a registration here.”

The USPTO examiner, though, warned in the refusal to Gervin that if both he and Williams appeal and win, Gervin’s application would likely still be potentially denied because Williams applied first. That could set up a trademark battle between the two athletes, Gerben said.

Indeed. Because the American system is a first-to-use instead of a first-to-file trademark system, Gervin would then need to oppose Williams’ mark, or sue him, in order to argue in court that he has a valid claim to the mark based on first use. But that isn’t all. He’d also have to demonstrate that he’s been continuously using the mark in commerce as well. I poked around a bit and can’t really find any explicit uses of the mark by Gervin since the 90s and it appears that at least one of his applications indicated that he wasn’t currently using it in commerce for some of the categories for which Williams applied.

In this case, Gervin’s use of the trademark ‘Iceman’ appears to be limited to a few videos on his website. His applications even admit that he has no active use of the ‘Iceman’ brand for clothing.

This is not the type of active, ongoing commercial use that is likely sufficient to defeat a prior-filed trademark application (such as Caleb Williams’s) on a claim of priority based on longstanding use of the trademark. Of course, Gervin may have other evidence that was not put into the trademark application, but at the moment, it appears Williams may have room to push back on the claims being made by Gervin. 

Now, another option here would be for everyone to just calm the hell down and let a nickname be a nickname, sans any need to trademark the term. Gervin has demonstrated pretty well that a trademark wasn’t needed for his nickname to be associated with him, nor to be used (at least a ways back) in commerce. There’s no reason that they can’t both be “Iceman” in other words.

But if it’s a fight we’re going to get, I’m with Gerben in thinking that Williams is in the strongest position. And I’m damned sure that a boot maker probably can’t argue any real likelihood of confusion.

11:00 AM

“Digital Colonialism”: U.S. Demands To Access Africans’ Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns [Techdirt]

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

Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.

But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face ongoing threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases. 

So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.

“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”

Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas as the U.S. has held a series of closed-door negotiations in which lifesaving aid has been conditioned on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals. 

The demand to access health data is central to the Trump administration’s new America First Global Health Strategy, an openly transactional approach that seeks to leverage the desperate need for medical treatments abroad. Aid will now be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September.

The State Department declined to publicly release global aid and data-sharing agreements it has signed with more than 30 countries as part of its new approach. But a ProPublica analysis of nine of the deals offers a window into the extensive U.S. demands for access to data — and the potential risks and vulnerabilities for the citizens of countries that have signed them. ProPublica also reviewed a data-sharing agreement struck with Uganda, which has not previously been reported; a data agreement with Kenya; six agreements over the sharing of pathogens that can cause pandemics that were made public by the State Department this week; generic templates of deals for sharing both data and pathogens that can cause pandemics; and an analysis of the documents the advocacy group Public Citizen shared exclusively with ProPublica. 

ProPublica also consulted more than a dozen experts in data privacy and global health, including several with direct knowledge of U.S. policy who said that the insistent demands for data access and other resources as a condition of aid are unprecedented. Without seeing the full suite of agreements, they could not identify all vulnerabilities. But they spotted some red flags: The terms of the deals are vague and lack language standard in most data-sharing agreements that adequately limits what data is collected and how it can be used. That increases the risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.  

In the Ugandan data deal, the U.S. will get direct, real-time access to nine of the nation’s health data systems for seven years, including the central repository that stores all of its health information, lab data, data collected by community health workers and, critically, its system for managing individuals’ electronic medical records. The agreement calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed. It also says the data should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. 

But lawyers and digital privacy experts argue that the deal raises questions about who will have access to the massive cache of health data and whether it could be inappropriately accessed and exploited.

Some expressed concern that, because it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized, people with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases could have their records exposed.

Stephanie Psaki, who served as the U.S. coordinator for global health security under President Joe Biden, described the Trump administration’s approach as a “blunt instrument of ‘just give me the login to your data systems.’” 

“The U.S. would never agree to that,” she said, if the deal were offered in reverse.

In Uganda, the U.S. will provide up to $1.7 billion over five years for global health security and the treatment and prevention of deadly conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and polio. In the past, the U.S. gave this aid without asking for direct benefits in return, saving an estimated 170,000 Ugandan lives per year. 

While a significant investment, it is less than the U.S. previously spent in Uganda and will decrease every year of the agreement. By 2030, the African nation will receive 45% less global health funding than when Trump retook office, according to an analysis by Vincent Lin of Partners in Health, which provides healthcare in poor countries. 

Several experts said there is broad support for some of the goals of the new plan for aid, including reducing African countries’ dependence on the U.S. for healthcare needs. But they worry the transactional nature of the approach could backfire by undermining trust or, in some cases, driving nations to reject deals altogether.

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries. Each of the agreements ProPublica reviewed includes a section on responding to outbreaks. And some countries have signed separate pathogen-sharing agreements, which state that countries must “initiate sharing specimen(s) and related data” within five days of a U.S. request. The Trump administration is also planning unprecedented involvement of private companies to manage and process data.

The State Department told ProPublica that it needs access to the data to improve health outcomes in recipient countries and keep Americans safe. The new approach also requires countries to invest more in their own health systems in exchange for the aid, a promise many countries will likely struggle to fulfill. And, in some cases, including the deal with Uganda, it aims to boost local manufacturing through partnerships with American companies.

The State Department said it took multiple factors into account to ensure the required investments from other countries were “realistic and achievable.”

“The United States is investing billions of dollars in other countries’ health systems to fight infectious disease. In return, we expect governments to increase their own spending on health, so programs are sustainable and under genuine national ownership, not permanently financed by U.S. taxpayers. For the first time, both sides are putting skin in the game to ensure lasting impact,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to questions about the agreements.  

In response to follow-up questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the agreements “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals. No personally identifiable information is being received or shared by the United States government.”

Uganda’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Personal Data Protection Office and embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions for this article. 

In the age of artificial intelligence, large health data sets have become so valuable they’ve been referred to as the new gold. The precise value of the health data of an entire nation is unclear, but it could be extremely valuable to AI-driven companies for training models. The industry of buying and selling such information troves is worth billions. And countries around the world have come to regard their citizens’ health records as national assets that deserve special protections and can confer economic and strategic advantages. 

Yet the agreements, which are part of a strategy the State Department openly states is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations,” provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in what happens with their data or receive a fair share of its benefits. “Once companies get this data, the value is being accrued. But there’s no way for the [African] population to know how companies will use it,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment for Intenational Peace, who has argued that the agreements may violate African privacy laws.

Africans have also expressed concern that they will not be able to access and benefit from medicines and vaccines developed from pathogen samples shared with the U.S. Five of the six specimen-sharing agreements reviewed by ProPublica state that, in the event that a medical product is developed primarily from a specimen from the country, the U.S. government “shall prioritize” a request from that government behind the needs of the U.S. Only one of the agreements, with Nigeria, commits the U.S. to facilitating “priority access” to — and the donation of — any medical products developed using the specimens.

The phenomenon of extracting information and samples from less-resourced populations and failing to credit and compensate them for their contributions to medical developments is well known enough to have several names, including “parachute science.” Just a few years ago, countries, including some in Africa, hosted COVID-19 vaccine trials, only to later struggle to access the shots they helped to develop.

Each agreement includes “benefit-sharing provisions,” the State Department said in response to questions. 

After the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance, it also drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and severely scaled back the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which combats HIV globally. In addition to withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. removed itself from international negotiations over a pandemic agreement intended to affirm countries’ sovereign rights to their biological resources and ensure equitable access to medical interventions.

Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who served in the first Trump administration, is now in charge of creating the system that would rise from the ashes. Before joining this administration, Smith founded three companies with business models that rest in part on using data to reduce healthcare costs, including CareBridge, a home care provider that sold for a reported $2.7 billion in 2024. During the presidential transition that year, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. After Trump took office, he presided over some $67 billion in sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services before being brought on as an adviser to the State Department. 

Although the humanitarian aid system had been largely dismantled, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing aid. So Smith and his team had to find new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics — all without most of the international partners and staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work. 

A Rhodes scholar known for his intense work ethic, Smith threw himself into the effort. State Department staff fielded calls from him at all hours of the night to explain budget items on spreadsheets. Through his personal lawyer, Smith referred questions to the State Department.

One of the greatest challenges lay in the handling of health data. In the past, PEPFAR, the HIV program, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from government health records — a setup that Trump administration officials and others have criticized as inefficient.

The America First plan proposed standardizing data collection and processing within countries. The Ugandan data agreement requires the country to provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the country’s data systems. The new approach, U.S. officials say, will enable the U.S. to continue auditing programs and track outbreaks. 

The agreements ProPublica reviewed include statements about the U.S. government’s intent to ensure data security and say that the data is being accessed for the purposes of addressing diseases and auditing that work, but they leave open the possibility that sensitive information could be revealed, according to the data privacy experts ProPublica consulted. 

At particular risk are countries that don’t have national data privacy laws, such as Liberia, whose memorandum of understanding requires “interlinked and interoperable” data systems for “surveillance, laboratory, response, health, environment, agriculture.” That country’s main health agreement doesn’t require the U.S. to limit the amount of data it takes to the least needed, a standard clause in U.S. contracts, according to Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, a recent postdoctoral fellow focusing on bioethics at Stanford University. (Neither Liberia nor the State Department has released the supplemental data-sharing agreement.) “Once data is breached, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” Mahamadou added.

The Liberian government did not respond to a request for comment.

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement says it will comply with the laws of both nations and permits the sharing of “sensitive personal data” if the consent of individuals whose data is shared is obtained, there is a compelling public health emergency of international concern and it is the only way information can be provided in a “timely and accurate format.”

Ssekamwa, the digital rights expert who also founded and runs the African Centre for Digital Justice, said there are important questions that haven’t been answered by the Ugandan government.

“Does the U.S. have appropriate data protections? Can the systems provide anonymized data? Are they really up to that standard?” said Ssekamwa. “If I’m someone who has had health issues, can you deny me a visa because of the health issues I’m having?”

Psaki, the former global health security coordinator, worried about the haste with which the changes to data access are happening. “Even in the best of circumstances, you can’t go from having parallel data systems that were established over 20-plus years to finding some way to integrate those data systems in six months.” 

Speed has been a hallmark of the America First global health effort. In September, just a month after Smith joined the State Department, it launched the strategy at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and five large pharmaceutical companies. By November, Smith was crisscrossing the African continent with a small team of negotiators, trying to persuade dignitaries to agree to deals. 

The State Department said the deals were “negotiated in a thoughtful and strategic way over many months.” 

On Dec. 4, Kenya became the first country to sign, during a triumphant celebration with Rubio and President William Ruto in Washington. Outcry over the agreement had already begun two days earlier, when a Kenyan activist named Nelson Amenya announced on the social platform X that he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement as well as a legal analysis that showed it would violate Kenyan law.

As a condition for receiving $1.6 billion in aid, the Kenyan government agreed to provide access to seven years’ worth of health records — two years longer than the U.S. would provide financial support. 

Although the Kenyan data-sharing agreement states that the U.S. will take “all reasonable measures to protect the confidentiality of information” and abide by American and Kenyan laws, Amenya worried that wouldn’t be enough. “Every HIV test, TB diagnosis, malaria case – accessible to US officials,” he wrote in the post, which now has one million views. “Your medical records, your children’s health data – all exposed.”

A few days later, a Kenyan senator named Okiya Omtatah sued members of the Kenyan government over the agreement, arguing that it poses a threat to citizens’ constitutional right to privacy by “allowing broad foreign access to sensitive data.” A Kenyan nonprofit also sued, and more than 50 groups weighed in on their side, describing the document as giving the U.S. “excessive access” to African data and raising the possibility of serious human rights violations. 

In court filings, the Kenyan government argued that it is obligated to achieve the “highest attainable standard of health” and that it is unable to do that on its own. After blocking the deal for months, in May, the Kenyan court temporarily allowed implementation of the agreement to proceed while it considers the case.

Since outrage bubbled up in Kenya, some other countries have negotiated shorter terms for sharing data and pandemic specimens, and have inserted additional protections, according to the Public Citizen analysis.

Still, groups across Africa have sounded alarms about dangers inherent in these provisions, including data breaches. Examples of such unauthorized access to personal data abound, including a recent case where the healthcare data of some 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank wound up listed for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba. 

Revealing whether someone has had an abortion, mental health condition, substance use treatment or sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence. And even when personal information has been removed, individuals in “anonymized” data can be reidentified using AI and other tools. 

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement calls for the U.S. government to “promptly notify the Government of Uganda of any unauthorized access” in such cases and requires the parties to conduct a joint breach assessment and remediation plan afterward. But by that point, it may be too late, Ssekamwa fears. “Once the data gets out of Uganda, we are skeptical that the government of Uganda will actually have any power to control it,” he said.

The secrecy around both the negotiations and the agreements has raised further suspicions. The State Department has declined to share the agreements, telling ProPublica the agency will release them when negotiations with all partner governments are complete and describing its actions as “protecting sensitive negotiations—not ‘secrecy.’” In response to a public records request filed by ProPublica, the State Department said it planned to provide the documents in September 2027. The advocacy group Public Citizen recently filed suit against the federal government in an effort to obtain the documents. 

“Why are they hiding the agreement if they think the terms are OK?” asked Bernard Okpi, a Nigerian lawyer who sued his government in March, alleging that the deal violates the country’s constitutional right to privacy and promotes religious discrimination by prioritizing funding for Christian faith-based health facilities. That suit is pending, and the Nigerian government did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The State Department said that the agreement with Nigeria “was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize protecting Christian populations from violence.”

The Trump administration says that its new global health strategy is designed to save lives and keep the U.S. — and the world — safe from disease outbreaks. But ultimately its hard-driving and secretive negotiations may work against those goals.

While the administration aspired to strike agreements with 50 nations, including the three countries that walked away from negotiations in part over concerns about data sharing, it has fallen far short of that number. (In Zambia, officials also balked at U.S. demands for critical minerals.) The loss of aid in those countries is already proving to be devastating. 

Despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of putting “America first,” the U.S. may feel the consequences of those failed negotiations, too, as mistrust compounds the loss of long-standing systems that provided care and responded to disease outbreaks. 

“It’s in everyone’s interest to have a comprehensive approach to respond to an outbreak early,” said Psaki, who pointed to the quickly escalating number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as evidence. While that country struck a healthcare deal with the U.S., five of the nine countries bordering it have not. “We need to get data and samples from all nine countries to collaborate effectively on that outbreak, and now we don’t have that.”

The State Department said the U.S. has responded swiftly to the outbreak and has provided over $270 million to the global fight against Ebola.

In Uganda, where people have also fallen sick and died from Ebola, Ssekamwa said that his country needs all the help that the healthcare deal can bring, including improved protection from outbreaks, but there needs to be more robust protection of people’s personal data.  

“We are happy to benefit from the technological advancement and the fruits of big data,” he said. Instead, he said, “the U.S. has left so many gaps within the agreement, which can be exploited in their favor.”

Kanji of the Day: 対 [Kanji of the Day]

対

✍7

小3

vis-a-vis, opposite, even, equal, versus, anti-, compare

タイ　ツイ

あいて　こた.える　そろ.い　つれあ.い　なら.ぶ　むか.う

対応   (たいおう)   —   correspondence (to)
対象   (たいしょう)   —   target
対策   (たいさく)   —   measure
に対する   (にたいする)   —   regarding
に対して   (にたいして)   —   towards
対戦   (たいせん)   —   fighting (against)
反対   (はんたい)   —   opposition
絶対   (ぜったい)   —   absolutely
絶対に   (ぜったいに)   —   absolutely
対決   (たいけつ)   —   confrontation

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 啓 [Kanji of the Day]

啓

✍11

中学

disclose, open, say

ケイ

ひら.く　さと.す

啓発   (けいはつ)   —   enlightenment
自己啓発   (じこけいはつ)   —   self-development
啓蒙   (けいもう)   —   enlightenment
啓蒙活動   (けいもうかつどう)   —   information campaign
中啓   (ちゅうけい)   —   ceremonial folding fan
拝啓   (はいけい)   —   Dear (so and so)
啓示   (けいじ)   —   revelation
一筆啓上   (いっぴつけいじょう)   —   this will just be a short note
天啓   (てんけい)   —   revelation
啓蒙書   (けいもうしょ)   —   book for novices

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Stop using Media Bias/Fact Check in research [The Luddite]

This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check. Upon further examination, it turned out that Media Bias/Fact Check is just some guy, and upon him there rests a surprising amount of academic research.

Abstract

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) purports to quantify the bias, credibility, and factuality of reporting for roughly 10,000 media sources, and the resulting data is commonly used in misinformation research. In the present study, we show that MBFC's methodology does not meet basic standards of rigor for academic research. Despite its widespread prevalence, studies using MBFC rarely examine it carefully, often describing it in ways that contradict its "About" page, or treating it as authoritative despite MBFC's disclaimer that it is "not a tested scientific method... [but] a simple guide to the idea of a source's bias." We identified no papers that adequately describe MBFC as the opinions of a single person or critically engage with its methodology in order to justify proceeding with its use. We argue that MBFC's data is not neutral or accurate, but a computationally legible account of hegemony, a specious dataset for uncritical research that mistakes the familiarity of the concepts it quantifies with accuracy. Our study concludes with a call for academic researchers to stop using MBFC. MBFC's data quantifies the results of political processes, including campaigns to discredit the press, and presents them as simple facts about the world, thus reproducing the crisis misinformation scholarship exists to address.

Full pre-print on arxiv.org

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09:00 AM

07:00 AM

The FTC’s National Nanny Returns: AI Edition [Techdirt]

In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that regulates unfair or deceptive advertising, proposed limiting TV ads for sugary foods on programs targeted at children. The Washington Post’s editorial board scoffed that the plan would “turn the agency into a great national nanny.” Congress clipped the agency’s wings, and “kidvid” entered history as a cautionary tale of regulatory hubris. Once again, the FTC is channeling its inner Mary Poppins in the name of consumer protection. Only in this incarnation, she pulls a novel theory of deception from her regulatory carpetbag to control what AI chatbots say.

Under the FTC’s proposed policy statement on “Suppression of Accuracy in Artificial Intelligence Systems,” announced July 1, AI developers “likely” commit false advertising whenever they “steer” their models’ outputs toward objectives users don’t expect. The theory: because AI companies market their products as helpful, consumers expect maximally accurate answers, and any undisclosed editorial shaping of a model’s responses is deception. 

It is a policy proposal in search of a problem. True to Mary Poppins’ “I never explain anything” credo, it does not identify a single false advertisement or deceived consumer.

It is also wanting on the legal front, failing to pay even lip service to relevant Supreme Court precedent. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the court held that video games—interactive software sold for profit—receive full First Amendment protection, because the Constitution’s protections “do not vary” when a new medium appears. In Moody v. NetChoice, the court reaffirmed that a platform’s choices about what expressive content to present are protected editorial discretion. The design choices underpinning large language models make them legally indistinguishable from video games and social media.

What the FTC calls “steering” is what the Supreme Court calls editing.

The FTC says developers could avoid liability under the policy by “clearly and conspicuously” disclosing that their systems prioritize objectives other than pure accuracy. But how would that work for Truthly, an AI chatbot promoted for its Catholic bias? Truthly’s slogan is “Every other AI is built to agree with you. Truthly tells you the truth.” Although Truthly affirmatively discloses its Catholic worldview and disclaims impartiality—seemingly just what the FTC policy demands—it also claims that, unlike secular chatbots, its news and information is filtered “through truth and morality.” Consumers might struggle to reconcile the chatbot’s biased-but-true disclaimers, rendering them ineffective under the FTC’s own disclosure standards. Paradoxically, a religious chatbot could face false-advertising charges for fulfilling its core function—generating religious outputs.

Freedom of the press, an explicit guarantee of the First Amendment, also would be vulnerable under the proposal’s legal logic. In theory, it would put a target on any media outlet that promises accuracy while exercising editorial judgment, including the NY Times, whose front page has promised “All the News That’s Fit to Print” since 1897. 

Right-leaning media also would be at risk. Newsmax tells viewers it delivers “real news.” Breitbart’s editorial guidelines declare its goal is “to report the truth – accurately and fairly.” One America News brands itself “Your Credible Source for National & International News.” 

Would print articles resort to cigarette-style bias warning labels to avoid an FTC investigation? Would cable news programs run a continuous chyron with their editorial criteria?

In 2004, the agency rejected any application of FTC law in this manner when it declined to challenge Fox News’s “Fair and Balanced” slogan as false advertising. According to then-Chairman Timothy Muris, the inquiry would have entailed an evaluation of the news content at issue, which is a “task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.”

The FTC’s new proposal, however, points the opposite way.

Not so long ago, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson touted the Commission’s enforcement focus on actors that use AI to violate the law or deceive consumers about the capabilities of their generative AI. When DoNotPay promoted a “robot lawyer” as comparable to a human professional, then-Commissioner Ferguson rightly voted to hold it accountable. When Workado exaggerated the accuracy of its AI-detection product, the FTC, with Ferguson as chair, ordered it to stop making unsubstantiated claims. 

At the same time, Ferguson was advocating for regulatory humility, declaring that “the FTC’s enforcement actions ought to be guided by the law, not the personal ideology, politics, or novel legal theories of its chairman or commissioners.” Under the Biden administration, he dissented from a proposed consent order against Rytr, a generative AI writing tool that was capable of generating deceptive outputs, arguing that the Commission was punishing “a product that helps people speak, quite literally.” 

Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, whom Ferguson joined in dissent, observed that “[p]art of generative AI’s promise is its ability to suggest new lines of thought that may never have occurred to a user in the first place.” In other words, he signed on to the view that generative AI may be most valuable when it defies consumer expectations. As chairman, Ferguson went further, vacating the Rytr order outright and condemning law enforcement “unsupported by facts or law.”

But that was then. 

The Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter subsequently stripped the FTC of its statutory independence, blessing a two-member, one-party Commission. And this Commission has not been shy about asserting its anti-left viewpoints. The FTC proposal puts “equity” in scare quotes and castigates Colorado’s AI law, while ignoring AI laws in Texas and Utah. Meanwhile, the administration the Commissioners serve requires federally purchased AI models to conform to its own official version of the truth. When a future administration inevitably jerks the ideological steering wheel leftward, consumers and AI developers—not the current Commission leadership—will suffer the whiplash. 

In the 1964 film, Mary Poppins measured the children with a tape measure calibrated with subjective character traits instead of inches. Of course, she was deemed “practically perfect in every way.” The FTC’s proposal similarly cloaks a subjective assessment in the language of unassailable objectivity. But all the spoonfuls of sugar in the history of children’s advertising could not mask the bitter taste of conformity with a single worldview.

By fostering regulatory uncertainty, the FTC’s proposal threatens to stall the innovation that the administration insists is essential to AI supremacy. Its facile assurance that developers could avoid deception liability through a disclosure that “dispel[s] the notion that the system is designed to give the best answer possible” is, in “Mary Poppins” parlance, “a piecrust promise. Easily made, easily broken.”

Keith R. Fentonmiller served more than two decades as a senior attorney in the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Advertising Practices. He is also a published fiction author. The views expressed are his own.

04:00 AM

New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 16.0a9 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 16.0a9 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

⚠️ Reminder: The Tor Browser Alpha release-channel is for testing only. As such, Tor Browser Alpha is not intended for general use because it is more likely to include bugs affecting usability, security, and privacy.

Moreover, Tor Browser Alphas are now based on Firefox's betas. Please read more about this important change in the Future of Tor Browser Alpha blog post.

If you are an at-risk user, require strong anonymity, or just want a reliably-working browser, please stick with the stable release channel.

It's ESR transition season again!

Well actually, it has been ESR transition season throughout this entire release cycle! As described in the aforementioned Future of Tor Browser Alpha blog post, we have been incrementally rebasing our Alpha channel on Firefox betas since December of last year. As a result, we now stand before you with Tor Browser 16.0a9 which is based on Firefox ESR 153.

We will continue rebasing Tor Browser 17.0 Alpha branches on Firefox betas throughout the remainder of the Tor Browser 16.0 release cycle. However, new feature-work for now must be put on hold for a few reasons:

  • We must focus our attention on resolving our Bugzilla Audit issues to ensure the features we have inherited from upstream comply Tor Browser's threat model and to patch any changes which do not.
  • Feature work targeting 16.0 stable would need to be cherry-pick'd onto our 17.0 Alpha branches to ensure we don't lose any work. The more invasive a feature patch is, the harder it will be to port to newer versions. This would also be a potentially error-prone process and there is some risk we would lose patches along the way.
  • We need to finish stabilizing as soon as possible as we have hard external deadlines which cannot be moved: the end-of-life of Firefox ESR 140 on October 13th and the Google Play Minimum Target API Level requirement on November 1st

Challenges and Triumphs

💍 Sharing the Load

Rebasing the hundreds of Tor Browser patches onto newer versions of Firefox is a challenging task. It is like maintaining the structural stability of sand-castle at high-tide with the waves crashing all around you.

As such, it quickly become clear early in this new process that we would need to do something if we wanted to avoid burning out the few developers typically involved in this work. To mitigate this, we shared the knowledge internally and spread the work out across all eight members of the team. This way, each developer was only responsible for at most two or three rebases throughout the entire release cycle.

🎨 UI Code Churn

Over the past year, Firefox has developed and integrated two major changes to the UI in Firefox: a redesign of about:preferences in Firefox Desktop and a migration from Material 2 to Material 3 in Firefox Android.

Adapting to these types of changes to the frontend are typically rather time-consuming for us, as many (if not the majority) of our patches modify Firefox's UI in some way. For example, we have an entire preferences page on Tor Browser desktop dedicated to configuring how the browser connects to the Tor Network. On Android, we similarly have various additions to the menus, configuration options, and custom UI.

Whenever Mozilla modifies their design systems and Firefox's user interface, we necessarily have to adapt our own custom additions to match. Otherwise, our Tor Browser-specific UI elements would look completely out of place and potentially confuse users (as well as simply looking unprofessional). Therefore, each of these upstream changes requires collaboration with the Tor Project's UX team to update our features' designs and of course development time to implement.

In addition to the time-cost associated with the extra engineering and UX collaboration, very often our old patches simply do not apply cleanly due to the amount of code which has changed. For example, the about:preferences changes on Firefox Desktop are essentially a complete re-write which means we also have to completely re-write our own settings changes without regressing in functionality.

On the plus side, one benefit of our new processes is that we have been able to spread out this work over the entire release cycle. In the past way of doing things, we would have discovered all UX elements which needed to be fixed, updated our designs, and re-implemented in the course of a few months during the old ESR transition season. Under this new way of working, we have been able to incrementally fix things throughout the development cycle.

The benefits of working this way does not just apply to UX of course. It is much easier to find regressions across the entire stack when rebasing between one major Firefox version at a time instead of across 12 or 13. It is also much easier for developers to fix individual regressions one at a time compared to diagnosing, disentangling, and fixing multiple bugs concurrently (divide et impera!).

⚙️ Pending Google Target API Level Requirements

Every year, Google requires new Android app releases to target an updated minimum API level. This means, we would not be able to upload new versions of Tor Browser Stable past a certain date (usually August 1st with an extension to November 1st typically possible) without first updating the app to support the new minimum target API level. Fortunately, we inherit most of the required changes from Mozilla when rebasing to the next major ESR.

However, this requirement does impose a hard deadline for the absolute latest we can responsibly stabilize Tor Browser Alpha and promote it to Stable. We've been fortunate in the past few years to make the deadline with a few days to spare (October 28th for Tor Browser 15, October 22nd for Tor Browser 14, etc). Given how far ahead of the curve we are this year, we are hoping to release about a month earlier in September (fingers crossed!).

🤖 Android APKs too big

The Google Play Store has a strict size limit of about 100 megabytes for Android applications. New functionality added to Firefox Android over the past year means a larger application which results in new headaches for Tor Browser developers. This release cycle was no exception to this rule and we have had to get creative with our size reductions.

In the past, we have been able reduce our package size though various methods including:

Our most recent effort has been the most invasive yet! For some background, the Firefox application consists of (among other things): various shared libraries, the Firefox executable, a library known as 'xul' which contains most of Firefox's natively compiled functionality, and finally a file known as omni.ja. This omni.ja file is a zip archive which contains the JavaScript, HTML, images, and other assets used in Firefox.

This time around, to reduce the size of our Android package we havechanged how this archive is compressed. We modified the Firefox build system to compress this archive with xz and we modified Firefox itself to decompress this archive at runtime. This work did require a few iterations to get right. In the end, we got back about 3 megabytes with these changes and got us once again under Google's imposed size budget.

📉 Even Less Telemetry

Over the years, we have worked to incrementally remove dependencies from Tor Browser Android as part of the aforementioned size reduction work. We of course inherit most of these dependencies from Firefox Android and unfortunately some of them can be labeled as 'trackers'. While we do disable telemetry by default at runtime, the code which implements it remains in the codebase.

We're happy to report that as of Tor Browser 16.0a8, are down to only 1 'tracker' library in the Tor Browser Android codebase: Mozilla Telemetry. Again, this telemetry is disabled at runtime, but this is one more unused dependency which we can hopefully remove in the future (and maybe get some more bytes back!).

Current Status

We have:

  • incrementally rebased Tor Browser and Tor Browser for Android to Firefox ESR 153 from Firefox ESR 140
  • updated the build systems with the latest dependencies and fixed a few reproducibility issues
  • triaged most of the upstream changes from the past year and flagged over 250 issues for further review (triaging of Firefox 153 is in progress)
  • resolved about half of these triaged issues

For the remainder of this release cycle, we will be focusing on auditing these issues and fixing bugs until the 16.0 alpha series is ready to become Tor Browser Stable 16.0. We are optimistically targeting a September release, which would put us one month ahead of schedule compared to last year.

Known Issues

🦊 Firefox Branding

In some places in the browser there may be Firefox branding (e.g. logos, cute little foxes, etc) instead of Tor Browser branding. We're currently tracking one known instance in tor-browser#44998. If you discover any other instances lurking about, please open an issue!

🌐 All websites marked 'insecure' on Tor Browser Android

Currently, the identity block in the URL bar on Tor Browser Android will always report insecure (e.g. a shield icon with a slash through it). For now, you can tap this icon and verify the certificate manually. This issue is being tracked in tor-browser#45115

Send us your feedback

Now is a great time to become an alpha tester! If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 16.0a8 is:

Daily Deal: The Modern No-Code Development Bundle [Techdirt]

The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering users to successfully launch digital products independently of developer assistance. It’s on sale for $20.

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.

Government Lawyers Say Trump Admin Can Use TikTok Again Because ‘Owned’ No Longer Means ‘Owned’ [Techdirt]

We spent a few years pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole “TikTok ban” moral panic, and the fact that all of the “concerns” magically melted away after Trump became president and then effectively gifted a controlling stake to some of his friends should raise some pretty big questions. However, most people seem to have accepted the new arrangement without much fuss — even though ByteDance still retains a 19.9% stake in the company, and users at no point needed to switch to a brand new app, continuing instead to use the very app we were told was a security nightmare. All of which suggests the entire moral panic was absolute bullshit.

Either way, prior to the full “ban” that forced further ownership into the hands of Trump’s friends, there was a separate law from Senator Josh Hawley which simply banned TikTok on government devices. That law is still in effect. It’s pretty clear that it applies to “the social networking service TikTok or any successor application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Limited or an entity owned by ByteDance Limited.” It’s also clear that such an application is not allowed on any government devices, with exceptions only “for law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities, and security researchers.”

Now, a plain reading of the law would suggest that the current app is still banned. The law is still in place. ByteDance still owns a significant stake in the new “US joint venture” and the app is absolutely a “successor app” since users never needed to download a new app after the joint venture was established.

But, the Trump administration apparently would like to use TikTok on their devices. So, they’ve had the Office of Legal Counsel put out a decision claiming that, you know, ownership doesn’t really mean ownership and that the Trump administration can ignore the law and start using TikTok on their devices again. First things first, we discover that because Josh Hawley wrote a stupidly drafted law that directly called out “TikTok,” the OLC has to first tap dance around the fact that the law’s clearly named “TikTok” apparently doesn’t mean this TikTok, even though that’s exactly what the statute says:

Blackletter statutory-interpretation principles illuminate which particular “TikTok” Congress sought to prohibit. It is old wisdom that “a general phrase can be given a more focused meaning by the terms linked to it.” Fischer v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 2176, 2184 (2024). Namely, “the canon of noscitur a sociis teaches that a word is ‘given more precise content by the neighboring words with which it is associated.’” Id. at 2183 (quoting United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285, 294 (2008)). We apply this rule to “avoid ascribing to one word a meaning so broad that it is inconsistent with its accompanying words, thus giving ‘unintended breadth to the Acts of Congress.’” Gustafson v. Alloyd Co., 513 U.S. 561, 575 (1995) (quoting Jarecki v. G.D. Searle & Co., 367 U.S. 303, 307 (1961)). And precisely that kind of unexpected breadth would ensue here, were the Government Ban understood to apply to any future social networking platform based on its name alone.

[….]

We have considered the counterargument that, under the Dictionary Act, “words importing the singular include and apply to several . . . things,” 1 U.S.C. § 1—thus indicating that the Government Ban’s use of the phrase “the social networking service TikTok” could denote multiple unrelated variations or iterations of social media companies named TikTok. But the Dictionary Act itself provides that its general prescriptions do not apply when “context indicates otherwise,” id., and context does so in this case. “In context[,] the phrase ‘[the social networking service TikTok]’ should not be interpreted to mean literally ‘any [social networking service called TikTok],’ but must be understood against the background of what Congress was attempting to accomplish in enacting the [Government Ban].” Gustafson, 513 U.S. at 575 (cleaned up) (quoting Reves v. Ernst & Young, 494 U.S. 56, 63 (1990)). Here, the plain text of the Government Ban indicates Congress was attempting to address a particular national security threat posed by the presence on federal government devices of software “developed or provided by ByteDance Limited or an entity owned by ByteDance Limited.” Government Ban § 102(a)(1), 136 Stat. at 5258. TikTok USDS thus is covered by the ban only if it, like the version of TikTok operative when the ban was passed, falls into that category of software.

Call me pedantic, but if Congress didn’t want to ban an app “based on its name alone” maybe they shouldn’t have drafted and then passed a law that banned an app based on its name alone. And if Congress thinks that the new TikTok is somehow safer, they should repeal the original, poorly drafted law. Instead, the OLC has to start asking “what is ownership, really, other than a concept”?

For three reasons, we conclude that “ownership” in the context of the Government Ban is best understood as referring to a controlling stake, such that TikTok USDS falls outside the prohibition’s scope.

First, the “control” sense of the word “own” is most “consistent with the way that an appropriately informed speaker of the language would understand [that term’s] meaning” in the specific context of corporate structure. Van Buren v. United States, 141 S. Ct. 1648, 1657 (2021) (quotation marks omitted). The United States is home to “large numbers of firms with widely dispersed share ownership.” Henry Hansmann & Reinier Kraakman, The End of History for Corporate Law, 89 Geo. L.J. 439, 443 (2001). But it would be unusual for someone to say that a person or even an institutional investor “owns,” for example, Meta, simply because the investor holds some of its stock. Cf., e.g., Van Buren, 141 S. Ct. at 1657 (“In the computing context, ‘access’ references the act of entering a computer ‘system itself[.]’”). Instead, in the corporate context, we generally recognize Mark Zuckerburg as the “owner” of Meta because he retains control of the company through so-called “super-voting” shares. See Nathan Reiff, Top Facebook (Meta) Shareholders, Investopedia (Mar. 21, 2026), https://perma.cc/XQ6V-ZNTT; Gregory H. Shill, The Social Costs (and Benefits) of Dual-Class Stock, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 221, 224 & n.6 (2023).

So, hear me out, if Josh Hawley and Congress meant for the law to only apply if ByteDance “controlled” the company, then it could have (and arguably should have) written that into the law. But they did not. They said ownership. And that mattered because, technically before the “divestiture” and new US “joint venture” Western investors already owned about 60% of ByteDance, with employees and ByteDance’s founder holding most of the rest. The goal of the various laws to ban TikTok was to get ByteDance out of owning any of the company.

And that didn’t work. But we all have to pretend this “fixed” things, so the OLC just says “eh, because US entities now control it, we can ignore the law and pretend it said “control” rather than “own.”

Our textual interpretation is confirmed by the facts on the ground, which indicate that the TikTok USDS joint venture is wholly controlled by American interests as a functional as well as a formal matter—and thus exhibits none of the concerning security features that initially motivated the Government Ban. As our prior advice to you highlighted, if facts did not bear out that conclusion, then our understanding of “ownership” as used in the Government Ban could be called into question. But where, as here, the facts demonstrate that ByteDance Limited’s status as a minority shareholder in the joint venture has no impact on the exercise of control over the venture by United States investors, the inference runs the opposite way. Congress had no need to target minority ownership by ByteDance Limited in the Government Ban because that state of affairs is wholly compatible with the joint venture “operat[ing] [TikTok USDS] under defined safeguards that protect national security.”

Of course, all this really does is confirm Calvinball rules: the definitions change exactly as often as it takes to get the outcome someone in power wants. When “ownership” needed to mean any ByteDance stake to justify a ban, it meant that. Now that the administration wants TikTok back on its phones, “ownership” apparently means “controlling stake,” and 19.9% doesn’t count.

The real lesson here appears to be that the earlier concerns were exaggerated. Josh Hawley and Congress wanted to get headlines about how they were “taking on China” and “big tech” more than they wanted to write a clear law. They had a moral panic about one specific app, dressed up in national security language, and now that the political winds have shifted, the Office of Legal Counsel is left doing contortions to make the text say what the moment requires.

03:00 AM

Industrialism and the slippery slope [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

One of the best traditional bakeries in New York has a kitchen you can see from the counter. People wait in line for their handmade French baguettes, and the confirmation that they were made right here and right now is reassuring.

I noticed that the baker was using a mechanical gadget called a loader. It allows her to place and shape six baguette onto a board, and load them into the oven all at once.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed by this. It’s still the same loaf, still handmade, but like the electric mixer they use to knead the dough, it seems to be part of the authentic process, not an industrial one.

The challenge is in what happens next…

Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s not big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…

This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.

Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.

We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.

Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.

      
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