This Week in 2016

• What The Election Means For Stuff Techdirt Cares About?
• If You’re Blaming Facebook For The Election Results, You’re An Idiot
• In Wake Of Trump Win, ISPs Are Already Laying The Groundwork For Gutting Net Neutrality
• In The Rush To Blame Facebook, Come The Calls To Suppress Ideas People Disagree With
• Trump’s Very First Tweet As President Elect Basically Shits On The First Amendment
• Long Time Mass Surveillance Defenders Freak Out Now That Trump Will Have Control

This Week in 2011

• The Secret Behind SOPA Defense: Insist That It Doesn’t Say What It Actually Says
• RIAA Explains Its Interpretation Of SOPA; Which Doesn’t Seem To Be Found In The Bill Itself
• Why PROTECT IP/SOPA Is The Exact Wrong Approach To Dealing With Infringement Online
• Rep. Darrell Issa Joins Rep. Lofgren In Saying That SOPA Is A Bad Idea
• Not To Be Overlooked In SOPA: Massive Expansion Of Copyright Maximalist Diplomatic Corp
• House Judiciary Committee Refuses To Hear Wider Tech Industry Concerns About SOPA

This Week in 2006

• Why ISPs Should Demand To See A Warrant Before Handing Over Customer Information
• Why The Solicitor General Has Tremendous Power Over The Patent System
• Google Explains How To Kill The Internet In Australia: Just Make Proposed Changes To Copyright Laws
• And Now, The Election’s Impact On Telecom Policy…
• Rights Holders Start Lining Up To Get Money From Google/YouTube
• EMI Admits No Harm Came From Grey Album, But Still

Earlier this year, NVIDIA released a demo video of it’s new DLSS 5 AI neural rendering technology and it caused an uproar. The complaints about the video were varied. There is a never-AI crowd in the gaming industry that doesn’t seem to understand that DLSS 2 and 3 already made use of machine learning for pixel reconstruction and frame generation. They were late to the party. There are those with environmental concerns that are on much stronger footing. But what it takes to run this technology today versus what it will take in the future can be widely varied as the tech progresses. And then there were the two loudest groups: those that suggested this broke the intent of the original artists and those that claimed all of this was stupid because of the expensive hardware required to run DLSS 5 smoothly at all.

And on those two specific issues, the latest game to get DLSS 5 incorporated into it offers us some answers. The tech has gotten leaner, faster, and Nvidia is working directly with the developer of Hogwarts Legacy to ensure that no artistic intent is infringed upon.

The progression into leaner requirements for the technology are the easiest to tackle.

Remember when Nvidia needed two monstrous RTX 5090 graphics cards to demonstrate DLSS 5 back in March? Now it runs on a single supported GPU.

Nvidia claims a tenfold performance improvement since that original showcase. Its latest neural rendering model runs twice as fast as September’s version while using 20 percent less VRAM at 4K. DLSS 5 supports GeForce RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs, RTX Spark systems, and GeForce Now Ultimate.

This, of course, also has implications on the environmental concerns, as the hardware needed becomes leaner. I know full well that the environmentalists out there won’t be satisfied with this, nor am I sure they should be. But we have to allow for progress in this area and admit when progress has indeed been achieved. I see no reason to think the tech requirements for DLSS 5 won’t continue to get leaner and leaner, especially since Nvidia is expected to bring this to the 40 series cards as well. GPUs are still expensive, so even one 50 series card requires a hefty investment, but the trend is going the right way here. Saying so should be easy.

But when you dig into how Nvidia and the developers behind Hogwarts Legacy are collaborating to make sure the tool can do what the developer wants and not break artistic intent, well, that’s sort of the ballgame on most of the backlash we heard initially.

Nvidia’s official before-and-after comparisons show richer lighting and deeper shadows throughout Hogsmeade. Moss stands out against weathered rooftops, foliage casts more convincing shadows, and the stonework gains an almost tangible depth. Character changes are subtler, without the dramatic facial transformations that kicked off the original uproar — at least in the promotional images.

Avalanche Software worked with Nvidia to dial things back. DLSS 5 lets developers adjust lighting and structural detail independently, choose different neural models for different scenes, and use masking tools to keep the AI from mucking with specific objects or characters. Avalanche says it fine-tuned Hogwarts Legacy’s environments, lighting, and skin details to preserve the game’s original artistic vision.

Good! Because making a game look more realistic doesn’t necessarily make it look better.

Indeed and the artists ought to retain control of their art. What Nvidia is doing here is taking a blanket tool it created and putting control over how the tool is used, and to what extent, directly in the hands of the developers of the game. The control over what the ultimate output of this art resides with the developer, which employs or contracts the artists.

And that’s precisely where it should reside. The tech demo, which was rolled out in a fashion that left it wide open to exactly the type of criticism it received, made it look like Nvidia was planning to stomp all over the Mona Lisa without permission and turn Mona into an Instagram influencer. That’s just not what is actually happening. DLSS 5 is being refined to be what it always should have been: one more tool in the artist’s tool belt.

Perhaps this is a one-off and Nvidia will do some horrible thing next that will revive all of the complaints. Perhaps the majority of those lashing out at this technology don’t care about this sort of progress and are simply going to remain never-AI-ers in gaming. There’s a small chance the tech can’t get even more lean and environmentally friendly.

But progress is progress, no matter how much some don’t like it. And the DLSS 5 of today is simply not the same as the DLSS 5 that was railed against in March.

For the past two decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has been slowly weakening the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a key human rights law that allows foreign nationals to sue persons or entities in civil court for harms resulting from violations of international law. The court’s recent ruling in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I dealt the law a final blow, foreclosing—absent new legislation by Congress—any future ability by plaintiffs to use the law to hold technology companies accountable for aiding and abetting human rights abuses. EFF filed multiple amicus briefs in the case, including most recently in the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court Rejected New Causes of Action Under the ATS

The ATS was passed by the very first Congress in 1789 and in just a few words gives U.S. federal courts jurisdiction to hear civil claims brought by foreign nationals against defendants who violated “the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” There has been a longstanding question about what counts as a valid civil claim under “the law of nations.”

In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004), the Supreme Court had noted three historical international law claims that the First Congress likely had in mind: violation of safe conducts, infringement of the rights of ambassadors, and piracy, collectively known as the Blackstone Three.

The Sosa court also held that federal courts may recognize other substantive causes of action under the ATS if they reflect international norms that are “specific, universal, and obligatory,” stating that this “door is still ajar subject to vigilant doorkeeping, and thus open to a narrow class of international norms today.”

Thus, the Sosa court recognized that the ATS could be used to bring claims related to historical violations of international law as well as select newer claims reflecting modern concepts of human rights.

In Cisco, the Supreme Court overruled the second Sosa holding. The majority held that the current case, a technology company aiding and abetting torture and other human rights abuses, was beyond the scope of the original three ATS claims and it was not for the court to create new ways of enforcing international law. The court said:

[W]e close the door that Sosa cracked to judicially created ATS liability. We do not disturb Sosa’s holding that the ATS is a jurisdictional statute; nor do we revisit its assumption that causes of action are available for torts corresponding to the Blackstone three. We conclude only that Sosa was overly optimistic in its prediction that there might be a narrow class of cases in which courts may create ATS actions without infringing on the prerogatives of the political branches. In truth, this class is a null set.

What result for this case? Cisco argues that the Ninth Circuit erred in holding that aiding-and-abetting liability exists under the ATS for the torts alleged by the plaintiffs. Cisco is correct. Courts cannot create new rights of action to remedy violations of international law, so there is necessarily no liability for aiding and abetting such violations. Plaintiffs’ ATS claims against Cisco must be dismissed.

Cisco is Off the Hook for Aiding and Abetting Horrific Human Rights Abuses

The Supreme Court’s ending of the plaintiffs’ case against Cisco is hugely disappointing given that the case has been going on since 2011 and the Ninth Circuit in 2023 allowed the case to move forward in an excellent and well-reasoned opinion. The court held, in part:

We conclude that Plaintiffs’ allegations, accepted as true, are sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng [violent struggle] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place. 

The plaintiffs sued Cisco for the company’s role in building and deploying the “Golden Shield,” also referred to as “The Great Firewall of China”—a vast surveillance system that Cisco began building in the late 1990s and that the company customized to enable the Chinese government to target disfavored minorities, including members of the Falun Gong religion.

The thirteen plaintiffs—Falun Gong practitioners—alleged arrest, detention, and torture, including of themselves and family members, at least one of whom died by beating while being detained. The allegations were horrific: the plaintiffs were placed in forced labor camps, beaten with steel rods, shocked with electric batons, and endured sleep deprivation and violent force-feeding.

Importantly, the plaintiffs also alleged that their private emails, text messages, and other information—intercepted by the Golden Shield—were shown to them and used as part of their torture and forced conversion sessions, which included threats to their family members and others who had communicated with them. 

And now, Cisco is off the hook for all of this.

Congress Must Act to Hold American Tech Companies Accountable for Aiding and Abetting Human Rights Abuses

As we argued in our amicus brief to the Supreme Court, a robust federal statute is necessary given that voluntary and informal mechanisms of corporate human rights accountability are inadequate.

The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in 2011. The following year, in 2012, Cisco first published its Global Human Rights Policy. Since then, the company has never provided redress to the plaintiffs, despite its currently operative human rights policy stating:

Where we have identified that we have caused or contributed to an adverse human rights impact, we are committed to providing access to and cooperating in remediation for affected individuals, workers, and communities through legitimate processes.

What’s more, the Associated Press conducted an extensive 2025 investigation, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, further mapping Cisco’s and other American tech companies’ involvement in creating China’s surveillance state over the past three decades. When questioned by the AP reporters, the companies dismissed any notion of human rights obligations and simply “said they adhere to relevant export controls, laws and regulations where they operate.”

In short, Cisco’s commitment to human rights is a fiction.

Given that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively read the ATS into non-existence, Congress must now step up. While there might be other avenues for redress including under state law, there must also be a comprehensive federal human rights law allowing any plaintiff to hold American companies—especially technology companies—accountable for aiding and abetting human rights abuses, with knowledge or intent that those abuses would occur, and whether the victims suffered those abuses in the U.S. or in foreign countries.

The implications of this gap in U.S. human rights law are significant. As Prof. Harold Koh considered:

[T]he Justices should ask whether affording such immunity in Cisco would implicitly signal to U.S. companies that they could not be held liable for assisting the U.S. government in committing gross violations. Such violations could include constructing a mass surveillance system that may be used to surveil, persecute, retaliate against, and punish real and perceived opponents and constructing systems that autonomously commit war crimes.

American companies should not have a free pass to build out surveillance states (or other technologically sophisticated systems) that not only violate personal privacy or facilitate censorship, but that can also lead to real-world physical violence and even death.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks Blog.

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

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

In this week’s episode, Ben is joined by Dex Hunter-Torricke, founder of the Center for Tomorrow and former head of communications and marketing at Google Deepmind. Prior to that, he also worked at The Oversight Board, SpaceX and Facebook. Together they discuss:

• Paris Call for AI safety and security (Élysée)
• AI firms sign Macron’s Paris Call, but safety group says it lacks teeth (The Next Web)
• OpenAI, Anthropic face new oversight as New York’s AI safety law takes effect (TechCrunch)
• Australia to mandate AI breach reporting, create regulator after OpenAI breach (Reuters)
• Exclusive: Former Meta and OpenAI Contractor Sama Liquidates, Citing Lawsuits (TIME)
• SpaceX Starship Flight 15 could be a major step toward full rocket reusability and cheaper missions (ABC News)

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

• Why a new report on Anthropic automating AI development is alarming researchers (The Verge)
• Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026 (METR)
• The AI Safety Debate Has Lost the Plot. We Asked 10 Experts What the Real Nightmares Are (Wired)

Our fun links this week include a crowdsourced collection of UK bin photos and Jensen Huang memes. 

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from the episode!

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

It’s easy to make fun of the federal government for paying well over market for items. We’ve all heard the stories about $900 toilets and $400 hammers and lol’ed generously, perhaps without considering that maybe the toilet was for a space shuttle or a submarine and therefore couldn’t be off-the-shelf. Maybe the hammers aren’t being used to bash in nails but used to assemble sensitive equipment that requires certain materials and reduction of blunt force.

Then again, maybe the government just spends excessive amounts of money because it has excessive amounts of money to spend. The current administration has increased our national debt to levels that seem almost hyperbolic. And this particular administration has thrown so much federal funding at ICE that it has surpassed the FBI — the mf’in FBI! — as the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency.

You’d think being over-funded would make you relaxed. With this sort of largesse, there’s really no reason for ICE to live from government shutdown-to-government shutdown. You just get what you need, splurge a little on some extras, and know that at least you won’t be furloughed the next time Congress decides an impasse is better than jettisoning toxic proposals that will never receive bipartisan support.

But what’s happening here? This just looks like the government being taken for the sucker it is by a specialist in predatory pricing.

This incident would never have come to light without the intervention of local Minnesota journalists. Reporters working for NBC affiliate KARE 11 obtained public records that show the federal government massively overpaid for vacant buildings after local officials decided CoreCivic was asking too much for a prison property it no longer had any use for.

CoreCivic found itself sitting on empty prison property in Appleton, Minnesota. The town of less than 1,400 people sits far closer to the South Dakota border than the Twin Cities. With the administration focused almost entirely on Minneapolis with its ICE-aided revenge tour of “Places Where Trump Failed To Secure A Majority of the Popular Vote,” a vacant prison in a rural area would rarely have piqued the federal government’s interest.

It certainly failed to generate any local interest when CoreCivic first offered it for sale, even though CoreCivic claimed it would include any recent improvements while generally stating that the prison that had been closed for 16 years had “ran when parked.”

KARE 11 obtained an email dated May 7, 2025, from CoreCivic representative Kelly Durham to the Deputy Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. 

The CoreCivic email states: “Yes, we would be willing to sell the facility to the State.” 

Then, CoreCivic states its asking price: “Sale price is $75M inclusive of the upgrades CoreCivic has identified would be needed to re-activate the facility.” 

A turnkey opportunity — one that had been garaged for years and apparently only driven on alternate Sundays by CoreCivic security personnel. What’s not to like? I mean, other than the fact it was located far from the current federal action and probably smelled the way things that have been abandoned for more than a decade tend to smell. (Granted, lots of prisons smell “abandoned” even when they’ve been operating at over-capacity for decades…)

The state did not wish to make CoreCivic $75 million richer just because it failed to pre-plan for this eventual (and apparently inevitable) divestment. The state of Minnesota walked, leaving CoreCivic with its empty investment that was located somewhere most people in the “caging people” business would consider to be too far out of the way to be worth the trouble.

But someone rode to CoreCivic’s rescue. It was an administration that already has a far-too-cosy relationship with private prison companies. And it was an administration that had recently given ICE far more money than it could responsibly spend.

This all added up to the obvious: ICE outbidding absolutely no one to obtain this empty prison located in Sticksville, USA for far, far, oh my god so far more than CoreCivic had valued it less than a year earlier when it was just looking to dump it on the locals.

One year later, the Trump administration agreed to use taxpayer funds to buy the same abandoned prison from CoreCivic, Inc., for $495.6 million.

This exaggerated purchase price matters for several reasons, not the least of which is the purported reason Trump has offered for his incessant — and often, violent — anti-migrant efforts in the state of Minnesota.

The price difference, $420 million, is more than taxpayers are estimated to have lost in Minnesota’s much-publicized Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.

If you’re wondering why ICE might agree to pay a highly inflated price for property previously offered for hundreds of millions of dollars less, wonder no further. This is just more Trump administration corruption achieving terminal velocity at the expense of taxpayers who just want to fill their gas tanks without going broke.

Federal records show CoreCivic donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.

Its CEO also made significant personal contributions to Trump-affiliated political committees.

It’s not just long-abandoned Minnesota prisons making bank for CoreCivic now that Trump has the purse strings. As the report points out, the same day ICE vastly overpaid for this prison, it snapped up another empty prison in Kansas for $238 million. One month earlier, CoreCivic took Trump to the cleaners for another $1.5 billion, unloading two unused facilities located in California.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not Trump’s anti-migrant activities might eventually fill these overpriced purchases with people whose rights have been violated. It only matters that the government wrote the checks and the recipient of this massive waste of taxpayer funds will remain profitable enough to throw money at the next set of politicians who might be willing to return the favor in the near future.

And even if mass incarceration in preparation for mass deportation trends downward following the forced exit of lots and lots of MAGA legislators, the United States has long had a hard-on for mass incarceration. And it’s apparently willing to pay top dollar to obtain places to lock people up, even when there’s absolutely no one else competing with it during the bidding process.

The Ultimate Guitar Lessons Bundle has 9 courses teaching you everything from reading tablature and basic fingering to more advanced skills. You can start at the very beginning and work your way through lessons on strumming, ear training, and jamming, to learning about Jazz, Blues, and Bluegrass techniques. It’s on sale for $30.

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.

By now you’ve seen that after over a week of waiting to make sure that every vote was counted, Democrat Scott Colom has defeated incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the new Senator from Mississippi — the first Black senator the state’s voters have ever chosen (during Reconstruction, Mississippi had two Black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, but that was before the Seventeenth Amendment, when state legislatures still picked senators). There is, of course, some satisfaction in seeing Colom, specifically, defeat Hyde-Smith, given that she directly blocked his opportunity to be appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

Colom won for a bunch of reasons (strong candidate, great ground game, putting in the hard work of meeting voters across the state) but one that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle — especially at a moment when hating the internet is popular — is his smart use of the open internet to get his message out there and to draw attention to the race both within Mississippi and across the wider nation.

Lots of people are now trying to do postmortems to explain how Colom won, especially since the Democratic establishment totally wrote him off. Matt Yglesias — who, for unknown reasons, is still listened to by Democratic leadership — openly scoffed at the idea of the Democratic Party spending money on Colom just a few months ago.

And Colom (rightly) called out the overreliance on election forecasters like the Cook Political Report that resulted in the Democratic Party mostly ignoring his campaign.

There were plenty of factors behind the win, even though the national party mostly ignored him until the final month. Obviously, the national environment that turned the expected “blue wave” into a “blue tsunami” helped at the margins. But Colom and his team had an incredible ground game, and he spent months personally meeting with Mississippi voters, especially in communities that are often ignored:

“We didn’t have hundreds of million dollars to come in to spend – we did it going door to door, festival to festival, earning support,” Colom said at a canvassing event on the Mississippi coast. “We’re gonna shock a lot of people, but I’m not gonna be shocked. The people of Mississippi are behind this campaign: they understand Mississippi matters.”

But some of the credit also has to go to how well he used the open internet to route around the money gap. While he didn’t have all that money for TV ads, he and his team created some incredibly memorable ads that went viral on social media, with perhaps none more powerful than his response to Hyde-Smith suggesting — in a very “let them eat cake” manner — that voters frustrated by beef prices just “pick another protein”: “Pick another protein? Shiiiiiit. I’d rather pick another senator instead.”

That ad (and a few other clever and catchy ones his team made) spread on its own, which meant he didn’t have to spend money he didn’t have putting it on TV. It’s been credited with helping put his campaign on the national map in its final weeks. Indeed, the virality of the ad actually helped open up more traditional funding from the Democratic Party that had avoided the race before. Colom himself has called the ad “game changing” while noting they were able to create it and get it out there “with SO little” support.

In an interview with Politico, the guy who created the ad, who Colom shouted out in that tweet, Ryan Sayles, admits that he’s never worked in a campaign and just focused on what he thought would resonate with people in Mississippi. The fact that they could just put it on the internet (and didn’t have to run it through political machinery) was part of the benefit:

I think the dope part is, we didn’t run that ad by anybody. … We didn’t go around getting OK’s from anybody … we just put it out. But also … I’ve never worked on a campaign, and I think that I didn’t have a sense of what Dems normally did. You know what I mean?

We just did what we liked, and that was one of the big things Scott always talked about. “Man, if we are good with the content, we are good.”

That matters right now, when so much of the political class seems to hate the open internet and keeps demanding that we “regulate” it into something locked down. When the party establishment decided Mississippi wasn’t worth the money, the open internet was what let Colom go around all of them, take his case straight to the voters — and then drag the national party into realizing he had a chance. I have no idea how Colom views internet regulations — though Mississippi’s state legislature has passed some horrific anti-internet laws. But when he’s inevitably asked to vote on bills to lock down the internet, I hope he remembers what the open internet did for him.

The increasingly unpopular president’s ability to cash in on his position shows no sign of showing down.

Earlier this year you might recall that Truth Social, the president’s dodgy, propaganda, tribute, and social media company, began charging customers for early access to Trump’s incoherent tirades and brain farts. More specifically, the “Truth API” allowed news organizations, trading firms and other companies to pay $60,000 to $100,000 per month for a direct feed of early posts on the social network.

Given the fact this was yet another way for companies and donors to curry favor with the president, and gain early access to potentially market-impacting (idiotic) decisions, the move was rightfully criticized as more corrupt insider trading bullshit in an ocean of corrupt, Trump-era, insider trading bullshit.

For whatever it’s worth, Truth Social now claims it saw a 205 percent revenue jump on the back of the new offering:

“Trump Media and Technology Group reported Monday that revenue surged 205% in the third quarter, which it says was “primarily driven” by selling a high-speed feed of posts on Truth Social.”

Its filings indicate that about 60 percent of the company’s revenue now comes from this patronage early access system. There’s of course no way to independently confirm these financials in a country where the SEC, the courts, and lobbying and campaign finance regulators have been hollowed out like a cheap Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.

Bloomberg is among the companies that thought it was the good idea to pay for early access to Trump’s verbal diarrhea, but the news company hasn’t much been interested in talking when approached by other news organizations for comment. Most of the news organizations covering the company’s earnings, including Bloomberg and Comcast NBC, curiously “forgot” to mention most of its very dodgy history.

For example, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), and the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took it public, Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), settled a civil investigation in 2023 for $18 million over “material misrepresentations” in its IPO filings. At one point the DOJ also charged three people (including a former DWAC board member) with insider trading amidst additional uncharged allegations of Russia-linked money laundering.

You’d have to assume more transparency (and charges) could come later if a reconstituted Congress prioritizes an investigation and some well-placed subpoenas.

While Trump Media has a purported market valuation of $1.13 billion, the company stock is down 69% so far this year. Once Trump’s power collapses and this dodgy patronage machine no longer serves its purpose, you have to wonder exactly what kind of sad and sorry rubes will be left holding the bag.

It’s now been nearly two straight years of embarrassment for America as measles has come back from the dead. As a reminder, America achieved elimination status for this disease 26 years ago and kept that status for more than two decades. It was only when the anti-vaxxer movement gained steam, culminating in the appointment of RFK Jr. to Secretary of HHS, that measles gained a foothold in early 2025. The way a country can lose its elimination status is supposed to be continuous spread of measles over the course of a calendar year. We have, obviously, experienced exactly that the last two years as evidenced in this CDC chart.

The United Nations is meeting soon to decide if America loses its elimination status. I can’t imagine in a world where it doesn’t decide that we have.

According to Politico, a U.N. body will convene this week. They must decide whether America maintains its measles-eliminated status. This pivotal choice will deeply impact the health secretary’s reputation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a known vaccine skeptic. Now, he leads the nation’s response to this massive crisis. As Politico notes, this is a “legacy-defining moment” for him. The situation comes at a very challenging political time. The Make America Healthy Again movement wants to stay relevant. Politico highlights that this movement is “fighting to maintain its political relevancy.”

When we do lose our elimination status, that might be the one silver lining in what is otherwise a national embarrassment. If it takes the U.N. pointing out that our country is so broken politically that we’ve allowed charlatans and fake science to usher measles back into our lives in order to destroy the MAHA movement, or at least the anti-vaxxer portion of it, so be it. Progress isn’t linear, as the saying goes, and perhaps a kick in the teeth is exactly what we need to reinvest in science and health. It’s a shame people had to get sick and die to make it happen, of course, but that’s where we are.

This is a problem that is currently getting worse, not better. And that is due to waning vaccination rates. This map will give you an idea of just how big a problem this is. Note that measles is so infectious that herd immunity protections require roughly 95% of the population to be inoculated against it.

If we lose elimination status and Trump still doesn’t fire Kennedy, he must be impeached when the next Congress is in session. If that isn’t done, the future measles deaths and infections will be on all of their heads.

The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public, prop up oligarch interests, and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.

There have been plenty of examples. Like that time the paper fired a cartoonist who criticized Jeff Bezos. Or that time it announced it was retooling its opinion pages so everyone is super nice to corporations, billionaires, and authoritarian assholes. Or just the general way the paper (particular its political journalism) loves to sanewash and normalize Trump’s historic corruption.

Or last year, when the paper fired its last Black opinion columnist, Karen Attiah. Her offense? She shared some of Charlie Kirk’s own racist words and expressed some personal thoughts on gun control, which Bezos’ editors lamented included some “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men.”

In short Attiah, who hired Saudi-murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WaPo’s opinion pages, was fired for the cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and racist rich people. Attiah sued, and won, the arbitrator in the case ruling that the Post’s management’s decision wasn’t based on any actual, meaningful offense whatsoever.

Amusingly, Attiah outlasted both of the Murdoch-orbit editors at the paper (Adam O’Neill and Will Lewis) responsible for her firing. This week she announced that while she could technically have her job back, she wouldn’t be returning to the paper:

“My arbitration win was a monumental victory for unions, for journalists, and for free speech. As the last full-time Black columnist in the Opinions section, I recognized how important the win was for Black journalists, especially those pushed out of newsrooms in recent years.

While I remain proud of the victory, I came to the painful realization that returning to The Washington Post meant coming back without the guaranteed freedom and institutional support to do what I loved: use my voice, seek truth, and serve readers.”

Nature is healing!

Attiah’s firing came last year amidst a backdrop of “free speech loving” MAGA authoritarians desperately trying to cancel anybody who didn’t engage in a distorted hagiography of Kirk and his work (helping rich people spread hateful and divisive internet propaganda among college kids to divide the electorate and normalize ignorance and racism).

Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.

The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race, foundational trans rights, and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes or having competent and well-funded regulators.

So seeing an opportunity in Trumpism, all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times, Politico, and countless others) tried to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors. It’s not really working. The result has been ethical columnists and journalists going off and starting their own worker-owned independent ventures and newsletters, while establishment media continues to enthusiastically dismantle whatever was left of its sagging credibility.

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

Ahead of the midterms, conservative election activists discussed plans to wield a powerful new weapon in the war against fraud: a data tool built by one of their own that could identify suspicious voters and help with contesting their ballots.

The system was put to the test this week in Forsyth County, Georgia, where a member of the county’s election board provided other officials with what he suggested was evidence of wrongdoing: four allegedly dead voters.

But it turns out all four are alive and well, ProPublica determined. The board rejected the attempt to challenge their ballots.

The effort, though, shows that even after last week’s blue wave, those who believe the 2020 election was stolen have continued to relentlessly search for ways to contest Republican losses. In Georgia, Democrats swept statewide offices.

The board member who initiated the Forsyth County challenge, Max Clavijo, is a member of the Election Integrity Network, a group led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell that works to restrict voting and tighten election laws and rules. Mitchell worked closely with Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election and, since he retook the presidency, has been central to his push to assert greater federal control over voting.

In the run-up to the midterms, on right-wing media and on private organizing calls, EIN participants outlined plans to search voter rolls with a software tool known as ELLY’s Election Monitor and contest ballots the tool deemed suspicious.

ELLY was developed by EIN member Rick Richards. It aggregates public data from state voter files, federal change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries, property websites like Zillow and other sources. In Georgia, State Election Board members and top staffers have urged counties to use the tool to search their voter rolls for signs of fraud.

Richards talked about ELLY’s national potential on a podcast in late September, on which right-wing media personalities and activists touted its capacity to help GOP candidates contest their defeats. “We can prove the fraud that’s gone on in every state,” one commentator said. “This data will be able to set up challenges to those who lose.”

The following month, on a private call with EIN members and other conservative activists, Richards promised to provide data from more than 3,000 counties to “citizen monitors” and GOP candidates to try to prove fraud, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica.

In an interview, Richards told ProPublica that he gave Clavijo data on Forsyth County at Clavijo’s request. He said in a subsequent email that their actions were meant to inform the board and remain confidential. Clavijo didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica.

Richards refused to answer questions about whether Clavijo’s effort was part of a wider EIN campaign to contest votes cast in the midterms.

“That’s irrelevant,” he said. “The data is the data. People can use it for what they want to.”

Mitchell, EIN’s leader, didn’t respond to questions about the group’s plans related to ELLY, either in Georgia or nationally.

In the months since some on Georgia’s State Election Board started promoting ELLY’s use, its accuracy has been much debated. The tool doesn’t have access to personal identifiers such as voters’ Social Security or driver’s license numbers or full dates of birth, which increases the potential for mismatches involving people with the same names.

Voting rights groups have called ELLY error-prone. The Cherokee County election director complained to the state board after the tool falsely flagged a county board member’s spouse as dead.

State Election Board members and Richards have defended ELLY. Accusations that the data is unreliable were “horse hockey,” Richards told ProPublica, explaining this was “a Southern colloquialism for B.S.”

Late last week, according to several people familiar with the matter, Clavijo circulated documents to board members and Forsyth County’s election director. Based on data from ELLY, Clavijo questioned whether the names of more than 22,000 people on the county’s voter roll were correct and disputed the eligibility of 69 voters. In addition to four he claimed were deceased, he alleged others had moved out of the county or state, had voter ID irregularities or had registered under fictitious names, giving an initial as their first name.

During the meeting, Clavijo claimed that he was not trying to disrupt the election’s certification or formally challenge the voters, a process outlined in statutes that can lead to ballots being tossed or voters removed from the rolls. (Richards also said they had not formally challenged ballots.) Clavijo said he was merely seeking “to clean the voter rolls” and inform the board so officials could investigate further.

But other board members accused him of doing an end run around the formal challenge process. Barbara Luth, the board chair, said she felt “sorry for” Clavijo because activists were bypassing the challenge procedure “by coming to you and having you submit it.”

Under fire from fellow board members, Clavijo admitted he could not vouch for the data’s accuracy.

“I did not make any explicit accusation that the information was 100% correct,” he said.

The cover letter Clavijo submitted with the challenges said that they had not been verified with any “human review,” according to sources familiar with the matter.

Richards and Clavijo submitted obituaries for the voters they claimed were dead, but there were discrepancies between the information in them and the voters’ records. All of the obituaries said or suggested the deceased lived outside of Forsyth County, which would have made it impossible to vote there. One said the person lived in Arizona.

ProPublica confirmed that all four are actually alive.

Alexis Ramirez, a night-shift nurse, told ProPublica that she cast her ballot during early voting. She was surprised to hear her vote had been contested — and why.

“It’s kind of crazy that they attempted to do that without trying to prove it first,” she said.

Saramma George, another voter Richards and Clavijo claimed was dead, said she was “really angry” to have the validity of her ballot questioned.

In the third case, ProPublica spoke with a voter’s son, who said she was alive but didn’t want to talk to ProPublica. Her “ballot is valid,” he said.

The fourth voter, Chris Strickland, said, “I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it’s false. I’m alive. I’m here.”

The majority of the challenges — 38 of them, according to people familiar with the matter — involved voters who’d registered using an initial.

One voter, Alexander Knight, told ProPublica that he goes by his middle name and that the information in voter records mirrors how Department of Driver Services officials suggested he be identified on his driver’s license.

“I am real,” he told ProPublica.

Four other challenged voters said they, too, abbreviated their first names. A. Joseph Guntherberg confirmed he routinely used the same formulation of his name, adding that blocking his ballot would not help the challengers: “My candidate didn’t win.”

Richards said it was up to county election workers to check ELLY’s data — he merely gathers it to facilitate efforts to maintain accurate voter lists.

But at the meeting, Joel Natt, a Republican board member, said the responsibility lay with challengers to justify their accusations. “This has no relevance to anybody here until” they provide solid evidence, he said, “through the proper channel.”