News

Thursday 2026-06-11

11:00 PM

Brendan Carr Prepares To Make Broadband Shittier, Censored, And More Expensive For U.S. School Kids [Techdirt]

I’ve noted repeatedly how the Trump administration is going out of its way to not only destroy all oversight of the country’s shitty and predatory telecom monopolies, but to eliminate any and all systems that try to ensure that U.S. broadband access is actually affordable. This stuff often runs in parallel to the administration’s brutal attacks on free speech.

For example, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr and Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently joined forces to destroy a bipartisan, popular FCC program that made sure rural school kids could get access to free Wi-Fi. They made up a bunch of bullshit reasons for the attack (falsely claiming these programs were “censoring Conservative viewpoints and content”), but the real reason is big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the government giving people free broadband they might otherwise have to pay for.

Trump cronyism, corruption, censorship, and ideological extremism just keep intermingling in new and creative ways.

Last week Carr announced he’s now taking aim at the broader FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” E-Rate is another historically bipartisan and uncontroversial program that helps bring affordable broadband to rural libraries, schools, and communities. Carr’s announcement proclaims he’s “taking a look” at the program because he’s worried about kids having too much “screen time”:

“Over the last several years—and especially during COVID—many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day. Research has now been pouring in that America’s experiment with heightened screen time in schools may be related to the negative educational outcomes we are now seeing in classrooms across the country—from declining academic performance to diminished reading comprehension skills.”

Obviously, having the guy who illegally censors comedians and journalists at the behest of Donald Trump determining what kids should or shouldn’t be seeing is problematic, though it probably won’t get as much press attention as it should. It’s worth noting that lot of the “harm” science Carr is referencing — and even the term “screen time” — is based on a lot of misleading bullshit.

Other Republicans, like Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn, have also been focusing a lot on sudden concerns about “screen time,” but they’re using the term as a trojan horse to mask other goals — like forcing tech companies or schools to coddle far right wing ideologies. Unfortunately, the corporate U.S. press is too broken to inform people that nothing these folks do is in good faith.

They’re all so pickled in their own propaganda, most Trumpies genuinely believe that existing systems are currently filling kids’ heads with trans rights activism and “wokeness.” But they’re not interested in educational programming or internet access filters that necessarily work and are broadly fair, they’re interested in systems that give right wing ideology an advantage.

The E-Rate program spends about $3 billion a year driving affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. While there is sometimes fraud in programs like this, the vast majority of the time it’s caused by private companies Carr, again, refuses to competently regulate and is afraid to stand up to.

So if you were to seriously reform these programs, you’d start doing audits of major companies like AT&T, who have a long history of defrauding these and other initiatives. Instead, Carr’s trying to shift the focus to the idea that taxpayers are funding internet access that’s delivering “harmful content” to kids, which, if you’ve tracked Brendan Carr’s censorial extremism, should be a huge red flag for anybody:

I suspect there’s several motivations here. One being big telecoms like AT&T that want E-rate revamped in a way that financially benefits them. The other being Carr and the right wing extremist mission to extend their censorship and ideological dominance into every aspect of American life, starting with the classroom, where they’re compelled to root out any and all criticism of right wing ideology.

This is how he framed his new plan for E-Rate reforms on a recent appearance on Fox News:

“There are school districts that have read our law as only requiring them to put Internet safety procedures in place on the devices that the school owns. If you bring your own device to a network supported by this program, you don’t necessarily have any filters on where you can go. Kids are ultimately finding pornography, and that’s a problem.”

To be clear schools already employ filtering systems. Some work, some don’t. The nature of these systems is such that they not only tend to over-filter content, but they’re generally easy to bypass.

Still, it’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content is acceptable, or even to manage kid “screen time” on personally-owned devices. That’s not only an unworkable game of whack-a-mole that would waste a lot of taxpayer money, that’s the precise sort of weird overreach Carr (and Republicans, and “free market” Libertarians) have whined about for as long as I’ve been alive.

When Carr demolished the program that brought free Wi-Fi to school kids, he and Cruz simply made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how the free Wi-Fi systems (and firewall systems) being implemented were “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Feeling emboldened from that weird performance, it’s clear he’s looking to expand his “reform” more broadly to other FCC programs.

If it’s not clear yet, nothing Carr does is in good faith, his government “efficiency reforms” always mask harmful, unpopular ideological extremism or cronyism (sometimes both), and like Trump often does, he’ll exploit our shitty press to drive a news cycle about “screen time” that will downplay or ignore all of Carr’s actual goals.

05:00 PM

Court Holds New York IPTV Box Seller Liable, Millions of Damages at Stake [TorrentFreak]

TVsIn December 2023, DISH Network filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in New York targeting the pirate IPTV service Glo TV, along with an alleged reseller known as Massive Wireless.

This reseller is a brick-and-mortar electronics store operated by Khaled Akhtar in Jackson Heights, Queens. According to DISH, this store was used to sell “Glo TV”/”Rays IPTV” pirate IPTV services.

This accusation was backed up with hard evidence, as DISH used a private investigator to buy a pirate IPTV box in the store. The owner of the small store purchased these boxes in bulk from co-defendant Mumtazur Rehman Daud, who is the CEO of the California-based Rays IPTV LLC.

Massive Wireless Store (Google Maps)

massive wireless

In the grander scheme, Massive Wireless is a small player. The store is just one of many resellers in the broader pirate IPTV ecosystem. Where wholesalers can earn millions of dollars and the top players even more, the store’s owner said that he only made $5,000 in gross proceeds from selling the boxes.

These relatively modest proceeds pale in comparison to the $25 million in statutory damages that’s at stake in this case.

Summary Judgment & Destroyed Boxes

While the story may just be a smaller player, DISH was determined to send a message. Last year the company moved for summary judgment against Massive Wireless and its owner Khaled Akhtar, asking the court to find them liable for willful contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

This request was granted this week. In an order handed down on June 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted DISH partial summary judgment.

In her order, U.S. District Court Judge Orelia Merchant noted that, by selling the pirate IPTV boxes, the store and its owner materially contributed to the copyright infringements of others.

“Massive Wireless admits that it, with the purpose of enabling customer access to the Service, sold set-top boxes preloaded with the Service and with a one-year subscription to the Service.”

“Akhtar and Massive Wireless provided the mechanisms for Service Users to access and view the Works and therefore materially contributed to the infringing activity,” Judge Merchant adds.

A separate permanent injunction, signed the same day, orders Massive Wireless and its owner to stop their infringing activities and to destroy any infringing hardware that is still in their possession.

Destroy

destroy

Notably, the injunction also requires the defendant to file a report under oath, detailing which IPTV devices were destroyed and how.

The Failed Supplier Defense

Massive Wireless and Akhtar did not lodge a detailed defense in response to DISH’s motion. Their opposition consisted of a three-page affidavit from Akhtar, which, as DISH pointed out, did not contest the legal arguments.

Instead, Akhtar’s affidavit pointed to the wholesaler who, like himself, speaks Bengali. He said that after receiving a warning letter from DISH, Daud told him it was a “scam” and that there was “nothing to worry about and to continue selling the boxes.”

Scam artist (from the affidavit)

scam

DISH cited the same cease-and-desist notices as evidence to show that the store continued its infringing activity.

In the order, Judge Merchant noted that Akhtar’s claim that he was misled by his supplier was legally irrelevant. Vicarious liability is a strict liability doctrine that does not require the defendant to have knowledge of the infringement.

For the contributory infringement claim, the court found that Akhtar’s attempt to ignore six cease-and-desist letters constituted willful blindness, which legally satisfies the knowledge requirement.

“Regardless of whether Daud informed Akhtar that he did not need to worry about the cease-and-desist letters, willful blindness or objective knowledge is sufficient to show knowledge of infringement,” Judge Merchant wrote.

Where Are the Damages?

Unlike Massive Wireless and its owner, wholesaler Daud and his company Rays IPTV did not show up in court. They previously defaulted and will be targeted with a default judgment later.

In a footnote, the court explained that DISH is holding its damages claim back. The willfulness finding against Massive Wireless and Akhtar will be folded into a later motion for default judgment against Daud and Rays IPTV, which aims to hold defendants jointly and severally liable for willful infringement of 170 registered works.

At the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, 170 works can lead up to $25.5 million in damages. According to DISH, these works are just a fraction of the total infringements, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the court will approve it in full.

What DISH’s exact demand is has yet to be seen. The same applies to a request for attorneys’ fees and costs, which the Queens-based store will face later this summer.

—

The summary judgment order, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is available here (pdf) and the permanent injunction here (pdf).

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

02:00 PM

RFK Jr. Talks About How Great A Job He’s Doing Managing The Measles Outbreak [Techdirt]

Cases of measles in American continue to rise. As of June 5th of this year, the official case count in the country stood at 2,030 confirmed cases. In 2025’s record breaking year for measles cases, the most we’d had in 3 decades, there were 2,288 confirmed cases. We’re going to speed right past that number in 2026, given that we’re nearly there already and we’re only half way through the year.

It was just weeks ago in April when RFK Jr. decided to wash his hands of the measles problem, literally saying it has nothing to do with him and was instead the fault of dirty immigrants invading our country.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

This anti-immigrant trope when it comes to disease is as old as time, of course, and plainly stupid. But because the measles outbreak isn’t going to go away on its own, Kennedy had to address it recently during a trip to Virginia, where measles is becoming a growing problem. And in addressing it, Kennedy managed to pack more wrong into two sentences than I’ve ever seen before.

“There’s a global measles epidemic right now, we’ve done better than any country in the world in controlling it,” Kennedy said. “At [the] CDC we encourage people to get their measles vaccination, that’s the best way to prevent yourself from getting measles.”

Stating that there is a global measles epidemic is a sneaky statement to make for a number of reasons. First, I’ll note that there is no definition of terms that comes along with the claim. Second, much of the global data on this comes from the WHO, which, to date, has published global case counts only up to 2024 on its main tracking page, though it does have some surveillance data that goes up to the current month. And that data suggests that there is an uptick of global measles cases, to be sure, but nothing like there was only a few decades ago. In 2024, for instance, the WHO counted roughly 700k global cases of measles, compared with 1.5 million cases in 1993.

But regardless of how true it is that this is a global problem, it doesn’t matter. Kennedy’s job is to keep Americans safe from disease, not the world. Hand-waving away our own measles problem by globalizing it is a non-sequitur. And claiming that America is doing better than any other country on the measles problem is so wrong as to be laughable. The WHO has a handy presentation on the current measles problem and you can see that we aren’t even handling it the best in our own region.

That chart pretty clearly shows that Brazil and Canada are both doing a far better job than us in keeping measles cases low and combating outbreaks, if nothing else. Canada has a much lower total population compared with America, but Brazil is much closer. Besides, as we stated before, Kennedy has already said that the measles outbreak has nothing to do with him. So why is he now taking credit for how great we’re doing combating it, even though we’re not. By the way, the entire European region is kicking the America region’s ass when it comes to combating measles currently.

And I don’t even know how much I have to say about Kennedy’s baffling claim that he and the CDC are huge advocates for getting vaccinated to prevent measles. As I’ve stated repeatedly, one of the tricks Kennedy pulls is to say all kinds of things about the same subject. On measles, he has said, begrudgingly, that people should get vaccinated. He’s also said it would be better for everyone to just get measles for natural immunity, not to mention that he’s attempted to blame the infected for getting the disease as well.

Telling the public to get vaccinated, but also to not get vaccinated, and that it’s their fault if they catch measles, does not distill to something so simple as “we encourage everyone to get vaccinated.”

Kennedy is a liar and a charlatan. As is common with a person like that, he’s all over the place with his public comments when it comes to the measles and what we, and he, should be doing about it. He thinks that allows him to pretend like he’s been very pro-vaccination. It doesn’t.

Remove this man from his post before he gets more people killed.

11:00 AM

10:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 世 [Kanji of the Day]

世

✍5

小3

generation, world, society, public

セイ　セ　ソウ

よ

世界   (せかい)   —   the world
世代   (せだい)   —   generation
世紀   (せいき)   —   century
世帯   (しょたい)   —   household
世の中   (よのなか)   —   society
世界選手権   (せかいせんしゅけん)   —   world championship
世界的   (せかいてき)   —   worldwide
世界観   (せかいかん)   —   world view
世界中   (せかいじゅう)   —   around the world
世論調査   (せろんちょうさ)   —   public opinion poll

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 諾 [Kanji of the Day]

諾

✍15

中学

consent, assent, agreement

ダク

承諾   (しょうだく)   —   consent
受諾   (じゅだく)   —   acceptance
快諾   (かいだく)   —   ready consent
許諾   (きょだく)   —   consent
応諾   (おうだく)   —   consent
諾否   (だくひ)   —   consent or refusal
承諾書   (しょうだくしょ)   —   letter of acceptance
内諾   (ないだく)   —   informal consent
指名受諾演説   (しめいじゅだくえんぜつ)   —   acceptance speech
許諾契約   (きょだくけいやく)   —   license agreement

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

09:00 AM

California’s AB 412 Still Demands AI Developers Do The Impossible [Techdirt]

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained. 

EFF submitted an opposition letter to the California Senate Privacy Committee explaining why we continue to believe A.B. 412 is simply unworkable. To the extent developers do follow this law, it will have the effect of locking in the power of the largest companies in AI. 

A Burden That Can’t Be Met

A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

The bill effectively asks developers to continuously cross-reference massive batches of online data against a copyright system that simply wasn’t designed to do so. If California passes A.B. 412, its impact will go far beyond the large AI companies we read about in the headlines. 

Not Just Big Tech

Supporters often frame this bill as a way to help creative workers have some leverage against Big Tech, but the bill reaches much further than the big AI companies. 

Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians. That includes indie developers tinkering with an existing model, open-source initiatives, nonprofits, and other non-commercial efforts. Recent amendments added exemptions for universities and government entities, which is important, but that still leaves out a vast swathe of non-commercial tech work that’s done by people without full-time jobs in government or academia. 

Large companies will hire compliance teams and lawyers to navigate these requirements. Smaller organizations and independent developers usually can’t. The result will be fewer opportunities for startups and new entrants. Faced with this massive compliance burden, some won’t even try. 

Courts Are Already Deciding These Questions

The bill is premised on the idea that copyright owners currently don’t have good remedies if they’re mistreated by AI companies. That simply isn’t true. And the growing wave of federal court filings in this space proves it. Content companies that want to sue tech companies, large or small, have no problem doing so. Those courts are still working through important questions about fair use and transformative use. Some courts have already concluded that many AI training activities qualify as fair use. Others continue to evaluate the issue.

California lawmakers should not rush to impose new state regulation while those questions remain unresolved. This is why copyright is governed at the federal level: both creators and fair users benefit from a single set of nationwide rules. 

At this point, the bill remains a solution in search of a problem. Rights holders already have powerful tools to protect their interests under existing federal law. What this bill adds isn’t clarity or transparency, but a costly and essentially impossible compliance burden that will discourage small developers and researchers. 

California has been able to support both artistic creativity and tech innovation for decades now.  But A.B. 412 does not strike the right balance. 

If you are a California resident and interested in speaking out about this bill, you can find and contact your representatives through this website. 

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

07:00 AM

LAPD Apparently Has Its Own Internal Cop Gang Problem [Techdirt]

The more things change, the more they remain the same. That could be said of anywhere in this country, now that the Trump administration is trying to turn the clock back to 1940, if not 1840.

But it’s especially true in Los Angeles, where law enforcement agencies have apparently learned nothing, despite being the ignition source of two riots. The 1965 Watts riot was provoked by racist, abusive actions of the LAPD. The 1992 riots were similarly provoked by the racist, abusive actions of the LAPD.

Before, between, and after, Los Angeles law enforcement agencies haven’t done much to improve. When not actively thwarting federal investigations and running illegal jailhouse informant programs, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has hosted any number of “gangs” composed of officers who are more willing than others to engage in violence and rights violations.

The LASD’s gangs have made headlines for most of the last decade, including stuff that would otherwise seem to be the broadest of satires:

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Allegedly Removed ‘Unauthorized” Sheriff’s Gang Tattoo With A Bullet

It’s admittedly hilarious, but only in the darkest sense. While absolutely absurd, it also indicates that LASD officers (especially those who are in LASD gangs) feel the solution to every problem — including tattoo removal — is to start blasting.

A handful of people who’ve run on “reformer” platforms have either failed to be elected, or have been elected only to renege on their reformation promises.

The LAPD covers less area and has fewer officers than the Sheriff’s Department. But it still has nearly 9,000 officers, which is only about a grand short of the LASD total (10,000 officers). If nothing else, basic mathematics would strongly suggest the LAPD would be just as receptive to internal gangs as the Sheriff’s Department.

The LAPD internal investigation leveled a troubling allegation: Officers in a specialized unit tasked with combating street gangs had themselves behaved like a gang.

In 2023, officers in the San Fernando Valley were accused of making dozens of improper traffic stops and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body cameras.

When confronted by Internal Affairs detectives, according to the findings of a months-long probe, officers in the Valley’s “gang enforcement detail” said they were engaged in a “gun hunting competition,” with each firearm-related arrest tracked on a whiteboard in their office. Cops with the most seizures would pose for pictures with pro-wrestling-style championship belt that had “Mission GED Pistoleros” emblazoned on the buckle.

And so it is. While this opening salvo of paragraphs merely suggest some members of the LAPD were more prone to doing bad stuff than others, the Internal Affairs report makes it more explicit.

The report said the Valley unit was a “law enforcement gang.”

That report was buried by the LAPD for almost three years. But that burial proved temporary. The report — which had previously only been seen by LAPD officials and some city lawmakers — prompted further inquiries. And those further inquiries generated answers that raised even more questions:

LAPD leaders said at the time that the problems were confined to that one division. But a new case involving similar allegations against anti-gang officers operating out of South L.A.’s 77th Street patrol area has reignited questions about whether there are deeper issues across the department.

Oh, the fucking irony. An anti-gang squad that behaves like a gang. Wow, imagine if we’d ever seen this anywhere else multiple times. I mean, say the first thing that comes to mind when I say “rampart.”

It’s tempting to simply say that no one cares. But I don’t think that’s true. I do think a lot of people care, including LA lawmakers who want to see real reform. The problem is that the people with the most power don’t care. That not only includes law enforcement unions, law enforcement officials, elected officials (including sheriffs), but also the handful of lawmakers who actually think law enforcement officers should be allowed to violate rights while performing their duties.

That’s the headwind reform efforts face. While thousands (or millions, in this case) may recognize the problem and want reform, it only takes a handful of powerful people to prevent their voices from being heard. And while it’s easy to tell people to vote their way back into power, we only need to look to the White House to see how facile and futile the “vote the bastards out” suggestion is. It’s something that should have been addressed years ago, because if you give the bastards an inch, they’ll entrench a mile. If Los Angeles is going to fix this, it will require the concerted efforts of people who are more motivated to protect their paychecks than serve the public. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

05:00 AM

Beneath The Enshittification, Something Amazing Is Growing [Techdirt]

Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put there by companies seeking to extract more and more from you. It’s a great read and here’s just a snippet:

The internet you grew up on is not gone.

Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends.

The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

It was not demolished.

It was buried under a louder layer for a while.

Go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it. This is why I wrote Protocols, Not Platforms, it’s why I’ve been so focused for years on helping more people understand the inherent power of distributing technological power.

But, as Godier’s piece notes, protocols are… boring. They change slowly (for a good reason, because you need stability to build on). They tend to change by consensus, which is messy. And rather than having billion dollar companies throwing a whole massive engineering team at making everything work, in the protocol world, we rely on constant experimentation by anyone who wants to experiment.

Sometimes that produces silly things. Sometimes it produces things that only kinda work. And sometimes, it produces wonderful new things that would never have existed in a world of fully centralized services.

But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future. The important thing for people to understand, though, is that while the amazing new breakthroughs in the protocol world may not get giant headlines in the NY Times or flashy stories about trillion dollar IPOs, they are building real things for real people, in which the people are the most important part, rather than the bankers or the billionaire execs looking to get richer.

So I was excited recently to take part as a juror for the Open Social Awards, put on by New_Public and Public Spaces, reviewing a wide range of projects looking to build on open social protocols (mostly ATproto and ActivityPub). The energy among developers right now for what they can do on open social systems is real, and it’s building fast. Tim Trautmann recently wrote about this, saying “the nerds are building a new internet.” As he wrote:

The open web of the nineties didn’t win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it. Slowly, unglamorously, in rooms that looked a lot like this one.

Whether atproto ends up being the thing, or a stepping stone to the thing, I don’t know. Nobody in the room claimed to know. But the work is real, the apps are shipping, and the people building them are taking it seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination is rare, and historically, it’s the one that wins.

You can see that kind of excitement as well in this recent video of a bunch of developers doing an ATproto hackathon, where you see people realizing in real time how powerful ATproto is in allowing you to build a better internet:

It’s so easy these days to get down on the state of the larger internet, increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies trying to extract more and more from you. But if you look beneath all of that, genuinely interesting, important things are being built, some of which was celebrated at the Open Social Awards last week.

The grand prize winner was the Newsmast Foundation, which has been helping mission-driven organizations build their own social spaces online, using ActivityPub. They’ve been building some amazing community apps for news organizations, non-profits, and more. Enabling those organizations to have their own social spaces, but built on top of an open protocol.

The two “Excellence Award” winners were equally strong — there was a real argument that either of them could have taken the grand prize. First there’s Blacksky Algorithms, which has built out an entirely separate and differentiated ATproto experience, where thousands of users can have a social media experience interoperable with Bluesky and others on the network, but without ever touching Bluesky hardware or software. The company keeps doing really fascinating things as well, including its use of pol.is for community decision-making, and offering up its ability to build entirely independent ATproto powered communities to others via Acorn.

And there’s one of my personal favorites, Sill, which is a wonderful cross-protocol newsreader app. You login with your Atmosphere (ATproto) handle and/or your ActivityPub handle, and it will find the news that is being discussed among your followers and format it in a nice digest format. I use it as a daily review of what’s happening in the world that’s interesting to me.

And then all of the “honorable mentions” were doing interesting things as well, figuring out ways to make open social more useful: Bounce (a tool for migrating between AcitivtyPub and ATproto while bringing your community with you, from the team who also does BridgyFed, a tool for communicating across protocols). Dandelion, an events platform built on ATproto. Streamplace, which does video streaming on ATproto. Leaflet, which has become one of the go to places for long form blogging within the ATproto world, and Bonfire Networks, which is also working on helping communities build their own communities online.

There were many other entries as well, and the energy developers are bringing to open social projects right now is genuinely contagious. People are learning that they can just build stuff, and specifically the kind of stuff that you had to rely on the goodwill (or perhaps commercial agreements) of a large company to build.

Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.

We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future.

In the meantime, congrats to the winners (and all the entrants) of the first ever Open Social Awards.

04:00 AM

Daily Deal: The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle featuring Databricks [Techdirt]

The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations. The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering and analytics workflows. The content is on-demand, self-paced and designed to be revisited as learners build proficiency over time. It’s on sale for $35.

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

ICE Wants To Hand Out Its Unproven Facial Recognition Tech To Thousands Of Cops [Techdirt]

The Trump administration has thrown billions at purging non-white people from this country. Most of that has ended up in the hands of ICE, which has — in turn — thrown hundreds of millions at a number of private companies offering bespoke and/or off-the-shelf surveillance solutions.

The slide down the slippery slope began less than six months after Trump took office in 2025, with the DHS repurposing tech used at border crossings for deployment as far inland as ICE, CBP, etc. were willing to travel. The facial recognition app of choice is “Mobile Fortify,” which ties into the DHS’s pre-existing databases and makes use of any number of third-party facial recognition products. (Which may include the much-reviled Clearview AI, yet another company being paid millions to provide the government with questionable tech predicated on even more questionable business ethics.)

As has almost always been the case with the DHS, the tech was primed, pumped, and deployed without proper testing or legally required privacy impact assessments (PIA) in place. And it was in such a hurry to spread its surveillance tech throughout the nation that it willingly deployed a product that not only couldn’t reliably do the one thing it was asked to do — verify identities — but was only able to be deployed by unilaterally stripping away Congressional limits placed on government use of facial recognition tech.

We’re still waiting on PIAs for Mobile Fortify to arrive and we certainly don’t expect them anytime soon. We also haven’t seen the DHS even pretend to address the app’s major flaws. One would think an app that’s still half-broken would have an extremely short lifespan. But this administration doesn’t care whether or not it works well. It’s only interested in subjecting as many people as possible to it.

Apparently, it’s not enough that thousands of federal agents have access to this app. As Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media, ICE wants to make things exponentially worse by giving it to pretty much any cop who wants to give it a whirl.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone’s immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

Regular cops will be given access to “Task Force Module,” which will use the underlying tech (and database access) found in the ICE app. Apparently the only difference is that TFM will provide text prompts to cops once the app has finished (mis)identifying someone.

When an officer scans someone’s face, the app will run their face against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records, and then provide instructions to the officer. Either “not detain or arrest under ICE jurisdiction,” or the app will provide a reference code the officer can use to get additional information from ICE.

The document readily admits that DHS expects this app to be used on US citizens. After all, how else can you verify their citizenship? I mean other than the documents people normally carry on them, like ID cards. Or the fact that people not crossing US borders aren’t legally obligated to prove they’re citizens to federal officers just because they’ve decided to spend more time far away from the nation’s borders. This app is a perversion of the American way — a point-and-shoot “papers please” by proxy that allows officers to, in essence, demand production of documents they’re not entitled to ask for.

If ICE, etc. actually cared enough to do their job right, an app like this wouldn’t be necessary. It should have stayed at the border where the government has the right to demand proof of citizenship. Now, this surveillance kudzu will become another toy for cops who are similarly uninterested in respecting rights and equally willing to treat everyone like a suspect because it’s easier than actually doing the legwork.

“Papers please” everywhere all the time is disturbing enough. But giving officers another surveillance toy that’s flawed and deployed without absolutely zero oversight is just going to deliver new horror stories of surveillance abuse by powerful government employees who know no one above them cares what happens to those the government turns its cameras on. Cops and federal agents alike are going to use the tech to stalk and harass protesters, critics, and anyone else they might want to fuck with. And all in service of a bigoted push to rid the nation of people who actually make it great.

03:00 AM

Video games, movies and books [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:

Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.

Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.

And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.

[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]

I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.

We get to choose.

      

The GOP and the Unfalsifiable Claim [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of CNN

On Monday, I wrote about Trump’s plan to use the “red mirage” of California's slow vote count to claim the results are fraudulent. Yesterday, the GOP leadership revealed how it will help him shape the false narrative that the midterm elections are somehow rigged in favor of the Democrats.

How they’ll prove that without actual evidence has always been a bit of a mystery. But no longer.

House Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN Monday afternoon to echo the president’s claims. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju pressed him on whether he had actual evidence that the California election had been rigged, Johnson’s answer was both candid and alarming. “I don’t,” he admitted. “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”

Vice President JD Vance joined the chorus on Jesse Watters’s Fox News program, calling the results “pretty shady” and suggesting that mail-in ballots ought to rank candidates in the same order as election-night totals. That’s a standard with no basis in how elections actually work, in California or anywhere else.

The outrage masks one inconvenient detail. The same “rigged” California system had somehow allowed Trump-endorsed Republican Steve Hilton to advance to the general election in the governor’s race. For a conspiracy apparently so diabolical it defies detection, it had a curious blind spot.

The GOP’s new argument is that the mere suspicion of fraud, unmoored from any evidence, is enough to delegitimize results Republicans don’t like. It is a position that is both remarkable and dangerous. It is also, to students of American history, disturbingly familiar.

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The “Invisible Deadline for Sabotage”

History may not repeat itself, but its lyrics often rhyme. I composed the score to the Broadway show Allegiance, set during the Japanese American internment. So when I heard Johnson utter those words, they stopped me cold.

In 1942, Earl Warren (yes, that Earl Warren, who later became a liberal Chief Justice) was California’s ambitious attorney general. He was calculating, with a keen instinct for which way the political winds were blowing. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, as fear of a Japanese invasion swept the West Coast, Warren appeared before Congress to make the case for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes, their farms and their communities.

His argument was not that Japanese Americans had committed acts of sabotage or espionage. In fact, he admitted none had been reported. Instead, he turned that absence of evidence into evidence itself. He infamously claimed that the absence of reported sabotage or espionage was itself proof that something terrible was coming.

Historian Roger Daniels later gave this reasoning its epitaph: the “Invisible Deadline for Sabotage” theory. Warren had constructed an argument that could never be disproved. in Warren’s twisted logic, no evidence of wrongdoing only meant the wrongdoing was being carefully concealed, waiting to strike.

More than 120,000 innocent people were uprooted from their lives, in part because of that tortured reasoning.

Speaker Johnson invoked a kind of “Invisible Sabotage” himself on Monday: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove.” Replace “these efforts” with “their sabotage,” and Warren could have said it in 1942. As with Warren, Johnson’s accusation is evidence-proof by design. He presents the lack of evidence not as a weakness in his claim, but as a sign of the enemy’s sophistication.

Warren later expressed deep regret for his role in the internment, calling it one of the great mistakes of his life. That regret came too late for the tens of thousands of people who lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases, their lives.

Beware the unfalsifiable claim

There’s a name for the kind of argument made then by Warren and now by Speaker Johnson: the unfalsifiable claim. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that for any assertion to qualify as a genuine factual claim, it must be possible, at least in principle, to prove it wrong. A claim that cannot be disproved by any conceivable evidence is a trap dressed up as a factual assertion.

Johnson’s formulation is exactly that trap. If evidence of fraud emerges, that proves the fraud. If no evidence of fraud emerges, that proves the fraud is too sophisticated to detect. It’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” There is no result, no audit, no court finding, no canvass outcome that could ever satisfy this standard because the standard was never designed to be satisfied. It was designed to be repeated.

Speaker Johnson wasn’t alone in this effort, which suggests the line is now a GOP messaging point. The No. 2 Republican in the House, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), took us one step further toward the cliff, dropping even the pretense that any factual claim, much less proof, is required. “Whether you can prove fraud or not,” he said, “it does undermine integrity in the vote.”

Note what Scalise is actually saying. He’s arguing that the very suspicion of fraud—invented and stoked by the GOP itself, evidence-free, conjured from nothing more than a losing result—is enough to corrode faith in an entire election. “The vote count felt off to us, so it’s your fault that we’re ready to discard the results!” is quite the position.

Then there’s Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. When a NewsNation host pressed him on why no evidence of large-scale fraud had ever materialized, Johnson had a ready answer: “I mean, people do things to cover it up.” Johnson, in other words, attributes the absence of evidence to a massive cover-up.

That is standard operating procedure from the Trump White House: accuse the other side of precisely what you are doing, in this case, a cover up of a huge crime. In the Epstein files case, there is plenty of evidence of that cover up, whereas here there remains exactly none.

Johnson might have gotten away with the “cover up” framing had he not been caught on hidden camera in 2021 stating plainly that the 2020 election was not stolen and that Trump had lost. He knows the argument is false but is making it anyway.

No, vibes aren’t admissible evidence

There is a reason Trump’s legal team lost more than 60 post-2020 election lawsuits before judges from both parties, including many Trump appointed. Courts of law operate on evidence. Vibes, instincts and faith-based assertions are not cognizable legal theories. Judges know precisely what to do with claims that lack admissible evidence: dismiss them.

The post-2020 litigation is instructive. In case after case, Trump attorneys who had spent weeks on television claiming massive, coordinated fraud walked into courtrooms and conceded they were making no such allegations. The reason was simple: making a fraudulent claim to a court carries immediate consequences that making one on social media or television does not.

Speaker Johnson, Rep. Scalise and Sen. Johnson know this. But their arguments were never designed for a courtroom. The unfalsifiable claim is a political instrument built for feeds, rallies and the grievance ecosystem, where evidence is beside the point, blind faith is a test of loyalty, and unfounded suspicions are self-sustaining.

These claims worked well enough in 2020 to send a mob into the Capitol. With five months remaining before the midterms, it is being road-tested again.

Wednesday 2026-06-10

11:00 PM

Paskoocheh: When you need a tool to reach the tool [Tor Project blog]

++ This guest post is part of a spotlight series on the organizations defending the free Internet.++

Due to heavy information controls, people in Iran face significant barriers to accessing the Internet. Authorities have actively blocked numerous websites and apps, including conventional circumvention and digital security tools such as VPNs, social media platforms, and the app stores themselves. This creates a "chicken-and-egg" problem: users need a VPN to download a VPN.

Launched in 2016, Paskoocheh, Persian for "alleyway," is an open source alternative app store, community hub, and one-stop-shop for users to access information and tools to circumvent censorship, enhance their privacy, securely communicate, and express themselves freely online. Developed and maintained by ASL19, a technology and exiled media organization named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Paskoocheh restores access and allows people to reach trusted tools through four censorship-resilient channels: the Paskoocheh website, Android App, Email bot, and Telegram bot. 

Users are also able to reach our Persian-speaking support team through the Paskoocheh Helpdesk, which handles over 200 tickets daily. In addition, ASL19 translates and publishes accessible user guides, blog posts, and multimedia content to help users navigate online privacy and digital security best practices.

Paskoocheh serves as more than an alternative app store; it is also a bridge between tool developers and in-country users. Our support team relays user feedback to tool developers, helping improve tools and overall experience in Iran. We also conduct in-country testing with developers and user communities to evaluate new features and strengthen censorship-resilient technologies.

Paskoocheh's impact so far

This combination of access, user support, and education has turned Paskoocheh into a critical lifeline for users in Iran.

  • # of tool downloads since 2016:  17,634,852 

  • # of community members in Iran supporting testing and localization efforts: 2,000+

  • # of monthly active users on web and app: ~200K

During periods of internet disruption and nationwide protests in Iran, these tools became critical communication lifelines. One longtime user wrote to us: 

"I've been using this free app for several years now. It's free, unique, and unlike others, it has no equal." Reflecting on the broader digital environment in the country, they added that "in these difficult economic conditions, people are struggling just to survive, while many apps either empty people's pockets, deceive and lie to them, or serve as tools for spying and propaganda."

Messages like these highlight the importance of privacy-preserving technologies in environments where surveillance, censorship, and disinformation shape everyday life online. In moments of crisis, internet freedom tools become part of how people maintain relationships, exchange trusted information, and stay connected to the outside world. For some users, these tools also made it possible to continue reporting on events on the ground, verify information during periods of state-backed disinformation, and safely communicate evidence of abuses despite widespread surveillance and connectivity disruptions.

The future of Paskoocheh: Scaling a community-first approach to internet freedom

As internet censorship tactics evolve rapidly, internet shutdowns are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, cutting communities off from information, communication, and one another. 

What we have learned through this work is that access alone is not enough. Technology is only useful if people trust it, understand how to use it safely, and can rely on support networks when digital spaces become unstable or dangerous.

That is why our work extends beyond technical development. Alongside building secure access technologies, ASL19 invests heavily in user education, digital security guidance, and community capacity building. Every support ticket answered, training delivered, and piece of digital safety guidance shared helps people stay connected under pressure. 

This human-centered approach is becoming increasingly important as authoritarian tactics evolve globally. During internet shutdowns and heightened censorship, local helper communities often become the first line of assistance for journalists, activists, students, and ordinary citizens. 

With additional support, ASL19 aims to continue expanding Paskoocheh beyond its current capacity into a broader resilience ecosystem that combines technical innovation with stronger on-the-ground support systems. This includes improving access to trusted circumvention and privacy tools during shutdowns, expanding multilingual user support and educational resources, and deepening collaboration with communities operating under digital authoritarianism. 

This work is not solely about technology products. At a moment when most people's understanding of the internet is shaped by the little squares in their pockets, it is important to acknowledge and support the broader ecosystems that make access possible. Civil society, independent media, and grassroots communities all play a part in helping people survive under pressure. This is why partnerships within the internet freedom ecosystem matter. Living under digital authoritarianism means that these are not abstract protections against hypothetical risks, but practical tools that make journalism, organizing, education, and communication possible in the first place. 

About ASL19

Named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ASL19 is a technology and exiled media organization working to counter digital authoritarianism. For more than a decade, we have partnered with civil society groups, journalists, researchers, activists, and internet users living under some of the world's most restrictive online environments. Guided by the belief that privacy and internet freedom are essential to safe communication, access to information, and civic participation, ASL19 develops technologies and support systems that help people navigate censorship, surveillance, internet shutdowns, and information manipulation. In countries such as Iran, Russia, and China, these tools serve as critical lifelines, enabling people to communicate securely, access information, document human rights abuses, and stay connected to the outside world.

Supreme Court Surprisingly Backs FCC Effort To Punish AT&T, Verizon For Spying On Public Location Data [Techdirt]

On one hand, the Trump administration wants to destroy most corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and regulatory autonomy. On the other hand, the administration very much wants to abuse government power and wield regulatory oversight in all sorts of terrible ways that censor speech, stifle journalism, and enable corrupt cronyism.

I’ve long noted how FCC boss Brendan Carr in particular personifies this inconsistency. He wants to abuse FCC authority to bully companies he doesn’t regulate (TikTok) and stifle journalistic criticism of the president (ABC, CBS), but he also routinely wants to try and claim that his agency lacks the authority to do anything to protect consumers or hold telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior.

Those inconsistencies came to a head last week when the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the Biden FCC’s attempt to fine AT&T and Verizon for spying on customer location data, selling access to that data to any random old nitwit, and failing to tell their paying customers about it.

A 2018 New York Times story showcased how stalkers, police, people pretending to be police, and the prison system routinely bought access to this data and then failed completely to secure it. Six years later the Biden FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon) for the abuses.

But the efforts were upended by a 5th Circuit ruling last year declaring that the FCC fines somehow violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial (one of several arguments AT&T and Verizon lawyers through at a wall to see what would stick). The 5th circuit had been supportive of a broader Trump administration second term initiative to basically defang the entirety of regulatory corporate oversight.

The wireless carriers’ case leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which declared that the SEC system for issuing fines violated the right to a jury trial. Verizon and AT&T lawyers insisted that they couldn’t be fined by the FCC for privacy violations, because it violated their Seventh Amendment rights.

So the Trump-stocked Supreme Court had a tricky choice. Do they support the administration’s effort to defang and neuter corporate oversight? Or do they protect their ambition to wield regulatory agencies as a blunt weapon? The Supreme Court decided to go with the latter, though the ruling shouldn’t be construed as any sort of good faith protection of consumer privacy rights or the public interest.

Only Clarence Thomas decided to buy into the telecom industry’s flimsy arguments.

“The Supreme Court got this one right,” John Bergmayer, Legal Director at consumer group Public Knowledge said in a statement. “AT&T and Verizon sold access to their customers’ location data, then failed to stop bounty hunters and even a rogue sheriff from using it to track people who had no idea they were being followed. The FCC investigated, found the carriers liable, and proposed penalties—which the carriers were always free to challenge in court.”

It’s a useful win, but it bucks the broader Trump court trend of declaring most regulatory agencies largely powerless to hold corporate power accountable across a wide variety of industries. And even here you’ll notice the FCC fines came six years after the initial revelations of wireless carrier misbehavior. They never would have come at all if not for the Biden FCC.

It may likely be years more before fines are collected (assuming Carr bothers), and they’ll still likely only comprise a fraction of the money made on the back of abusing consumer privacy. But in the golden age of corruption and incoherent Trump court rulings, you take whatever victories you can get.

05:00 PM

02:00 PM

Trump Attempts To EO America Into Mimicking Denmark’s Vaccination Schedules [Techdirt]

Back in January of this year, RFK Jr. clearly strong armed the CDC into changing the childhood vaccination schedules in America to mimic those of Denmark. The public messaging was crafted to sound as reasonable as possible and amounted to a claim that America was going to revise vaccination schedules to match those of another successful, industrialized, peer country. There were a couple of problems with the move.

For starters, Kennedy did his usual move of trying to make this change completely outside of the normal process for such things. There was no indication that any of this was done at the behest of his reformed ACIP panel. It didn’t go through the normal scientific checks and balances. And even if it had, the courts later put a stay on all such changes, because Kennedy didn’t follow the American Procedure Act in either those revised schedules or even the formation of ACIP itself. The Trump administration has appealed that decision.

The other main issue with the change was the obvious one: America is not Denmark. Calling Denmark a peer nation to America is laughable for many reasons. As one Danish official pointed out at the time: Denmark has a homogeneous population, universal free healthcare, lower serious outcomes from infectious diseases that they don’t vaccinate for, and a population that actually largely trusts government institutions. America doesn’t have any of that, in large part because the party of Trump doesn’t want us to have it.

Donald Trump doesn’t know how to take an “L”, though, so of course he simply picked up a pen recently and is attempting to executive order his way to trying to change those same vaccination schedules.

While the federal government is appealing that injunction, the new executive order on Friday reaffirms Kennedy’s plans to adopt Denmark’s strategy, calling for “realigning” US vaccine policy with “best practices from peer, developed countries.”It states that the scientific assessment written by Høeg and Kulldorff is a “guiding resource for the Federal Government” and that the CDC shall ” take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule.”

As before, the AMA is strongly against the unilateral change made without backing from scientific evidence.

“Altering [the vaccine schedule] without clear, evidence-based justification risks continued confusion for parents and patients, undermining trust in vaccines, and ultimately lowering vaccination rates,” Mukkamala said. “That would put more children and communities at risk of preventable illness.”

The American Medical Association (AMA) wasn’t the only one to come out against this top-down edict. The American College of Physicians (ACP) likewise pushed back on the EO publicly, stating unequivocally that it must not be implemented or there would be severe negative health outcomes for American children.

As did, hilariously, scientists in Denmark itself.

Anders Hviid, who leads research on vaccine safety and effectiveness at the Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s equivalent of the CDC, told The New York Times in December that it did not make sense to compare the US to Denmark. “It’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark,” he said.

Hviid also told the Times that the US public health policies under Kennedy “get crazier and crazier” by the month. “It is surreal, and it is difficult, from a Danish perspective, to understand what’s going on.”

Trust me, dear Anders, it’s difficult to understand from within the American borders, too.

Now, neither Trump nor Kennedy give a flying damn about Denmark, of course. That much is obvious to anyone with a working frontal cortex. The country’s vaccination schedules are merely being used as a prop to reduce the vaccination schedules for American children because that’s all Kennedy really wants. Over the objections, it turns out, of Danish scientists themselves.

I’m sure the AMA, ACP, or the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) will be filing lawsuits over this Executive Order. And I see no reason why the courts shouldn’t put a hold on its implementation, as it did to Kennedy.

But the real mystery is why the do-nothings in Congress just can’t be bothered to push back directly on all of this.

Call It The Trump Effect [The Status Kuo]

Trump booed at MSG, Photo courtesy of AP News

Trump ruins everything he touches.

The latest proof? On Monday night, for the first time in 27 years, the New York Knicks hosted an NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden. The city had been building toward this for weeks: 13 straight playoff wins as part of a 46-day winning streak, a 2–0 series lead over the San Antonio Spurs, and a cross-borough electricity rarely felt even in a metropolis of eight million.

The world’s most famous arena was about to host the most consequential basketball game played in New York since 1999. It would also, as the price of one man’s vanity, be locked down like a war zone.

Trump confirmed his attendance on Friday, citing an invitation from Knicks owner James Dolan, a longtime friend and campaign donor. “I’ve been a Knicks fan for a long time and also a Jim Dolan fan,” Trump told reporters. “He’s a nice guy.”

Trump showed up Monday night and promptly ruined everything.

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Sports as political currency

Trump’s decision to crash the Knicks game was not an impulse. Since retaking office, he has attended the Super Bowl (the first sitting president to do so), the Daytona 500, the Ryder Cup, two UFC fights, the U.S. Open, the FIFA Club World Cup final and a Washington Commanders game—even going into the Fox broadcast booth during the latter. That’s roughly a dozen major sporting events in his second term alone, with a UFC fight night at the White House scheduled for June 14, Trump’s birthday.

According to communication professor Kara Alaimo, Trump’s strategy is “as old as human civilization.” Leaders often associate themselves with the pageantry and goodwill of major public events, borrowing the crowd’s energy for their own brand. Trump has refined the practice into a second-term signature move. As OutKick founder Clay Travis put it: “Sports has embraced President Trump for the second term in a way that it did not in the first term.”

The NBA Finals, though, presented a particular opportunity. The Knicks are New York. Trump grew up in New York. With Monday’s game being the first Finals game at MSG in a generation, the hometown team up 2–0 and two wins from their first championship since 1973, it was exactly the kind of cultural moment Trump couldn’t resist. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave him a warm official welcome, calling Trump “very much a New Yorker” and saying his attendance “adds to the bigness of the event.”

Ten city blocks closed

This is what the “bigness” of the event actually looked like for the tens of thousands of people who live, work and commute through Midtown Manhattan on a Monday evening:

Starting at 4 p.m., the NYPD established a security perimeter stretching from West 30th to West 35th Streets between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Seventh and Eighth Avenues were closed to vehicles and all general pedestrian traffic. There were only five designated entry checkpoints. No one was permitted inside the zone without a ticket, a train to catch, a business to reach, or “some other authorized reason.” In all, it was ten blocks of one of the densest neighborhoods on earth, locked down six hours before tipoff.

Inside the perimeter, the security apparatus included a TSA-style magnetometer screening at every entrance. There was a strict no-bag policy, no exceptions, and no locker storage. Fans who showed up with a backpack or tote got sent away or were forced to discard it.

The Secret Service deployed drones and counter-drone technology, protective intelligence and specialized tactical units—“from the ground to the sky,” in the words of Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool, who urged ticketed fans to arrive at the arena two hours before the 8:30 p.m. tipoff.

Attendees began lining up to enter MSG more than four hours before tipoff—a scene, as the AP observed, “more closely resembling New Year’s Eve in Times Square than the usual leadup to a basketball game.” For those who had paid upward of $7,000 earlier in the week for even the cheapest ticket just to get in the door, it was a horrible experience.

Greg Weldon had been in the stands when the Knicks were in the Finals more than half a century ago. He made the trip back from Florida with his son, standing in line outside MSG in his Knicks jersey. “You can’t really put a price on the experience,” he told reporters. The main inconvenience, he said, had been the sheer absence of information. “We’ve asked so many cops, Secret Service, guys with machine guns, what to do, where should we go. Nobody knows.”

The precedent from Trump’s other sporting appearances was not reassuring. At last year’s U.S. Open men’s singles final in Queens, thousands of fans missed the start of the match because of the security lines. The U.S. Tennis Association pushed back the start by a half-hour, and many fans still couldn’t get through in time.

The disruption reached inside the building long before tipoff. An MSG kitchen employee told NBC News that staff who normally enter the arena around 6 a.m. did not make it through the added screening until 8 a.m., two hours late, for people whose job it was to feed the crowd.

Even the players felt the disturbance in the force. Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, speaking from courtside after arriving early, described the experience as “like getting screened by TSA.”

“I think the president being here just makes it inconvenient on everybody else,” Fox said. “We’ve got more security. We’ve got to send stuff early, our buses are a little earlier… A little inconvenient for the people that’s gotta play.”

The outdoor watch parties that had become a fixture of the playoff run, with fans gathering on Plaza33 outside MSG, game after game through 13 straight wins, were gone for the night. Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambled to set up a substitute watch party at Bryant Park, half a mile north, capped at 5,000 and requiring pre-registration. “We improvise,” said Knicks guard Jose Alvarado, a New York native. “We’re New Yorkers. We’re going to find a way to watch a game, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Fan Gisele Cintron captured the mood outside: “I do feel sad, because the fans have been waiting for a while. I think they should be able to enjoy it outside. But it is what it is. We’ll make the best of it. New York always has fun, no matter what.”

“Get Lost”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a lifelong Knicks fan from Brooklyn, had been building toward this moment for days.

On Friday, speaking with CNN’s John Berman, he gave voice to the frustration felt by millions. “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing? Like literally, the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA Finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.”

He added, “I mean, come on, seriously, give us a break. Why doesn’t this guy just focus on trying to improve the quality of life of the American people? Because the Trump economy has been a disaster.”

By Monday, Jeffries’s exasperation had grown. “He has to make the America 250 celebration about himself. He’s got to make the World Cup about himself. He’s got to make the East Wing of the White House about himself. And now he wants to make this historic Knicks championship run about himself as well. Get lost. Doesn’t this guy have better things to do?”

Outside the arena, Jeffries added a kicker. “Does this guy even know the difference between Karl Rove and Karl-Anthony Towns? I don’t think so.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram on Sunday that Trump’s attendance had “already been a vibe killer, because now the city has to shut down all the MSG watch parties that happen outside of the arena.” She noted she frequently skips major public sporting events herself, out of respect for the fans who would otherwise bear the security burden.

Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN’s First Take Monday morning, said he had been publicly pleading with Trump not to attend for days. “This president has no business showing up in New York City. I am dead serious. It is selfish. It is narcissistic. It is ridiculous that he is coming to this game.”

Even Ann Coulter piled on. The conservative commentator called Trump’s decision to accept Dolan’s invitation “selfish, narcissistic” and “the worst decision” of his presidency.

I can think of far worse, to be honest, like the Iran War, global tariff wars, and ICE and troop deployments in our major cities. But this was certainly one of the more pointless and selfish.

Booo!

Outside, before he had even made it inside, Trump’s motorcade arrived to a wall of sound. Fans lined the route with signs and profanity-laced jeers. Some gave him the middle finger. “Put them gas prices down!” one fan shouted before adding an expletive. “F— Trump, but we came here for the Knicks!” another hollered. The crowd broke into chants of “F— Trump, go Knicks!”

Trump’s response, as the jeering washed over him, was a smirk.

He has worn that public mask before. At the U.S. Open men’s final in Queens last fall—his home borough—he was booed on the ABC telecast. When he heard the crowd’s reaction, the AP reported, he “offered a smirk,” which “briefly made the boos louder.”

Inside MSG, as Broadway star Avery Wilson sang the National Anthem, the broadcast cut to Trump standing in the Dolan suite, his hand raised to his brow. Madison Square Garden erupted in boos. Faint claps could be heard, but they were swallowed by the crowd.

Trump, boarding Air Force One afterward, was asked about the reception. “It was, I think, mostly cheers,” he told reporters. “It was loud, and it was very enthusiastic.”

The Longest Blink

As the game wore on, cameras in the Dolan suite caught Trump with his eyes closed, hands clasped in his lap. His head dipped slightly for roughly 45 seconds before he reopened his eyes with a start, glanced around and refocused on the court. Footage of the moment spread across social media within minutes.

Trump napping through major public events has become a regular occurrence. In May, a Reuters photograph captured him with his eyes shut in the Oval Office. A White House-associated account responded with “He was blinking, you absolute moron.” MeidasTouch deployed the “long blink” defense again when the MSG footage surfaced.

Worse still, Trump was apparently dozing through one of the tighter fourth quarters of the NBA season. The Spurs had pulled ahead 111–104 with under two minutes to play. The Knicks clawed back to within two on an OG Anunoby three-pointer. The Garden was loud enough to rattle the windows. Trump, in his suite above it all, was catching some shut-eye.

Social media quickly delivered its verdict. “So he ruined the night for all of those people just to take another nap?” “He shut down New York and screwed over Knicks fans just to nap in a new location.” “Bringing half your cabinet courtside just to take a historic nap is wild.”

He also left before the buzzer. Photographers captured his motorcade departing MSG while the final seconds were still on the clock.

The Trump Curse

The Spurs won 115–111. The Knicks’ 13-game winning streak—a 46-day run that had turned an entire city into believers—was over. The series was now 2–1. Would the Knicks come back stronger, now that Trump was gone? We’ll have to see.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom shared the news of the Knicks’ loss alongside a screenshot of a recent White House tweet. The tweet read: “Call it the Trump Effect.”

10:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 会 [Kanji of the Day]

会

✍6

小2

meeting, meet, party, association, interview, join

カイ　エ

あ.う　あ.わせる　あつ.まる

大会   (たいかい)   —   mass meeting
会社   (かいしゃ)   —   company
社会   (しゃかい)   —   society
協会   (きょうかい)   —   association
会長   (かいちょう)   —   president (of a society)
会場   (かいじょう)   —   assembly hall
会見   (かいけん)   —   interview
委員会   (いいんかい)   —   committee
記者会見   (きしゃかいけん)   —   press conference
会議   (かいぎ)   —   meeting

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 慶 [Kanji of the Day]

慶

✍15

中学

jubilation, congratulate, rejoice, be happy

ケイ

よろこ.び

慶応   (けいおう)   —   Keio era (1865.4.7-1868.9.8)
弁慶   (べんけい)   —   strong person
慶事   (けいじ)   —   happy event
早慶   (そうけい)   —   Waseda University and Keio University
慶長   (けいちょう)   —   Keicho era (1596.10.27-1615.7.13)
内弁慶   (うちべんけい)   —   someone haughty and boastful at home but meek and reserved outside
慶弔   (けいちょう)   —   congratulations and condolences
国慶節   (こっけいせつ)   —   anniversary of founding (of PRC)
落慶   (らっけい)   —   celebration of the completion of a temple or shrine's construction
大慶   (たいけい)   —   great joy

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

09:00 AM

Pulte Appointment Underscores Need To Reform Section 702 Spying [Techdirt]

President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed. 

Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues. Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to collect communications from targets overseas – including communications with Americans in the U.S. – and stores them in massive databases. The NSA then allows other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to access untold amounts of that information.  

Under current practice, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. What’s more, victims won’t even know and have very few ways of finding out that their communications have been surveilled. EFF and other civil liberties advocates have been trying for years to know how data collected through Section 702 is used in domestic investigations and prosecutions.  

Our advocacy to reform Section 702 has been consistent across administrations, including when the federal Intelligence Community was run by people with experience in the relevant agencies. In fact, the 2004 law creating the position of DNI – which coordinates America’s 18 spy agencies – requires those who hold it to have “extensive national security expertise.” 

Enter Bill Pulte. 

Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience.  

“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Because Trump named him acting DNI, Pulte isn’t subject to Senate confirmation. And under the Vacancies Act, Pulte could remain in the role for about seven months. 

This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets – including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency.  

All these targets and others have denied wrongdoing. A federal criminal complaint filed against James in Virginia imploded after a judge found prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed, and prosecutors twice failed to convince a grand jury to indict James. Pulte’s accusations against Schiff, Cook, and others have not led to criminal charges. 

Pulte also used his FHFA pulpit to attack then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and dismantle internal oversight. 

Pulte isn’t a qualified intelligence administrator. He does, however, seem to be unquestioningly loyal to President Trump and willing to use his position to attack and smear the President’s political foes. As acting DNI, Pulte would have access to every scrap of classified information the Intelligence Community holds, and under Section 702, that includes massive amounts of information about Americans. 

Even lawmakers who are typically friendly to the intelligence community acknowledge that this is a disaster in the making. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, told NPR that Pulte has “no experience in the military, no experience in Congress, no experience in the intel community or law enforcement” and was chosen because he is “100% loyal to doing anything and everything President Trump demands.” 

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters “we don’t need a weaponized” national intelligence director. Asked about fears that Pulte might pursue Trump’s political opponents, Thune said: “We need professionals there.” 

Congress already has had trouble reauthorizing Section 702 as Freedom Caucus Republicans and many Democrats joined forces to demand reforms including the common-sense requirement that federal agencies get a probable cause warrant from a judge before searching any data involving Americans. Pulte’s appointment exemplifies why no administration should have the power granted by Section 702 without the independent judicial review required in seeking a warrant. 

Republished from EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

07:00 AM

Techdirt Podcast Episode 452: How To Stop Good Companies From Going Bad [Techdirt]

The concept of “enshittification” has helped illuminate why companies and their products so often get worse over time, but the causes of this process are complex and multifaceted. In his new book Incorruptible, author Eric Ries presents a related but contrasting take on how good companies go bad, and how to build companies that resist the process. This week, Eric joins the podcast to talk all about the book and what we might be able to do to solve this problem.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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