If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven’t been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He’s generally wrong about all of that, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from saying it over and over again. The end result, if you didn’t bother looking any further into what Kennedy has said and written on the topic, is that you might believe that what Kennedy really cares about is a cautious approach with stringent testing before allowing something to be put into American bodies.
But that isn’t what Kennedy believes. It’s not what he demonstrates through actions, either. And if you want proof of that, you need only read about how Kennedy has unilaterally adjusted rules at HHS to allow pharmacies to sell you peptides over the objections of the FDA.
Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration.
Kennedy’s new rule sidesteps the need to formally undo that FDA action. The rule is titled “Enforcement Discretion Policy Regarding 503A Compounding Using Certain Peptide Bulk Drug Substances” and was made available Wednesday on the Federal Register, with the final publication date set for October 30. The rule does not change the regulatory status of the peptide; instead, it states the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer take enforcement action against compounding pharmacies for making the peptides, essentially giving them a green light to freely produce and sell them.
So what qualifications does Kennedy possess that is informing his decision to overrule actual FDA scientists on the topic of peptides? None, of course. Kennedy is not a scientist. He’s not a healthcare professional. What he is, instead, is both a user of peptides personally and someone who has many friends in the peptide business. It’s just another grift, though it is being wrapped in pretend backing from the panels that Kennedy personally stocked with sycophants.
One reason cited for all the peptides was that an FDA advisory panel voted in July to add these six peptides back to the list of drugs compound pharmacies can make. However, prior to the vote, Kennedy stacked that 12-member committee with eight new members. At least six of Kennedy’s additions have ties to peptide-related businesses and clinics, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.
Another explanation for allowing the peptides is that the safety concerns are mainly hypothetical or “inferential” and not based on observed harm in humans. But this is mainly because there are few to no studies involving humans that show either benefits or harms from the peptides.
And here we put the lie to Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines. If he wants to claim that vaccines haven’t been tested enough to be in wide public use, he cannot create a non-enforcement policy over peptides that have had far less, if any, such testing. We are living under health policies that are purely Kennedy’s personal whims. That’s nothing like the gold standard science that he has been promising to follow throughout his tenure at HHS.
The peptide pushers are celebrating and it’s not hard to understand why. Many Kennedy allies are among them. He gave them a gift, almost perfectly circumventing his previous fears about testing to do so.
With just four days to go before the midterms, Trump is unraveling. Yesterday, a Reuters reporter asked him whether his decision to skip a planned weekend rally in Kansas had anything to do with being sick of traveling. Trump shot back that the reporter was “way out of shape” and looked “like hell” while insisting he himself felt fine. HuffPost described the president as visibly drenched in sweat during the exchange.
By Thursday evening, Trump had also scrapped a Sunday rally in Dubuque, Iowa, leaving a Friday stop in Florida as his only remaining in-person event before Election Day. By Friday, perhaps due to the negative perception those cancellations left, Trump had reversed himself and put both rallies back on the schedule for Sunday.
These final chaotic days in the campaign cap a month of red state Trump rallies that have done little to move the political needle. If anything, they may have made things even worse for the GOP.
Two of Trump’s first October stops were Durant, Oklahoma and Mobile, Alabama—odd choices. Trump carried Durant’s congressional district by more than 50 points in 2024, and as redrawn, Mobile’s district favored him by around 40 points. Nebraska, another reliably red state, came next.
In an analysis of the GOP’s midterm panic, CNN’s Aaron Blake tallied Trump’s 2024 margins in the three states at 31 points in Alabama, 34 in Oklahoma and 20 in Nebraska. Asked why he was spending the home stretch in places like these, Trump explained, “Well, I won all of them by a lot. I’m going there just to make sure.”
Republican strategist Ryan Mahoney offered a less reassuring explanation. “There’s no shortage of states, solid-red districts, solid-red states [that] are starting to suffer with Republican base voters who lack enthusiasm and motivation to get out and vote.”
In Durant, Trump’s message to the home-field crowd was telling.
“I feel a little foolish, you know what I’m saying, ‘Go out and vote, go out and vote.’ You’re gonna, they’re gonna win in the last half, but still go out and vote. We’re worried about Michigan. We’re worried about Texas. We’re worried about a few states.”
By Trump’s count, there were as many as 40 races worth worrying about.
“This looks both necessary and risky,” one GOP strategist said of Trump’s unusual strategy. “We’re playing defense in some red states here.” He likened the swing through GOP strongholds to a farewell tour and warned that battleground stops could backfire.
Trump’s aides heard that warning, too. The New York Times reported that political advisers and outside Republican groups cautioned them that rallies in battleground races could do more harm than good. But the president’s team largely discounted the concern. In his advisers’ view, the strategy was simple: “Focus on red states and juice turnout.”
But turnout where, exactly?
Perhaps the White House understood that it was going to lose but didn’t want to lose quite so badly.
Eight days before the election, the Trump tour reached Mississippi, where recent polling suggested GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s race had grown more competitive. Her Democratic opponent, Scott Colom, posted, “Cindy High Prices is scared and that’s why she’s sending Donald Trump down here.”
Paid protesters, all
Trump is used to hecklers, but probably not quite this many or with messages this pointed. At San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum on Oct. 7, at least 18 hecklers were either removed by security or walked out after disrupting his speech.
Kansas was rowdy too. At Trump’s Oct. 19 rally in Park City for Sen. Roger Marshall, there was one interruption after another, including a protester who shouted a memorable expletive:
At times, the MAGA crowd grew hostile. In San Antonio, a man in a red hat grabbed a departing protester by the hair before other rallygoers pulled the two apart. Five days later, at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio, a woman in a “Release the Epstein files” T-shirt was swarmed by at least three men, one of whom appeared to punch her in the head and pull her hair. From the stage, Trump narrated, referring to her throughout as a man:
“They’re all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country. They’re scum. But he’s going back home to Mom. He’s going back home to Mom. Look at him. Look at him. Terrible. Don’t we love law enforcement? Oh, he’s gotta go on a diet! He’s a fat guy. Wow. Wow. Gotta go on a diet fast. We all do.”
By Wednesday, the hecklers had broken into song. In Chillicothe, Ohio, a man interrupted Trump’s remarks to sing that Trump had flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.
Trump claimed, without evidence, that he was a paid protester who had been given $250.
Thursday brought Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Trump sold out the 6,000-plus-seat Winthrop Coliseum in 2016. This time, he spoke at the Rock Hill Sports and Event Center, which has just 1,200 stadium seats.
Crowd size remains a point of pride and a sore spot for Trump. He has reportedly grown agitated over coverage of empty chairs and early departures at his rallies. At a rally in Perry, Georgia, last Saturday, Trump told the crowd that Barack Obama had been in Michigan “and the place was empty,” adding, “I had 40,000, he’d have like 90.” (Obama’s Detroit crowd was reported at more than 4,300, and video from inside showed the gym packed.) The next day in Port Huron, Michigan, Trump opened by calling Obama “my competitor” and argued that he had drawn the bigger crowd. On Thursday, he falsely declared on Truth Social that he was drawing “the BIGGEST CROWDS at Trump Rallies in the history of Midterm Elections, by a factor of five times.” Sad!
Per the Times, Trump has also been complaining that JD Vance hasn’t drawn large crowds to his own events. White House aides came to the vice president’s defense, after a fashion. “Donald Trump is the hardest working person in the country, followed by JD Vance,” spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said.
Amusing fact: Trump opened his Rock Hill remarks by talking about the North Carolina Senate race, where polls show Democrat Roy Cooper leading Trump’s handpicked candidate, Michael Whatley. “Whatley should win because he’s phenomenal,” Trump said. “But what are you going to do?”
Maybe remember which Carolina you are in, for starters.
Sick of traveling
The now-viral Trump exchange with Reuters correspondent Jacob Bogage came Thursday at Joint Base Andrews, as the president stepped off Air Force One. When the reporter raised travel fatigue, Trump called him sick, demanded to know who he worked for and pronounced Reuters terrible. Mediaite suggested Trump may have misheard the question as asking whether he was sick. When the reporter replied that he only wanted to make sure the president was doing well, Trump went on:
“Look at this guy. He’s way out of shape. … I’m not going to Kansas because he’s doing very well. … You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell!”
(Trump gripes, privately and publicly, about how hard he is working, apparently hoping to guilt his supporters into voting. “I’m working my ass off,” he told a Tennessee crowd earlier this month. “You better get out there and vote.”)
Nine days earlier, Trump had a similar back-and-forth with a reporter in the Oval Office. On Oct. 20, he warned Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent, that he had “better be careful.” Later, as Feinberg began a question about the golf courses Trump owns, the president cut him off:
“What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?”
“Not that I know of, sir,” Feinberg replied.
“I actually think there’s something wrong with you,” Trump said.
Even comedians he’s courted get the same treatment. After Bill Maher, who recently dined with Trump at the White House, used a monologue to bring up Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the president dictated a 1,300-word Truth Social post to aide Natalie Harp aboard Air Force One. “You’re not transformative, you’re a Loser!” Trump wrote. “I never watched your show much, but I will never watch it again.”
Trump insists he feels perfect. But C-SPAN footage of his rallies captures verbal stumbles and unfiltered behavior that have fueled questions about mental decline.
Phoning it in, literally
The Kansas rally had originally been set for Saturday in Salina in support of Sen. Roger Marshall. A YouGov poll conducted from late September into early October showed his Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, leading 48 percent to 45 percent. Trump nevertheless claimed he was skipping Kansas because Marshall was doing very well.
The plan, at first, was for the unpopular president to hold tele-rallies instead. “President Trump will continue connecting directly with Americans nationwide through more than 20 tele-rallies before Election Day,” an official said. A GOP source claimed that requests for tele-rallies were pouring in. A tele-rally, as HuffPost explained, is basically a conference call that Trump places to activists gathered around a speakerphone.
The Republican National Committee extended Trump’s stated reasoning to Iowa. “With Republicans in a strong position in Kansas and Iowa, previously planned in-person rallies in those states will no longer take place as scheduled.”
The Iowa event, a Sunday rally at the Five Flags Center in Dubuque, was reportedly still on the schedule during Trump’s exchange with reporters at Joint Base Andrews. Public polls show Democratic challengers still within striking distance in Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Alaska and Kansas—all traditional GOP strongholds.
The vice president scrapped a trip of his own. On Thursday, the White House announced that JD Vance would appear Friday in St. Cloud, Minnesota, for a fraud-focused press conference in the state that has become the White House’s favorite fraud punching bag.. By Thursday evening, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota had confirmed that “Vice President JD Vance will no longer be coming to St. Cloud on Friday.” St. Cloud Mayor Jake Anderson said no reason was given; the vice president’s office cited a scheduling change.
Trump, meanwhile, heads to Daytona Beach, Florida, on Friday, ahead of Sunday’s now restored stops in Kansas and Iowa—though the jury is still out on whether he will actually show up Sunday. He plans to be at the White House as the results come in.
Aides have removed all bottles of ketchup from the premises as a precaution.
There’s a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models were trained on. We made a few points.
One overarching point is that what the plaintiffs are trying to do is not what copyright law is for. Copyright gives the holder the ability to control how the embodiment of the work is used (ex: you can’t copy a book without permission, or, as the example we used in the brief, perform a play) but not the ability to control the public from benefiting from its contents. Copyright can control such activities as copying, distributing, or performing a work but NOT reading, watching, listening to, or learning from a work. What OpenAI does with its training is the latter set of activities, not the former. But if OpenAI is somehow not able to engage in these activities because of copyright, then no one can. Which would lead to a direct harm to the public, a loss of an important benefit copyright law is actually supposed to give it.
In fact, it is a benefit copyright law must provide the public. The whole point of copyright law is to promote “the progress of sciences and the useful arts,” or, in other words, help ensure we get more innovation and expression. But the plaintiffs in these cases want the opposite: they want copyright to stop these things. They want copyright law to prevent AI from being further developed (indeed, in its complaint the New York Times Company even asked for OpenAI’s models to be destroyed!) by denying it the ability to do the learning that is needed for it to be useful. And they want to prevent any of the further expression that AI helps facilitate, even though fostering new expression is exactly what copyright law is supposed to do.
In fact, it is what copyright law is constitutionally required to do. Moreover, if, rather than fostering innovation and expression, copyright law instead obstructs it, then copyright law is not constitutional. Congress only gets its authority to make copyright law through the Progress Clause (“to promote the progress of science and the useful arts…”) so if it turns out that the law it has passed instead does the opposite of promoting progress, then that law is unconstitutional, as being beyond its authority.
The First Amendment also limits Congress’s authority to pass laws that inhibit free expression. So Congress also would not have had the authority to pass a law that let copyright holders of existing works prevent either the development of AI or any of the downstream, lawful expression AI helps facilitate. If the copyright statute Congress passed were to have that effect, then it would be unconstitutional.
It also would violate the Constitution in another way we’ve discussed before: by violating the First Amendment-protected “right to read,” which is sometimes also referred to as the right to receive information. All those learning activities (reading, watching, listening to, etc.), which the current statute does not actually restrict, are activities that the First Amendment entitles the public to do, and copyright law not only does not prevent, but constitutionally could not prevent.
Meanwhile, we also made an overarching point: even to the extent that AI as we know it may be terrible, and we are looking for a law that can stop it, copyright law is still not the right law to do it. First of all, it’s not tailored to the actual problems we’d want to address (for instance, if using AI in hiring decisions produces discriminatory results because of bias incorporated into the AI model, then the solution to that problem is making sure that AI can train on even more material, not less, because it is the training limits that tend to create that bias). Secondly, the worse we think today’s AI is, the more important it is that something better is developed, but if law can stand in the way of further development, then none will be. None can be, and we’ll be stuck with the technology we have, if not an even worse version of it if we have to degrade the models in response to copyright claims. As well as stuck with an imbalanced, super-powered copyright law that could stand in the way of lots of other non-AI innovation and expression.
And, again, if we have to freeze the technology because of copyright law, then copyright law is definitely running afoul of the Constitution, which allows Congress to pass a copyright law that only does the opposite.
In sum, the worse you think AI is—and we make no quibble with that assessment, although we did point out that it also has some distinct upsides, particularly when it comes to enabling more expression—the more important it is that these copyright claims be dismissed. Because however bad the state of play may be today, a copyright law that would let these claims prevail will only make everything worse.
We have talked about the Wyden Siren many times before. Senator Ron Wyden learns, through classified briefings, that the intelligence community is doing something most Americans would consider a clear violation of their civil liberties — often justified by interpreting plain English words to mean something no other English speaker would recognize. But because that information is classified, he can’t just say what it is. So instead he sends a letter demanding that the intelligence community explain itself, carefully worded to tip off the public that the government is effectively lying about how it’s violating our civil liberties. He’s done it many times, from warning that the government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to flagging that supposed “cybersecurity” legislation was really being pushed for a more nefarious purpose.
Two Democratic senatorswho have long overseenUS intelligencesay the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.
Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration’s own deadline for releasing it passed in September.
The program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), lapsed in June after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March approval. The administration’sown public documentationsays rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance.” That window closed September 13, even as intelligence officials press lawmakers to reauthorize the program by the end of the year.
Wyden sounding the alarm is expected (and welcome). Schiff co-signing it is, however, a surprise. For many years when he was a Representative (prior to recently moving over to the Senate), Schiff was a reliable voice and vote for greater surveillance powers. He would frequently roll out his “as a former prosecutor” line to defend giving more and more power to the government.
Indeed, back in 2018, we called out Schiff (who was then the House ranking member on the Intel Committee) for giving Donald Trump greater surveillance powers in renewing Section 702. It was bizarre: Schiff was one of the loudest voices calling out Trump’s abuses of power during his first term, and yet he led the charge among Democrats to hand Trump even more surveillance power. He even undercut Wyden’s own attempts to rein in those powers, as Trevor Timm noted at the time in an op-ed blasting Democrats for handing Trump more surveillance power:
Schiff was a leading driver in the House to extend the NSA’s surveillance powers, and has been undercutting the more robust reforms proposed by other Democrats, like longtime Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Ron Wyden, for months.
Given that history, seeing Schiff co-sign a letter accusing the administration of illegally hiding a ruling about 702 abuses is quite the turnaround.
Indeed, Schiff even blasted out a press release talking about “serious abuses of American’s rights.” That’s quite a statement given how strongly Schiff fought to give those powers to the government.
The specifics here involve a secretive FISC ruling regarding Section 702. Technically 702 expired back in June, after Trump tried to tie its renewal to his ridiculous voting bill that no one is willing to pass. But back in March there was a secret ruling by the FISA Court which allows the government to keep using this surveillance authority at least until March of next year. That same ruling also objected to the search filters analysts use to pull Americans’ messages without the approvals and records the law requires — and then approved another year of surveillance anyway. Wyden and Schiff want it public, and the law is on their side: the statute requires either a declassified version within 180 days or if the DNI waives declassification by yelling “national security” then it requires an unclassified statement from the Attorney General summarizing the legal interpretation. And Attorney General Todd Blanche unequivocally promised the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would deliver the unclassified opinion by the deadline.
That deadline came and went on September 13. The ruling remains classified. From Wyden and Schiff’s letter:
We and others have repeatedly called for the administration to release the March FISC opinion. In May, the Chair and Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a letter to the administration stating their expectation that the opinion would be released by May 15 “in order to inform the Senate debate on section 702.” The statute itself requires the administration to release a declassified version of the opinion within 180 days. In July, Attorney General Blanche told the Senate Judiciary Committee he expected that the public release would happen “in advance of the statutory deadline.” Attorney General Blanche unequivocally committed to “declassifying the opinion by the statutory deadline of 180 days and complying with the law.” Nevertheless, it is now a month past the statutory deadline and the opinion has still not been released.
Simply put, this is not acceptable, especially as this administration restarts its attempts to lobby Congress to renew Section 702 without reforms. The administration has now had over seven months to declassify and release this opinion. It is time to stop violating the law and finally release this opinion. And if this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive, it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.
We demand that you release this opinion as soon as possible. We also request that you respond in writing by November 6, 2026, providing an explanation as to why the opinion was not released by the statutory deadline and identifying the officials that were responsible for withholding its timely release.
As Wired notes, Senators can read the ruling, but only in a secure room, and those who have done so are dropping heavy hints about what it reveals:
Lawmakers who have read the ruling hint that it says more. Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged colleagueson the Senate floor in Juneto read it in a secure room. “I have seen it,” he said. Once they did, he told them, “your opinion of the role of FISA and the rights of Americans will be impacted for sure.”
Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,”he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
Of course, the Trump administration seems to believe that laws are meaningless, especially if they require transparency or limit the government’s ability to abuse the rights of anyone in America. So don’t hold your breath waiting for Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to cough up this ruling. But as Wyden and Schiff point out, if the administration can’t be bothered to follow a simple disclosure deadline, why should anyone believe it’s respecting any of 702’s other limits while it begs Congress for a clean renewal?
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Well well well. All it took was a regime change and the persistent abuse of camera networks by police officers to change MapQuest from “Remember MapQuest?” nostalgia to “hey where can I download MapQuest” demands.
First, there’s the regime change. Trump has been stupid as fuck all the time since day one but nothing was much stupider than issuing an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Oh wait. There was more stupidity. Trump — again saying anything that momentarily glanced off the shiny, wrinkless lobes of his forebrain — demanded Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America.”
If that were the end of the story — a wet-brained spray-tan-maxxing fuckmook participating in some short attention span jabbering between hours of Truth Social doomscrolling — we wouldn’t be here today discussing this latest turn of events.
But Trump said something and companies started doing something. Some even started doing something before the spittle dried on Trump’s lips, as Karl Bode discussed earlier:
That’s how tech billionaires greeted this momentary outburst from a guy who’s never bothered to think twice. One company altered its map before it was even made official. The other did it even though no one in the company actually wanted to have it done. These are the actions of two of the richest and most powerful companies in the world — companies whose fortunes would have dipped to the equivalent of a rounding error if they’d chosen to reject this overture.
Meanwhile, one of the first names to the (map) game refused to play along. MapQuest doesn’t have billions of revenue to spare, much less the ubiquity of companies that offer phones as well as pre-installed map apps. MapQuest once owned the digital mapping world, but it has been sidelined by vertical integration.
Maybe it’s just because MapQuest (relatively) has nothing to lose. Or maybe it’s because MapQuest actually seems to care about its users. Either way, MapQuest refused to alter its map to reflect Trump’s digital takeover of Lake Ontario.
And now MapQuest is going after America’s surveillance state — one made most infamous by another company that has far more liquidity than MapQuest: Flock Safety. While it’s certainly not the first company to offer automatic license plate readers, it’s the most famous. Its network is huge, capable of capturing 20 billion plate reads a month. And it’s the current favorite of law enforcement agencies all over the US.
But Flock is working against its own ubiquity at the moment. It’s more famous now for allowing cops to stalk people, especially ex-wives and girlfriends, as well as any people their exes might now be seeing. It’s also a handy tool for cops who just want to track people, including anti-police violence protesters or anyone else who’s annoyed them.
People want to know where these cameras are. Flock’s tools have generated a ton of public records that have ultimately given activists the ability to locate and map camera locations. Other companies working with law enforcement have generated some data as well, albeit not as much as the current market leader.
MapQuest users in Canada and the U.S. can now see where some surveillance cameras have been set up in their communities.
The company introduced a “surveillance layer” earlier this week that uses animated eyes to mark where automated licence plate readers, or ALPRs, have been set up by police or others.
“We knew that there were a ton of cameras in use and documented in the U.S. and Canada,” MapQuest general manager Doug Berger told CBC News. “You would never know unless they were pointed out to you.”
This is very cool. For multiple reasons. A company deciding to highlight law enforcement surveillance on its official app is completely unexpected. That it did this because some of its users asked it to is even better, which means MapQuest cares more about its (relatively) small number of users than Google and Apple care about their millions of users who default to their apps simply because its part of their smartphone’s pre-installed ecosystem.
And that means MapQuest will continue to grow, three decades after its debut. GM Berger noted that the company gained three million new users after refusing to rename Lake Ontario. Adding a “surveillance layer” just means more deliberate interaction from users. And people who choose apps for a reason, rather than just using whatever first presents itself to them, are far more loyal.
This is a very smart move by MapQuest. The decisions it has made in the last couple of months shows it’s far more respectful of its current and future users than the massive tech companies that assume (often correctly) that consumers will eat whatever shit is shoveled at them by their service providers. MapQuest is looking for people who want to use MapQuest because they like what the company is doing. It’s an incredibly smart move that builds the sort of trust and loyalty larger companies can only wish they had.
Last week’s book list was a success, and I realized that it would work even better with others. Bookstores work precisely because they stack the books right next to each other.
Even though each of these authors has a book out this fall, they’re not my competition. Too often, we avoid cooperation because we’re embracing scarcity.
Each of us will be linking to thehotlist.org today. Ideas that spread, win. The page automatically updates based on which books get clicked on the most.
What happens when you help connect and organize the others?
Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that police all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, national security, and consumer rights abuses. But big U.S. companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and regulatory accountability, eroding quarterly revenues.
So instead we get corruption-fueled protectionism run by a bunch of racist, and incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.
Which it isn’t.
For example, I recommend this recent Verge piece about the Trump effort to ban Chinese drones, which notes how it has been trivial for Chinese companies to trick the administration and bypass the ban simply by renting a strip mall office, tweaking a few names, and pretending their equipment is produced domestically. Curiously, officials who don’t believe in government can’t govern. Fancy that.
Another report this week by Ars Technica indicates that U.S. chip giant Intel has also been so disoriented and confused they felt it necessary to get a waiver from the Trump administration’s “foreign robot ban” because executives didn’t really understand what is or isn’t covered:
“Intel’s waiver request stated that it was “unclear” whether its robotic vehicles even qualify as robots covered by the FCC ban but said it sought relief just in case. The tech company also received approval to “make certain hardware, software, and firmware changes” that would help ensure the continued operation and maintenance of the robotic vehicles.”
So it’s a foreign robot ban, unless we need foreign robots. In which case big U.S. companies have to spend a bunch of time and money kissing the Trump administration’s ass to ensure they have what they need to function. It’s far from the “free market” dogma the administration rose to power on. It’s a weird and racist autocratic nanny state operated by the dimmest people imaginable.
A recent study by the International Data Corporation predicts that the foreign robot ban could reduce US humanoid robot revenues by 58 percent over expected baseline. China is still expected to dominate the market with most of its cheaper, better gear avoiding the U.S. for the EU. And much like the FCC “drone ban,” a big impact will be less tech product availability and higher prices overall for U.S. consumers.
Not content with screwing up the drone, robot, vacuum, and lawnmower sectors, the Trump FCC last week announced it would also soon implement a ban on “foreign surveillance chips.” You’re to ignore that the FCC can’t really define what this means. And doesn’t really want to answer any serious questions about how this will be implemented in a country already dominated by Chinese tech.
The Trump administration makes an endless stink about protecting U.S. cybersecurity defenses by taking aim at Chinese-made tech. But with its other hand it has devastated U.S. cybersecurity agencies with policies that are indistinguishable from a foreign attack, make it easier for foreign governments to surveil U.S. citizens at scale (the refusal to pass real privacy laws or regulate data brokers, for example), and function largely as a way for the administration to line its own pockets.
Again, protectionism is bad. But what we have here isn’t really even that. There’s zero real indication that the Trump administration has any idea what it’s doing. There’s simply no reality in which the Trump administration can implement or enforce any of this. And because our consolidated corporate press sucks, most coverage simply refuses to make this clear to anybody.
Outlets like Reuters, for example, inform the public that the Trump administration is “aiming to safeguard the U.S. artificial intelligence supply chain from Chinese threats.” Others will parrot claims that the Trump administration is “dedicated to creating safety guardrails for AI.” But there’s no real evidence that’s true or that the administration is capable of doing literally any of that.
This sort of pseudo-journalism will be all the rage in the new year as the Trump administration sets its sights on a likely ban of foreign AI models (to lock in the dominance of U.S. giants that dutifully kiss the authoritarian ring). Which is to say: expect this sort of normalization and sanewashing to increase despite zero evidence that any of this is working or makes any coherent sense.
The authorities didn’t name the site at the time, but we identified it through footage aired by state broadcaster VTV. Vietnam’s Supreme People’s Procuracy now names HiAnime directly, in an indictment that also reveals where the money came from.
Seven Defendants Head to Trial
Today, the procuracy indicted Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa and six co-defendants, who will be tried by the Hanoi People’s Court. Khoa, Nguyễn Trung Anh, Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh and Nguyễn Đình Xuân are charged with copyright infringement and money laundering. The other three only face copyright infringement charges.
The defendants
According to state news agency TTXVN, the case originated with a complaint filed with the Ministry of Public Security by Rouse, the law firm that represents the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in Vietnam.
This complaint was filed on May 7, which was also the first day of a nationwide crackdown on pirate sites, triggered by an urgent order from Vietnam’s Prime Minister.
The HiAnime investigation eventually traced the operation back to early 2019, when Khoa allegedly came up with the idea to build pirate streaming sites that were easier to use than existing ones.
Khoa reportedly bought more than 100 domain names and worked on search engine optimization. Trung Anh managed the servers, Xuân programmed the sites, and Thanh designed them and handled the payouts. To expand the operation, co-defendant Nguyễn Phước Toàn was allegedly put in charge of the Zoro, Aniwatch and HiAnime pages on Reddit.
HiAnime wasn’t the only brand. The indictment also mentions Sflix/Myflixerz and 9animetv. Between mid-2019 and March 2026, the group allegedly offered 26,000 TV series and 7,500 anime titles through its network of sites.
12.85 Million USDT Through PropellerAds
The prosecution says that Khoa was in charge of the advertising. He allegedly dealt with advertising platform PropellerAds via Skype and Telegram, and placed its ads on the various pirate sites.
“Through the Propeller Ads platform, the defendants received a total of 12.85 million USDT, equivalent to 12.85 million USD,” Báo Bảo vệ pháp luật’s report reads (translated).
According to TTXVN, PropellerAds paid out 12.85 million USDT which was sent to the group’s crypto wallets.
The indictment notes that Khoa personally received 2.5 million USDT from 2020 onward, while Thanh collected 10.35 million USDT through wallets on the Binance exchange starting in September 2023. After costs, the four main defendants split the profits equally, which earned each of them at least 50 billion Vietnamese dong, roughly $2 million.
PropellerAds has been criticized by Hollywood before. The MPA recommended the advertising company for the USTR’s annual notorious markets list, arguing that many pirate sites use it to generate revenue. PropellerAds rejected these claims and, in 2023, accused the MPA of harassment and defamation.
Whether PropellerAds was aware of HiAnime’s activities is unknown.
Cloudflare Storage, DMCA Subpoenas
The indictment also mentions other intermediaries. Trung Anh allegedly rented servers from hosting company Evoluso between 2019 and 2022. From 2023 until March 2026, the group’s storage system relied on services from Cloudflare.
The MPA previously tried to identify the people behind HiAnime through Cloudflare. In October 2024, it requested a DMCA subpoena requiring the company to share information on hianime.to and several related domains. A year later, it requested another one, listing a new batch of HiAnime branded domains.
Whether these subpoenas produced any information that helped the Vietnamese investigation is unknown.
From Porsche to G63
Over the years, the sites repeatedly received DMCA copyright warnings from Google, prosecutors say. However, the defendants kept changing the site addresses, so they could continue streaming and collecting ad revenue. This matches with the rebranding efforts.
Early this year, the defendants allegedly began to cover their tracks. In February, fearing detection, Trung Anh had his sister register his Porsche in her name. Xuân did the same with a Mercedes, which he registered to his father and later his sister, while also changing its license plate.
By March 2026, as the authorities stepped up their action against copyright infringement, the defendants decided to stop operating and deleted the websites they had used,” Báo Bảo vệ pháp luật reports (translated).
HiAnime’s goodbye in March
The money laundering charges are linked to how the advertising revenue was spent. The four main defendants allegedly moved the USDT through several crypto wallets, sold it for Vietnamese dong, and transferred it to personal bank accounts. The money was then used to buy property and cars.
According to the indictment, Khoa spent more than 24 billion dong, starting with a Porsche Panamera that he registered in his wife’s name in January 2022. He later sold it, and used the proceeds and more crypto money to buy a Mercedes G63 in April 2024. That car was sold for 8.5 billion dong, which went toward a Land Rover Autobiography earlier this year.
The other main defendants allegedly spent their share on cars and property too, as can be seen in the summary below.
The four main defendants, according to the indictment
Defendant
Alleged ad income received
Alleged profit
Alleged purchases with crypto proceeds
Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa
2.5 million USDT
50 billion dong
Porsche Panamera, Mercedes G63, Land Rover Autobiography, GAC M8, two plots of land (more than 24.45 billion dong)
Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh
10.35 million USDT
More than 51.3 billion dong
House in Hanoi; bought and sold a Ford Mustang, BMW Z4, Audi A7, Dodge Challenger and Kia Carnival (7.65 billion dong)
Nguyễn Đình Xuân
Not stated
50 billion dong
Mercedes GLS 450, Mercedes C300, apartment in Hanoi (10.69 billion dong)
Nguyễn Trung Anh
Not stated
50 billion dong
Porsche (6.85 billion dong)
This high-profile case is also being watched in Washington. In May, the USTR opened a Section 301 investigation into Vietnam’s copyright enforcement, which could lead to tariffs. In its response, Vietnam cited the HiAnime prosecution to show that it is taking piracy seriously.
The defendants are not the first pirate site operators to face trial in Vietnam. Two operators of the Fmovies piracy ring dodged prison last year, as they received suspended sentences.
That was a thorn in the side of rightsholders. The USTR also flagged the issue, urging Vietnam to seek “deterrent-level prison sentences.”
None of the reports we have seen mentions a trial date. Whether the Hanoi court will hand out the deterrent sentences Hollywood and the USTR have called for has yet to be seen.
The details of the indictment were reported by Vietnamese newspaper Báo Bảo vệ pháp luật and state news agency TTXVN, through VietnamPlus. Quotes from the newspaper’s report on the indictment were translated from Vietnamese by TorrentFreak.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
午後 (ごご) — afternoon 今後 (こんご) — from now on 最後 (さいご) — end その後 (そのあと) — after that 後半 (こうはん) — second half 直後 (ちょくご) — immediately following 年後 (ねんご) — years later 前後 (ぜんご) — front and rear 最後まで (さいごまで) — to the end 戦後 (せんご) — postwar period
October 16, 2026 was a good day for the cryptography community. A 25-year-old question about the math behind some of the Internet’s most widely used encryption was finally answered. The previously lost method used to create the widely-used NIST elliptic curves has been found.
In 2023, Filippo Valsorda created a bounty for answering the question, with a twist: if the solvers gave the prize to a nonprofit, it would be tripled, from $12,288 to $36,864. A group of engineers raised their hands to fund the bounty prize. Such a generous and thoughtful idea. And you guessed it! The solvers, a team of researchers at Anthropic, took Filippo up on it and donated the bounty to ISRG. ISRG is grateful for the generous support and we’re grateful because the answer itself strengthens confidence in cryptography that secures much of the web. A good day indeed.
What was the bounty? What was the answer? It’s a long story. TL;DR: The NIST elliptic curves, used in encryption across the Internet, were built from “seeds” that two NSA engineers generated in the late 1990s. Years later, nobody could remember exactly how they’d made them. Humans do what humans do, and without an answer, some people grew skeptical. That kind of doubt chips away at trust, which obviously isn’t great for cryptographic infrastructure. The answer turned out to be reassuring: the seeds came from an ordinary random number generator, seeded with the time.
What we love most about this story is that Filippo and our community wanted to uphold the public’s trust. We build and protect Internet infrastructure, and work to keep it secure every day. Filippo didn’t have to create this bounty, but he wanted answers for his fellow engineers and the public. The engineers who chipped in didn’t have to put up their hard-earned dollars, but they wanted to help put the speculation to rest. And the team at Anthropic didn’t have to spend time solving it, but enlisted Claude’s help in closing this cryptographic chapter of history.
Who do you know that is helping make the Internet better? Thank them! Many of them are paid to do this work, but they also do it on their own time because they care deeply. And so do we.
In the cryptography and security community, we are working every day to protect our teams, our organizations, our friends and family, and in ISRG’s case, billions of users online. Consider making a donation in honor of that work. You can give online or make your donation via stock, crypto, check, DAF, and more. Learn more in the Ways To Give section of our donation page.
John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini, and Steve Weis, the team at Anthropic who solved it and chose to send the prize to ISRG. Read Anthropic’s writeup.
Amir Omidi, Chris Palmer, Colm MacCárthaigh, David Adrian, David Anderson, Filippo Valsorda, Jeff Hodges, Matt Green, Matthew McPherrin, Paul Kehrer, Ryan Sleevi, and Soatok, who chipped in their own money to fund the bounty.
Thank you for making the Internet more secure every day.
To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about how many measles deaths have occurred this year is also wrong. Hell, at a recent campaign event in Michigan, a state with a large Arab population, Kennedy decided that the best way to stump for Mike Rogers was to claim that none of the Arabs throughout the world produce any science or literature, which is also wrong.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” he said.
Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, “would disagree” with Kennedy’s comments.
So, not just wrong, but racist in perhaps the stupidest manner possible given his only reason for being in Michigan in the first place.
So let’s rewind the clock back to April, when Kennedy decided to tell the public that this whole measles outbreak thing had nothing to do with him. Rather, the only reason we had the outbreaks to begin with was because of dirty foreigners coming in as immigrants.
But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.
“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”
That was wrong too, of course. We knew it at the time, just was we knew that the practice of blaming immigrants for disease outbreaks is such common practice that we could set our watches to it. But now we have actual data on how the measles is spreading in America and that data fully puts the lie to Kennedy’s bigotry.
Most of the meat of the study focuses on very specific instances in which Washington state endured measles infections that were spread specifically from South Carolina earlier this year.
The study in Washington relied heavily on epidemiological data, linking cases among contacts and exposure sites. But also key to the work was whole-genome sequencing, which made clear that cases didn’t just stem from one single introduction of the virus from South Carolina that then spread among Washington residents; instead, it revealed five separate introductions.
“As public health jurisdictions prepare to respond to increased measles importations linked to domestic measles outbreaks, while remaining vigilant for international importations, timely whole-genome sequencing can supplement epidemiologic information to help differentiate distinct importations from local transmission and inform outbreak response,” the authors conclude.
But when you pair that with the data from CDC as to exactly how the infections are spreading, you get both the micro and macro data for how it’s occurring.
Kennedy claims that there is a “global outbreak” and the US is “doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak.” Both claims are false. Dozens of other countries have lower case rates than the US. While some countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico, are also seeing large increases in cases, the soaring case tally in the US is not being driven by international imports, but by domestic spread in under-vaccinated communities.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 18 of the country’s 4,588 confirmed measles cases this year were reported among international visitors. Of all the cases, 4,404 (96 percent) are linked to a domestic outbreak.
There can be no doubt that disease is sometimes imported into America from foreign visitors. But the point is that that just isn’t the real problem here. America’s measles problem is a domestic problem, not a matter of immigration. If we had maintained our vaccination rates such that we had herd immunity, we’d be fine.
It’s because of Kennedy’s many, many lies on vaccines that we are not. Don’t let him tell you another lie, that this is all a result of immigrants, to cover up his responsibility.
When we think about foreign powers interfering in elections in democratic countries, we usually think first of Russia. Putin has put his finger on the election scales from the 2016 presidential contest in the U.S. to more recent campaigns across Europe.
We don’t normally think of the United States that way, but perhaps we should. On Tuesday, Justice Flávio Dino of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ordered police to investigate whether a donor network co-founded by none other than JD Vance helped finance or staff Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign.
As I wrote in The Big Picture, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil had turned his struggling campaign into a fight over national sovereignty after President Donald Trump issued threats and tariffs over the prosecution of his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father. Lula warned voters that Flávio would surrender Brazil’s sovereignty to Trump, and on election night, after winning Sunday’s runoff, he told supporters, “This country will not accept being anyone’s backyard.”
Few realized that potential meddling in Brazil’s election may have extended far beyond Trump’s public threats. Dino’s order opens a formal investigation into Vance’s network and lays out some already eye-popping claims.
Police have yet to gather the evidence, and much remains unknown. The network, the businessmen named in the order and the Bolsonaro campaign all deny wrongdoing, and Vance’s office declined to comment. Still, the allegations describe conduct that, if proven, could constitute a serious crime under Brazilian law. They lay out a motive, a vehicle for support, people on the inside of the campaign and powerful friends in Washington.
Below I walk through the case Brazilian investigators will now seek to build.
Brazilian law draws a hard line around its elections. The Elections Law bars parties and candidates from receiving, “directly or indirectly,” any donation “in money or its equivalent in value” from a foreign entity or government. The ban covers in-kind help, including advertising, so staff, services and expertise can count alongside cash.
The penalties stack up. A candidate proven to have raised money illegally can be denied office or stripped of it. Hiding contributions by keeping them off the books can constitute electoral falsification under Article 350 of the Electoral Code. In a separate case involving abuse of political power and misuse of the media, Brazil’s electoral court barred Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years after his 2022 defeat.
Brazil saw this coming. In December 2025, its intelligence agency, Abin, warned of the risk of foreign interference aimed at destabilizing the 2026 electoral process. In late August, a confidential Abin report sent to the presidency and the electoral court went further, rating the risk of U.S. interference as critical.
Abin was watching Washington’s public pressure, including tariffs, sanctions and statements from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the allegations now before Brazil’s Supreme Court point to a murkier channel: a private donor network called the Rockbridge Network, co-founded by Vance.
The motive: rare earths
Brazil sits on rare earth reserves of about 11 million tons by the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest estimate, a quarter of China’s 44 million. China produces about two-thirds of the world’s supply of the minerals, which go into everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and missiles, and the Trump White House has been encouraging exploration in Brazil to break that grip.
Everyone in Brazilian politics knows the minerals are worth something. Lula himself invited the United States to “partner” on rare earth exploration in May, weeks after meeting Trump at the White House. He also warned that no foreign power would reach Brazil’s mineral wealth without respecting its sovereignty.
The investigation turns on a narrower question: whether talk of campaign help was tied to foreign appetite for those minerals. Here’s what we know so far.
On March 19, André Marinho, a Rio de Janeiro gubernatorial candidate whose father would inherit Flávio’s Senate seat if Flávio left it, created a 22-page English-language presentation. The cover reads “Flávio Bolsonaro | 2026 Campaign,” and every page after it carries the slogan “Prosperity Partnership.” The document lays out a plan to make Brazil the main supplier and processing hub for critical minerals and rare earths, aligned with the United States and away from China. The file’s metadata lists Marinho as its author, and he confirmed writing it. In early April, he traveled to the United States to meet Vance.
Nine days after the file was created, Flávio told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas that Brazil was the solution to America’s dependence on China for critical minerals. In late May, with his poll numbers falling, he flew to Washington. Trump received him in the Oval Office in a meeting that wasn’t on Trump’s public schedule, and Flávio met Vance and Rubio the next day. Afterward, he said the talks covered rare earths among other topics.
Dino’s order makes the minerals a formal line of inquiry. Police are to look for concrete evidence linking the talks about political funding to foreign economic interest in Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals. Dino noted that those minerals belong to the Brazilian state and can be exploited only by authorization or concession granted in the national interest.
Marinho claims the study was his own initiative, kept on his own device, and that the campaign never asked for it or guided it—despite its cover page reading “Flávio Bolsonaro | 2026 Campaign.”
The network
The Rockbridge Network was founded in 2019 by Vance, then a venture capitalist, and Chris Buskirk, editor of the pro-Trump website American Greatness. A 2021 donor brochure described it as “a kind of political venture capital firm.” By 2024, Rockbridge oversaw five political groups and a super PAC financing right-wing investigative reporting, polling and turnout efforts in battleground states, according to Reuters, which named Peter Thiel among its backers. Reuters also reported that Vance appeared to retain no formal role in the group.
Vance has kept showing up at Rockbridge Network gatherings anyway. In March, he headlined Rockbridge’s spring summit in Nashville, where about 250 donors paid at least $100,000 apiece to attend. One conservative venture capitalist told CBS that Rockbridge members are “the people that will be rallying around JD, and they want to back JD.” By September, Axios was describing Rockbridge as “closely aligned with Vice President Vance” and an influential hub for his likely 2028 run.
Brazil came onto Rockbridge’s map this year. On May 12, a company called Rockbridge Brazil LLC was formed in Wyoming. The filing named no owners. The person listed as its organizer was Chris Applegate, who oversees Vance’s relationships with donors. Meanwhile, Rockbridge co-founder Buskirk was making connections with Brazilian businessmen, speaking at Brazil Week in New York.
The Brazilian operation came with a business plan. The document, dated April, marked “not public” and branded “Rockbridge Network Brasil,” describes a “political venture capital fund” whose member dues would finance projects in the press, universities and the legislature, three fronts it considered out of balance.A membership form accepted payment in dollars, cryptocurrency, shares, corporate structures or trusts, all payable to Rockbridge Brazil LLC.
Then there was the pitch. A second document, addressed to Flávio’s pre-campaign, proposed a Technology Council of 23 business leaders, 19 of them foreign, to advise the candidate. It promised investment commitments in the tens of billions before Flávio even took office, arranged through a nongovernmental, private instrument. It is unclear whether the document reached Flávio’s campaign.
If all this is confirmed, we would have a motive, a vehicle and a plan to use foreign resources to influence the Brazilian election, all operating through JD Vance’s group.
The middlemen
Plans, proposals and a shadowy investment vehicle are bad enough. But were there boots on the ground, too?
Dino’s order names two Brazilian businessmen as possible go-betweens. One was a Rockbridge member who had Flávio’s ear. The other worked inside the campaign itself.
The named member is Tallis Gomes. “I’m part of a business group in the United States called Rockbridge, which was founded by J.D. Vance,” he said on the podcast Os Sócios. According to The Conversation, Gomes also said Flávio asked him for written proposals for his government plan. He later shared a stage in New York with Buskirk.
The insider is Pedro Sang, whom Rockbridge’s Brazilian business plan names as head of the operation. He helped set up Flávio’s São Paulo campaign headquarters— potentially a form of in-kind foreign support—and worked directly with the candidate. He introduced himself at headquarters as “Pedro da Rockbridge,” meaning Pedro from Rockbridge. Six people close to the campaign said Sang produced or commented on monitoring reports and sat in on meetings.
According to Sang, the man who brought him into Rockbridge was Marinho, the author of the rare earths presentation. Marinho has confirmed meeting Buskirk and traveling to Dallas at Rockbridge’s invitation, and he has acknowledged exploring a Rockbridge branch in Brazil.
The alibi
Everyone implicated has offered the same defense: no money moved. Sang insists that “not a single cent” changed hands. Gomes says he never raised, donated, received, offered or brokered money for political purposes. Flávio’s campaign says it took no foreign money or organizational support.
But putting on my lawyer hat for a moment, this is not a full defense even if proven. Brazilian law asks a broader question: The ban on foreign support covers anything of value, given directly or indirectly. Dino’s order accordingly directs police to look for “resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages.” A foreign network that lends a campaign its people, its expertise or its connections could fall within that ban without wiring a dollar.
That makes the go-betweens’ proximity a central question. Brazilians may volunteer their own services to a candidate, subject to electoral rules. Investigators want to know whether Gomes and Sang were working for Flávio on their own behalf or on Rockbridge’s.
Sang denies working for the campaign in any official capacity. Yet he helped set up the São Paulo headquarters while Rockbridge’s Brazilian business plan listed him as its head. His services, and those of his consulting firm, reportedly do not appear in the campaign’s filings with the electoral court, according to Folha.
Gomes says he holds no “management, direction or representation” role at Rockbridge. But he has confirmed he is a member, and Flávio sought his policy proposals. On Oct. 1, the campaign’s own allies told Folha that businesspeople linked to the network had produced reports and provided consulting services for the campaign.
Rockbridge’s statement goes to the same question. Earlier, it told reporters it had formed its Brazilian company in anticipation of a possible venture, and that the company never received funds or began operating. On the day of Dino’s order, it threw the two go-betweens under the bus.
“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said. The statement disowns the Brazilians, but it still says nothing about the Rockbridge co-founder who spoke to Brazilian businessmen in New York, the Vance donor adviser who filed the papers for Rockbridge Brazil LLC or the invitation that brought Marinho to Dallas.
Whether any money moved remains a separate question, and investigators have only begun to examine it.
If the allegations hold up, campaign officials could face prosecution for false electoral declarations, and anyone who helped disguise foreign support could face charges as well. An abuse-of-power finding could bar Flávio from running for office for eight years and could also disqualify others found responsible.
Nothing in Dino’s order names Vance as a suspect, and Rockbridge sits beyond the easy reach of Brazilian courts. The network built around the vice president’s donors, though, is now a focus of a Brazilian criminal investigation.
The U.S. public is also entitled to know whether the network of billionaires Vance co-founded violated Brazilian law to help their favored candidate win, potentially to gain easier access to Brazil’s mineral riches. We are entitled to know whether Russian interference in our own elections was just the warm-up to something truly mind-boggling: a Russia-friendly, criminal Trump/Vance regime doing the very same thing throughout the democratic world.
What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced as evidence, auctioned as an asset or inherited by a buyer, depending on which dispute reaches that record first.
The picture that fits is a diary written on pages that belong to somebody else. The user types into a window that works as a place to think, and the law treats the window as the property of the company that supplied the pages. Nobody asks whether the stationery supplier owes a duty of confidence before protecting a diary, because the diary is protected for what it contains, namely people’s inner thoughts. A chatbot user has no such luck: when the company fails, its creditors can claim whatever the estate holds, and the trustee inventories the notebooks like any other asset.
A U.S. insolvency estate now holds the confidences of millions of users
Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware and says it will keep operating while a court-supervised process sells the business, with a close expected in late November or early December 2026. Disney is the stalking horse bidder, offering $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license. According to a notice filed by forty U.S. State attorneys general, that license excludes the app, the user data, and the chat content, so the most intimate part of the company stays in the estate unless another bidder wants it. The company’s lawyer told the court that no buyer has yet made an offer for the user data or the chatbot business.
The privacy policy anticipated this moment. It allows chat transcripts, voice recordings, and images to be disclosed in connection with a sale, and it does not require a buyer to follow the original terms and conditions a user signed up for. In its filing, Pennsylvania claims the company had more than 20 million monthly active users, and the Kentucky complaint, cited in the multistate notice, counts more than 2.1 million U.S. accounts with a declared age under 18 out of 21.6 million as of March 2025. The notice furthermore argues that many minors were recorded as adults, as they did not give their actual birth date when creating a profile.
The attorneys general appeared before Judge Brendan Shannon on October 14 to ask that any buyer protect those chat histories. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the company had collected “some of the most private thoughts children have ever shared.” The states reserved the right to seek a consumer privacy ombudsman, an approach that was used in the 23andMe case.
The OpenAI litigation reached the same result through copyright
This is not a phenomenon limited to bankruptcy. Similarly, nobody in the New York Times v OpenAI copyright case launched in 2023 turned freedom of thought into a key element, even if it was raised at the fringes of the debate. In May 2025, the court ordered OpenAI to preserve output logs that would otherwise be deleted, and Sam Altman answered by calling for an “AI privilege,” arguing that talking to an AI should be like talking to a lawyer or a doctor. The duty to preserve new logs ended on September 26, 2025, and excluded logs from requests originating in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom from continued preservation. On January 5, 2026, Judge Stein affirmed an order to produce 20 million de-identified conversations, finding that the magistrate judge had adequately balanced users’ privacy against the relevance of the documents. In other words, the chat conversations were just business as usual under the logic of ordinary operation of discovery in a U.S. court.
The individual scale followed in February. In United States v. Heppner, Judge Rakoff held that 31 documents a defendant generated with Claude were not privileged, because Claude is not an attorney and the consumer terms defeated any expectation of confidentiality.
Sam Altman and Judge Rakoff disagree on the result but look at the issue from the same perspective: to them, protection depends on what the machine is. Privileges protect relationships between humans and professionals who owe enforceable duties, so a chatbot cannot qualify. In the present bankruptcy case, the point is moot, as privilege only governs what a court may hear. It says nothing about what a company may keep, sell, or hand to a buyer, and that is the question that should be at the core of Character.ai bankruptcy.
Protection has to attach to the act of thinking, not to the file it leaves behind
International human rights law offers two zones. The forum internum, the inner realm of thought, is absolutely protected. The forum externum, the realm of expression, is subject to limitation. The binary was drawn when thinking left no trace and was limited to the inner workings of our brain. In a paper published in July 2026, I propose the creation of a third zone, the forum interstitiale, for external acts that perform the function of thinking, such as a prompt, an abandoned draft and a confession made to a machine.
Applied to the Character.ai estate, such an approach would guarantee predictability, as the protection would exist before the user types, not after a bankruptcy judge balances interests case by case.
Bankruptcy procedure handles personal data as a line in a customer list. A diary has no place on that list and a privacy policy cannot supply sufficient safeguards.
Europe has the same gap and a second way to widen it
Europe should not feel smug about Delaware. The e-Evidence Regulation has applied since August 18, 2026, and providers now have 10 days to answer a European Production Order and 8 hours in an emergency. The rules cover content data and reach services that store or process user data as a defining part of what they offer, a description that includes AI chatbots. A year of conversations with a chatbot is content data. The negotiators of that instrument were not thinking about chatbots, which is the pattern that Delaware and the Southern District of New York have already shown.
The one moment in the OpenAI saga when European residents fared better was the exclusion of requests originating in the European Economic Area. That exemption is, however, triggered by where a request came from and has nothing to say about what the user was doing.
So what now?
Four rules would stop the diary from becoming an auction lot:
Bankruptcy courts should appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman in the Character.ai case before any bid for the chat logs is considered, and should decline to treat boilerplate sale clauses as consent to transfer the records of users, and especially children’s private thoughts.
Legislators should put one screening question to every AI instrument: what happens to user conversations when the company fails, when a court asks for them and when a regulator pushes the provider to filter them.
Providers should retain less, keep identity data separate from content and offer modes in which nothing readable exists to hand over, so that they can say so truthfully to a court, a trustee or a buyer.
Litigators should argue the functional frame, which asks what the person was doing, and abandon the relational frame, which asks what the machine is.
None of this means that chatbot conversations should be beyond the reach of law. Evidence of wrongdoing may need to be preserved. Allegations of harm to children must be investigated. Legitimate competing interests do not disappear because someone used AI.
But neither should those interests automatically reduce the record of a person’s thinking to an ordinary corporate asset or an unrestricted source of evidence.
The law, in most cases, already understands that a diary deserves protection because of what it contains, not because of who manufactured the notebook. AI conversations require a similar change of perspective.
Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur.
Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines powering the system.
The lawsuit points out that his Memphis-area data centers are violating the Clean Air Act, funneling all manner of pollutants into minority neighborhoods that already see a disproportionately high number of pollution-caused childhood illnesses:
“xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year.“
The Trump administration had tried to intervene on behalf of their favorite billionaire authoritarian, leveraging the power of the DOJ to claim that holding Musk accountable for violating environmental law would run in contrast to the country’s national security interests. The admin also ham-fistedly tried to have the Trump EPA take over the lawsuit as plaintiff and “voluntarily dismiss” the case.
Apparently advertising that fact wasn’t a particularly smart idea. US District Judge Debra Brown last week issued a ruling stating the US Environmental Protection Agency could intervene in the case but lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to unilaterally terminate the lawsuit after joining it.
“The EPA’s role as a primary enforcer of the Clean Air Act does not mean that the federal government retains complete control over all Clean Air Act litigation,” Judge Brown wrote.
A cornerstone of the Trump administration has been a close collaboration with oligarchs and corporate power to hijack the courts, then obliterate already extremely shaky regulatory autonomy and corporate oversight. While the gambit has been broadly successful, likely culminating in decades of avoidable deaths and suffering, every so often the court system still procedurally balks at Trump’s ham-fisted corruption.
“The NAACP, along with our partners, is pleased that the Fifth Circuit Court recognized the importance of following Civil Procedure 101,” Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice, said of the ruling. “The DOJ tried an end run to the court of appeals, but its effort did not work in its favor. Our case has always been about holding polluters accountable and making sure that entities follow the law. The court made clear today that the law applies to everyone, including the federal government. We look forward to continuing our fight against pollution in the courtroom.”
Musk is facing a different class action lawsuit in Memphis for the massive noise (see this local video) created by his unpopular regional data center operations.
As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand’s Malibu mansion.
Streisand demanded $50 million in damages ($10 million for each of five counts). It quickly came out that prior to the lawsuit, the photo had been accessed a grand total of six times, and two of them were by Streisand’s lawyers. But after the lawsuit was filed, more than 420,000 people went to view the photo in the following month alone. California’s anti-SLAPP law protected Adelman, and Streisand was eventually forced to pay $177,107.54 in legal fees, including $155,567.04 to Adelman.
The story is remembered for the effect I coined, in part because of the futility of trying to hide information, but in part because it’s a reminder of the importance of free speech.
It’s possible that story would go very differently in Germany today. We already know that Germany is much more sensitive to concerns about privacy and data collection, and when Google launched its useful “Street View” feature in Google Maps, some people in Germany insisted it was a violation of their privacy. I have difficulty seeing how a single static photograph of buildings taken from public streets can be a privacy violation, but German regulators and plenty of residents insisted otherwise, so Google now lets residents blur out their own house in street view (and, tellingly, fewer than 3% of German households actually bothered to do so).
But now there’s a new story, again in Germany, with a court ruling that Google Earth, which gives you satellite imagery of the world, somehow is the equivalent of spying on people in their homes, because the photos were taken without notice.
The German court ruled that Google acquired the aerial images by “spying” on ordinary people because it does not inform property owners beforehand that their homes will be filmed and photographed. As a result, Google does not get their consent to publish aerial photos and information about their property on its Maps and Earth sites.
The German court determined that Google had violated the privacy of the man and his family by sharing aerial images of their property onGoogle Earth. It found that a person’s right to privacy extends across their entire property, not just inside their home.
“Nobody must accept the worldwide publication of aerial images of their property without their consent, at least when concerning areas of a property hidden from public view,” the court says in the ruling, according to DW.
The case concerned whether a property owner can demand that their inhabited property disappear from Google Earth and Google Maps or be blurred. The plaintiff lives with his family in a house in Frankfurt. At his request, his house had already been pixelated in Street View and Apple Look Around. However, in Google Earth and the 3D view of Google Maps, it remained visible as a three-dimensional model – including the rear portions of the property that are not visible from the street.
That same source notes that there is conflicting caselaw in Germany already though:
The Frankfurt ruling stands in stark contrast to an earlier decision. The Itzehoe Regional Court dismissed a similar lawsuit on June 11, 2020 (Case No.10 O 84/20). At that time, the court primarily based its decision on property rights: According toSection 905, Sentence 2 of the German Civil Code (BGB), the owner cannot prohibit overflights at the altitude from which such images are taken. The court deemed the information discernible in the images too unspecific to infringe on the right to privacy. We reported on this previously:Itzehoe Regional Court: No right to pixelate a property in Google Earth.
The Frankfurt am Main Regional Court takes a different approach. It does not ask whether the overflight itself can be prohibited, but rather whether the worldwide publication of the images violates thegeneral right of personality. For the injunction, it bases its claim onSection 823 Paragraph 1 of the German Civil Code (BGB)andSection 1004 Paragraph 1 of the BGBby analogy. Since 2020, the technology has changed: flat satellite images have become detailed 3D models that can be linked with other data. The Frankfurt ruling addresses this change.
Neither ruling is precedential until there are higher court rulings.
The court also brushed aside Google’s argument that it was democratizing access to knowledge, admitting that was important, but saying that the privacy rights outweigh the access to information claims. Though the report notes Google may still appeal.
Maybe this is just cultural differences, but I find the whole thing bizarre. The court tries to limit this to parts of a property ‘hidden from public view,’ but that’s what an overhead photo is: a periodically updated snapshot of what anyone in a plane could see. Ongoing or real-time surveillance might be a different story. A static image from the sky is not that.
But, I guess Barbra should have moved to Frankfurt if she wanted to keep aerial photos of her home off the internet.
The Fifth Circuit has shown itself to be especially subservient to the Trump administration since his return to office. And it’s certainly not going to rock Trump’s mass deportation boat — not when it’s sitting right on top of Texas, which contains almost two-thirds of the US-Mexico border, as well as some of ICE’s largest detention facilities.
It’s been several months of back-and-forth at the Fifth. While it has long been held that migrants living in the US are afforded the same rights as US citizens, the Fifth Circuit has done its best to ignore this. In February of this year, it simply decided — in opposition to hundreds of federal rulings across the nation — that detained migrants could be subjected to indefinite detainment without a bond hearing.
It chose to believe what the DOJ told it to believe: that there was no difference between someone detained illegally crossing a border and someone swept up by ICE’s kidnapping squads after living peacefully and productively in the US for months, if not years or decades.
Then in July it pulled back a bit from that precipice. While it couldn’t be convinced to fully support rights recognized everywhere else but in the Fifth Circuit, it did at least put a time limit on constitutional rights violations. While most courts have reasonably found that any rights violation begins the moment the right is violated, the Fifth Circuit declared the government could ignore migrants’ due process rights immediately… but only for 90 days.
Apparently, that wasn’t acceptable for the more far-right cheerleaders on the Fifth Circuit’s bench. Less than a week later, the Fifth Circuit announced it would be rehearing this case in front of the whole roster of judges — the sort of thing a court only says when most of those judges disagree with respecting long-held rights.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The en banc hearing has rolled back the already-wrong “rights, but only after 90 days” decision handed down during the first week of July. We’re back to where we were in February: no due process rights for migrants, no matter how long they’ve been detained or how long they’d already resided in this country when they were arrested. (h/t Chris Geidner)
The new decision [PDF] simply says migrants don’t have any rights, even though this puts the Fifth Circuit in opposition of hundreds of federal courts and tens of thousands of court rulings:
We now conclude that Petitioners were not entitled to individual hearings on their dangerousness or flight risk before they could be lawfully detained by immigration authorities pending their removal proceedings. Moreover, the duration of Petitioners’ detention presented no constitutional issues warranting habeas relief.
And while thousands of decisions have made it clear the law this administration has chosen to abuse via an extremely novel interpretation of the phrase “applicants for admission” (something that has historically been applied exclusive to people confronted by immigration agents when attempting to cross the border) doesn’t actually say what the government wants it to say (that any migrant in the country for whatever length of time is no different than someone apprehended during the act of crossing the border), the Fifth Circuit goes the other way.
Then it shrugs and says that if plaintiffs want this fixed, they should talk to Congress. But Congress has already made it extremely clear that due process rights apply to anyone residing in this county and that the exception only applies to people apprehended while crossing the border. This is the court giving Trump what he wants while pretending Congress is to blame for this sudden, one-circuit-only refusal to recognize migrants’ due process rights.
Controlling illegal immigration is, no doubt, an important and controversial issue of public policy. But the Constitution entrusts broad authority to delineate immigration policy, and to design proceedings to effectuate those policy choices, to Congress—not courts.
Bullshit. This ruling is nothing more than cowardice from a majority of Fifth Circuit judges who don’t want to cross Trump and are more than willing to blame their own lack of spine on the legislative branch. Also included are 70 pages of concurrences and dissenting opinions. The dissents point out the obvious: the Fifth Circuit is interpreting the law in a way Congress never intended, or even merely hinted at over the past few decades. The concurrences just want to see the rights removed. The worst of those is Judge James Ho, who claims the dissenters are more interested in protecting the rights of migrants than US citizens:
Alas, such passion for liberty has been lacking when U.S. citizens have been detained for expressing opinions disfavored by government officials. See, e.g., Villarreal v. City of Laredo, 134 F.4th 273 (5th Cir. 2025), reaff’g 94 F.4th 374 (5th Cir. 2024); Gonzalez v. Trevino, 60 F.4th 906 (5th Cir. 2023); see also Mayfield v. Butler Snow, L.L.P., 78 F.4th 796 (5th Cir. 2023).
My point is not to relitigate those cases, but to contrast the dissent’s votes in those cases with its views today. It’s to point out that liberty wasn’t favored for citizens who seek to vindicate their constitutional rights—but it’s cherished for illegal aliens who seek to violate our national sovereignty.
Only one of the dissenters in this case (Stewart) agreed with the ruling in Villareal — a case in which the majority blessed vindictive prosecution of a police critic. None of the dissenters in this due process case were part of the majority decision that said — again — that it’s okay to engage in vindictive prosecution of a government critic (Gonzalez v. Trevino). And James Ho himself heard the final case he cites (Mayfield v. Butler Snow), delivering the blow to constitutional rights himself, which makes it extremely disingenuous for him to call out these judges (who weren’t actually part of the hearing panels) for not expressing their dissent at that point in time.
The end result is the same as it was back in July. Texas will be the destination of choice for the Trump administration, which now knows for certain it won’t be forced to respect due process rights. And the Fifth will get back to its day-to-day business of being the worst circuit in the nation — a place where constitutional rights (except the 2nd Amendment!) go to die.
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