Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) has been steadily pushing the limits of transparency and accountability for several years now. The project — spearheaded by Emma Best — does what other activists won’t… or perhaps simply don’t have the expertise to carry out.

DDoS made a name for itself by hitching Best’s non-stop FOIA onslaught to data and info exfiltrated from government agencies by hackers and data breaches. Add it all together and it’s a project that actually delivers transparency and, consequently, increases government accountability.

From releasing files about Russia that Wikileaks selectively chose to ignore to dumping multiple terabytes of law enforcement helicopter camera footage none of these agencies would ever have voluntarily released, DDoS does what it says on the tin: refuses to let the government’s secrets remain secret.

Today, it’s releasing information on nearly 40,000 DHS employees — something that is estimated to cover nearly 20 percent of its total workforce. This covers all DHS component agencies, including ICE, CBP, HSI, and another dozen or so subsidiaries that don’t make the headlines nearly as often as the Big Three.

But it’s not just a data dump. As Best points out in DDoS’s press release, this info — leaked by an “Okta single sign-on service” — has not only been vetted, it’s been cleaned up to give viewers a clearer picture of organizational structures as well as make it easily searchable. It’s not about dumping data on thousands of foot soldiers. It’s about drawing connections between the boots on the ground and those who have put those boots on the ground.

”Rather than an indiscriminate directory of every DHS employee, Icepick identifies many of the architects and drivers of DHS policy and operations,” said journalist and DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best. ”The leak is extraordinary but deceptive in it’s simplicity as it identifies the officials responsible for overseeing covert and undercover operations, the government’s hunt for leakers and the failed BlueLeaks investigation — along with key personnel in DHS’s ever-escalating rendition and deportation programs.”

The “Icepick” referred to by Best is the front-end for searching this database. The data on these 40,000 federal employees was obtained by a source that has only referred to itself as the “Department of Peace.” Journalist/hacktivist “crimew” (assisted by journalist Ryan Fae) did the dirty work of creating a rather sleek front end for the search engine, as well as doing the even dirtier work of cleaning up the data to deliver relevant results more frequently.

The end result is useful for everyone from journalists to people suing DHS employees. Here’s a sample shot providing details on David Easterwood, an ICE Deputy Field Office Director currently working in Minnesota:

Everything underlined is a link that opens a new search. It allows users to climb up the chain of command (the “Manager” field), as well as drill down to the specifics of those in Easterwood’s command (“Manager of”). It also pulls up a list of all related groups Easterwood is a member of in this Okta instance, ranging from the instantly worrying (ERO St Paul Intelligence Team) to the “it’s just offices all the way down” banality of “Adobe-Acrobat Pro DC Users.”

While it may have been possible to brute force email addresses by dialing in on shared nomenclature among federal agencies, it’s highly unlikely most people would be able to suss out direct phone lines, much less cell phone numbers. To be sure, this small amount of immediately visible (and searchable) info will provoke outlandish reactions from government officials. On the other hand, any arguments that this makes things more “dangerous” for DHS agents and officials should be immediately dismissed.

What this does do is allow people to figure out who’s calling the shots wherever they’re experiencing surges in ICE activity and the violence that so often comes with it. And this allows plaintiffs seeking to hold the government accountable the ability to go up and down the chain of command to find names to add to lawsuits. If their rights were violated by masked ICE thugs in a certain area, perusing city and state data could potentially allow them to identify the officers who were directly responsible for these acts.

And, going back to the inevitable claims that this will allow people to “target” government agents, let’s not forget these same people have access to way more data about citizens and aren’t particularly shy about using that info to track and surveil critics and activists. The info released here shouldn’t make anyone fear for their safety. What it might do, however, is remind federal officers that they’re not untouchable.

It seems that every election cycle over the last decade has had concerns being raised about the state of “political deepfakes” and their ability to impact the election. So far, these have always been overblown, and there’s been little evidence of deepfakes having any real impact at all — perhaps other than creating the concept of “the liar’s dividend” enabling politicians caught doing actually bad things to falsely claim that it’s “fake news” and a “deepfake.” That could change, of course, and there are already concerns being raised about the impact of deepfakes midterms along with the fact that most of the major models are letting people create deepfake content.

The concern raised in the Tech Policy Press piece is less about putting a politician in a compromising photo or video (those don’t seem to get very far before people recognize they’re fake) and more about using these tools to produce ancillary artifacts that help support claims of other conspiracy theories:

Every AI tool that we tested produced convincingly false content. Different chatbots created images that included an AI-generated person stuffing a stack of mail ballots into a drop box, a fake memo from the federal government on “official” letterhead reporting millions of ineligible voters, and a raid on a voter registration drive that never happened. We then fed those fake pieces of content back into chatbots and asked whether they were authentic. Most chatbots got it wrong, even when given images they had generated themselves. After California’s AI Transparency Act — which requires companies to provide provenance data for images they generate as well as free, public tools for detecting synthetic media — took effect, we conducted a follow-up test. The chatbots still failed to spot AI-generated images.

When we re-ran our image generation prompts this month, we found that two of the AI models we previously tested made it easier to create convincing fakes. Gemini no longer put a visible watermark on its generated images, as it did in the spring, and Meta AI produced an image of a fake executive order on mail voting that it refused to make in April, though it did garble some of the text.

I’m still not convinced this is as big a risk as others have made it out to be, but it’s definitely worth watching how things play out as the tech gets better… and as some people are more and more desperate to hold onto power.

That said, there’s potentially a much bigger issue regarding AI and elections. As Will Oremus notes at The Atlantic, this is the first big US election where all the major AI tools don’t just “generate” content, but can also search the web as a part of that process. And that means the results they generate can steer people in the wrong direction:

In a forthcoming report, Forum AI, a start-up that evaluates AI models’ performance on questions about controversial topics, found that about 40 percent of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions contained at least one factual inaccuracy. When Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier. (Forum did not specify the precise AI model.) In the same report, shared with The Atlantic ahead of its publication, Forum determined that about one in three responses cited an unreliable information source, such as posts on Reddit or Quora. Google’s Gemini answered a question about why America’s global power is declining by citing an article from People’s Daily, a Chinese state-run news outlet. “These aren’t trick questions,” Campbell Brown, a co-founder of Forum AI, told me. “There’s no excuse for chatbots to keep getting them wrong.”

Now many people respond to this by blaming the AI companies — and they should be taking some responsibility to figure out ways to validate the quality and truthfulness of their sources — but it also feels like the media is partially to blame here. As we’ve been discussing, many of the big, more trustworthy news sources are suing AI companies, and demanding licensing fees for being trained on old content. As part of that fight, more and more such sites are also blocking all AI scraping tools. While I can understand blocking access for training purposes, in many cases, they’re also being blocked for search.

A NewsGuard study (from two years ago, admittedly) found that 67% of top news sites block AI tools, while 91% of low-quality sites allow AI scraping. That’s a pretty drastic difference. This is a variation on the now-familiar complaint that the lies are free while the truth is paywalled. And plenty of news sites debate whether or not it’s worth blocking those tools. And then there are the purely fake sites, many of which appear to exist just to poison AI tools.

There is some evidence coming out suggesting that media sites blocking AI could regret that decision, as it’s showing up in diminished traffic numbers (as much as 23% decline!) as more people rely on AI for news (for better or worse). But plenty of sites still think blocking is the better approach.

So far, it sounds like the AI tools are mostly able to handle the deluge of attempts to poison their results, debunking foreign propaganda narratives roughly three-quarters of the time in NPR and NewsGuard’s testing. So perhaps this never actually turns into a major issue (just like deepfakes never really became a huge problem). But I do worry about how much the more trustworthy publications have been walling themselves off from these tools, even as a larger percentage of the public relies on them.

And at least some questionable info is definitely getting through. Though, some of it is also fooling the traditional media as well. You may have heard the recent stories about sketchy polling operations* such as Wedgewood Polls, which admitted to faking its data, and SoCal Strategies, which vanished from the internet once people started asking questions (both caught by the poll aggregator FiftyPlusOne).

Researchers from Innovating for the Public Good and Dewey Square Group looked at whether or not Wedgewood’s totally fake polls were showing up in AI results, and found that, yes, they absolutely did.

Findings on Wedgewood in Those Answers

While Wedgewood’s own website is nowhere in the AI platform citations we collected, its fake polls decidedly are in the answers.

• We found 869 AI answers that quote a Wedgewood poll as a data point, on 83 of the 85 days we collected between July 24 and October 20, with no change through October 20, the day of the admission.
• Wedgewood’s numbers appear in 15 of the 63 races we analyzed the AI answers for.

The interesting thing here, though, is not so much that AI tools were “tricked” by this fake polling data, but rather that it only got into the AI answers by first landing on more trusted sites:

The route for the fake pollster’s data into the AI platforms was the polling aggregator websites.

The answers that repeat Wedgewood’s numbers cite polling tables from the websites at 270toWin (481 of the 869 answers), Pollsmax (465), RealClearPolling (261), PollingSource (144), Decision Desk HQ (144), Call The Map (135), PoliAgg (127), and FiftyPlusOne itself (97).

Because an answer can cite more than one aggregator, these source counts overlap and do not sum to 869; 72 of the 869 answers cite none of these eight sites.

So, basically, right now the infrastructure for handling truth and lies in AI remains shaky, but maybe not as shaky as some people suggest. The real problem shows up once sites the AI tools treat as trustworthy — here, the poll aggregators — accept the faked information as accurate, effectively “laundering” it for the AI tools. But it can’t help that news sites that might do a better job of putting polls in context are frequently blocked from the AI tools.

None of this is settled (and it never really will be). It’s going to continue to be something of a cat and mouse game between those trying to pollute the information tools, and those trying to resist. But keeping fake info out of political discourse only gets harder if the most trustworthy sites keep hiding themselves from the search side of the popular AI tools.

* While we also recently wrote about Brendan Carr whining about “fake” polls, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t talking about the recent stories that have cropped up about fake polling operations, but rather polls that make Trump look bad. Even if he actually was talking about these supposedly fake polling organizations, the target of any investigation should be those operating the services for misrepresenting things to the public, and not journalists reporting on those numbers, which would not qualify for the “news distortion” policy Carr mentioned.

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Who wouldn’t love the chance to clear themselves of misconduct? I guess not the Trump DOJ, which decidedly won’t be investigating itself, even though it could cook the books to an acceptable temperature (155-170 internally) to let itself off the hook in the Reflecting Pool prosecution debacle.

It’s too many metaphors to be sure, at least in the previous sentence. But here’s the thing: the DOJ Inspector General, in theory, could examine these cases, get stonewalled by everyone, and selectively choose to ignore any input from the Department of Interior (which apparently had always known the problem was faulty work rather than vandalism) to deliver a clean bill of (rights violation) health to the DOJ.

Given that it won’t, we have to believe the DOJ Inspector General would rather not get involved because the only possible outcome is the end of a career, rather than a dispassionate recounting of the facts on the ground.

The Department of Justice’s inspector general has declined to investigate the handling of the criminal case against a former Olympian cleared of accusations that he intentionally damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to a letter Wednesday from the man’s lawyers.

The man referred to here is David Hearn — the high-profile former Olympian Trump hoped to see swing from the metaphorical (or maybe not!?) gallows for exposing the shoddiness of the Reflecting Pool revamp Trump was so proud of.

Hearn’s case was dismissed by the DOJ, after none other than Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor/former Fox personality Jeanine Pirro told the judge the Department of Interior had hidden evidence of flawed repair work from her until after she had already filed charges.

But the DOJ refused to dismiss the case with prejudice. This matters. This meant the DOJ could go after Hearn again if it managed to find a prosecutor more besmitten by Trump than respectful of the law. The court handling this case made this moot by doing the prejudicial dismissal itself, blocking the DOJ from attempting to re-string Hearn up for the same (non) crimes at some point in the future.

It all looked shady as fuck. And that’s why people beyond the (falsely) accused David Hearn are demanding an investigation of the DOJ’s actions. But the Inspector General isn’t going to do it. Instead, Trump-appointee Don Berthiuame [break for relevant content]:

Berthiaume, 51, worked as an attorney in the Justice Department inspector general’s office for 10 years until 2020. Among his highest-profile assignments was detailing errors in the use of wiretaps in the federal investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

*cough* Berthiuame is attempting to have this turfed to the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

He’s not wrong, necessarily. While this would be the sort of thing we might expect a DOJ watchdog to take a look at, it does intersect with what the DOJ OPR is supposed to be perpetually keeping an eye on.

OPR’s primary mission is to ensure that Department attorneys perform their duties in accordance with the high professional standards expected of the nation’s principal law enforcement agency.

But this buck-passing by Berthiuame looks especially obvious now that we know the DOJ OPR is no longer in the “ensuring DOJ attorneys perform their duties in accordance with the law” business. It’s now in the business of… going out of business.

Nearly half the workforce at the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has left during Trump’s second term, while about 17% have departed the Office of Inspector General, government records show. Many retired or took buyouts the administration offered to shrink the federal workforce, according to the records and three people familiar with the departures.

[…]

The number of new OPR investigations has declined to a 20-year low even as misconduct complaints soar, the review found. The government watchdogs are “afraid of doing any watching,” said one former DOJ official who left last year.

This is the cowardly Inspector General punting and expecting an office that has low-octane blend of loyalists and people browsing Indeed.com to move forward with something he wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pension plan.

The whole thing is so corrupt and toxic that career government officials won’t even wade in when they’re given the chance to clear their own oversight subjects of wrongdoing by performing a cursory investigation and selectively releasing supporting documentation. Instead, they’re trying to see if anyone else is willing to possibly incur the wrath of an administration that has never met a scapegoat it doesn’t like.

If anything, this demonstrates how absolutely fucked the DOJ is, especially in terms of the concept of “justice.” There’s nothing to be had by anyone who isn’t part of the president’s in-group, or who doesn’t care what he does, so long as he’s the one doing it.

Anna Gomez is the only Democrat at the current FCC because Republicans simply refuse to seat any new ones (or even formally renew her term, which technically was supposed to end over the summer). And while Gomez may not have much voting authority, she’s done a good job criticizing the Brendan Carr-run agency for its endless First Amendment-trampling censorship efforts.

As we’ve all seen in vivid detail, America’s corporate media giants have been utterly feckless cowards during America’s dance with authoritarianism. Most media giants are far more interested in tax cuts, deregulation, and getting their giant and pointless mergers approved than they are in pesky things like human lives, public safety, civil rights, and democratic norms.

But as Trump’s health and political power have begun to fade, you’ll occasionally see media giants show some backbone (see: ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC for repeated First Amendment violations).

Last week, Brendan Carr began threatening media outlets with costly investigations should they simply report on polls the thin-skinned president doesn’t like. In response, Gomez has sent a letter to the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt, urging him to find his spine:

Gomez’s letter reiterates that Carr’s threats are illegal and empty. The rule Carr is citing is the “broadcast news distortion rule.” It was created in 1949 and gives the agency the power to punish media companies for clear ethical violations involving an intentional, misleading distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”

The president being upset because his polling is cratering does not qualify, Gomez notes:

“Absent that level of clear evidence, this commission has no authority to act. Reporting the results of a poll this administration happens to dislike does not come close to meeting those standards.”

Gomez also penned letters to giant broadcasters like Disney, reminding them that the law is very much on their side:

It remains unclear if Carr will ever see any meaningful accountability for his extremist censorship campaigns while at the FCC. The most likely outcome remains a comfortable high six figure think tank job in media and telecom industries that — should we actually survive authoritarianism — will be very keen to pretend absolutely none of this ever happened.

If there are good, nuanced ways to make use of generative AI in gaming, as I think there are, that doesn’t change the fact that there are nuance-free and terrible ways for advocating for AI in gaming. Tim Sweeney and Epic Games have emerged as helpful foils for the never-AI crowd, given just how cartoonishly brazen Sweeney has been about the use of AI at Epic, as well as the absolute trash vibe-coded launcher the company recently produced. What’s going on there almost seems purposefully designed to bolster the arguments from those against any use of AI in gaming.

Epic and Sweeney are not alone in this, it seems. Brandon Stirrup is a business strategy employee at Xbox and he recently went on his own brazen ExTwitter screed that claimed AI use is in far greater employ than anyone is talking about, that games can be easily made by anyone using generative AI tools, and that anyone not using the technology as much as possible doesn’t deserve to be in the industry at all.

Stirrup kicked off his thread on October 18 with a simple message saying he’d “vibe coded a bad but improvable game” over two days, although he only “actively” worked on it for about three hours. “I’m telling you I tried it and it’s true…anyone can build a game.”

After saying that developers and studios who aren’t incorporating AI into their strategies are “planning for a fake future,” Stirrup went all in.

“Look if I’m fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. You can make a game with a simple prompt and yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse,” he wrote.

This epic online rant went much further than that. Here is a capture of all of it in one image.

There’s a ton to hate in there, frankly. Calling gamers stubborn and stupid is one hell of a “business strategy” for Microsoft to be taking here, for instance. I have my own issues with the never-AI crowd, but I have made the point over and over again that their fears are not stupid, not unfounded, and their complaints are not only not to be dismissed, but rather that we need their viewpoint to be taken into account to navigate to a proper type of AI use in the industry. Stirrup does the opposite and dismisses them entirely out of hand. And that is very dumb.

The claim that anyone can make games with a “simple prompt” is also about as obviously untrue a statement as I can think of. Even Stirrup couldn’t do so, acknowledging that what he’d managed to produce in his own experimentation was “a bad but improvable game.” And that’s his own self-assessment. I would hope that a business strategy manager at a gaming company would understand that his opinion of his own product isn’t really what matters here. This is what gets so many AI bros in trouble with the public: the constant unsubstantiated claims that AI can do things it simply cannot do. And I imagine that the human artists currently making Xbox games aren’t in love with this devaluation of their work, either.

And, finally, stating that anyone who disagrees with him “should not be in the business of being in business” is idiotic. There are many game developers out there making zero or very limited use of AI tools. And they’re making great games. There is of course a place in the industry for never-AI developers, just as there is a place in the film industry for directors who make no use of CGI. These are tools, nothing more. Insisting that a painter has no place as an artist if he doesn’t use your preferred type of paintbrush makes no sense.

Stirrup deleted his ExTwitter account, claiming he did so because of the volume of responses he got from all of this. I imagine the tone and tenor of those responses had as much to do with it as the volume. And he has only his completely tone-deaf, dismissive screed to blame for any of that. He said aloud he could be fired for what he said. I think he should be.

Not because AI use in gaming should be entirely verboten, but because posting all of that while being employed in a business strategy role seems to prove to me that he’s not built for that role.

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.

For example:

• In late 2025, Australia became the first country to implement a minimum age requirement for prohibiting children under age 16 from creating or holding social media accounts. 
• India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act that includes mandatory verifiable parental consent and has undertaken ongoing discussions for social media restriction.
• The United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act requiring age verification across a swath of services hosting content considered harmful to users under 18. More than half the states across the U.S. have enacted age verification laws. 
• An EU Commission’s expert report recommends a ban on social media access for users under 13. It also recommends mandatory age verification for platforms to ensure that users are ‘age appropriate.’ 

The Access Problem 

Age verification laws that are predicated on the necessity of users possessing a current passport, driver’s license, credit card, or similar documents proving their identity exclude critical sections of populations.  And this problem is global in nature: Millions of people lack government-issued identification or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it. 

Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s license, and a further 2.6 million lack any government photo ID; leaving large groups blocked from online content or services. The UK has a similar predicament: proof-of-age checks are often reliant on passports, driver’s licenses, or other recognized alternatives, which can pose unique challenges to people without these documents.

Much of the advocacy around age verification discusses the privacy harms of age verification. Yet these measures also threaten something more fundamental: equal access to information and the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression. 

Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether. 

Effects on Global Majority Countries 

Age verification laws reshape who can speak, who can access information, and who gets excluded from the digital public sphere. In other words, age verification is not a neutral safety measure: it presents a structural barrier to disproportionately exclude certain groups—particularly those in the global majority—and alters the architecture of global online expression. Some of these groups are already marginalized offline, and age verification extends that exclusion into digital spaces.

For instance, 850 million people globally do not have ID. Most of these individuals exist in primarily low and middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The World Bank points out that many are members of marginalized groups and more than half of those lacking access to identity documentation also have children whose births have not been registered. Women are particularly vulnerable and are 8% less likely than men to have an ID. Other vulnerable groups, such as adults in low income countries, are less likely to have an ID when they fall below 25 years, as are those with a primary school education or less or those in rural areas. 

A policy paper from EDRi points out that age verification laws provide quick tech solutions but overlook longstanding structural challenges and undermine the universality of the internet. The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect. Moreover, these laws depend on the collection of harmful mass data that human rights organizations, including EFF, is fighting against—and has for decades. 

For example:

• In Morocco, a push to restrict children’s access would ban under-13s from creating accounts on gaming platforms. This could potentially create challenges for those with IDs that have incomplete information concerning the year of birth. In addition, this push would also impact those who attempt to leave Morocco.
• In Egypt, the lack of ID cards has created challenges for minority groups such as the Baha’i.
• Stateless individuals would also struggle under age verification laws. The Rohingya, the world’s largest population of stateless people, often lack IDs. 
• Kuwait’s Bidoon population also lacks proper identification materials. According to Amnesty International, this leads many to rely on standard civil identity cards, which can be restrictive.  
• Nigeria launched a national program to provide ID cards to its population in 2007. Since then, 64.4 million have registered, but that represents just over 30% of the national population.
• The Kafala system, a practice in several countries across the Middle East, also introduces challenges for age verification laws. Under this legal framework, migrant workers’ legal residency and employment status are bound to a specific employer. This potentially leaves stateless persons or migrant workers vulnerable to forced labor and restricted movements. 

No ID, No Access

Age verification laws are less about confirming the age of a user and more about creating barriers to online participation that many people cannot reliably scale. The net result is reduced access, more data collection, and an increased chance of unequal or mistaken exclusion from accessing information online. 

Nobody doubts the importance of protecting children online. While proponents assert that age verification laws protect minors from harmful material, online harassment, and digital addiction, these laws are not the solution. They subvert fundamental freedom of expression rights and pose significant privacy risks.  

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive, and as more countries considering implementing ID-based checks, the risks move beyond censorship and surveillance toward excluding some people entirely. That’s why we’re working with groups in the U.S. and around the world to push back against these laws, and why we hope you join our effort.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

It wasn’t until after immigration officers started murdering US citizens that the Trump administration finally agreed to do anything about it. First, Trump turfed Kristi Noem, setting her up with a “special envoy” dead end job (which has also now come to an end). Then it elevated Markwayne Mullin, who first insisted his priority was to tone down things a bit to keep ICE from generating negative press on a daily basis.

Pressure was applied to outfit ICE officers with body cameras. Hilariously, DHS officials claimed there simply wasn’t any money to do this, despite ICE now commanding the most money of any federal law enforcement agency. More money was given to ICE to handle this fake budgetary shortfall, which then led to a lot of things, none of which did much to rein in ICE’s tendency to abuse its power, violate rights, and engage in violence.

First, the rollout was slow-walked. The deadline for deployment kept being pushed back. When full deployment finally arrived, it was pushed back even further by vague claims about delays in training. Then the DHS made it clear body cam footage would be almost inaccessible by the public. Finally, the cameras were being worn by officers but somehow never seemed to be rolling when officers violated rights, abused their power, or engaged in violence.

The Government Accountablity Office was asked to look into ICE’s body cam program. The resulting report [PDF] noted that while this was better than not having cameras, it left a lot to be desired.

The report, requested by congressional Democrats, comes as they have fumed about slow deployment of the cameras as well as ICE officers’ failure to activate them in a string of shootings, including during multiple fatal interactions. ICE officers have killed six people since President Trump took office.

“ICE has not implemented controls to help ensure compliance with activating cameras when required by policy,” GAO concluded in its report.

First of all, while ICE has promised to outfit all field officers with cameras, it has continued to delay the rollout because it is continually onboarding new hires. This is a problem that’s never going to go away — not when the administration is constantly demanding more officers and more arrests and the agency isn’t able (or willing) to throw more money and personnel at training programs to ensure new hires are both trained and outfitted with these mandatory recording devices. According to what’s stated in the GAO’s report, ICE has decided the best stop-gap solution is to… just stop buying more body cameras.

[A]s of June 2026 ICE has not updated its plans to reflect changes stemming from an increase in the total number of cameras scheduled for deployment and schedule delays caused by the pause in further camera deployment. Further, ICE, like CBP, is at least one year behind its 2024 plan.

Additionally, ICE’s overall deployment needs have increased. Specifically, according to ICE program officials, the component intends to provide cameras to all personnel, including planned future hires. In July 2025, ICE initiated a hiring surge of about 12,000 additional personnel. However, the number of cameras scheduled for deployment documented in its 2024 plan has remained relatively stable as of April 2026.

While both CBP and ICE have policies that state officers must start recording at the beginning of “encounters,” only CBP seems interested in actually making this happen. It does have some auto-record options deployed. The GAO recommended ICE do the same thing. And despite both agencies being housed by the DHS, ICE has affirmatively stated that it won’t implement auto-activation features in cameras worn by ICE officers.

ICE disagrees that it is necessary to implement additional controls or procure the accessories required for automatic activation, which triggers upon the drawing of a firearm or TASER. Specifically, automated activation presents significant operational risks, including inadvertent or false activations during routine movements.

ICE then goes on to list the possible “harms” of auto-activation, which include recording discussions with “informants or victims,” as well as the “inadvertent” documentation of First Amendment activities. This might mean something if (1) ICE didn’t control the recorded footage, (2) allow officers to record people engaged in protected First Amendment activities, and (3) ICE officers didn’t routinely leave their cameras off when engaging in violent acts.

In the end, this is nothing more than ICE telling everyone — the people it serves and the people it answers to — that the body cameras are nothing more than expensive lip service. These devices aren’t going to be used to hold officers accountable. If they’re used for anything at all, it will be to find more charges to throw at arrestees or selectively released to support the government’s preferred narratives.

The big Meta settlement with a bunch of states got most of the headlines, but state AGs have gone all in on suing tech companies of late, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Last week things went ballistic when the judge in New Mexico’s case (New Mexico being one of the few states that refused to join the others in settling) ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion penalty. As Daphne Keller points out, a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that $15 billion of that judgment covers the same claims that all the other states together settled for just $459 million (though Meta has said it will fight the ruling).

As we discussed earlier, TikTok also settled with Alabama in a separate case. But the cases just keep coming. Rhode Island just sued Meta (again), this time claiming it allowed scam ads to run rampant on the site. And a group of state AGs (mostly using the same outside law firm) sued OpenAI separately (same basic lawsuits filed individually in each court). TikTok, Snap, YouTube, all face additional similar lawsuits as well.

Many people are cheering these lawsuits on, and you can understand why. These are some of the most hated companies on the planet right now. No one trusts the big Silicon Valley companies and their broligarch CEOs who seemed willing and eager to fall in line (literally) behind the fascism of Donald Trump. Not to mention the enshittification. Oh so much enshittification. And then add the relentless attempts to force AI tools into places people clearly don’t want them.

People were understandably and reasonably fed up. And they wanted blood. Massive verdicts deliver it.

But as I’ve warned, we shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate these kinds of things. Indeed, we may quickly be learning exactly why I was so concerned with those early verdicts against Meta earlier this year. As I noted at the time, some of those cases were the kinds of lawsuits that Section 230 was supposed to protect against — and for good reason. Other cases (like the latest New Mexico ruling) do involve statements by the company (thus they’re not Section 230 issues) but are still equally problematic, as we’ll discuss below.

First, most of the product liability, negligent design, and kid safety cases really shouldn’t even exist under Section 230. Effectively all of them are predicated on the fact that some people do bad things, some (not all) of which were loosely connected to the internet services that are being sued, under the theory that the internet companies should have prevented the bad things from ever happening. But the entire premise of Section 230 was that if you hold internet platforms liable for every bad thing that happens on them, they will massively crack down on speech online, to avoid facing liability. It turns the internet from being a global communications network… into a bland “broadcast” tool, where only approved content gets shared.

It also makes it almost impossible to run an online platform that allows third party speech unless you have massive resources and a building full of lawyers. In other words, it means that only the largest internet companies can survive, while making it way harder for there to be any new entrants in the market.

There’s a reason that State Attorneys General spent many, many years pushing Congress to amend Section 230 to carve out the enforcement of state laws. They never actually got that. But they may have gotten something better. A bunch of judges who decided that state AGs and the courts can simply ignore Section 230 and hold internet companies liable for things their users do, so long as you claim the bad things were due to “product design” or “negligence.” The Ninth Circuit recently eviscerated the key part of the law that was supposed to stop exactly these kinds of cases.

It’s the “get around 230” trick that collapsed the entire law.

As for the New Mexico case (and some of the new Rhode Island case), they are, in theory, predicated on statements by the company. But when I look at the New Mexico ruling (even setting aside the size of the judgment), I can’t figure out how it makes any sense. The jury verdict is based on the claim that public statements by Meta and some of its executives were “willfully deceptive.” And, as someone who doesn’t trust Zuckerberg or Meta at all — and who has called out some of his willfully deceptive statements in the past — I was primed to side with the jury.

But look at the “statements” in question. I’m having trouble seeing how any of them are actually deceptive in any meaningful way. I’m not going to post them all, but they all seem mostly true, even if the public believes otherwise. Take for example:

“We don’t sell your data and we don’t tell advertisers who you are. What we do is allow advertisers to reach people interested in their products.”

This statement (by Sheryl Sandberg in this case) is… accurate. I know that, broadly, people often claim that “big tech sells your data” but that’s never actually been true. Their business model has always been based on selling advertisers access to your feed based on your data. That’s a very different thing. What the company does is allow advertisers to target you based on the data Meta has about you, but the advertiser never gets or sees any identifying information from you or data about you. There are data brokers out there that do sell that kind of data (and those should be wiped off the earth, as far as I’m concerned), but that’s never been any of the big tech companies’ business. Indeed, one of the statements the jury found deceptive was Mark Zuckerberg accurately describing this dynamic:

“There are other internet companies or data brokers or folks that might try to track and sell data, but we don’t buy and sell.”

That’s an accurate statement! But the jury found that this one statement alone generated 1,386,648 violations of the law! What?!? How that and all the other “violations” (almost 44 million of them!) came about is also highly questionable. It assumes that each New Mexico resident who might have come across one of the statements counts as an actual violation under the law:

It assigned 2.1 million violations to each of 11 statements that appeared in major news outlets and 1,386,648 to each of 15 statements made through company channels, including its newsroom, executives’ Facebook posts, earnings calls and a developer conference, for a total of 43,899,720.

According to reports, 2.1 million was the population of New Mexico in 2020. 1.4 million was the number of New Mexico residents with active Facebook accounts at the time. So basically the jury claimed that each person who could have seen one of those statements because they appeared in a major news outlet… equals a violation of the law. And for the statements made on Facebook/Meta properties themselves, they assume every person with an account could have seen it, making it another violation. That calculation seems… bizarre. Lawyers are already saying they doubt it will hold up on appeal.

Even worse, Meta execs also got dinged for general statements about how they try to take down misinformation and don’t profit from misinformation:

“Well, if we see harmful misinformation on the platform, then we take it down. It’s against our policy. So the 18 million number that I shared is the number of pieces of content that we’ve seen on the platform that we take down. Now, do we catch everything? Of course there are mistakes that we make or areas where we need to improve, but that’s the best number that we have in terms of what we’ve seen and what our systems have been able to detect.”

That’s Zuck again, and that statement is also… pretty accurate? They certainly do miss some harmful content, but that is the nature of content moderation, especially when you have billions of users around the globe. I don’t see how that claim can be deceptive.

In court, New Mexico apparently argued that this was deceptive because of Meta’s Xcheck program. But as we were just discussing last week, there was a perfectly valid reason for Xcheck. It was the program that was put in place to deal with high profile accounts. Those were the accounts where Meta recognized that if they made a mistake, and took down those accounts incorrectly, it would make the company look really bad. So they created a system where no action would be taken on those accounts without a secondary human review. Given the situation, this sounds reasonable. It’s what most companies would do facing similar challenges (and, it is, in fact, what most companies have done).

But when Frances Haugen released the details of this program, it was reported on (misleadingly) as “Meta allowing the elite to violate its rules.” But that’s not what the program was for. It was to make sure there was additional human review, even if that review sometimes took too long.

But New Mexico presented it to the jury as Meta claiming to take down harmful misinformation while secretly using Xcheck to let big accounts spread it, and the jury (and now the judge) punished Meta accordingly.

I’m honestly not sure how any internet company avoids facing a similar risk down the road. When an AG can take broadly true statements, strip them of context, and call them deceptive (when the only deceptive thing is the AG’s presentation), how can any company survive such lawsuits?

And, with the chance to get a $25 billion award from it, these lawsuits are going to be everywhere. It could even be worse, given that New Mexico actually asked for even more, and the judge said he could have ordered a penalty over $200 billion. And, again, these are for basically true statements! How do you run an internet company with that kind of threat of liability over your head?

Even if you look at the strongest elements of New Mexico’s case against Meta, I’m left a bit baffled. The key part of the case resolved around the claim that “You have control over how your information is shared,” which was a statement from back in 2010. The court in New Mexico claimed that was deceptive… because of the FTC’s $5 billion fine of Meta, over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That fine hinged on the same claim, with the FTC arguing that it was misleading by Meta to claim that because anyone could also share their friend graph, and since that graph includes information about other people (namely that you are connected to others), they argued that revealed private info.

But, as we noted at the time, that doesn’t seem like that big a deal? Knowing who is in your friend graph from a social media site doesn’t really seem like violating privacy. Friend graphs are… just how social media works. There’s also no evidence that anyone was directly “harmed” from the ability to access a friend graph this way.

Finally: the FTC fined Facebook for this already, and did so at $5 billion for the entire country. Why does anyone think that New Mexico alone deserves 5X that amount?

Combined with the judgments and the settlements, these cases are going to keep piling up, and they’re going to make the internet worse in almost every way. If you thought enshittification was bad before, wait until politicians and judges are the true product managers for the internet, driven by headline seeking and profit maximizing Attorneys General who will view suing tech companies as a way to fill state coffers.

People can celebrate the fact that big internet companies we all hate are losing cases and having to pay, but the end result won’t be a better internet. It will be one driven by politicians looking to shake down tech companies any time anything “bad” happens online. That’s going to lead to way more restrictions on the internet. Way more identity verification to do anything. Way less innovation (and new offerings will have to go through an exhaustive legal review — not to make them better, but to make them less likely to end up in court). It’s also going to lead to way less transparency. The New Mexico verdict means that even accurately describing how your site works can lead to a massive verdict against you, so companies are going to tell execs to shut up completely. This will also mean very few new competitors — except those with massive bank accounts. The broligarchs will be able to afford the liability risks of new services. Everyone else will be priced out.

This was the world that Ron Wyden and Chris Cox sought to avoid when they authored Section 230 30 years ago. But it’s here now — even without the repeal of Section 230 — and we’re going to see just how bad that is for the internet.

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The thing about being in power is that there’s not much room left between the floor and the ceiling. The administration can fall, but only so far, because it’s still the administration. Conversely, it can only rise so far. The system of checks and balances — even when broken — limits upward trajectories. Bureaucracy generates plenty of friction on its own, which means even when everything aligns perfectly, things still move slowly and rarely reach the heights promised or projected.

Trump’s anti-voter operations are banging their collective heads against the wall. The main man continues to insist millions of illegally registered voters exist. The operational side of this obvious lie continues to struggle to convert this hyperbole to reality. Sure, it tries to lay the groundwork for the lies, but the moment anyone pushes back, the administration has been forced to admit it doesn’t actually have any facts to back up its accusations.

This attempt to disenfranchise voters, cast doubt on any future election results, and discourage people who might not vote for GOP candidates from heading to the polls is backfiring spectacularly. In California — a state Trump often portrays as being completely overrun by dangerous migrant criminals — the DOJ and DHS have delivered next to nothing. The DOJ brags about its 28 arrests of “illegal” voters, but those have happened in a state that has more than 23 million registered voters.

The administration is apparently tiring of having to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to propping up its own false narratives. Under the threat of further legal action by the DOJ, Trump is now demanding California engage in a witch hunt of its own.

The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.

The letter — sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — also said local officials would “risk significant federal scrutiny” if they failed to comply with the Justice Department’s demands.

California is, of course, under no legal obligation to do this. Its obligations to ensure the legitimacy of voters are already subject to local laws and other efforts it already engages in. This bizarre demand doesn’t have any legal weight behind it. But it does contain a vague threat that the DOJ could easily turn into a reality by directly interfering with the election process during the mid-terms.

It certainly seems like that’s what the administration will do, whether or not California officials agree to do Trump’s dirty work for him.

Last week, the Trump administration sued California, a heavily Democratic state, seeking to temporarily pre-empt the counting of more than 20,000 mail ballots sent to people it said were suspected of registering to vote for the Nov. 3 election, even though they were not U.S. citizens. 

That was the opening shot. The 28 arrests the DHS touted are the second wave. This threat — which comes with a 48-hour compliance expectation — is the latest. There will undoubtedly be more, even if the administration loses its attempt to block more than 20,000 ballots in court.

The counties receiving these lists have been given less than two days to validate hundreds to thousands of issued ballots. The government’s demands are already ridiculous, as it expects state officials to prove negatives as well as positives. But they’re also ridiculous in a much, much stupider way: it appears the DOJ hadn’t bothered to vet its own list of suspected “illegal” ballots before sending out its mass email to California election officials.

In rural Inyo County, along the Nevada border, the registrar of voters said the list she was sent included just two people, and neither of them had been issued ballots. Danielle Sexton, the registrar, said her records showed they had never voted anywhere in California.

And in Mendocino County, a rugged stretch on the north coast, the registrar said the list she received was completely wrong.

“It’s not our voters that were listed,” said Katrina Bartolomie, the Mendocino clerk-recorder. “It’s from another county.”

Par for the course for the Trump administration, where high-level officials view themselves as snipers, but always opt for birdshot and sawed-offs during the loadout process. But they know who they work for, so it probably doesn’t matter. We should absolutely expect the administration to disrupt the election process and engage in protracted legal battles everywhere the GOP loses a seat. We should also expect the DOJ, DHS, and others to contradict the public assurances they’ve offered and send feds to polling places to suppress voting in contested precincts.

What’s on display here is just the groundwork being laid for future bullshit challenges of the legitimacy of an election that, at this point, looks to give the Democratic Party the control of the House.

Last week Elon Musk arbitrarily started throttling the LEO (low-Earth orbit) satellite connections of Ukraine’s military, preventing it from engaging in offensive and defensive operations. The decision blindsided the White House, caused significant financial and operational headaches for Ukraine, and created no shortage of bipartisan backlash.

After spending a week blaming one another, both the White House and Musk ultimately settled on the flimsy excuse that the throttling was because Ukraine had been violating Starlink’s terms of service.

Regular Starlink terminals have automatic network throttling implemented if a connected vehicle operates in excess of 70 km/hr. Starshield — the significantly more expensive military variant — is supposed to have no cap, but was throttled by Musk if drones or vehicles exceed speeds of 90 km/hr, preventing Ukraine from conducting both defensive and offensive operations.

Musk of course knows that Starlink and Starshield alike are used for military operations, terrorism, and criminal activity planet-wide. Smuggled Starlink terminals are routinely used for all manner of military, criminal, and black-market operations. Ukraine had been using both Starshield and cobbled together black market Starlink solutions for years without issue. Why the sudden issue?

As a right wing extremist in alliance with global authoritarians, it seems most likely that Musk interfered to drive Ukraine into Moscow’s arms for a negotiation in which they’ll be expected to surrender significant territorial gains (something Musk has long openly advocated for).

The move came as the Trump admin temporarily suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine and lifted Russia sanctions to allow for diesel imports from Moscow — something Trump hopes (falsely) will lower domestic gas prices and save him from an expected midterm bloodbath.

But it seems very likely Musk was also exploiting a crisis to upsell a country fighting for its life to a more expensive broadband plan (kind of like Verizon did to those California firefighters back in 2018).

Obviously Musk isn’t keen on openly admitting he’s a greedy, traitorous, and unstable national security threat, so he spent much of the last week defensively insisting he arbitrarily messed with Ukraine’s satellite connectivity because he’s so bravely anti-war. From a post to Musk’s personal right wing propaganda website, X:

“Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.

Starlink remains critical to the defense of Ukraine, as it is the only system that cannot be jammed or blown up, at least for now. Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately. This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.

Starlink was also crucial to preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine in the early days of the war, as all other means of communication were destroyed or jammed by Russia.

SpaceX has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR.

That said, I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict. May you burn in hell.

End of story.”

That non-threat is definitely a threat. Claiming the loophole is now “closed” also makes no sense, given that Ukraine says the limitations have been removed after significant bipartisan backlash, and there’s no indication that Ukraine actually changed anything. What actually changed things was global, bipartisan, political pressure against Musk and the Trump administration for their ratfucking of an American ally.

Recall that Musk, at one point, had already restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by authoritarians). It’s clear that Musk has a goal in mind, and it’s not Ukraine regaining full territorial control after being invaded by an authoritarian neighbor.

Musk isn’t anti-war as much as he is sympathetic to Putin (in perfect sync with his favorite politician) and keen on ensuring that if Starlink is used for war, the violent result is as profitable as possible.

Given the ugly nature of an unstable billionaire proving he’s a national security threat, I’d suspect we’ll see more investigations into this episode in the new year (especially if Republicans lose control of both the House and Senate). And countries worldwide are clearly accelerating their exploration and funding of numerous fledgling LEO Starlink alternatives to try and demuskify the planet.