And sometimes, when the awareness of our freedom arrives, it’s too late to reclaim the opportunities we missed.
Some of the walls around us are real—built by people who have no right to build them, who profit from our staying put.
And some of the walls aren’t walls at all. A door we never tried, because no one told us it was unlocked.
Perhaps, instead of waiting for certainty, we act as if, just for now, to explore what’s possible.
Too often, we’re held back unfairly by others who have no right to do so. But sometimes, we hold ourselves back simply because we didn’t know we had a choice.
My team is off today in observance of the Juneteenth holiday. As Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson wrote, Pride and Juneteenth share common principles:
Juneteenth is a day to reflect on our history of slavery and Jim Crow, celebrate generations of Black Americans, and recommit to confronting racial injustice. This year also marks the fifth anniversary of Juneteenth being recognized as a federal holiday, though Black Americans have celebrated it since the end of the Civil War.
Juneteenth reminds us all that our liberation is bound up with the liberation of all marginalized communities. The fight for LGBTQ+ equality has always been inseparable from the fight for racial justice. Our movements share common roots, struggles and a unified vision of a world where everyone can live freely and authentically.
I’m commuting to NYC on the bus this morning for a special showing of our musical Indigo (we are finding backers for our London premiere!) so it’s another crazy day in Jayland.
No big write-up today, except to note it’s also FAFO time for the Russian aggressors, even in Moscow:
Fun fact: That explosion was reportedly the result of a Russian air defense missile that went astray. Oops!
Slava Ukraini!
And I have another wonderful update! Our fundraiser for Democrat James Talarico, who will be the next U.S. Senator from Texas, raised $66,055 for his campaign from my readers and followers alone. I can’t thank folks here enough for helping drive this number well above my target of $50K!
And I received a wonderful voice message I just have to share with you:
That’s a keeper!
Have a great Friday! See you back here for Skeets and Giggles tomorrow—
Print-on-demand lets authors and organizations create small, purpose-built versions of a book without treating each version like a major publishing project.
Sometimes, AI does get it right. I gave it my outline and a list of source material I was looking at for this post. I wanted a simple, single sentence that got to the point.
Yes, that sentence is pretty clearly AI. But it’s right.
Print-on-demand, dropshipping, and direct-to-consumer selling have the publishing industry on the precipice of a revolution. In fact, I would argue this revolution has been slowly approaching a tipping point for some years now.
For publishers and businesses, that tipping point is about the bottom line. When does using POD fulfillment cost less or earn more than offset and warehousing?
But for individual creators, authors, and small presses, it’s more a question of versatility. Doing large offset runs was never a sustainable model due to the sheer volume of sales necessary to match costs. Short-run printing works for a new release, but neglects the backlist. They need the versatility that POD brings, not just for controlling costs but also for offering the variety of designs readers crave.
Custom Books Are Having a Moment
If Bookcon 2026 is any indicator, readers are loving the modern fantasy and romance trends. This dedicated following creates a desire for collectibles. Unique versions, custom art, and bonus content are all popular ways to drive your fans to support you.
Special editions are wildly popular right now. Custom covers, bonus content, and reader involvement are among the most popular ways to offer your readers something collectible that they’ll be eager to buy.
Because print-on-demand makes it possible to print one, ten, or a hundred copies, you can limit the print run for special editions to create scarcity. Readers love this—they want to have the version of their favorite book with a limited edition cover or special foreword.
Creating Custom Books for Your Readers
Because you don’t need to print thousands of copies of your book ahead of time (offset printing), creating unique versions is as simple as editing your files.
Okay, it’s maybe not that simple. But it’s much easier than it has been in years past. Each version of your book needs a unique PDF, either for the cover or interior (or both), depending on what you’re customizing. Add the extra content, make a new cover, or make any other adjustments you want.
Then, create a new project and upload those files for your special edition.
How to Design & Print Unique Books
Print-on-demand makes it easier than ever before to create custom versions of your books. Once you’ve got your book published, you can create a custom version in three steps:
Create a new project. You should probably give it a descriptive name in Lulu, so you know which version is which. Something like My Book Title - 2026 Event version or My Book Title - Hardcover, alt art cover.
Create a revised interior or cover (based on what you’re customizing). Upload the amended files and verify they’re accepted by our system.
Publish the new version and order a proof copy!
It’s important to note that you can’t duplicate projects with Lulu. This is actually a good thing—the risk of duplicating metadata is not worth the convenience. To make a unique version of your book, you’ll need to make a new project and ensure you add all the correct metadata when creating that new version.
1 Minute Lulu Tutorial
Leveraging Your Custom Books for Audience Growth
The first step to making the most of your ability to offer custom books is figuring out what kinds of custom books your audience wants. Two great ways to do this are:
Social listening: Paying attention to the conversations happening online, even outside your own community (but still in your niche or genre).
Surveying your followers: A simple email survey can do a lot of work. Ask your readers what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they want from you.
Seriously, it’s that easy. Ask what people want, then customize your product offering to match it.
Creating In-Person Demand
Once you’ve learned what your readers want, you need to assess how best to bring those custom books to them. Local signings, readings, or any kind of event are the perfect opportunity to put your custom books to work.
If you’ve got a local signing opportunity, perhaps at your favorite bookstore, you could add a page to your interior that calls it out. Or add a page specifically for your signature. Maybe you create a little badge and add it to the cover that says ‘signed edition’ or ‘signed at [Bookstore name].’
Building Your Book Club
We’ve all seen those flowery paperbacks in the bookstore with an ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ stamp on the front. It might seem like a small thing, but adding that to the cover is technically a special edition.
You can use this same tactic.
First, get your most excited fans together to form the book club or reading group. Then offer them a unique edition of your book. Only available to the club members, maybe with a reading guide, bonus chapter, or personal introduction.
Crowdfunding & Stretch Goals
Using crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to fund your next project is nothing new. Putting your customization options to work here is one of the best ways to drive more backers and to convince your existing backers to upgrade.
Making Your Book a Multipurpose Marketing Tool
One of the core lessons for content marketers is the old recycling slogan: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
Once you’ve created a piece of content, be it a blog post, video, podcast, LinkedIn article, or whatever, you should look for ways to reuse that content. Take that long-form post and chop it up into short statements for social media. Or make a YouTube short that highlights your broader point.
The same is true for your book.
The initial version you publish is your base. A special edition hardcover might feature alternate art with your main characters. You might do an additional foreword for the audience at an event you're attending. Or a unique dedication for books you’re selling at bookstore signings.
Putting Your Books to Work
Make your book a versatile part of your brand-building. You’ll earn more money this way, have numerous opportunities to delight your readers, and potentially broaden your reach.
Print-on-demand makes it easier than it’s ever been to create a unique edition of your book for specific purposes.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world
I can’t say I know for sure that Stephen Colbert is a Techdirt reader, but I very much believe he is. His interests align somewhat with ours, he often comments on some of the same topics we do, and, it turns out, he decided to troll his previous employer during his last show in a very Techdirt-ian manner.
After CBS decided to sacrifice Colbert at the altar of American fascism, the wind down of The Late Show culminated in a final broadcast weeks ago. During that broadcast, Colbert was covering a story about Lee Mendelson Film Productions, which owns the music catalogue for the Charlie Brown franchise, suing several targets for use of its copyrighted music. As he did so, the show band began playing the Charlie Brown theme song. Colbert mused afterwards sarcastically that he hoped that wouldn’t cost CBS any money.
Well played, if only to highlight the absurdity that such a short performance of an iconic song like that could actually result in threats, lawsuits, or demands for payment. But many speculated that the show had already gotten the rights to play the music before it aired, or that Lee Mendelson Film Productions wouldn’t actually do anything about it all to avoid inserting itself into the public spat between Colbert, CBS, and our current government.
Wrong. The company did apparently reach out to CBS, which eventually had to enter into a licensing agreement to avoid any legal issues.
The agreement will see CBS take a license for “Linus and Lucy,” the unofficial Peanuts theme that Colbert’s band played on the air during the show. The proceeds from the deal will be donated to the charity World Central Kitchen, run by Chef José Andrés.
“LMFP found the music’s use on The Late Show funny and entertaining, and is proud to support World Central Kitchen’s mission,” the group’s chairman Jason Mendelson said. A spokeswoman for CBS confirmed the agreement but declined to comment.
On the one hand, I guess it’s nice to see some of CBS’ money go to a good organization like World Central Kitchen. But I do indeed wonder if similar arrangements were struck with the other four entities against which LMFP filed lawsuits. I somehow doubt it. I would guess instead that such treatment was reserved for CBS, in order to make this story more lighthearted and warming.
It’s not, this is stupid, and none of this is as it should be. Colbert shouldn’t have been forced out of his job by a combination of a thin-skinned gibbon and a compliant CBS. It’s insanity that copyright law is in a place where such a diminutive use of a famous song could result in the requirement of a licensing arrangement, never mind actual potential lawsuits. And if it’s so necessary to protect copyright in this instance that lawsuits need to be filed against multiple parties, it should be important enough that any licensing fees and/or damages obtained shouldn’t just be given away to charities.
But as a final poke in CBS’ eye, this was a good one.
In the end, Odysseus did what Circe told him to do. Steer toward Scylla, she had warned, and accept the loss of sailors. The alternative—the whirlpool of Charybdis—would swallow the ship entire. So he made his choice, gripped the tiller, and sailed his crew into the monster’s reach. Six men were plucked from the deck. The rest survived.
Last month, writing for The Big Picture, I used a Homeric epic to describe how Trump had sailed us all into the Strait of Hormuz and found himself caught between two gruesome fates: a humiliating peace deal that left Iran stronger than before the first bomb fell, or a wider war that risked pulling the entire region into a conflagration no one would survive intact. Like Odysseus, Trump would eventually have to choose. And like Odysseus, choosing the lesser catastrophe would not spare him from loss.
On June 14, Trump made his choice and announced a deal. The Strait would reopen, he proclaimed. The war, ostensibly, would end. Trump posted on Truth Social that ships around the world should “start your engines,” and declared the deal complete, with all the confidence of a man who has just avoided drowning the world in a giant whirlpool of war.
But the fearsome Scylla had already reached down from the rocks. The beast would exact its price: six losses that Trump and his party must now bear.
Odysseus lost six of his crew to Scylla as their vessel sailed past the rock where it perched. For Trump and the GOP, six political blows have left them reeling just months before the midterms. Trump and his party have given up power, security, wealth, sovereignty, credibility and legacy.
Power. At the start of the war, the U.S. appeared all-powerful. It commanded the skies and seas. It sank the Iranian navy and decimated its air defenses. Flush with that power, it made categorical demands of Iran, including the dismantling of Iran’s ballistic missile system and the turnover of its nuclear stockpile.
But at the announced end of hostilities, it is Iran that has emerged victorious, with none of the U.S.’s major demands met other than the Strait of Hormuz reopening to traffic. Iran’s missile program was not merely sidelined from negotiations; Trump affirmatively conceded Iran’s right to have it. At his G7 press conference, he argued Iran could not be barred from having ballistic missiles altogether. “Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he said. “It doesn’t work that way… and missiles aren’t the problem.”
And under the MOU, Iran’s nuclear material stays put, deferred until later. The MOU’s nuclear pledge uses the word “reaffirms,” meaning Iran is simply restating what it said in the 2015 agreement secured by President Obama that Trump tore up in 2018. The pledge stands unaccompanied by any verification mechanism or enforcement process, so the West has less leverage than it had under the Obama deal. When a reporter asked Trump what would compel Iran to cooperate, he said fear of renewed U.S. bombing would guarantee compliance. “If it doesn’t get done in 60 days, it’s all right. We go back to bombing,” Trump declared. But that’s a threat Iran had already absorbed for three months without yielding on either point.
Security. Trump declared Iran would stop funding terrorism, which it does primarily through its proxies throughout the region. But Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are explicitly excluded from the negotiations. Iran’s network of armed groups emerges from the war intact. America’s allies in the region are no safer than they were before the first bomb fell.
At the start of the war and through its prosecution, there were two bright line security goals for the U.S.: Iran would surrender its highly enriched uranium, and its ballistic missile program would be dismantled. Trump repeatedly stressed the fundamental nature of these goals. Marco Rubio warned in February that Iran’s reluctance to discuss its ballistic missiles was a “big, big problem,” that they were “solely designed to attack America and attack Americans,” and that these were things that “have to be addressed.” Pete Hegseth, in the administration’s first briefing after strikes began, declared the operation’s mission was to “destroy the missile threat” and ensure the regime has “no nukes.” Neither bright-line goal made it into the final deal, and the whole world is less secure as a result.
Wealth. Trump spent his first term dismantling the Obama nuclear deal precisely because it extended economic relief to Tehran. But the MOU offers a host of economic bounties to Iran, including sanctions waivers and unfrozen assets. Most notably, it also commits the U.S. to developing “a definitive, mutually agreed plan” for at least $300 billion in reconstruction funding to repair the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. For context: the entire Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe after World War II, cost roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars. The reconstruction commitment in the MOU is roughly twice that.
This wealth is being delivered to a regime that Trump spent years calling the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror. Iran enters the world financial system not as a chastened adversary but as a country that held a chokepoint to ransom and collected.
Sovereignty. Trump promised to restore free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. But the MOU does no such thing. It commits Iran only to use “its best efforts” (not a guarantee) to ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels. Moreover, that commitment runs for only 60 days, “with no charge.” After that period, only Iran and Oman will “define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.” The U.S. is excluded entirely from the decision.
Iran went into this war merely monitoring the Strait. It comes out as essentially its administrator, with the legal architecture to charge tolls and significant leverage to threaten closure again whenever it chooses.
Credibility. The U.S. launched this war with little to no consultation with its allies. Then, when the operation stalled, it demanded they join it. The response was unambiguous. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated flatly that this was “not our war” and that Germany “did not start.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer drew a clear line against being pulled into a broader conflict. Trump called the refusal cowardice. A Pentagon memo drawn up by Elbridge Colby reportedly outlined retaliatory measures against what it called “difficult allies.” It failed to impress them.
Those same allies then heard the U.S. president describe a deal no one had yet seen as “very strong”—adding, without apparent embarrassment, “Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong.” When Trump did discuss the nuclear provisions with The New York Times, the paper’s David Sanger noted that the president “seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made.” The final MOU was so far from “very strong” that the White House read it aloud rather than circulate its terms publicly.
The Center for a New American Security observed that trust in the U.S. and its commitment to Article 5 defense of its allies had already been undermined. The Council on Foreign Relations followed up, noting that the Iran war had left European governments deeply divided on questions of military intervention, and that this was a fracture the U.S., not Iran, created. The U.S. had started a war it could not finish on its own terms, inflicted three months of economic damage on everyone, and settled for less than it demanded in nearly every case. As former Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, “The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started.”
Legacy. Trump came to power promising to undo the Obama Iran deal as an act of historic strength. The deal now signed offers Tehran more than Obama’s ever did: more money, more relief and more leverage. The Revolutionary Guard’s grip on power remains unbroken, and an extremist supreme leader is still in place. The Islamic Republic that Trump spent a decade calling an existential threat to civilization survived the full weight of American military power and negotiated from a position of strength.
Trump had also urged regime change in Iran. On the first day of the war, he told the Iranian people directly: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” But at the G7 summit in Evian four months later, the same president said: “I never cared about regime change. It was never a part.” Of Iran’s new leadership, the same people he condemned for killing tens of thousands of its own protesters earlier this year, Trump also offered this: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. Strong people, smart people. They’re not radicalized.” Any dissidents in Iran who once hoped Trump would be their savior are now likely cursing his name.
The crew erupts
In the Odyssey, the crew’s dissent began quietly, then erupted all at once and led eventually to a full mutiny, leaving Odysseus floating on the wreckage of his vessel, clinging to a branch above the swirling waters of Charybdis.
For Trump, criticism from his own party began as soon as word of the MOU terms leaked, and it has been building ever since:
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that the deal “would be a disaster” and that “everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.”
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared Wicker’s post without comment, a pointed silence from one of the Senate’s most hawkish voices on Iran.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the framework “straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook,” a direct comparison to the Obama-era diplomacy Trump spent his first term dismantling.
Former U.N. Ambassador under Trump Nikki Haley piled on: “This regime chants death to America, murders our troops, and attempts to assassinate Americans on U.S. soil. Now, we plan to unlock billions of dollars and lift sanctions, with the promise of even more money.”
Former senior Trump advisor Steve Bannon, whose views rarely align with Haley’s, broke with the president on sanctions relief. “Keep the sanctions,” he said on his War Room podcast. “If we lose that, it will take forever to get back.”
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called it “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” noting that Iran had “learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.”
The National Review editorial board warned of “a risk that Trump will return the United States to the failed Obama-era Iran deal, which Trump tore up in his first term.”
And conservative radio host Erick Erickson, after Vance suggested Iran’s leaders had expressed regret about their 47 years of hostility toward the United States, responded with three letters: “FFS.”
Trump’s counter-narrative
Trump has offered his own counter-narrative, and it has shifted with each telling. That is not helping in the least.
On March 9, with gas prices already climbing and the Strait effectively closed, Trump told reporters the disruption was largely someone else’s problem. “It doesn’t really affect us,” he said. “We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.” Three weeks later, in a primetime address to the nation on April 1, he went further. “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East,” he declared. “We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have.” Then at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains on June 17, the same president warned that without the deal, markets would have collapsed “at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929 or whatever.” He then added, in a moment of unguarded honesty: “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.”
In short, the president who told Americans in March that the Strait’s closure barely touched them was telling G7 leaders in June that another month of war would have drained the world’s oil reserves and crashed markets to Depression-era levels.
At the G7, he also dismissed Iran’s roughly 440 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium—the stockpile he spent months insisting Iran must surrender—as “nuclear dust” buried too deep to reach. “You could make the case, why even bother?” he said. “It’s not really valuable stuff.” He added that the goal of securing it was not altogether “necessary,” and described it as more of a “public relations” issue than a strategic imperative. This from the president who cited that same stockpile, repeatedly, as justification for launching the war.
Some in the GOP now realize the party must own the terrible deal Trump signed. And that requires some serious spin.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, a Trump loyalist, appeared on CNN to defend the idea of Iran retaining its missile program, one of Trump’s stated justifications for launching the war in the first place. Marshall told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he preferred Iran not to have missiles, but that “the key issue” was that “they have to be able to defend themselves.” Historian Joseph Stieb observed: “It’s like the last 40 years of the Republican Party’s foreign policy didn’t happen.”
Trump signed the MOU himself at a dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles. It was the same venue where, after World War I, the Allied powers compelled Germany to sign what became one of history’s most famous surrender documents. The world grasped the symbolism immediately.
In the myth, Odysseus cleared the strait. But he did not escape what came next. His crew, having watched him sacrifice six of their own, stopped believing his promises. When he forbade them from slaughtering the sacred cattle, they did it anyway—driven by hunger, exhaustion, and the collapse of faith in a captain who had led them somewhere no one wanted to go. Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last one of them drowned.
In a voice vote last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that.
H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current supervisory role over the Copyright Office, transfers several powers directly to the Register of Copyrights, and makes the Register a presidential appointee, confirmed by the Senate.
These changes would make an office that’s already hugely influential in copyright and tech policy much more political. EFF first explained why that’s a terrible idea when it came up nearly a decade ago. This bill, like the older one, weakens the few public-interest checks and balances that do exist. We hope the Senate promptly rejects this bill.
The Copyright Office Doesn’t Need More Politics—Or More Power
The Copyright Office’s main responsibilities are administrative and advisory. It registers copyrights, maintains records, grows the Library of Congress’s collections, and provides expertise to Congress on copyright law. But over the past two decades, the Office has also become increasingly influential in copyright policy debates that affect free expression, libraries, educators, competition—and everyday internet users. Unfortunately, it has not been a neutral advocate. The office’s recent report on the role of AI severely bungled the issue of fair use, prioritizing private licensing market “solutions” over user rights.
Going further back, the Copyright Office supported one of the most infamous anti-internet proposals of all time—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a disastrous internet censorship proposal that sparked one of the largest online protests in history. The Office has repeatedly advanced positions that favored large entertainment-industry interests over the public interest.
The Office also plays a major role in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 rulemaking process, which determines when the public may lawfully bypass digital locks for activities such as security research, repair, preservation, or accessibility. EFF has used this process repeatedly to mitigate some of the worst harms of the DMCA. H.R. 6028 would move rulemaking authority over 1201 from the Librarian of Congress to the Register of Copyrights, further consolidating power within the Copyright Office itself.
The bill also makes the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate. Each administration will be pressured to pick nominees aligned with their own policy preferences, and the powerful copyright owning industries will invest even more heavily in lobbying to get their way, and influence the selection. This position should be focused on administrative ability and actual expertise, not lobbying and politics.
The Copyright Office Should Stay Connected To The Library of Congress
H.R. 6028 would do more than change who appoints the Register of Copyrights. It would sever the Copyright Office from Library of Congress supervision and transfer many Librarian powers directly to the Register.
The supervisory relationship exists for good reason, as the nation’s libraries have pointed out for years. The Library, while far from perfect, at least has the mission of preserving and providing access to knowledge. That should be an important public-interest counterweight in copyright debates. Congress has not explained how weakening the ties between the Library and the Copyright Office would serve the public better, or even seriously inquired about it.
This Bill Was Rushed Through
Back in March, EFF joined Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, library organizations and tech groups, urging Congress not to fast-track this legislation. We told them changes to the Copyright Office will have major consequences for the “speech rights, educational opportunities, and creative freedoms of all Americans.”
Yet Congress moved forward without any hearings on the bill, and without meaningful examination. H.R. 6028 creates a years-long separation of the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress, transfers significant legal authority, and restructures the appointment process for the nation’s top copyright official. Changes like that deserve hearings, debate, and public scrutiny. H.R. 6028 got none of that.
The Senate Should Stop This Bill
Copyright law exists to serve the public and “promote the progress” of science and learning. The institutions that administer copyright law should do the same.
H.R. 6028 would move the Copyright Office further away from that goal. Congress should be strengthening public-interest oversight of copyright policymaking, not looking for ways to concentrate more authority in a single presidentially appointed official.
The Senate should reject H.R. 6028. The Copyright Office should serve the public—not presidential administrations, and not industry lobbyists.
Senators Ron Wyden and Ted Cruz have released the JAWBONE Act (“Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression Act”) as a way to prevent government suppression of speech. While some of the premises behind it are silly and nonsensical, the actual law is not bad. Of course, if it became law, the Trump admin would face a bunch of lawsuits over it, but we’ll leave that aside for now.
For much of the Biden administration there were misleading (and often downright false) claims that administration officials were pressuring social media companies to suppress content online, which has been generally called jawboning (for historical reasons not worth getting into). It can be a real issue, as government officials across the political spectrum often do seem eager to silence speech they dislike. And while the First Amendment should prevent that, there are limited remedies for those who are victims of it.
However, in the legal sense, jawboning, dating back to the famous Bantam Books case and evolving through the Murthy vs. Missouri case, has tended to focus on the important distinction between the government trying to persuade intermediaries to allow or suppress certain speech vs. attempts to coerce. The coercive version crosses the First Amendment boundary. The persuasive version is allowed, as it involves political speech on its own.
I still think one of the best efforts to lay out this distinction was not at the Supreme Court, but by Judge Richard Posner in Backpage v. Dart. That was the case where Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart sent letters on his official letterhead telling credit card companies they needed to stop working with Backpage or else. Backpage sued, and Dart tried to argue that he was just using his personal First Amendment rights to express his opinion to the credit card companies. Judge Posner pointed out that this was nonsense, and the clear intent in the letters was to threaten them with legal consequences as a government law enforcement agent.
Posner highlights that Dart not only sent the letter on his sheriff’s letterhead, but opened by identifying himself as “the Sheriff of Cook County,” used the legal language of “cease and desist,” and later suggested that the credit card companies “willfully play a central role” in criminal activity by allowing Backpage to use their services. As Posner notes, this is not just an official expressing their personal opinion. There’s a clear coercive threat involved:
And here’s the kicker: “Within the next week, please provide me with contact information for an individual within your organization that I can work with [harass, pester] on this issue.” The “I” is Sheriff Dart, not private citizen Dart— the letter was signed by “Thomas Dart, Cook County Sheriff.” And the letter was not merely an expression of Sheriff Dart’s opinion. It was designed to compel the credit card companies to act by inserting Dart into the discussion; he’ll be chatting them up. Further insight into the purpose and likely effect of such a letter is provided by a strategy memo written by a member of the sheriff’s staff in advance of the letter. The memo suggested approaching the credit card companies (whether by phone, mail, email, or a visit in person) with threats in the form of “reminders” of “their own potential liability for allowing suspected illegal transactions to continue to take place” and their potential susceptibility to “money laundering prosecutions … and/or hefty fines.” Allusion to that “susceptibility” was the culminating and most ominous threat in the letter.
That’s what coercion looks like. And despite what MAGA folks (including Ted Cruz) insist, none of that was present in the Biden admin requests regarding social media. There were certainly a few instances that appeared to get pretty close to the line, but even the very conservative MAGA-pilled Supreme Court repeatedly pointed out that there was “no evidence” they could find of the administration crossing that line against the plaintiffs in Murthy, and thus they had no standing to sue.
Of course, if you look at the level of jawboning happening now in the Trump administration, it’s quite incredible and way beyond even what they (falsely) accused Biden of doing. Almost every day we see yet another story of someone in the Trump admin threatening intermediaries to suppress speech.
So, given that backdrop, the JAWBONE Act (silly backronym aside) comes at an interesting time. While in theory the First Amendment already protects against such activities, it’s quite difficult to get your full day in court. So the new bill gives apparent victims of jawboning a direct cause of action, allows for early discovery to try to prove that they were targets, and allows cases to live on after officials involved are out of office. It also would require “transparency” regarding certain government communications with media companies.
The good part of the law is that it makes it clear this is about coercion:
Except as provided in paragraph (2), it shall be unlawful for an agency, or an officer or employee of the United States under color or pretense of office or employment, to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, a provider of an interactive computer service, or a provider of an artificial intelligence system within the United States (including the territories of the United States) for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.
Because Cruz and the MAGA crew are absolutely certain that the Murthy case would have gone differently if only the government had been forced to share details, it includes a “pre-trial motion for limited discovery.” Of course, in Murthy there was a ton of discovery… which turned up absolutely nothing (hence the Supreme Court ruling). So, if anything, this will allow for any crackpot to sue government officials claiming they were censored and require the government to go through extra discovery. But, well, it’s the government. They can handle that.
The requirement for making communications between government officials and covered platforms available isn’t bad, per se, but seems like it may be a compliance headache. Though it would also show that most communication between platforms and government is not some cloak and dagger censorship nonsense but pretty standard information exchanges. And we already know how some of this will go, since whenever there is communication with an agency like the FCC it’s supposed to be publicly reported, leading to a flood of pointless filings almost no one reads any time anyone meets with an FCC Commissioner. It’s fine, but it’s just more paperwork.
Of course, the likelihood of this ever becoming law is slim, given that the impact would be a ton of lawsuits against the Trump administration and its many officials who seem to think their only purpose is to jawbone in pursuit of suppressing any speech critical of MAGA.
On the whole, though, it’s a reasonable bill, even if Cruz’s support is based on a total misreading of what happened in the Murthy case. The government shouldn’t be in the business of coercing intermediaries into suppressing speech, and if a bill like this helps make that a reality, so much the better.
That said, even if this did become law, given how eager the courts have been (throughout modern history) to make it close to impossible to sue government employees for any violation of rights, I do wonder how much good it would do.
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You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.
Or, put more succinctly:
if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.
There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.
It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:
What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:
Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:
This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":
Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:
The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.
But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.
This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would loose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.
In other words:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI
Then: AI = 0
If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.
If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:
Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:
(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)
And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI
Virtual: The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order), Jun 19 https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY
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"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
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Here it is: the dumbest defense of automatic license plate readers I’ve ever read. While we can subtract some points because the person writing it has no power to install/un-install/cover in garbage bags surveillance tech, he’s a regular contributor to a long-running newspaper in a major city. And since this paper is still willing to give him a byline and inches (or digital equivalent), he’s not going to get a pass.
This would be the work of Ted Diadiun, who at least appears to be the MAGA ideal of a centrist. (This means he occasionally criticizes Trump but also gets big mad when people suggest this nation might be better off if Trump was dead.)
I don’t expect everyone — even those with newspaper staff credentials — to get into the weeds when it comes to surveillance tech. On the other hand, I fully expect them to present a better argument in favor of ALPR systems than “Man, I wish the cops were pulling over every driver I think they should be pulling over.”
How many of us have witnessed an idiotic driver and muttered, “Why is there never a cop around when you need one?”
That is why – getting to the point – I’m a big fan of surveillance cameras. Speed cameras, red-light cameras, Flock cameras … all of them.
They’re always around, even when a cop isn’t. And they give me some assurance that people who think laws are for others will get what’s coming to them. And those, like me and my friend, who think that scofflaws are increasing exponentially, can cling to the hope that the number will come down if people know or suspect they’re on camera.
Bro, I hear you. I share the road (and see it not equally shared) with assholes. I do wish vengeance upon them. But I also would rather keep my rights than give them up in exchange for traffic enforcement that subjectively pleases me.
I’m on the other side. And that would be the other side that Ted feels is too stupid, too soft on crime, or otherwise misinformed.
Not everyone, unfortunately, thinks that way.
How can you tell you’re the greatest? Well, it’s when you present your side (me and my friend think “idiotic” drivers need more punishment) and follow it up with a statement that says anyone opposed to your subjective views on traffic enforcement are “unfortunately” wrong.
Ted Diadiun is upset because city leaders are trying to do their best to serve their constituents. Many are opposed to the ALPR system imposed on them. This system belongs to Flock, which has become a surveillance tech front runner — one that has often greeted legitimate criticism with “go fuck yourself” vibes.
Immediately after invoking the unholy name of Flock, Diadiun says a number of things very quickly. First, he admits ALPRs won’t do anything to punish the speeders and scofflaws that so incensed him and his neighbor. Then he says something even Flock itself might not want him to say:
These cameras do not identify speeders or people who bust through red lights – there are other devices for that. What they do is capture the license numbers of every vehicle that drives by. Their gaze can also capture other things, such as porch pirates and car thieves and vandals and other dregs of society lurking in our neighborhoods.
Wow, Ted, wow. These ALPRs are great because… they do so much more than collect the plate/location records the public assumed AUTOMATIC LICENSE PLATE READERS (ALPRs) would be limited to doing.
But you’re fine with surveillance, surveillance creep, and giving the finger to your fellow Cleveland residents because?
There are more than 1,700 of these devices scattered around Cuyahoga County, but at current issue are 100 Flock cameras in Cleveland. Mayor Justin Bibb, who correctly understands their value, has tried to renew the city’s contract with the company, but has been beset by objections from, among others, a raucous group called “Flock No.” As a result, he tossed the decision to Cleveland City Council. Flock No members disrupted a recent council meeting with clapping and chanting, but there’s been no decision as yet.
That organization has also taken on the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which has 200 Flock cameras outside its buildings in an effort to help police solve cases of car break-ins, vandalism, street takeovers in parking lots and sex offenders illegally visiting school property.
Hmmm. The citizens protested a council meeting. The mayor punted. And while Flock may have installed 200 cameras in the school district, naming the things Flock claims it cameras will prevent isn’t even in the same galaxy as naming the things Flock’s cameras have actually prevented. Why, I could claim my use of the letter “e” in this post has been done to prevent sex offenders from being appointed by the Trump administration. And it would be every bit as credible as claiming a couple hundred cameras are “helping” police do everything from investigating petty theft (they don’t care) or keeping sex offenders off school property (citation PLEASE).
And then Diadiun goes on to both (1) make it clear Flock’s cameras aren’t limited to license plate readings and (2) pretend fighting for rights is just advocacy for criminals.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which can always be counted on to throw roadblocks in front of efforts to stop crime and capture criminals, of course has weighed in on the anti-camera side, charging that it amounts to mass spying that turns its plate-reading into surveillance cameras, and that its recordings of bumper stickers amount to an invasion of privacy.
(Ironically, it was the photos of bumper stickers on a Chevrolet Camaro captured by Flock cameras that allowed federal agents to capture and arrest an armed robber who had held up ten local stores at gunpoint in 2021, as chronicled in a Thursday story on cleveland.com. Guess the ACLU would have preferred that the guy remain free to continue to terrify and perhaps harm additional clerks and customers.)
If the first paragraph doesn’t make you want to punch the columnist in the face, read it again. This is not what the ACLU does. It’s not there to protect criminals. It’s there to protect rights. Rights apply to everyone, even (alleged) criminals. Ted is here to declare he’d rather see a thousand innocent people jailed than allow a single criminal to go free.
Then he goes on to (unhelpfully — in the case of Flock) note that Flock captures more than plate images and allows law enforcement to run searches on things that aren’t normally considered to be part of day-to-day ALPR business… like bumper stickers.
And, again, Diadiun closes out the paragraph by pretending the ACLU’s intervention in this case was in the interest of increasing crime, rather than forcing the government to respect constitutional rights.
Having already demonstrated he’s a facile dolt, Ted Diadiun wraps things up by ensuring there can be no debate about his (barely) “useful idiot” status:
Unless you have something to hide, why would you object to cameras that record license plates and other information?
Please post your location history data publicly, Ted. You have nothing to hide. Let’s see where you’ve been and who you’ve associated with. Just dump it out in a future column so we can sift through like the cops you love so much. Until you’re willing to that much, please shut the fuck up about location tracking, ALPRs, civil liberties, and drivers who will now feel increasingly justified in their attempts to run you off the road.
[I have reached out to Ted Diadiun to see if he’ll provide readers with location data collected by his phone and/or other services since he’s apparently has nothing to hide. I’ve also asked him to explain why it’s okay for the government to have this information by default, if he’s unwilling to share it with his readers. I will update this post in the unlikely event that Ted chooses to respond to my inquiries.]
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If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it’s that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he’s about to do is absolutely necessary… and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within minutes.
The excellent reporter Laura Jedeed has been tracking all of the excuses Trump and his team have been giving for why we absolutely had to go to war with Iran, and the very top one: eliminate their ballistic missile capability. Next: eliminate their nuclear program entirely. There was also some talk of “regime change.”
When Trump went to war with Iran, I watched every speech anyone in the administration gave and made a chart of every reason given for going to war"Eliminate ballistic capability" was the #1 reason given: more even than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon
Now that Trump has signed the surrender agreement at Versailles (the traditional place to sign a total surrender agreement), the scorecard looks like this: no eliminated missile program, no eliminated nuclear program, no regime change. Also: no actual deal.
What Trump signed is a one-page memorandum of understanding with a 60-day time limit. After that, another deal needs to happen — one that may or may not actually get signed. The thing being called a historic peace agreement is, in legal terms, a note on the back of a napkin that expires in two months.
With that established: here’s what he gave away to get it.
The US backed down on everything to get the Strait of Hormuz only partially opened, in a situation where Iran still seems likely to come out of this way stronger and way more powerful than before Trump started this illegal war. Remember, before this war, the Strait was open. So with this deal we only get partially back to where things were before the war, but with a huge draw down of US military stock, over a dozen dead US soldiers, and tons of unnecessary Iranian casualties, including a school full of young girls.
Iran retains their ballistic missiles and MAGA officials have to pretend that makes sense.
KAITLAN COLLINS: Are you okay with Iran having missiles?SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I prefer that they not, but they have to defend themselvesCOLLINS: You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself?MARSHALL: I do, otherwise we turn this into a forever war
Also, remember how the Trump world insisted that Obama’s JCPOA was one of the worst deals of all time?
That’s Donald Trump tweeting in 2015 about the JCPOA:
The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!
The “deal” Trump just made is a complete capitulation, a loss on every point, and way, way, way worse than what was in the JCPOA, which, in retrospect, was a genuinely good deal — carefully negotiated by actual experts — and briefly a real win for peace in the Middle East before Trump tore it up.
And remember how MAGA spent years misleadingly talking up all the money that the US supposedly “gave” Iran with the JCPOA? Or the deal Biden did to extend a Trump-era policy to unfreeze some of Iran’s frozen assets, which even Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed was Biden “giving” Iran money?
“We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest. Like, what are you going to do to say ‘you can never ever invest in a country,’ I mean, it’s pretty tough.”
So: MAGA spent years insisting that financial flows to Iran — even unfreezing Iran’s own assets — would fund its military and get soldiers killed. Trump just opened Iran to hundreds of billions in new investment while leaving both the missiles and the nuclear program intact. The threat, apparently, only counts when a Democrat is president.
Obviously, ending this war is a good thing. But it never should have happened in the first place. Trump launched it without congressional authorization, in clear violation of the War Powers Act — and once it started, Congress should have stopped it cold.
The final accounting: Trump tore up the JCPOA, which he called “one of the most incompetent deals ever made.” He started an illegal war. He drew down US military stockpiles, lost over a dozen American soldiers, and killed Iranian civilians — including a school full of young girls. And he came away with a memorandum of understanding that expires in 60 days, leaving Iran with everything it had before the war started, plus full knowledge of exactly how hard Trump will push before he folds.
Trump’s own verdict on the JCPOA was: “The U.S. lost on virtually every point.” He was describing this deal.
[A long riff on book publishing with (perhaps) wide applicability to your work as well.]
Publishing is different from writing—it’s the hard work of creating the conditions to help people get in sync, move forward, and get to where they’re headed.
The best reason to publish a non-fiction business or how-to book in 2026 is to change lives. Transformation is possible.
Transformation can happen, but only if the book ends up in the right hands for the right reasons.
Today, it’s harder than ever to pull that off. Tim Ferriss shares the numbers. We have a glut of information, but not nearly enough action. I’ve been at this for forty years, but the change this time is significant.
The number of books in this category continues to expand, but their total impact has not. At the same time, more books are being purchased by more people—the long tail is real. Publishing a book is super easy now, but publishing one that works is harder than ever.
Authors and publishers get stuck on the gap between interest and action. Too often, we don’t act until it’s too late in the process.
The author’s job in publishing begins long before pub day.
There are three pillars:
Promotion
Activation
Conversation
The first one gets way too much discussion, energy, and noise. Promotion gets the word out. Promotion can easily become all-consuming, and it can also become selfish. The promotion part of the equation asks, “have you seen my new book?” Promotion is everywhere, so we come to believe that it matters.
Activation creates the tension that answers the promotion question with, “I’ll go grab a copy.”
And conversation is the unsung part of every single hit book in this genre: “I need my friends to read this.”
Successful publishing, then, looks like this: Generate awareness. Create tension that leads to engagement with the work. Deliver an idea that works better for the reader when it’s shared and discussed. Reader traction leads to the network effect. The transformations compound, and the book becomes a foundation of culture and alignment.
That’s the work of publishing. Each component matters, not just the first one.
I’d break promotion into a few components:
Permission: When you can deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to the people who want to get them, you’ve earned attention, not stolen it. Letting people who read your blog or listen to your podcast know about your new book is mutually beneficial. This is a trust that’s not to be taken lightly.
Shared permission: When you appear on someone else’s podcast or in the media, you’re bringing the message of your book to people who trust the host. The paradox is that the more trusted the media channel, the more difficult it is for you to appear when it suits you.
Buzz: This is a side effect of a good story and a medium that wants to carry it. In the hyper-parallel world of social media, there are an infinite number of tiny media outlets, and when they start to vibrate at the same frequency, buzz occurs. This is 5% preparation and 95% luck.
Hustle and Hype: Burning bridges and crossing lines just because it’s important to you. Please don’t. No one ever ends up glad they did this. It might not feel like hustle to the hustler, but if the person you’re targeting with your hype feels hustled, then that’s what’s happening.
But promotion is not worth much if it doesn’t translate into people actually purchasing and reading your book. Activation overcomes inertia, fear, and inconvenience. Activation energy leads to someone not only buying a book, but reading it.
Most publishers have someone who does publicity and promotion. Most marketers think about their job in the same way. Where are the teams that focus on activation?
In two recent book launches, I worked to create awareness with a record-breaking podcast tour. Each time I appeared on more than fiftypodcasts on launch day. It took months of recording sessions and the kind support of some of the best podcasters in the world to pull this off.
Together we reached millions of people in just a few days. And yet, very few of these listeners bought a book as a result of a podcast. The math might be 1,000,000 YouTube interview views equals a hundred books sold.
Estimated growth in hours spent (billions!) listening to podcasts or other forms of online productivity/business learning
The common-sense math is simple: Over the last two decades, hours spent listening to podcasts, blog posts and videos about non-fiction topics is exponentially higher than it was, but sales in the category are flat or down.
Podcast appearances often solve the problem of what’s in the book (“oh, I heard it, I get it”) as opposed to creating useful and generous tension that leads to a read.
[Let me pause for a second here and clarify: If you can effectively give your idea away without writing and publishing a book, please do! Most of my blog posts reach more people than my books do, and I keep them as posts because that’s the best way to get my point across. But if it’s worth publishing a book around a set of ideas, it’s probably not easily translated into a thirty-minute podcast. Buying, reading, holding, shelving, sharing–these are opportunities the book has to amplify its impact.]
Now, consider the idea of a knock-knock book. This is a book with a secret. The world asks about it (knock knock) and the answer is, “buy the book.” This was a big part of publishing for a long time—if you want to know, you needed to read the book. But now that the answer is free, online, there’s not a lot of reason left to buy this sort of book… If all a book has is a secret, it won’t have the secret for long. TLDR.
Instead, the most resilient books in this category serve a different purpose. They’re shareable. They amplify a network. They serve as an instigator and a totem, a device that allows one reader to share insights with another, all in service of getting in sync. Books are souvenirs for some purchasers, but tools for most of us.
The step after activation is the one with the highest leverage: Conversation.
Successful books in this category don’t sell by the copy; they sell by the carton.
How will my organization, my team or my relationships improve if we all read this book? Can we talk about these ideas and put them to work together?
This is why Purple Cow and The Dip were two of my bestselling books.
When David and Brian wrote The Dip into Billions, they were using it as a shorthand. The judge was saying, “we need to talk about this nuanced idea, here’s an anchor.” The book becomes the foundation for a conversation that needed to happen.
Books that matter over time almost always fit this description: Atomic Habits, In Search of Excellence, Grit, The War of Art, The Let Them Theory, Mindset, and Big Magic… practical books that stand for something and offer a foundation for shared exploration and possibility.
You can do all the promotion and activation you want, but if your book doesn’t support conversation, it will soon fade away.
Have you seen my book? →
I’ll grab a copy →
I need my friends to read this →
My circle is using this as a tool.
Don’t tell me about your promotional strategy. Talk to me about activation and build conversation into your work from the start.
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Stewart Brand, 1984.
The two ideas don’t have to fight with each other. Information isn’t enough. It’s transformation and conversation that fuel our future.
For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t even bother to get the necessary permits to run the turbines at its xAI’s Colossus 2 data center.
The lawsuit also notes how these 27 turbines (which has ballooned to 57 turbines since the lawsuit was filed) belch all manner of contaminants, including formaldehyde, into minority neighborhoods already seeing some of the highest asthma rates in the country, violating the Clean Air Act.
But this being Elon Musk, he apparently has been able to leverage the presidency he helped purchase to get those pesky Memphis minorities off of his back. In a filing this week obtained by Wired, the DOJ is trying to claim the lawsuit can’t proceed because xAI and Grok are highly tethered to the country’s national security efforts:
“In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”
Musk and his friends at the DOJ are asking the courts to dismiss the lawsuit. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction, stating that the climbing rates of environmental pollution “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities that already face significant pollution thanks to regulatory capture and systemic racism.
Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Marc Andreessen pretended to not understand why a civil rights group might be upset that unregulated data centers are pumping pollution into minority Memphis neighborhoods:
It’s worth noting that when Musk built the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, he promised that the facility would largely re-use water via a next-generation water-recycling plant as to not strain the area water supply. But curiously, construction of that part of the project has stalled out completely. Musk says the company needs to focus on finishing their other data center in the region, then will finish construction. But, well, it’s Musk. The guy always saying we’re *this close* to settling Mars.
The youth movement has tethered AI to the country’s growing fascist, racist corruption and income inequality (and the tech sector that openly embraced it at almost every turn), and it’s going to take a lot more than sloppy CBS propaganda and new software updates to shift the perception. I’m not sure the tech sector truly groks what their enthusiastic support of Trumpism will ultimately reap them.
This is the future we’ve built in a country too corrupt to have functional regulatory oversight of obscenely rich men and corporate power. Without a meaningful ethical renaissance and profound political sea change, it only gets uglier and more violent from here.
This week, the same publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a new complaint at the same court, this time with the relatively young pirate library WeLib as the target.
Again, the stakes are substantial, with the publishers seeking up to $19.5 million in potential damages for direct copyright infringement.
A New Entrant
The similarities don’t stop at the legal arguments and stakes. Anna’s Archive already highlighted the newcomer in a blog post last year, describing WeLib as a “new entrant” in the space that had copied both its collection and its code.
“They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase,” Anna’s Archive noted.
The same blog post was also critical of WeLib for not contributing back to the ecosystem and recommended that people avoid using the site.
From Anna’s blog post
This week, the publishers also warn against using the site, albeit for different reasons. Their complaint accuses WeLib’s unnamed and anonymous operators of widespread copyright infringement, while also confirming that connection to Anna’s Archive.
“Defendants’ entire business is the illegal copying and distribution of literary works,” the complaint notes, adding that “WeLib was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of the Notorious Pirate Site, Anna’s Archive.”
Not a Library
WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.
“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”
“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.
WeLib.org
The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.
The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month.
While the site can be used for free, users can pay for fast downloads and to skip the queue. Subscriptions start at $7 per month for 25 fast downloads and 25 fast reads per day; while the top tier costs $90 a month for 1,000 daily downloads.
Staggering Scale
These payments, or “donations” as WeLib calls them, can be made through cryptocurrency, WeChat, and Alipay. They are allegedly processed through a company called Malum.co, which offers payment services to high-risk vendors, without the need for any KYC identity checks.
Damages and Domain Seizures
The complaint lists a sample of 130 copyrighted works as evidence. This mirrors the Anna’s Archive lawsuit, where the court awarded $150,000 per work, which is the statutory maximum, resulting in a total of $19.5 million.
In addition to the monetary damages, the publishers are also seeking a permanent injunction that aims to take the site offline. They ask the court to order third-party registries, registrars, and hosting providers to disable WeLib’s domains and render them untransferable.
Domain Names Targeted
This also includes a specific request to disable the authoritative nameserver for the .st domain, registered through Njalla, a Costa Rica-based registrar that is not necessarily responsive to U.S. court orders.
The AI Training Conundrum
As with other recent publisher lawsuits, the complaint also mentions AI training. Specifically, it alleges that WeLib supplies copyright infringing data to AI companies.
“WeLib has also been an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry. In a recent lawsuit, publishers alleged that Meta utilized WeLib to train their Llama models,” the complaint reads.
The recent lawsuit they refer to is Elsevier Inc. v. Meta Platforms which is filed by several of the same publishers through the same law firm, Oppenheim + Zebrak. However, what that complaint actually says about WeLib is more specific and not in line with the current case.
The Elsevier v. Meta complaint describes WeLib as a source found within C4 training dataset Meta used, but identifies it as “formerly known as PDF Drive.” This dataset was built years ago from a Common Crawl snapshot and predates WeLib and even Anna’s Archive.
From Elsevier v. Meta
More confusingly, the complaint against WeLib that was filed this week makes no mention of it formerly being known as “PDF Drive”, or the C4 dataset for that matter.
According to our knowledge, there is no evidence that content hosted by WeLib was included in the C4 database. All we can confirm is that the database does include “PDF Drive” data and that the pdfdrive.com domain redirected to the new WeLib site at some point.
PDF Drive is a long-running PDF hosting site that has operated for years, predating Anna’s Archive entirely. It has no documented connection to Anna’s Archive’s codebase or collection. Whether it shares more than a domain redirect with the WeLib now being sued is unclear.
The publishers’ framing of WeLib as an active AI training pipeline may be backed up with further evidence later, or not. For now, WeLib has yet to respond. However, since anonymous operators typically don’t show up in court, this case may also copy Anna’s Archive’s path, heading to a default judgment.
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A copy of the complaint, filed by Oppenheim + Zebrak on behalf of the thirteen plaintiff publishers, is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he’s been out to lunch on most of what HHS’ work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied all of this of course, commenting that everyone was freaking out just because he missed “a couple” of meetings. He then suggested that real journalists would check his public calendar to see how busy he’s been, despite his calendar apparently not being in any way public.
The question that leaps to mind in all of this is where the rest of Kennedy’s time is going, if not spent on HHS’ core functions. The answer appears in part to be demanding that scientific journals explain their decisions to retract articles, so long as they were articles that fit Kennedy’s agenda.
In a letter dated June 11, Kennedy wrote to Toxicology Reports Editor-in-Chief Lawrence H. Lash concerning a 2021 study titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature.”
The study in question was authored solely by Neil Z. Miller and was among those cited by Kennedy’s former personal lawyer Aaron Siri in a presentation he gave before a federal vaccine panel in support of altering the childhood immunization schedule. Those alterations to the vaccine schedule, and the panel that approved them, have since been blocked by a federal judge.
Miller, who identifies as a “medical research journalist” in his author biography, is a prominent vaccine skeptic, having published numerous books questioning the safety and efficacy of immunizations.
Now, a couple of things to note here. First, Toxicology Reports has a bit of a reputation problem that arose during the COVID era. It is considered a generally reputable outlet, to be clear, but it had several controversies that arose in 2020 and 2021. Lash is actually the founding editor of the journal, but he had stepped away during this controversial period, during which the journal published articles of a conspiratorial nature around COVID and 5G technology. Lash returned as Editor in Chief of the journal in late 2021.
Importantly, that happened after the article in question was published. Lash has apparently been attempting to reestablish the reputation of Toxicology Reports and has, on occasion, gone back and retracted articles that don’t meet his renewed standards. That’s, you know, the work an Editor-in-Chief does. Kennedy’s demands for an explanation why an article he liked was retracted is particularly odd, since the retraction came along with the journal’s justification.
The article was about research the author had done in correlating data in the VAERS database with vaccine injury and infant death. A large problem with such research is, as was detailed often during the height of the pandemic, that VAERS is largely a self-reporting system. Claims of vaccine injury that are reported are not verified. If you try to get at the data yourself, you will first see a disclaimer you have to acknowledge that includes the following text:
Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data:
The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event, or as evidence about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, and unverified information.
VAERS does not obtain follow up records on every report. If a report is classified as serious, VAERS requests additional information, such as health records, to further evaluate the report.
VAERS data are limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date for which data are available.
VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information.
And the justification for the retraction follows along those lines.
In its removal notice, Elsevier, the publisher of Toxicology Reports, stated, “Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed.”
“In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal,” the publisher added.
That’s really all you need to know. The dataset the study was built on is unreliable when it comes to the conclusions the research attempted to draw. And that’s before we get into the inappropriate nature of the sitting Secretary of HHS reaching out to scientific journals to demand explanations on matters of medicine and science when he is neither a doctor nor a scientist. I’ll note that the editorial board for Toxicology Reports is chockablock full of PHDs and MDs.
If Kennedy finds the real work at HHS boring, then he should quit and go back to advocating for people to be less healthy from infectious diseases for which we have vaccines. Otherwise, there are about a half a dozen health crises going on right now that he could work on instead of harassing the editors of science journals about their independent editorial decisions.
On the morning of June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen—a Trump appointee confirmed on a party-line Senate vote—stood before cameras at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis to announce what his office called a sweeping conspiracy to undermine federal law enforcement. His office had obtained an eight-count felony indictment against 15 people connected to anti-ICE organizing in the Twin Cities.
The lead charge was conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer. Rosen described the defendants as participants in a left-wing coalition called Direct Action Minnesota, which he accused of “surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.”
Behind him, on a monitor, was the evidence he had chosen to lead with: a screenshot of a social media post. “You see here a Facebook post from one of the defendants writing, quote: ‘We need to become ungovernable. We need to resist any way we can to materially stop the Nazi occupation,’” Rosen read aloud.
Twelve of the 15 defendants had already been arrested that morning. Two remained at large. Rosen closed with a warning: “If you are actively conspiring to impede law enforcement … you ought to assume that we’re watching you and that we will get you.”
But the unusual charges have already led to many questions.
Rosen had told MPR News reporter Matt Sepic that the people were “charged not for what they said but what they did.”But he led his presentation with a defendant’s thoughts posted publicly online.
A defense attorney in attendance, Bruce Nestor, called the presser a “propaganda show” and zeroed in on this central contradiction. Then he asked what we were all thinking: “What’s wrong with being ungovernable by a fascist government?”
Minnesota Reformer reporter Madison McVan noted that more than a third of the individuals charged during the earlier federal crackdown on Minnesota protesters had already had their cases dismissed or failed in some way. If that’s the case, why was this case different?
“I don’t think any cases have failed in any way,” Rosen replied.
A second reporter immediately bodychecked him with facts. Prosecutors had in fact dropped 18 of the 36 prior cases entirely, with non-prosecution agreements in at least 11 more.
Rosen was also asked directly whether any federal officers had actually been harmed. He declined to say. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm,” Rosen argued, “is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime.”
Minneapolis in the spotlight again
In Season Two, the federal government has chosen to put Minneapolis back in the news, so it’s helpful to review what happened in Season One.
Operation Metro Surge launched in December 2025, flooding the Twin Cities and surrounding areas with federal immigration agents. At its peak, roughly 4,000 officers from ICE and Customs and Border Protection had been deployed across the state, ultimately making more than 3,700 arrests. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in incidents caught on camera—Renée Good on January 7, and Alex Pretti on January 24—bringing the number of people shot across the country between September 2025 and February 2026 to 13, with four fatalities.
Residents of Minneapolis organized in response to the surge and the killings. Community members filmed federal agents during enforcement actions, a practice former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem characterized as a form of violence against officers. Hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Twin Cities residents joined community patrol networks, monitoring ICE movements and bearing witness to arrests.
On January 23, the day before CBP agents killed Pretti, Minneapolis saw a general strike. Schools and businesses shut down as workers marched under the banner of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” Over 50,000 people marched through downtown in subzero temperatures, with hundreds of businesses closing their doors, in a shutdown endorsed by the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, which represents more than 80,000 workers across 175 unions.
One coalition that emerged from this moment was Direct Action Minnesota. The people now facing federal felony charges were organizing during, and in direct response to, all of it.
The charges
The indictment unsealed Tuesday runs 94 pages. The bulk of it is devoted to a single charge applied to all 15 defendants: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer under 18 U.S.C. § 372. The statute was first enacted in 1861, and the Justice Department’s own Office of Legal Counsel, in a 1977 memorandum, noted it had historically been charged only alongside substantive offenses like assault, and had rarely stood alone.
It appeared most recently in a handful of January 6 prosecutions. Before that, its most notable use was against a pair of tax protesters who retreated to their New Hampshire home with a cache of weapons in 2007. The Justice Department is now applying it to nonviolent protest organizers in Minnesota.
To establish the conspiracy, the indictment leans heavily on the group’s internal communications and organizational activity. These include
conducting Signal chats in which members expressed frustration with non-violent tactics;
holding planning sessions for blockades around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling;
creating a GoFundMe account;
organizing training sessions for new members;
attendingworker assemblies held at the United Labor Centre in Minneapolis, cited in the indictment as evidence of criminal coordination;
and holding an “Anarchist Speaking Tour” in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle in April, where members allegedly shared tactics with other groups.
And of course, that Facebook post.
As Talking Points Memo noted, beyond the base conspiracy charge, some individual defendants face additional counts. Kyle Wagner, who had previously been arrested in February on federal threat and cyberstalking charges, faces counts of solicitation to commit a crime of violence and interstate threats, based on social media posts urging followers to abandon peaceful protest.
Isaac Auman Sant faces an interstate stalking charge for following a federal officer from the Whipple Building across state lines to Hudson, Wisconsin. William Morgan faces the same stalking charge, plus assault on a federal officer and destruction of government property, after he allegedly knocked an agent’s notes from his hand, kicked a government vehicle and placed sandbags under its tires.
Natasha Rakotz faces a single count of assault on a federal officer.
Courts should proceed very skeptically
Tuesday’s indictment didn’t arrive in a vacuum. It was delivered by a Justice Department whose record of prosecuting anti-ICE demonstrators in Minnesota has been spotty, and whose record elsewhere has drawn allegations of gross misconduct.
Of the 36 people federally charged with assaulting or impeding federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, prosecutors have since dropped 18 cases entirely and resolved 11 more through non-prosecution agreements, meaning they were dismissed for reasons including a lack of probable cause and evidence that directly contradicted law enforcement’s own claims. Several others were quietly downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors.
The case of Nasra Ahmed is illustrative. At the height of the surge, federal officers arrested Ahmed, a 23-year-old U.S.-born citizen, posted her booking photo on social media, and named her in a news release alleging that 16 Minnesotans had assaulted immigration agents. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi called her a “rioter” in a post that drew 3.3 million views. The Department of Homeland Security amplified it, calling the defendants “violent anti-ICE anarchists.”Four months later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked to drop the charges. A federal judge lambasted the office for prosecutorial harassment, finding that the government’s conduct had violated a court order, likely violated the Justice Department’s own policies, and undermined the presumption of innocence. The charges were dismissed with prejudice.
Defense attorney Bruce Nestor, who has followed these cases closely, said the pattern is consistent. The prior Metro Surge charges, he said, “were based on lies. They were based on false information, they were based on violation of judicial orders. And now today, 15 more people are going to go through that process, and the same thing will be true of the charges.”
The Minnesota dismissals are part of a broader national pattern. In Chicago, the Justice Department brought a conspiracy prosecution against six people who had demonstrated outside the Broadview ICE detention facility. It was a case that included a progressive congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, and it became a national flashpoint. The case collapsed in May when U.S. District Judge April Perry reviewed grand jury transcripts and found prosecutorial misconduct so severe she described it as unlike anything she had seen in hundreds of such transcripts over her career. The U.S. Attorney dismissed all remaining charges with prejudice and took responsibility before the court. Sanctions against the prosecutors involved may follow.
Chris Parente, a former federal prosecutor who represented one of the Broadview defendants, was unsparing in his condemnation. “This DOJ has completely corrupted the grand jury process. When they decide that they want to get a political indictment through, they will do whatever it takes, even acting in an unethical way.”
Abughazaleh, whose own charges were dismissed after the grand jury misconduct came to light, drew the connection between the Broadview Six and the charges announced on June 16. “As the government raids ‘antifa groups’ in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six,” she wrote on Bluesky, “we need to be asking how they got this indictment. And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.”
The question of how the Minnesota grand jury was conducted, and what a judge might find if she looked at those transcripts, too, remains unanswered but may come to light.
What This Means
The statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. § 372, was written in 1861 to protect federal officers from organized interference at a moment when the authority of the federal government itself was under armed challenge. The Justice Department is now applying it to people who organized blockades, attended union hall meetings, monitored ICE vehicles on public streets, and posted on Facebook.
Among the indicted are leaders of Minnesota’s labor movement, who received the George Meany–Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award from the AFL-CIO at its national convention in Minneapolis on June 7.
Conduct that would be entirely unremarkable in any other civic context—coordinating volunteers, raising money, holding meetings and traveling to share information—has been reframed as overt acts of a criminal conspiracy, all because the object was to resist federal immigration enforcement.
The Trump administration has been explicit about its intent. An executive order signed by Trump titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” directed the Justice Department to treat left-wing activism as an organized terrorist conspiracy. It declared that political violence “does not emerge organically” but is instead “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns.”
The label of “conspiracy” is now being attached to any left-leaning group engaged in direct action. The Brennan Center for Justice, analyzing NSPM-7 shortly after its release, concluded that the directive was “ungrounded in fact and law” and that acting on it would threaten “any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.” The 15 Minnesotans charged Tuesday are the latest proof of concept, meant to chill organizing against the federal government across the country.
Minnesota’s labor movement built one of the most robust and celebrated civic responses to a federal enforcement action in recent memory. It developed food distribution networks, stood up a rapid response system, and held a general strike that shut down a major American city for a day in negative-30-degree windchill. That is a real threat to the White House’s authoritarian goals and, seen in that light, the charges, while deplorable, are unsurprising.
Whether the charges survive judicial scrutiny is a separate question. Given the record of the prior prosecutions, there is ample reason for skepticism and a clear need for close scrutiny.
Survival in court may not be the White House’s primary objective. The legal process itself, as these defendants and the Broadview Six before them have learned, is the punishment. Arrests, bail conditions, legal fees and public branding as “antifa”—all of it accrues before a single day of trial, and all of it is meant to deter others from attempting the same resistance.
But there is a high cost to the White House, too. By filing these charges and reopening the wound of Minneapolis, the Justice Department is reminding Americans of the brutality and fascism of this regime at a time when Trump’s popularity is at a nadir. And for a party that has long railed against censorship and thought policing, there is the strong stench of hypocrisy.
As historian Heather Cox Richardson noted in her newsletter, the government’s highlighting of the words “Become Ungovernable” in a Facebook post bears an inconvenient backdrop. “Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 when its theme was ‘Become Ungovernable,’ and stood in front of the banner bearing that slogan,” Richardson observed, “so the idea that the phrase is part of a criminal conspiracy will be awkward to argue.”
The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth proposals to ban social media for younger users.
In late 2025, Australia’s government rolled out the first complete ban on users under 16 from having social media accounts. In this sweeping regime, platforms are required to introduce age assurance tools to block under-16s, demonstrate that they have taken “reasonable steps” to deactivate accounts used by under-16s, and prevent any new accounts being created, or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million USD). The 10 banned platforms—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch, and X—have each said they’ll comply with the legislation, which led to young people losing access to their accounts overnight. Reddit is currently challenging the law in Australian courts on constitutional grounds. Recent research notes how the ban is preventing teenagers from accessing news in the country.
In the United Kingdom, rules took effect in mid-2025 under the Online Safety Act that require all online services available in the country to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children; if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people.
This approach is reckless, short-sighted, and we’ve already seen it introduce more harm to the young people that it is trying to protect. The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn’t one, and we’ve spent years urging UK politicians to abandon any measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities.
Earlier this year, Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Affairs Minister, Meutya Hafid, announced that users under 16 would have their accounts on “high risk” platforms deactivated from 28 March. The platforms subject to this ban are YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox; with Hafid noting how this policy would make Indonesia “the first non-Western country to delay children’s access to digital spaces according to age.”
Similarly, the Malaysian government has recently pushed forward with plans to ban users under 16 from having accounts on social media platforms with at least 8 million users in Malaysia, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Users under the age of 16 are being told to download or transfer their data from these platforms in one month before the restrictions are applied. Platforms failing to comply with the ban may face penalties of up to $2.5 million USD.
In Latin America, Brazilapproved a new law in 2025 establishing that providers of information technology products and services directed to children and teenagers, or likely to be accessed by them, must conduct age checks when their products and services offer risks to underage users. Regulation requires age assurance for products and services that are not allowed for children and adolescents in accordance with Brazilian legislation. App stores and operating systems are required to provide age signals for other providers.
While the law is already in force, full compliance with its obligations is expected for early 2027, after the approval of further regulations and a transition period, and the authority responsible for enforcing the law is the Brazilian National Data Protection Agency. The list of concerns regarding the implementation of the law include: the wide scope of products and services that may fall within age-check obligations, how these obligations can affect non-proprietary operating systems and free software projects, and how effective the law’s crucial data protection safeguards will be in a context of likely widespread age checks for accessing content online.
Similarly, the European Union has taken large steps towards mandatory age verification that could undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for everyone. Politicians are promoting an EU-wide approach to age verification through its age verification “app,” which will be fully interoperable with the Digital Identity Wallet. While this mini-app has been announced as technically ready to be rolled out “for citizens to use,” it comes with its own realm of potential privacy and security concerns, such as long-term identifiers (which could result in tracking) and over-exposure of personal information.
The European Commission also supports age verification in various legislative initiatives, from proposals that would allow or mandate companies to scan our communication (“Chat Control”) to non-binding guidelines of existing laws, such as the Digital Services Act. The EU Parliament, too, has proposed an EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media, a move that aligns with EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s recent public support for measures inspired by Australia’s model. To all these initiatives EFF has provided one consistent response: mandatory age verification measures are not the right way to protect young people.
These proposals restrict the fundamental rights of young people to speak to each other and to access information. They also force all internet users, not just those under a certain age, to upload private data—like a face scan or passport—in order to access a website or service. In considering the vast scope of privacy issues pertaining to the collection, storage, and sharing of this personal information, the problems of age verification in restricting free speech are compounded by these reckless and harmful approaches to verification.
The problem of censorship and surveillance goes far beyond the borders of the internet. EFF continues to explore support for legislative and litigation challenges that recognize how these laws harm everyone’s rights to privacy, free expression and due process.
You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr’s obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it’s quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and fundamental rights, rather than letting MAGA chuds stuff the comment box with nonsense.
Karl and I have detailed much of the history of how we got here. For many years, Carr has presented himself as a true defender of free speech and the First Amendment, but his actions made clear long ago that he only meant when Democrats were in the White House. During the first Trump administration, Trump demanded that his FCC support his plan to wreck Section 230 and enable greater censorship online. When one of the three GOP FCC commissioners — staunch Republican Mike O’Rielly — made a few tepid comments about how the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of messing with 230, Trump pulled his renomination. Carr, however, made it clear he’d be Trump’s little censorial lapdog.
He then spent the four Biden years once again pretending to care about free speech, but the second Trump was elected, Carr made it abundantly clear that if Trump made him chair of the FCC he’d be Trump’s loyal censor in chief. Since then he’s lived up to that promise and more. He’s launched a series of bogus investigations, always into perceived ideological enemies of Trump and MAGA, always pretending that he just has to do this. He held up the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount and CBS until CBS agreed to pay Trump a bribe. And, most famously, he briefly got Jimmy Kimmel kicked off of TV for making a joke that Carr didn’t like.
His latest move, as we’ve covered, was to go after ABC’s The View for having Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on their show. It was yet another in Carr’s long line of bullshit, censorial investigations designed to intimidate broadcasters (but only those he deems too woke — if you’re MAGA, you get a total free pass) into only letting MAGA and MAGA-supportive guests on the air. This time, though, Disney fought back.
Rather than pathetically caving like CBS, Disney filed a petition for declaratory ruling that The View had done nothing wrong in having Talarico on as a guest. They even hired some big time litigators in Paul Clement and Jennifer Tatel to file the petition.
The underlying issue is the “equal time rule,” which was barely discussed for decades. But Carr has glommed onto it as his tool for attacking ABC for not being obsequious enough to Trump. The rule, which only applies to broadcast license holders, says that they have to provide equal time to competing candidates for public office. But there’s a clear exemption for a “bona fide newscast” or a “bona fide news interview.”
All the way back in 2002, the FCC made it clear that The View, and plenty of other shows like it, qualified for the “bona fide news exemption,” and it has been operating accordingly, as have many right-leaning radio and TV programs. Indeed, most local TV station affiliates (which these rules technically apply to) are owned by MAGA friendly media giants like Sinclair and Nexstar. Did Carr go after any of them? Of course not.
Instead, he manufactured a fake controversy. Most broadcaster affiliates (including Disney’s owned and operated affiliates) didn’t bother to file any paperwork regarding Talarico’s appearance because they (like everyone else) had been relying on the FCC’s granted exemption as a bona fide news interview. But Carr then got a few non-Disney owned affiliates (i.e., those owned by Trump-friendly media conglomerates) to file some paperwork in order to pretend that Disney’s owned and operated affiliates were somehow bucking the normal way of operating. As Disney noted in its filing, the whole thing was manufactured by Carr:
“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”
With Disney filing its petition, Carr recognized he basically had to open a public comment period, even though he clearly has no intention of admitting that his entire investigation is bullshit.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. As Karl noted, it’s quite likely that MAGA folks are spinning up their usual fake-comment-orama-generator, which Carr will undoubtedly use to claim there’s widespread public support for him punishing Disney.
But having comments on the record calling out how this is censorial nonsense, a massive abuse of Carr’s power, and blatantly unconstitutional still matter. The record is public, and it will be helpful to make it clear that Carr knows exactly what he’s doing and for whose benefit he’s doing this little charade. MAGA folks won’t be in charge forever, and dismantling the corrupt censorial rot represented by the likes of Brendan Carr needs to start with the basics: getting it on the record that we all know and see what he’s doing.
The first round of comments are due on June 22nd. It’s a simple form and you can just fill it out. Or if you’d prefer, write out a document, save it as a PDF, and attach it via that form as well. Just get it on the record that you don’t support Carr’s censorial retaliation campaign. There will also be a second round of comments due July 6th, but it would be nice to get more people to file in this first round and make it clear that the public knows what Carr is up to.
For what it’s worth, in any such filing, I would recommend making your arguments as clearly and compellingly as possible. I know that sometimes people just file pure angry screeds but those are less effective than a few paragraphs explaining why you don’t support Carr’s censorial campaign and asking the FCC to knock it off.
The US military has engaged in extrajudicial killings via drone strikes since it was first shown this tech could be used to murder people. The War on Terror has given us more than two decades of drone strikes — all of which have used war-related justifications to excuse them without the actual authorization of Congress.
The War Powers Act was written specifically to prevent presidents from doing what they have done pretty much since its passage: engage in foreign military actions without seeking approval from Congress. If we were actually engaged in declared wars, these drone strikes would still be problematic, but possibly supported by law. But since every president has routed around this act, the killings of people in foreign lands and foreign waters looks a lot more like murder than the justifiable defense of the nation against foreign threats.
We’ve moved on from double-tap strikes targeting Yemeni wedding parties to sinking pretty much any non-commercial vessels spotted heading from South America in the general direction of the United States. The administration’s Office of Legal Counsel says this is all very legal, even as it struggles to explain how targeting boats allegedly loaded with drugs is something the military should be handling with deadly force, rather than the way this has been handled for decades: with law enforcement interception of drug traffickers.
This administration doesn’t care. Trump likes seeing stuff get blown up and Defense Department secretary Pete Hegseth likes being crassly violent. What already looked like murder now looks a whole lot like war crimes. The military isn’t content to disable boats containing alleged drug merchants. It keeps firing until boats are sunk, even though it’s legally obligated to rescue people who refused to immediately die after being hit with a drone strike.
We’re now killing nearly a person a day in international waters near South America. And it’s up to journalists to figure out who’s being killed because we certainly can’t trust the government to care enough about the targets of its drone strikes to perform this minor due diligence.
But there are also admissions by government officials that make it clear the boat strikes are wandering past the vaguely-defined limits of the administration’s horrific new twist on the Drug War. In testimony that has yet to officially be made public, a military official admitted one of Trump’s first boat strikes likely killed more crime victims than alleged criminals.
In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”
It’s a good question. But that answer is only surfacing now, despite being given months ago. According to this report by The Intercept, the truth was told by military official in a closed-door meeting with congressional oversight.
During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing.
The government refuses to officially discuss this likely possibility. In the run-up to publication, The Intercept made multiple efforts to obtain comment from Bennett, as well as from the Defense Department itself. These requests were refused.
Meanwhile, the commander who authorized the second strike that killed the survivors of the first strike — Admiral Frank Bradley — continues to claim the US government identified all eleven people aboard the boat before initiating the first strike. But that seems incredibly unlikely, given what’s known about the “intelligence” the DoD relied on to engage in this strike.
JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.
Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”
That’s not acceptable, not when you’re killing people. While it’s impossible to be 100% accurate in all cases, the rule should be to not pull the trigger unless you’re absolutely sure. And since drug interdiction efforts that involve seized and boarded boats are wrong 20% of the time, the standard should be even higher when it involves trying to straight-up kill people. But this is a shoot-first, ask questions never administration. It is an inarguable fact that innocent people are being killed in these boat strikes. And we can be doubly-sure of that because this administration has never expressed any concern whatsoever about collateral damage or shown any restraint when it comes to engaging in extrajudicial killings.
In May, thirteen major publishers won a 
