A company wants web traffic, so it dumbs down content, builds listicles and grows. But then others become even dumber or more convenient, so it has to race to keep up with them. Eventually, with nothing but junk, it fades away.
A company builds a reputation for delivering useful permission-based email newsletters. But it needs to grow, so it eases its rules on spam, facilitates list swaps and grabs for attention. This attracts new users, but eventually the spam filters catch on and the site (and its users) sink into the muck.
A celebrity finds their notability fading, so they appear on C and then D list reality shows until everyone is in on the joke except them…
We can justify most moves to the bottom while they’re happening, but the problem with this race is that you might win.
With effort, you might not get to the top, but without resolve, you’ll certainly find yourself at the bottom.
The alternative is to resist the temptation for fast growth and settle for trust and authority instead. The race to the top is possible, but it’s more like a patient, persistent climb.
It’s difficult, lonely and only for long-term players. That’s precisely why it’s so valuable.
Rather than addressing soaring fuel prices, the wars in Iran and Ukraine and rampant corruption, the president and his cronies seem intent on a smash-and-grab.
Trump is whining again about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you’re on Russia’s side, it’s hard to pass as a peacemaker.
The oligarchs are particularly worried about the latest turn in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Widespread reports say that the online right’s yammering has died down lately. Coincidence?
I misread this at first, too. Truly gallows humor!
Dems now appear to hold the upper hand in deep-red Texas.
But his faithful are sticking by him, even if they can’t explain why.
This is a far cry from the Republicans of a generation ago.
SNL had thoughts on a widely shared image of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The big news this week: Trump’s handpicked new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, lasted just five days (or four depending on how you count it). Why? Well, let’s just say her first press briefing was less than stellar.
I had no idea Kacey Musgraves was an internet sniper.
If you’re like most readers, you’ve seen this ask each week and scrolled past. I get it. This is free, and money is tight. But I’m hoping a few of you will take a moment today to support this newsletter, which depends wholly on voluntary contributions. The tip jar has been very low on new subscriptions lately, and it would make my day if a few folks would pledge $6 a month or $60 a year to support my daily efforts! Thanks for listening and considering!
Object permanence: Big Mouth Billy Bass x Linux; No-Fly lists v common sense; Lemony Snicket advises the 1%; "Aloha From Hell"; KSR v Elon Musk; "Everything Belongs to the Future"; Trump's mail-servers run Win2003; Copyfraud v covid.
Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (permalink)
More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, everyone – should block every "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices.
That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take any action:
These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies also allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers.
This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve "malicious ads" (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained "no-click, zero-day" attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.
Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself "Integrity Labs" because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps.
Discover-Tech was "certified" as a safe supplier by Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Beeswax (a division of Comcast) and IAB, the ad-tech industry's leading professional association. Ironically, Discover-Tech even attacked users by serving them malicious GDPR notices that appeared to let users opt out of commercial surveillance.
Because Discover-Tech was certified by all these industry bodies and firms, it had access to more than four billion ad-auctions, meaning that on billions of occasions, it was able to collect the identities of users loading apps and visiting websites, check them against the list of targets, and attack any victims it discovered through this dragnet.
Discover-Tech is an Israeli company with ties to other Israeli spyware and hacking companies, including through its board, whose members included Eric Banoun ("One of the pioneers of offensive cyber in Israel" –Haaretz). They have overlaps, relationships and affiliations with a rogue's gallery of Israeli companies, including the notorious NSO Group, who routinely sell cyber-weapons to the world's worst governments and whose products have been used to attack journalists, embassy workers, and activists.
The whole incident highlights the monumental insecurity of the ad-tech industry, whose indiscriminate and voracious surveillance and manifestly insufficient vetting and security auditing now exposes every internet user in the world to terrifying targeted attacks. These companies – including Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist whose surveillance tendrils are wrapped around the whole world – claim that they operate their networks with prudence and oversight. But the proof is in the pudding: for years, they've played host to a murderer's row of cyber-mercenaries who used their infrastructure to attack journalists and others.
The only way to avoid this is to block ads. This is easy enough to do in a browser (which is why the majority of internet users have installed an ad-blocker in their browsers), but it's illegal to reverse-engineer and modify an app so you can block the ads in it:
Many websites run anti-ad-block scripts that push out nagging, guilt-tripping notices that call you a thief and a cheapskate for blocking ads. Ignore those notices: if a website is running "programmatic" ads that allow arbitrary third parties to spy on billions of people and target individuals for malicious device takeovers, they are charging too high a price to see their content.
Some sites go further: their notices demand that you either turn off your ad-blocker or pay for a subscription. This "pay or okay" scheme is illegal in Europe, California and other territories with strong privacy laws, and they are morally bankrupt besides. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury item and everyone deserves to be secure from cyber-attacks:
This report also provides the most comprehensive rebuttal to a dangerous idea that refuses to die: that we should improve competition in the ad-tech sector by assigning every internet user a mandatory, government-issued advertising ID to "democratize" ad-targeting and followup (which the sector calls "attribution"):
Despite all this, none of it is an indictment of ads per se. The problem here isn't advertising, it's surveillance. The ad-tech sector has convinced advertisers that targeting ads to users rather than content will massively improve ad performance. The evidence for this is very poor: targeted ads improve clickthrough rates by less than 5% (relative to content-based ads that relate to the substance of the page you're looking at), and they're incredibly expensive (and very dangerous!) to serve.
On top of all that, surveillance-based ads shift power away from publishers (who know more about the materials they publish than any ad-tech company ever will) to spying ad-tech companies (who can spy on users in ways that no publisher could ever match). Whatever minor additional revenues surveillance advertising can wring out of the market are totally swamped by the cost of the ad-tech sector's own operations, which the ad-tech sector makes up for by grossly underinvesting in security and by colluding to cheat publishers and advertisers, charging more for ads and paying less to the websites that run them:
If we want to improve competition in advertising services, the answer isn't to facilitate spying (which also allows the world's scummiest cyber-mercenaries to stage and serve targeted attacks). We should ban surveillance advertising altogether, restoring context-based ads to their role as the way that publishers make an honest living without selling out their audiences:
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 563 (26602 total).
"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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Back in the much simpler times of 2021, we wrote about some of the games Major League Baseball decided to play as part of a brief owner’s lockout of players while both sides negotiated a collective bargaining agreement. This included essentially scrubbing the MLB website of all pictures of current players, stories about current players, and other references to current players other than their names, current and career stats, and the teams they played for. The league claimed that this was all to comply with federal labor laws, but nobody seemed to think that made much sense. Instead, this looked like an attempt to punish members of the MLBPA by taking them out of the spotlight as much as possible. That ultimately backfired, with MLB players changing their social media profiles to the blank silhouette that appeared on MLB.com while they made fun of the entire effort. It all made the league look very petty and very stupid.
In addition to instructing teams on what they are allowed to speak with players about, as well as what conduct they are allowed to engage in if they attend the weddings of players (yes, seriously), the website will once again be transformed into a useless landing page filled with all the things the public doesn’t care about when it comes to baseball.
Additionally, the league’s website will once again remove videos and player images during a lockout, per The Athletic. That includes altering articles and headlines.
“Player images (including from their profile pages) and videos would be removed, and player names and pictures would be removed from article headlines.”
There will almost certainly be a lockout, which means this is likely to go into practice once again, unless the league reverses course. Which it absolutely should. This petty nonsense is not a needle-mover for public sentiment, which is half the game in a labor dispute in professional sports. The league is also on very shaky footing arguing they need a salary cap for competitive balance, given the last four teams in the playoffs that are currently going includes three teams that are small-salary teams compared with the rest of the league.
This is purely about MLB owners attempting to claw back money from the players who are actually performing on the field through artificial limits on spending. Spending that, by the by, is currently being done by those same owners who say they need to limit spending.
None of it makes much sense in the macro. And, for our purposes, it’s worth pointing out that trying to strong-arm the players’ union by playing petty games with the league website is pointless and self-defeating.
Back in the early days of the Internet – 1988 to be precise – the self-replicating computer program known as the Morris worm spread across the network and shut down thousands of online VAX and Sun computers. It was a good example of software not going rogue, but doing exactly what its creator had intended it to do without understanding the consequences. As Wikipedia explains:
By instructing the worm to replicate itself regardless of a computer’s reported infection status, Morris transformed the worm from a potentially harmless intellectual and computing exercise into a viral denial-of-service attack.
Since that early botched experiment, intentionally malicious worms have been written to create botnets that can launch DDoS attacks, for example to overwhelm systems punitively, or for the purpose of blackmail. Examples include Mirai and the later Aisuru-Kimwolf. These worms targeted specific kinds of Internet-connected hardware. But the arrival of AI agents that can carry out actions autonomously brings with it a new threat: AI worms potentially able to seek out, hack into, and infect any device that is online. Researchers at Anthropic have been studying this possibility:
small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes….Unlike non-AI malware, [such a replicator] could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own.
artificial intelligence (AI) agents enable a fundamentally new threat: a worm that generates tailored attack strategies to each target it encounters. The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its reach for further attacks. Deployed on a network of machines spanning Linux, Windows, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, the worm propagated by exploiting common, real-world corporate network vulnerabilities.
The Anthropic researchers explored whether an AI worm could run a capable model in a distributed fashion across low-power IoT devices, as “shards”:
A model that’s too large to fit on one device can be split into pieces, or shards, that run on separate machines that communicate with each other to collectively run the model. Machines that could run a significant model shard for a <30B model [that is, an LLM that contains fewer than 30 billion parameters] include smart fridges, smart ovens, automatic vacuum cleaners, and lawnmowers. A growing number of home and business devices, such as security cameras and video-conferencing units now ship with small built-in AI chips, designed to run AI models on the device itself.
A 26B model running across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, costing around $55 each, created manually by the researchers as a demo system, showed that IoT devices could indeed run quite capable models as shards, albeit slowly – at 0.39 tokens per second. Building on that result, the research project sought to answer two questions:
First, can small models get a model running on unfamiliar hardware? And second, can they do the whole cycle (find an uninfected device, copy themselves over, start running there, and repeat) all together in a single run?
The answer to both is “yes” – details in the Anthropic paper. The good news is that the process is very slow, typically taking one or two days to replicate. As the researchers put it: “As an analogy, imagine the replicator as a slime mold or a swarm of fruit flies, which replicate over days.” However, they also caution that things will speed up as IoT hardware becomes more powerful, and LLMs more compact. They write in conclusion:
As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control. While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.
These replicators will not be an example of AI agents “going rogue”, but of humans intentionally exploiting new capabilities for malicious purposes – or perhaps simply releasing badly written software, just like the Morris worm all those years ago.
On Thursday, Trump donor Eric Deters sued Kimberly Guilfoyle. Until December 2024, Guilfoyle was Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée. And until Tuesday, she was the Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to Greece—something of a consolation prize for getting dumped. Per Newsweek, the complaint, filed in Kenton Circuit Court in Kentucky, names Guilfoyle and two of her attorneys as defendants. It accuses them of defamation and false-light invasion of privacy and adds a breach-of-contract claim against Guilfoyle.
Deters bases his defamation claim on Guilfoyle’s response when The Wall Street Journal put her on blast. According to the complaint, a Journal reporter told Deters that Guilfoyle and her lawyers had dismissed their text messages as “fake” and branded him a blackmailer. Deters writes, “The texts are not fake. I have never been accused of or charged with blackmail.” The breach-of-contract claim alleges Guilfoyle violated an agreement to help former patients of Abubakar Atiq Durrani, a fugitive spine surgeon Deters has spent years trying to get extradited from Pakistan.
Weird, but OK.
Deters, quite a character himself, announced the filing in a Facebook video, holding up the complaint. Riffing on her Greece posting, he likened Guilfoyle to Apate, the Greek goddess of deceit, and declared his lawsuit “might bring down the entire Trump administration.” He promised to play a 16-minute phone recording by the end of Friday, which he said would be devastating to Guilfoyle. She is rumored to have kept a “Burn Book” that has Trump allies worried.
Before we jump in, a note of caution: Take everything Deters says with a big red hatful of salt. The die-hard Trump supporter has not substantiated his claims about the recording, and his disciplinary history in Kentucky and Ohio invites skepticism. That said, his feud with the now-ousted Guilfoyle makes for great Schadenfriday viewing.
The texts at the heart of the case date to July 3, 2025, six days before her Senate confirmation hearing, when Guilfoyle allegedly asked Deters for $100,000. She wanted him to wire it directly to her American Express account, assuring him “it won’t show up anywhere.” She followed up with a PDF of payment instructions and a prayer-hands emoji.
🙏
“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she also wrote.
Deters already had a long-running arrangement with Guilfoyle. By his account, he had paid her about $300,000 over several years to speak at Freedom Fest, an anti–COVID-mandate event he launched in Kentucky. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Democrats mocked the festival online when this year’s edition was canceled after Deters, by his count, sold just six of 100 VIP tickets. In September, Deters said that he was “never ever, ever, ever ever doing this event again.”
🙏
Deters described his relationship with Guilfoyle as a “quid pro quo.” Judging by the quo he wanted for his quid, these two were meant for headlines. His wish list included:
getting a summary he had prepared in front of then-Attorney General Pam Bondi;
getting a meeting with then-IRS Commissioner Billy Long about a tax issue; and
getting booked on Tucker Carlson’s show.
He also offered her $1 million if she helped secure Durrani’s extradition, payable after the spine-surgery litigation settled.
My favorite quo: He wanted her to send Kid Rock some song lyrics he’d written. As someone who has written a Broadway show and often receives unsolicited lyrics, I feel a little sympathy for Kid Rock here.
Guilfoyle, he told PBS, had promised to be his “ride or die” inside the regime. For readers unfamiliar with hip-hop, “ride or die” gained currency in the 1990s when B.G. and Jay-Z each released songs called “Ride or Die,” the Broadway equivalent of The Wild Party. This part I had to look up: A “ride or die” can describe a woman who stands by a man living a dangerous life, even at the risk of death—think Bonnie and Clyde. By the 2010s, white people who viewed themselves as gangsta had ruined it through overuse.
By late June 2025, Deters was losing patience with Guilfoyle. He sent her a memo complaining that she had not delivered. “I am not naive or a sucker. I need results. No results. No need for me to pay,” he wrote.
Quid pro quo, indeed.
Guilfoyle answered with a copy of a letter congratulating IRS Commissioner Long on his confirmation and asking him to look into Deters’ tax matter.
Guilfoyle, the Bonnie to his Clyde, wanted Deters to stop putting things in writing. In a late-June text, she warned him that doing so was dangerous and urged him to call her on Signal. That’s right: She put her request to stop putting things in writing in writing. In another message, read on air by PBS’s Amna Nawaz, she wrote, “What a nightmare. You’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship. Stop writing.”
Props to her for getting that one spot on.
Deters had a practical problem with that advice. “She wants me to use Signal. I didn’t know what Signal was,” he told CBS News. A question for Deters: How are you going to work with a grifter if you don’t know how to hide the evidence?
Deters never sent the money. A cash-flow problem apparently spared him. He told CBS News he didn’t have $100,000 to spare, “or I actually would have been a dumbass enough to do it.” In other words, Guilfoyle had picked a convenient mark with an inconvenient bank balance.
He told her instead that paying would cost him his marriage.
Fifteen months later, Deters handed reporters a 292-page file. It held their texts, his grievances against Trump world figures, photos of himself with assorted Trumps and an excerpt from his book.
What, no Kid Rock lyrics?
🙏
A modern Greek tragedy
The Journal published the texts about Guilfoyle’s Amex bill while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens. (Well played, WSJ.) Guilfoyle was at Rubio’s side during official meetings, but he was in no mood to entertain the story. At the foot of his plane, with Guilfoyle looking on, he lectured reporters about trusting their sources. “It’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel for me. That’s not the way we do things,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance was asked whether a U.S. ambassador seeking payment of her debts in exchange for access was a problem. He managed a hedge worthy of Speaker Mike Johnson. “Obviously I don’t love that, but I, you know, I don’t know exactly who you’re talking about,” he said, likely knowing exactly whom they meant. Vance also urged patience, saying “we don’t try people in the court of public opinion”—unless they’re Haitians or Somalis, apparently. Meanwhile, according to CBS sources, White House officials were being told the texts were authentic.
Trump started out sympathetic. Asked about the reports on Friday, he said, “I just heard a little bit about it. I don’t know too much, but she was always very nice.” By Monday, his tone had darkened. Asked whether he was considering firing Guilfoyle, Trump replied, “Well, we’re looking at it. We’re not happy.”
On Tuesday morning, new press secretary Katie Zacharia (I’m copyrighting my moniker, Katie Sack-a-lies) took the podium for her first official briefing. “We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” she announced. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.” About two hours later, Guilfoyle posted her resignation. Fun fact: Hours before the announcement, she had posted birthday wishes to Lara Trump set to Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” from the Barbie soundtrack.
Perhaps “What Was I Made For” would have been more appropriate.
Trump offered his own assessment later that morning. “She went to Greece. She was doing a good job, but we didn’t like what we were reading,” he said. He also distanced himself from Guilfoyle. “She wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago,” he told reporters. Oof.
Guilfoyle went out swinging. “These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” she wrote, as if she had any by this point. Her lawyers, now her co-defendants, say that Deters owed her “approximately $150,000 for speeches and consulting work she performed for him long before she was nominated to serve as Ambassador.” Deters says he had already paid her $300,000 and never owed her anything.
This “bulldog” don’t hunt
Deters bills himself as “The Bulldog”—a personally painful moniker because it was also my nickname as an aggressive litigator back in the day. Deters is a former Kentucky lawyer and businessman who once co-owned the regional chain with the snappy name Snappy Tomato Pizza. He has run unsuccessfully for Kentucky governor and for Rep. Thomas Massie’s House seat. In 2021, per CBS News, the Ohio Supreme Court fined him $6,500 for the unauthorized practice of law.
Maybe he and the soon-to-be-out press secretary can commiserate.
His disciplinary history is worthy of Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn. Per The Hill, the Kentucky Supreme Court repeatedly suspended him for false statements in court and frivolous claims. In 2021, the court refused to restore his license and described his practice as anarchy. The opinion added, “Deters’ lack of self-awareness is utterly amazing.” Deters disputes that account. “I’m a retired lawyer because I got tired of the lawyer game,” he told PBS.
For years, Deters has campaigned for the extradition of Durrani, an orthopedic spine surgeon accused of billing Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers millions of dollars for unnecessary and potentially harmful spinal surgeries. He fled to Pakistan while awaiting trial on health care fraud charges.
Deters says he represents hundreds of the surgeon’s former patients, though how he will do this without a law license is unclear.
Maybe in China?
How many could fall alongside Apate?
Deters has been candid about why he went public. He told CBS he emailed White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Don Jr. and Guilfoyle with a deadline: “You got until 5 o’clock on Monday to help me out with the Durrani victims.” When nobody responded (and really, why would they?) he took his file to the press. His motive, he told PBS, “is revenge, for lack of a better word.”
Deters had dangled money before. In one message reviewed by CBS, he pitched Don Jr.’s circle on how “lots of money could be made for a little money in this Durrani matter.” Perhaps that carrot was a bit too orange, even for the Trumps and their circle of grifters.
Deters telegraphed his lawsuit against Guilfoyle and her attorneys on Monday. “I’m going to be suing those lawyers, that law firm, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. It’s going to be fun,” he said on CNN. The next day, on the ironically named NewsNation, he laid out his terms. “I made this demand: extradition and investigation, or I am going to not only sue Kimberly Guilfoyle, I am never going to shut up,” he said.
Deters said the litigation will let him question Guilfoyle under oath. “I’m a tough hombre,” he told CBS. “I’m going to get to take Kimberly Guilfoyle’s deposition.” He also says he intends to subpoena records from the Trump regime.
Getting those records may prove trickier than demanding them. On Wednesday, Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, renewed his request for records, including Guilfoyle’s finances and her communications with top Trump officials such as FBI Director Kash Patel and former IRS Commissioner Billy Long. The American public is entitled to know just how far Guilfoyle’s “quo” reached on Deters’s behalf.
Garcia set an Oct. 22 deadline for Guilfoyle to respond. She may simply ignore it. At least until Garcia can wield the gavel and subpoena power—if Democrats take back the House in these ride-or-die midterms.
In this week’s episode, Mike is joined by Mike McCue, founder and CEO of Flipboard, and a long term Silicon Valley exec and entrepreneur. Together, they discuss:
For years, the idea of expanding the Supreme Court has been dismissed as a fantasy among “serious” thinkers. However, with it becoming ever more clear that the Supreme Court has gone completely off the rails and is now a purely partisan entity, rather than one doing neutral adjudications, more people are open to the idea of “fixing” or “reforming” the court in some form or another. Plenty of reforms are regularly suggested, from term limits to strict ethics and abstention rules. But one that gets the most attention is expanding the court.
This one is also the most controversial. A new Marquette poll found the public evenly split, 50-50, on expanding the court. That’s way behind the 79% who support term limits, but it’s hardly a fringe position.
Law professor Steve Vladeck, whose work we regularly discuss and cite, recently posted what he called “hard questions about court expansion,” which I think cover the key criticisms most people make about expanding the court. As regular Techdirt readers know, I advocate for expanding the Court to 100 Justices, with cases being heard by random panels of nine, with the possibility for some sort of larger “en banc” review as well.
Part of this also has to involve a more balanced system for bringing the number of Justices up to 100 without it being initially overweighted with ideologically biased Justices to one side. The most obvious initial system is to elevate a bunch of existing appeals court judges (currently there are 179 such seats), but doing so in a manner that requires some form of bipartisan consensus (at least one Senator from each party?) to agree to the elevation. Yes, such a system risks deadlock, but if there’s broad agreement that the process won’t tilt the Court toward either side, there’s at least a path to making it work. We have seen something kind of like this work with the FTC and the FCC and their bipartisan commissioners — at least until Donald Trump blew that up and basically fired all Democratic Commissioners (minus the one still hanging on at the FCC, because she’s needed under the law to allow the FCC to operate). And, yes, this ideologically captured Supreme Court blessed Trump doing so, but that’s all the more reason to set up a stronger system to ensure a Supreme Court that can’t become ideologically captured.
This can easily be combined with a term limit structure, but I’m not convinced term limits make that big a difference under my plan, other than changing the political calculus of when to retire. And with 100 Justices, that calculus matters a lot less, because no single retirement can swing the Court.
I think this type of expansion deals with nearly all of the “negatives” people warn about when it comes to expanding the Supreme Court. Let me explain why, and then see how it holds up against Vladeck’s “hard questions.”
By expanding to 100 Justices you massively dilute the power and importance of any single Justice. So much of the issue now is that each Justice has so much influence and power that every single one of them matters a massive amount. Each Justice individually has a strong likelihood of changing the way fundamental parts of America work, with effectively no true recourse. Expanding the pool to 100 Justices means that none are nearly as important.
Expanding to 100 Justices, rather than the much more conservative suggestions of 11, 13, or even 21, likely defuses one of the first concerns people raise: that each party, whenever it takes control of Congress, will simply expand the Court again in its favor. I agree that that is a very real risk if the expansion is just a few Justices. Then “packing” the Court becomes practical in some form. Leaping from nine to 100, with randomized nine-judge panels makes future packing much more difficult. It’s not impossible, but the much larger pool with the panel selection process makes it way more difficult to consistently bias decisions to the extreme level we see today. A smaller number makes it easier.
Adding an en banc review process creates an additional check on consistent biases. En banc already exists in the appeals courts, and this could follow the Ninth Circuit’s model, where review goes not to the “full” court but to a larger, more randomized panel (the Ninth Circuit isn’t fully randomized, but the Supreme Court could be). Law professor Paul Collins has discussed the potential benefits of having cases handled by three-Justice panels at the Supreme Court with the possibility of alternative panel reversal, and many of his arguments for why that could limit extreme ideological capture would apply to my scenario as well.
If this system were combined with term limits, and a better way to select the Justices that diminishes partisan bias, then it would limit a setup where one party could overwhelm the Court with too many Justices with a strong ideological bent, but rather would push for more Justices who can get support from both parties. I may have my own ideological biases, but any system designed to stock the Court with only Justices who believe in specific ideological beliefs will be seen as illegitimate. But a 100-Justice Supreme Court with an actual mix of Justices and beliefs is much harder to insist is ideologically biased towards either side, making it less a target of ideological capture.
Side benefit: having way more Justices means they can handle way more cases more fairly, increasing access to justice for many parties who are effectively squeezed out of the Supreme Court by the heavy focus on so-called impact litigation, brought by parties seeking to use the Supreme Court as a tool to route around Congress. It might also help deal with Vladeck’s other big issue: the weird recent infatuation of the Court to make consequential decisions on the shadow docket with no reasoning.
I’m sure there are risks. But a massive shift in how the Court itself functions, rather than a small increase designed to swing the ideological balance, has a much better chance of surviving long-term without triggering partisan swings every few years. The goal of the 100-Justice system isn’t to swing the ideological balance. It’s to rethink how the Supreme Court functions to make it way more difficult for it to become ideologically captured in any way. And with such a big change, it also acts as a bit of a shock to the system, getting people to rethink the function of the court, to bring it back to being a true judicial body, rather than a political body.
Now, on to Vladeck’s “hard questions”:
How do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom, where each time one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it expands the Court to ensure an ideologically and politically sympathetic majority?
I think my explanation above gets at this point directly. Merely expanding the Court by two or four Justices likely does set off just such a “race to the bottom” for each time Congress switches hands. But by massively shifting the setup of the Court, greatly diminishing the importance of any single Justice, we can avoid the value of constant one-upping the previous party in control, and reset the judicial balance.
If a race to the bottom is unavoidable, how do we avoid further (and potentially fatal) erosion of public confidence in the Court—which will quite transparently be little more than a lever of power for whichever party last had such a trifecta?
First off, I think with my system, a race to the bottom is absolutely avoidable! And, again, there are other elements in my system that I think should increase public confidence in the Court. It diminishes the risk of ideological capture of the Court, it enables greater effectiveness and throughput of the Court, and includes a safety valve in the en banc system as well.
If eroding public confidence in the Court is a feature, and not a bug, how do we insulate against the same erosion of public confidence in lower federal courts?
Again, I think my plan doesn’t erode public confidence at all. If anything, it should rebuild it, by making the institution more resistant to ideological capture. It could also help restore trust in the lower federal courts because the Supreme Court itself should be more effective and able to take on more issues, which gives the lower courts more clarity, as opposed to the vague hand-waving we’ve gotten used to under Chief Justice Roberts.
What is the case for why expansion is a better way to achieve the desired reforms than alternatives that would (or, at least, should) avoid many of these forward-looking concerns?
Vladeck has outlined a number of alternative proposals for Supreme Court reform in his own work, and we can address those and some of the other most popular suggestions.
Term limits by themselves seem to do very little to increase public confidence in the Courts. It still allows for ideological capture based on the party in power. Yes, it gets rid of a few very old cranks, but that’s a short term fix if they are just replaced by the next MAGA crank in line. A massive expansion with a push for some level of bipartisan consensus again seems like a much bigger lever towards resetting the Court.
The ethics enforcement system seems like it barely helps at the margins of the most corrupt scenarios, but does little more to help in other ways.
“Jurisdiction-stripping” would block the Court from hearing certain kinds of cases, but I’m not sure how that helps, other than potentially increasing the power of Congress in a way that could further unbalance our three branch system of government.
Vladeck also has suggested systems of increased accountability:
There are many examples, but these would include: (1) expanding the Court’s mandatory docket; (2) establishing an Article III Inspector General; (3) codifying existing standards (as opposed to raising the standards) for emergency relief; (4) increasing public congressional oversight of the Court (including of its budget); and (5) on a more basic level, heightening congressional engagement in the Court’s day-to-day work.
The paper linked above also includes specific docket reform proposals that… are… fine? But I’m not sure any really move the needle on institutional trust.
Finally, to Vladeck’s long-term focus on the shadow docket, I’d be open to a specific reform on that as well, requiring that the shadow docket be explicitly tied to actual emergency situations, designed to focus on keeping the status quo in such an emergency, and only up to the point when a full briefing/hearing process can lead to a full decision on the merits. That alone wouldn’t fix the Court’s reputation problem, but it would be a useful addition.
But, on the whole, part of the argument for switching to the 100-Justice system is the very fact that it’s not an incremental reform, but a rethinking of how the Supreme Court itself works in a way that shocks the system out of the mess it has currently become.
Just like no voting system is perfect, no system for selecting a Supreme Court will be perfect either. But I remain fairly convinced that a 100 Justice Supreme Court would be a big improvement over what we have today, and clearly better than almost all other suggested reforms, including (importantly) the much more narrow plans to increase the number of Justices by two or four, which would set off the very concerns Vladeck outlines in his questions.
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There’s been plenty of talk by judges about imposing sanctions on ICE and DOJ lawyers who have routinely violated court orders and constitutional rights, and straight up lied in court (or allowed agents and officers to lie in court). But not much has actually been done about this. So far, it’s mostly been threats of future punishment. But if there’s a sign of hope for the future, it’s this, even if “this” is a bit underwhelming. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
Sanctions are coming. Slowly. And almost comically. But it’s better than nothing, if only barely. A federal court in Arizona is finally going to “punish” an ICE lawyer for misconduct. The targeted wrist may barely feel the slap, but here it is, as delivered by federal judge Diane Humetewa in this recent court order [PDF].
The DOJ lawyer being hit with sanctions is Brooks Chupp, the Assistant US Attorney for the District of Arizona. Chupp is a Notre Dame graduate whose LinkedIn profile seems to have suddenly gone missing now that he’s been sanctioned by a federal court. According to his Notre Dame bio, Chupp served as a “research assistant” to Professor David Waddilove. It will surprise no one to know that Prof. Waddilove is a current contributor to The Federalist Society. (It will surprise everyone even less to learn that Waddilove claims to be a “legal historian,” despite apparently being far more focused on securing multiple degrees in “Theology.”)
That’s the background. This is how Chupp fucked up, leading to his being sanctioned by a federal court.
From the record here,the Court has little difficulty concluding that AUSA Chupp’s accusation against Petitioner’s counsel was factually baseless from an objective perspective. No evidence has been provided to support that Petitioner’s counsel “represented to ICE that Petitioner was not presently removable due to his pending motion before the Board of Immigration Appeals.” What evidence has been provided supports, at most, that Petitioner’s counsel informed the “El Paso field office” that Petitioner had an appeal pending with the BIA, but made no representation as to Petitioner’s removability. (Doc. 14-1 at 8). Objectively, there was no factual basis to assert that Petitioner’s counsel had “represented to ICE that Petitioner was not presently removable.”
[…]
This is not, as AUSA Chupp argues, an instance of “weak” evidence; it is an instance of no evidence. (Doc. 26 at 6). While AUSA Chupp may have desired to “preserve an argument based on an inference,” that inference was wholly unreasonable, unsupported by the evidence, and antithetical to the ethical rules that guide attorney conduct.
More simply put, AUSA Chupp lied to the court. Then he attempted to cover up his lies with factually unsupportable statements and inferences — things that are, of course, just more legally acceptable lies.
The court’s not going to put up with this, at least not from Brooks Chupp.
The Court has no difficulty concluding that AUSA Chupp’s accusation was, at the very least, negligent and possibly reckless. On its own this would be insufficient to justify finding a violation of Rule 11 here. Id. However, the Court further finds that the accusation was also frivolous.
[…]
Nor was the accusation here some minor or tangential fact, but was instead presented as a dispositive fact justifying Respondents’ continued detention of Petitioner and carrying with it the implication that Petitioner’s counsel had engaged in potentially criminal behavior. See 18 U.S.C. § 1001. As such, it required Petitioner to expend the effort and resources—in less than 24 hours—to secure a signed Declaration from his former counsel, complete with evidentiary support, and briefing in response. Only then, after that effort had been made, did AUSA Chupp “withdraw” the argument, and even then, only because he “d[id] not have specific records of what Petitioner’s attorney did or did not state.” Given these stakes and, as he himself recognizes, the “special role of AUSAs” (Doc. 26 at 2), the Court concludes—especially in light of how the accusation hardened from “unclear” on March 24 to “likely” on April 1 without any supportive evidence or reasonable investigation in the interim—that the accusation was both negligent and frivolous, and thus “tantamount to bad faith,” and, as such, in violation of Rule 11(b)(3).
So, what does this mean for this DOJ lawyer? Not a lot, unfortunately. I mean, he’ll be viewed as untrustworthy from now on (so expect a resignation or firing in the near future), but Chupp is only being ordered to spend a few hours being told things he already knows, but chose to ignore in hopes of pleasing the bloodthirsty bigots running/ruining the country at the moment.
The Court will therefore order that AUSA Chupp participate in at least one (1) hour each of continuing legal education on a) the special role of United States Attorneys and b) the need for evidentiary support for all factual contentions.
That’s it: two hours of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) that Chupp can likely apply to any outstanding CLE balance he might have racked up as a practicing attorney. As I said earlier, it is better than nothing. But not because it’s something other than nothing. On its own, it’s no deterrent at all. It practically suggests DOJ lawyers engage in lying and cheating because they’ll still have their jobs, their incomes, and their freedom, no matter how much they fuck with the legal system and fuck over people who just want their rights to be respected.
But it does do something, although it will be some time before we see whether or not it will have any effect. It breaks the seal, so to speak. It signals to other judges dealing with similarly slimy DOJ lawyers that sanctions can be brought and enforced. Any judge hesitating to be the first to do these things in their own jurisdictions should draw some courage from this turn of events, especially if the Trump administration decides it’s not worth its time to step in every time one of its lawyers is caught fucking up. Hopefully, there will be more of this in the near future, but only better, faster, and harder.
Our consolidated corporate press doesn’t really make this clear, surprisingly, but the United States is too corrupt to function. There’s simply no shortage of evidence across every arena that matters. Trump’s corruption is utterly historic, yet it’s just endlessly normalized. To the point where most press outlets don’t really even mention Trump’s corruption clearly when discussing policy moves.
But it exists all the same.
Recently, the administration issued yet another executive order; this one purportedly aimed at “expanding U.S. commercial space transportation.” How? Mostly by urging the U.S. government agencies to market U.S. commercial space options. There are also some vague calls for new export controls; as well as a push to make it easier for SpaceX to obtain land.
The goal purports to be to orient the U.S. to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030. But a lot of the order, as is typical for Trump EO’s, just a bunch of words jumbled together to make it sound useful and official:
“The Memorandum directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce to ensure U.S. space transportation market access to promote and enable U.S. space transportation capabilities and standards.”
Primarily the order is about easing regulatory oversight and putting the government at the direct beck and call of top donors like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
The fun part: financial disclosure statements indicate that the president purchased $5 million in SpaceX debt two days before he signed his policy attempting to expand U.S. commercial space transportation (that same day, Trump acquired $25 million in Meta shares).
“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” Ingle continued. “All investment decisions are made entirely by independent managers. There are no conflicts of interest.”
In a functional country, the president divests individual stocks or relies on blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid potential conflicts of interests. The Trump administration, by contrast, is just one largely-unchecked financial conflict of interest.
Last week Trump awarded Musk — who has spent $366 million to try and ensure Republicans maintain control during the midterms — the National Medal of Science at the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit.
The truth is, I’m not a good worker. I’ve had very few traditional jobs, and my performance on typical tasks was poor.
Work the exact hours, do precisely what’s asked, don’t ask questions and focus on what the boss wants.
We modeled ‘good worker’ behavior in school. “Will this be on the test?” was the key question for 100 years. Do what the teacher asks for, and don’t overthink it.
The indoctrination of compliance came from factory owners. It’s easier to run an industrial operation when you can treat your workers as interchangeable cogs, not individuals.
We took that idea to schools, to communities, and even to how some engaged in spirituality.
The good worker trope falls apart when the world changes fast. It becomes a hindrance when job security wavers. And it doesn’t really pay off when AI and the atomization of work mean that most of us are the boss now, even if we are on a payroll.
It’s better to be a good leader, a resilient contributor and someone who has the insight and guts to ask why.
Object permanence: Anthrax penmanship; Stolen WEBGEEK license plate; Arizona Republic endorses Clinton, gets death threats; Against the great forces of history.
You find the weirdest stuff inside your walls. Our house was built in 1949 and we're its third owner, and I have no idea what those other people were doing, but at one point someone installed a junction box full of live, bare wires that they filled with crumpled newspaper (!); and don't get me started on the decision not to put vapor barriers in the kitchen windows (we were one good shake away from the entire front of the house falling down when we discovered that one, and while it cost us an extra $19,000 to fix, that was still cheaper than rebuilding the whole front of the house).
Plus there was the unpermitted drainage system installed down the side of the house that must have attracted some (undocumented) planning inspector negativity; at least, that's the only reason I can think of for someone to have filled those drains with concrete (!!), a fact we discovered during the first heavy rainfall after moving in, when the water rose to shin-height (!!!).
But the weirdest and most nerve-wracking mysteries were the "structural" members of dubious quality, placement and utility. Some of them only seemed to be holding stuff up, but on closer inspection turned out to be free-floating 2x4s, not anchored to anything. On more than one occasion, our builders have moved jacks into position and removed those random uprights, only to discover that they weren't holding anything up.
Say what you will about this method, but it is decisive: if you remove a vertical member and nothing falls down, you can be pretty sure that wasn't a load-bearing member.
(This is a metaphor about AI.)
You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes when the subject of "digital sovereignty" comes up. Rhetorically, "digital sovereignty" is a coded way for a politician to say, "We should build a fuckton of AI data-centers while bypassing any environmental review":
But AI has nothing to do with digital sovereignty. It is not load-bearing. All it takes to understand this is a little thought-experiment. Imagine that we removed all the chatbots from Canada, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. What would fall down?
Nothing important.
Every public administrative body – national, regional and local – would continue to function. Every firm – large and small – would continue to trade. Households would be unscathed, save for their youngest members, who would suffer the indignity and tedium of having to do their own homework again.
Which is not to say that "digital sovereignty" is a nothingburger. The walls of our nations are filled with load-bearing digital members. It's just that these are the most boring, regular-degular-ass technologies imaginable.
Like Microsoft Office 365. Take away M365 and every ministry collapses, every firm shutters, and many if not most households will be in serious trouble.
And here's the thing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella paid $1m out of his own pocket to join the murderer's row of tech CEOs who sat behind Trump on the inaugural dais:
The CEO of Microsoft France admitted that if Trump ordered the company to spy on French citizens' data (or the data of the French government), his company would comply, in secret:
And here's the kicker: Microsoft has terminated the M365 and Outlook access of international public officials whose official acts made Trump angry, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his accounts after he swore out the genocide warrant for Netanyahu:
This is a white-hot, 278-alarm digital sovereignty dumpster-fire. M365 – as well as cloud software from Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon and other US tech giants that have fused themselves with the Trump regime in exchange for tax breaks and antitrust forbearance – is load-bearing, and worse, those 2x4s are filled with termites and dry-rot.
Digital sovereignty is as real as real can be. It just has nothing to do with AI. AI isn't load-bearing. Boring-ass tech monopolist cloud software is…and we can not trust it:
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 503 (26039 total).
"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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In May, the Paris Judicial Court ordered several VPN providers to block ten pirate sites and IPTV services that streamed WTA tennis matches, including thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
The order followed a familiar pattern. It was requested by beIN Sports, which holds the exclusive French rights to most WTA tour matches. A day later, the broadcaster secured a similar order against Cloudflare.
In its initial request, beIN asked for penalties of €2,000 per day for each domain that two of the VPN providers failed to block. The court refused to grant that, however, as nothing showed that the providers intended not to comply. If problems arose, the parties could return to court. That’s exactly what happened.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first reported by L’Informé, the broadcaster went back to the Paris court, complaining that VPN providers and Cloudflare had not fully blocked the sites. This time, it requested a daily penalty of €10,000 for every domain that remained accessible.
Cloudflare, Surfshark and NordVPN, all represented by the same lawyer, cited technical constraints and said they had done their best to comply. Proton was also targeted but did not show up at the hearing.
The blocking efforts were indeed not bulletproof. Cloudflare blocked three of the four sites, but only through its CDN. Surfshark and NordVPN blocked six of eleven, and only through the DNS service on their servers in France.
‘Reasonable Effort’
For the court, those measures were enough. In two rulings issued on October 7, it concluded that the intermediaries must make a reasonable effort to block the sites, but they don’t have to guarantee the outcome, in line with EU Court of Justice case law. The case files also showed that all companies had carried out the orders, at least in part.
“The requested penalty (…) therefore does not appear necessary or proportionate, given the need to strike a fair balance between the protection of the intellectual property rights of copyright and neighboring rights holders, and the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by economic operators,” the court wrote, as quoted by L’Informé (translated).
The original blocking orders themselves remain in effect until the end of the WTA season, which is currently set for November 14. Meanwhile, beIN can still appeal.
The outcome mirrors the Paris court’s ruling in Canal+’s case against Cloudflare last month. There, Canal+ was refused daily penalties of €50,000 per site, as the court concluded that Cloudflare only had to take reasonable measures, which it did by blocking through its CDN.
DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line. According to the Swiss foundation, beIN wants €10,000 per domain, per day, which adds up to €580,000 a day. Quad9’s position is different, however, as it isn’t blocking any of the domains at all. A decision on that request is expected later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
The penalty rulings are not the only setback for rightsholders. The VPN providers are also fighting the blocking orders directly, and that effort just got room to run.
Last year, NordVPN, Proton and CyberGhost appealed one of the first VPN blocking orders, which French football league LFP obtained in May 2025.
At the request of the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal put that case on hold on September 30. Instead of ruling on the appeal, it will wait for France’s Supreme Court, the Cour de cassation, to decide on appeals against seven earlier rulings.
These rulings, issued in March and May this year, upheld blocking orders that Canal+ obtained against DNS providers. In the March cases, Google, Cloudflare and Cisco lost their appeals. Several DNS providers then took the matter to the Supreme Court.
The appeals court acknowledged that these cases are not identical to the VPN dispute. However, it sees enough overlap to pause the case and wait for the Supreme Court outcome.
“Despite the differences, namely that the seven decisions under appeal concern DNS providers rather than VPNs, and that they were issued at the request of the Canal Plus companies rather than LFP and LFP1, the present case has many legal questions in common with the rulings under appeal before the [Supreme Court],” the court writes (translated).
From the freeze order
These overlapping questions include who can be ordered to help stop piracy, whether the French blocking law complies with EU law, how infringements must be proven, and when blocking measures are proportionate.
When the Supreme Court will rule on the matter is unknown, but the appeals court believes the outcome could affect the VPN case as well.
—
A copy of the Paris Court of Appeal’s ruling (RG 25/09229) is available here (pdf).
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We just talked about how the majority of the American public either believes that RFK Jr. recommends they not get the MMR vaccine that protects people from measles, or are otherwise unsure of what his stance even is on the topic. When Kennedy sycophants (sickophants?) attempt to point at all the times Kennedy has said he recommends people get vaccinated for measles, that polling is the only retort needed. Because Kennedy routinely talks out of both sides of his mouth on the topic, both stating that people should be vaccinated while also claiming that the vaccines cause all kinds of harms and deaths, he’s created a confusing and confused message that allows him to say he’s not an anti-vaxxer. It’s bullshit, most of us know it’s bullshit, and Kennedy definitely knows it’s bullshit. When Kennedy headlines an anti-vaxxer group conference, however, what he actually believes is laid bare.
In a press announcement Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) laid out four aspects of the large-scale initiative. The first is a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health that is “dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination.” Despite only being announced today, the clinic actually opened October 5, and Kennedy secretly attended its ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside other high-level Trump administration officials. It’s unclear why his visit and the clinic’s opening were not disclosed by the Trump administration, but they were reported by Bloomberg Law at the time.
Another aspect of the initiative is a proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting possible injuries from vaccines to a federal system called VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System). VAERS, which is run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a common focus of anti-vaccine advocates, who incessantly misuse it. The system is meant to be an indiscriminate dragnet of any potential safety concerns linked to vaccines, providing a sensitive early warning monitoring system. Anyone, including members of the public, can submit an unvetted report.
VAERS has always been used by the anti-vaxxer crowd to try to legitimize their bullshit claims. Because that platform is open to anyone who wants to make a vaccine injury claim, it is overflowing with claims of injury that end up having nothing to do with vaccinations. I can go in there right now and claim that the MMR vaccine I got as a child made my left ear fall off. Reviewers of the platform will find that to be a false claim, but it’s in the system nonetheless. Or, if you want a more horrifying example, a woman could allegedly suffocate her twin 1 year old children, but then report the deaths as vaccine injuries before she gets charged with murder. That’s how wide open this platform is to reporting errors and fraud.
And now, Kennedy is going to spend your money to solicit more of these claims from doctors.
In addition to providing a financial incentive for doctors to submit reports, the HHS is also working to overhaul VAERS to make it “simpler, more accessible, and easier to use.” That includes making the reporting system available on mobile devices—so doctors can report vaccine injuries on the go—and adding more tools for researchers studying vaccine injuries. The CDC has already awarded a nearly $1 million contract to a Virginia-based Christian tech company called SPN Solutions Inc.
Lastly, Kennedy’s initiative will also require electronic health records to include information about vaccine injuries. This requirement will be carried out through the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which oversees federal health information technology standards. HHS said that by adding vaccine injuries to electronic medical records, healthcare providers will have a “more complete picture of a patient’s medical history.”
It’s hard to overstate just how insidious this is. Kennedy is going to financially incentivize doctors who are willing to claim vaccine injuries to do more of that, then append those claims of injury to patient medical records. The fraud that is going to occur here is multiplicative. First taxpayer money will be used to generate more claims of vaccine injury, then those patients’ future medical care will be altered by those same fraudulent claims.
“Somehow the Trump-RFK Jr. anti-vax agenda keeps getting more corrupt and dangerous,” Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, said in a statement Thursday. “Now Secretary Kennedy wants to bribe doctors to claim they see vaccine harm without proof, which is just asking for higher insurance costs and a rash of waste, fraud and abuse.”
This is going to result in poorer health outcomes for many, many people. Kennedy doesn’t care about that. Sociopaths never concern themselves with the outcomes for others when their own interests are at stake.
No, Kennedy will use this plan to generate more “evidence” of his preconceived claims. It’s false-proof manufactured on the public’s dime, which will only lead to worse health outcomes for all involved and the further eroding of vaccination numbers. All as we’re dealing with an outbreak of a disease we were supposed to have effectively eliminated more than two decades ago.
Get this ass out of government the moment the November elections are over, if at all possible.
On the 19th of October, I’m doing an open Zoom call for members of purple.space and those that might be curious about how cohorts and mutual support open the door to possibility.
You can reserve a spot here. It’s free, but there are limited spots.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part VIII — The Long Decline of Certainty In Part VII, the universal ambitions of the internet met the realities of geopolitics. Part VIII turns to another form of reckoning: the growing gap between Big Tech’s extraordinary technological capability and the declining certainty that capability alone is enough.
The history of technology is often written as a succession of inventions. We remember the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, the automobile, the personal computer and the internet as though each represented a discrete breakthrough that propelled humanity from one age into another. Yet technologies rarely transform societies on their own. What changes history are the systems of belief that emerge around them.
The railway altered far more than transportation; it changed how people understood time itself. Electricity did not simply illuminate cities; it transformed architecture, labor, domestic life and the rhythms of human activity. The internet was never merely a communications network; it also carried with it an entire philosophy about openness, participation, decentralization and the distribution of knowledge.
The platform era represented a further evolution of that philosophy. It proposed that complexity itself could be managed through increasingly intelligent systems. Human relationships could be organized more efficiently. Information could be filtered more effectively. Communities could be cultivated at planetary scale. Public conversation could be optimized through algorithms that learned continuously from billions of interactions.
For a time, the proposition seemed not only plausible but self-evidently true. Then something curious happened. The technology continued improving while confidence in the underlying philosophy began to erode. This is a pattern that historians encounter with surprising regularity. Empires often reach the height of their administrative sophistication shortly before their political legitimacy begins to weaken. Financial systems become increasingly efficient in the years preceding systemic crises. Institutions acquire extraordinary technical competence while gradually losing public confidence. Institutional decline rarely begins with the collapse of capability. More often, it begins with the discovery that capability is not the same thing as legitimacy.
By almost every measurable indicator, today’s largest technology companies remain astonishingly capable. Their engineering talent is unrivaled; their computational infrastructure stretches across continents; and, their investments in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology are redefining the frontier of scientific research. Their products continue to mediate the daily lives of billions of people. Judged solely by conventional measures of corporate performance, they have never appeared stronger. And yet something important has changed.
For much of the platform era, the central political question was whether governments would regulate Big Tech. That question produced years of commissions, hearings, white papers,consultations, investigations, and legislative proposals. Some of these produced important rules. The GDPR changed how personal data is treated. Competition authorities have imposed significant constraints. The Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and other legislation have begun altering the legal environment in which the largest platforms operate.
But legislation has its limits. Big Tech has spent decades learning how to operate inside political systems. It has the resources to lobby governments, influence legislative drafting, challenge rules in court, negotiate implementation, and shape the technical details that determine whether an ambitious principle has a meaningful effect in practice. Even the strictest legislation can be weakened by exemptions, delayed through litigation, narrowed during implementation, or transformed into a compliance exercise that leaves the underlying structure of power largely intact. This does not mean regulation is futile. It means that regulation is not self-executing.
A law can establish a boundary. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that the institutions subject to that boundary will surrender power willingly. Large corporations do not usually change because they have experienced a moral awakening. They change when the cost of maintaining existing behavior becomes greater than the cost of changing it.
The question is therefore no longer simply whether legislators can produce sufficiently ambitious rules. The more consequential question may be who has the power to enforce a different understanding of corporate responsibility when governments are slow, politically divided, or vulnerable to corporate influence. Increasingly, the answer may lie elsewhere: it may lie with users and it may lie with courts.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
In May, the Paris Judicial Court 
