You may have seen the headlines about a Microsoft employee calling AI scraping “the largest theft of labor in human history.” It made the rounds on social media, with plenty of people insisting it was a slam dunk admission of criminality. I think I saw this gif applied to it multiple times:
It certainly doesn’t look great. But does it actually matter? An exec’s statement doesn’t change the underlying facts: fair use isn’t copyright infringement, and even when something is infringement, it still isn’t theft. That someone colloquially calls it theft isn’t supposed to change the legal analysis, no matter how emotionally satisfying it feels.
For basically all of Techdirt’s history, we’ve explained that copyright infringement is not “theft,” and that using that term is misleading in dangerous ways. It’s been a few years since we last mentioned it, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dowling vs. the US has always been the clearest legal statement on this point.
Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
That’s not to say that infringement is necessarily okay. But it’s a distinct issue from “theft.”
For years, most of the internet seemed to agree. But the arrival of generative AI has triggered a remarkable amount of backsliding, as people rush to (incorrectly) label training as “theft.” That’s wrong on two levels. First, if it were infringement, it still wouldn’t be “theft.” Theft removes something from someone’s possession. Copyright infringement doesn’t. It makes a copy without a license. Those are not the same things. At all.
But there’s an even bigger issue when it comes to AI training, which is that there’s a fairly strong argument that training is fair use. And at least one judge in one of the (many) cases exploring this issue has agreed. As Judge William Alsup noted:
To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
And here, too, the law is clear. Fair use is not a “defense” to infringement. Rather, a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” at all. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be some aspects that are infringing and are punishable: indeed, in that very case where Alsup determined that Anthropic’s training was fair use, he also dinged them for widespread mass infringement for creating and storing “pirate libraries” of content without a license.
The point is that Alsup actually looked at the specifics of each use. An AI data scientist firing off an emotional internal message is not legal analysis, nor is it someone who understands the elements of either copyright infringement or fair use, let alone “theft” in the legal sense.
Of course, for decades now, the large copyright interests have polluted the discourse on this by deliberately equating infringement to theft (and simultaneously minimizing, dismissing, or demonizing fair use). Hollywood and others (including Microsoft!) spent years poisoning the language around copyright until calling infringement “theft” became the default, and “fair use” got treated as a grudging loophole or limited defense, rather than the public’s actual right.
Bill Patry, who knows more about the modern history of copyright law than maybe anyone, wrote a wonderful book about how the large copyright players used the language of “theft” and “piracy” to influence policy discussions.
Given all that as background, it’s somewhat hilarious that people are acting like it’s a huge deal that a Microsoft employee called AI training “theft.” This came out in a recently unredacted filing from the NY Times in its case against OpenAI.
This case is about, as Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science put it, “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”; SF1437, perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.” SF1652. Defendants repeatedly copied millions of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.
The NY Times is trying to win a copyright lawsuit, so of course it has every interest in portraying these quotes as damning. The rest of the media doesn’t have to accept that framing — especially when it’s not how copyright law actually works. Just because a random employee of one company colloquially calls it “theft” doesn’t magically make it so, either legally or morally.
And, yes, that same filing goes after the fair use argument by quoting an OpenAI employee calling AI an “existential threat” to publishers, then insisting that this “undermines” any fair use claim. Notably, the filing quotes so little of the surrounding context that it’s not even clear what the person was referring to, but just because one employee makes such a statement doesn’t make fair use disappear. That’s not how fair use is determined.
There’s also a more basic problem with the “existential threat” argument. Lots of things can be “existential threats” to companies that refuse to adapt and change. That doesn’t make their competitors illegal. It’s just how competition itself works. This is also true of the “doom loop” quote from the filing:
A Microsoft document recognizes that nobody wins that contest: “Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”
Read the full filing, though, and the Times’ lawyers seem to be playing a neat bit of sleight of hand here, conflating statements about search results that give users the facts they were looking for (rather than driving them to a separate website) with the claim that chatbot output is a substitute for news. Those are two separate things. Take the Satya Nadella testimony the filing leans on. He’s talking about chatbots answering questions a user has, not about anyone going to ChatGPT and asking it to replace the NY Times:
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella agreed under oath that conversing with chatbots “has substituted … giving you the information right there on the website on the AI platform versus needing to go to the underlying source.”
And, in the end, what matters most is what users actually want, because that’s what they’re going to do regardless. The NY Times might not like that someone looking for a quick answer doesn’t want to read a long article, but that’s not the fault of an AI system. It’s how people work: the AI tools (or the search results) may simply be meeting that reader’s needs in that moment better than a long-form article does.
As an entity engaged in long-form reporting ourselves, that certainly represents a challenge for us, but we try to respond to that by providing something that can’t be replaced merely by a straight answer to a question. Instead, we focus on providing more value that makes it worthwhile to read our full commentary.
Why does the NY Times think it can’t do that? Does it really value what it does so little that it can’t compete with a word generator?
The courts still have a long way to go on the copyright questions around training, but the rush to wave a few cherry-picked quotes from the NY Times filing around as “evidence” that AI training broke the law is getting silly.
Fair use isn’t infringement. And if it is infringement, it’s not “theft.” And even if a use competes with you, competition doesn’t make it illegal. Indeed, the “effect of the use upon the potential market” is just one of four factors, and it isn’t supposed to let ordinary competition swallow the entire fair use analysis. That these employees (who are not, themselves, copyright experts) said random things does not change the actual underlying analysis of fair use. Or, at least, it shouldn’t.
In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.
For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.
Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.
Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.
But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.
Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.
What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.
Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.
Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.
Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.
Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.
Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.
Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.
The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.
Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.
The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.
ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.
Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.
Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.
Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.
“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”
Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”
She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.
“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”
In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.
Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.
Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”
But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.
Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
The Navatek Method
Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.
The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.
In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.
Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.
Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.
Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”
Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.
Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.
Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.
Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.
Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.
Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.
“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.
While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.
Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.
Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.
Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.
“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”
In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.
Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.
Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.
The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”
But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”
In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.
Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.
In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”
Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”
The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.
“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.
Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”
Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.
Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.
While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.
The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.
In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.
“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”
Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”
The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.
Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.
Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.
To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.
In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.
In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.
“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.
FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.
The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.
The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.
“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”
Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.
Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”
“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”
Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.
The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.
Emails Between Martin Kao and Scott Reed, Discussing Contributions to the Susan Collins Super PAC, 1820 PAC
“Hi Scott: Had a chance to discuss 1820 with my CFO and attorney last night. They are suggesting setting up a separate new LLC to make the donations. Name of new LLC: Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers.
In my personal real estate investments, we often use LLCs that can be set up to “facilitate” transactions. They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on. Totally legal and typically used in real estate transactions to conceal the identity of buyer/seller. Wanted to get your thoughts/concerns.” —email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019
“Very smart and glad your counsel understands. Thanks for doing this.” —email from Scott Reed to Martin Kao, Nov. 22, 2019
“Great! We will proceed on getting this set up ASAP. Have a nice weekend.” —email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019
The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.
The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get to know you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.
A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.
“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.
Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.
Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.
Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.
“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”
Downfall, Cover-up
In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”
This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.
A check for $150,000 to the Collins super PAC 1820 from the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers — a shell company that obscured the actual donor.
The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.
Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”
Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”
Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.
Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.
But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.
“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.
Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”
“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”
On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.
Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.
The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.
They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.
The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.
He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.
Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”
Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.
Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.
For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.
Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.
Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.
Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.
By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.
Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.
Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.
Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.
Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.
Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.
Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.
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The true nature of hastily erected ICE detention facilities — especially the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” erected in Trump buddy Ron DeSantis’s home state — was called out by Mike Masnick shortly after its debut last June:
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
All of that is indisputably true of this detention facility, which was very belatedly “retired” roughly a year after its opening. While those arguing in bad faith will strive to point out the differences between Alligator Alcatraz and concentration camps run by other fascists over the years, most people will generally understand the comparison and not get hung up about the lack of gas chambers, hard labor sites, or mass graves.
This detention center was nothing more than a bunch of “tents” (generously speaking — much of it more resembled portable car ports than actual tents) housing a bunch of metal cages. Detainees were exposed to heat, humidity, swarms of insects, and routine abuse/neglect by the people hired by ICE to “manage” their detainment.
The official name for the facility is far more humane-sounding than the nickname routinely used by Trump, members of his administration, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Alligator Alcatraz” was MAGA marketing. According the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the official name was “Florida Soft-Sided Facility” or FSSF.
FSSF was established by the state to better serve Trump’s mass detainment/deportation desires. The Florida Division of Emergency Management was somehow tasked with running this facility via a third-party contractor. While the DHS did not directly oversee this facility, the housing of federal arrestees for alleged immigration violations made it a de facto part of ICE operations — something aided and abetted by “several operative 287(g) agreements” with local agencies.
This likely explains the OIG’s decision to step into the breach and its ability to actually perform an unannounced inspection of “Alligator Alcatraz.” It started poorly, before getting much, much worse. From the OIG report [PDF]:
At the time of our inspection, FSSF staff could not clearly identify which detention standards they used for holding detainees on immigration-related charges. The absence of well-defined standards at detention facilities increases the risk that detainees may not receive appropriate care. When we asked the warden and staff which standards they used, we received inconsistent answers.
[…]
FSSF did not provide any written policy, procedure, agreement, or contract specifying the standards it followed, which undermines accountability and consistent application of detention standards.
What it looks like is what it is. Lowest-bidder plus zero standards or accountability. No one from the Trump or DeSantis administration was ever going to object to anything that happened there, so there was never any impetus to be better than the worst people imaginable.
This is what was done in our name by the Trump administration and its Florida-based enablers:
FSSF did not provide detainees with sufficient living space — less than half of what is required — creating cramped conditions for detainees who spent most of their time in their housing units.
And this:
We observed that there were no TVs or playing cards available, and reading materials were limited to religious texts, further restricting detainees’ ability to meaningfully occupy their time. One detainee in administrative segregation reported being held for 8 days in the SMU [Special Management Unit] without any opportunity for recreation.
And this:
FSSF leadership confirmed this limitation to legal materials, stating detainees could request escorts for scheduled legal appointments, but detainees could not access or retain legal materials otherwise. One detainee reported he did not have access to a telephone to speak with his attorney or ICE case officer during his 8 days in the SMU. FSSF had installed SMU telephones shortly before our inspection, but they were inoperable at the time of the inspection.
But especially this, which seems more Auschwitz than Alcatraz:
Between July 17, 2025, and January 18, 2026, FSSF confined 79 detainees in small metal enclosures — each offering about 18 square feet of floor space — for periods ranging from several minutes to nearly 2 hours, a practice unlike any OIG team has observed in ICE facilities. The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment.
If you’re not sure what 18 square feet looks like, the OIG has provided photos of cages that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Hanoi Hilton:
Yeah, that’s fucked up. And the statements made by FSSF only make it worse:
Staff also reported that time spent in the small metal enclosures is closely monitored, and detainees are not locked in, even though we observed locking mechanisms on the enclosures.
And then there’s this, which is just psychopathic:
The purpose of a Holding Cell Space is to provide a safe and secure place in general population for detainees to reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress, and practice self-directed behavior.
This was posted on each “holding cell,” not only to make detainees feel like its was their own fault that they were locked in FSSF’s version of “tiger cages,” but to make those overseeing their detention comfortable with their decision to subject detainees to this particular form of torture. While the OIG did note that the average detention time was less than half of the posted two-hour maximum, it only does so after making it clear that it has never seen anything quite as fucked up as this in any of its other ICE detainment center inspections… ever.
And that’s on top of everything else that’s only the bare minimum expected when housing humans, like providing clean drinking water (nope), storing refrigerated food properly to prevent spoilage (nope), regular access to showers and other hygiene options (nope), and preventing insect infestations in cells, showers, and common areas (nope). If all of this doesn’t add up to a concentration camp, I don’t know what people actually think the baseline should be. It’s apparently far higher than I’m willing to accept. And it should be unacceptable to every American, even if they firmly believe we need tighter immigration standards.
Earlier this week we noted how California Democrats fecklessly folded to Paramount’s demands and settled the 12-state antitrust lawsuit against Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. We also noted how the conditions affixed to the deal are largely pathetic, and generally consist of a lot of performative fluff Paramount itself recommended and California AG Rob Bonta had previously laughed off.
But Bonta is thinking politically about not just Paramount’s lobbying influence, but any future relationships with potential presidential candidate Gavin Newsom or potential future California governor Xavier Becerra (both of whom rushed to pushing for settlement).
None of the conditions meaningfully protect consumers, labor, and markets from what’s coming, but they clearly spent a lot of time designing conditions that let them pretend otherwise.
That includes a purported “independent CBS and CNN oversight board” that’s supposed to prevent Larry Ellison from degrading CNN and CBS’ editorial mission even further. That’s something Paramount itself first floated last August, largely because it knows it will be able to safely ignore it (just as Rupert Murdoch did when he struck a similar deal after the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal).
And sure enough; as details leak out it’s clear the board is largely decorative. Insiders have already noted how the “independent” board will consist of journalists that have at least ten years experience in journalism, but they’ll be hand picked by Paramount:
“According to the terms of the settlement, the board must be established within 180 days of the closing of the deal. It will be composed of five current or former journalists with at least 10 years of experience each and will be appointed by the board of the company for three-year terms.”
That’s just profoundly embarrassing. There’s absolutely zero chance that Paramount is going to appoint the kind of folks capable of pointing out that Ellison, and underlings like Bari Weiss, are actively working to convert CNN and CBS into corporation and oligarch-friendly agitprop. And there’s really nothing preventing Paramount from tap-dancing around the requirements.
I’m sure, like a stopped clock, this board will occasionally and initially make a useful decision to give the impression it’s a real entity. But historically this stuff is designed to prevent real oversight, particularly by government. Former and current insiders at the network simply aren’t impressed:
“There is no way that is going to work,” former CNN anchor Jim Acosta said. “They will start to fire anchors and certain folks to send a message, and the rest will either have to fall in line or leave. This was a colossal mistake.”
CNN and CBS were already pockmarked with a lot of weak-kneed corporation-friendly journalism. Now that Ellison’s involved, both will indisputably begin to look more and more like other right wing propaganda outlets like the New York Post and Fox News.
These kinds of conditions are designed to make it look like responsible people are doing something about media consolidation — without actually doing anything about media consolidation. You protect consumers, labor, and markets by actively enforcing antitrust law; not by endlessly designing half-cooked half-measures that state regulators then fail to consistently enforce.
What’s extra embarrassing is that Democrats like Bonta, Karen Bass, and Newsom had an opportunity here to demonstrate that Democrats had backbone and actually care about subjects like media reform, media consolidation, and the rise of right wing propaganda and disinformation.
Instead they immediately buckled to Ellison’s threat that he’d move Paramount out of California, and are now patting themselves on the back for “saving jobs” — when the end outcome of these deals is always thousands of layoffs as the bigger company offloads merger debt to labor and consumers.
One nice thing about antitrust: if U.S. politicians were to actually enforce the law, we’d have markets more heavily peppered with the kind of small and mid-sized companies that lack the scale and political influence to threaten government when it tries to enforce the law.
Throughout this whole process Paramount (and by proxy a consolidated press) have made it sound like the 12 states were engaged in “radical leftism” simply by enforcing existing antitrust law. It’s important to remember how little Newsom, Bonta, Bass, and Becerra cared about standing up to corporate power the next time you’re in the voting booth.
Gretchen Clark and I have been working on research on language teachers with ADHD for over two years now, and it feels like this article has been in limbo forever. When I first started my research on teachers with ADHD with Matthew Noble in 2022 I only had an inkling of this becoming a major part of my research agenda.
This article looks at the qualitative thematic analysis of questionnaire data that we published in a special issue of FLuL in 2024. It provides more nuance to the subject and more details about the travails of working in language teaching as someone with ADHD.
This new publication is substantially changed from the preprint and is now available at the European Journal of Education & Language Review here. We also have more on the way!
Our world is shaped by contagious and competitive games.
Along the way, we invent scoreboards that change the culture, and badges that we award to various players.
An example: How did we end up with weddings that cost $200,000?
It’s a great example of a runway cultural dynamic, a system within a system, a game that rewards the players who keep it going.
Weddings, like most things humans participate in, are about status and affiliation. A demonstration of the hierarchy, a chance to fit in and be part of something.
Being married is a badge, but the way we get married is processed on a scoreboard.
Weddings are group events, you can’t have one by yourself. As a result, the ornamentation and structure are broadcast, often to horizontal peer groups. Friends and relatives, some of whom are likely to get married soon. “People like us do things like this” is the definition of culture, and weddings have the ‘people like us’ part built in.
The industry benefits from a more expensive event. Since a florist or caterer can only do one wedding at a time, making each wedding more profitable (see below for more on profitable) is the best way for them to meet their goals. They have an incentive to turn the scoreboard and keep the game going.
Spending more turns the ratchet, and the ratchet almost always turns in one direction.
Of course, the most prevalent contagious and competitive game system is capitalism. A simple metric–profit–that’s universal, easy to measure and rewarded–creates an interoperable game that almost everyone is part of.
If you want to change people (your industry, your community, the world), the most direct method is to build a contagious and competitive game that works within the uber-capitalism game, until it gets enough momentum that it spirals in its own direction.
It’s not simply money. We can use any easily sought and compared metric. How you look at the gym, or your time running a mile are both metrics on the scoreboard.
A badge/label (like ‘organic’ or ‘B. Corp’) is a start, but without a chance to exceed, it can stall because it doesn’t encourage people to seek status by doing more of it (hence the endless litany of post-organic certifications that some food purveyors seek out). “How can I be more more compliant to the rules?” is not an endless game. “Compared to them” might be.
Badges are finite. Check the box, get the badge. As a result, they level off.
Scoreboards that spread have ‘more’ built in. Birders have lists of lifetime finds, DuoLingo users have streaks and the Olympics, in addition to medals, have world records. Youth sports go off the rails because we act as though there’s a trophy shortage, and the cost of college increases because of the feature race of more. The same is true for diagnostic medical equipment. Compared to what?
The dynamics involved don’t automatically make each of these games bad, though. The hard work is seeing the effective dynamics and then putting them to work to build a sticky, contagious game that moves us toward better.
A theme going on many years here at Techdirt has been the idea that separating content and advertising, as was the traditional model, makes far less sense in the modern era. Audiences are no longer captive in the way they used to be, with many ways to skip advertising. Entertainment vectors are far more plentiful then they used to be, with more options for how we spend our entertainment time. Eyeballs are the currency of the day, which has led to far, far more things competing for our attention.
Given all of that, content is always some form of advertisement, intentional or otherwise, and advertising definitely better include good content or it will be ignored. On the advertising side, this means creating ads of one sort or another that are engaging and interesting. That itself can take many forms, but absurdity and humor are a common method for achieving this.
Ikea, the Swedish furniture-and-stuff giant, has released a mod for Skyrim called Kallax Storageborn: A new companion who is also a shelf, who is also voiced by Matt Berry. If you think that sounds weird, it gets weirder, because this mod doesn’t just add a companion, it includes an entirely new questline built around the character. Becoming encumbered in the game, as will inevitably happen eventually, will give you the opportunity to visit an abandoned dwemer emporium, where you’ll embark upon a quest to “unravel the origins of a mysterious master.”
During this quest, you’ll assemble Kallax Storageborn, a companion “with unfathomable storage capacity,” who can be summoned with a newly-added Thu’um—Skyrim’s famous voice of power—even when he’s not your active companion. Your ultimate goal: Tidy up the clutter plaguing the realm of Nords and Dragonborn.
There’s more. You can acquire the Allenblade, which is, yes, a sword styled after an Allen wrench, a common tool shipped with Ikea furniture. There’s also a helmet that is made from a meatball, a nod towards Ikea’s famous in-store Swedish meatballs.
You can see the announcement video here for yourself.
This whole thing is incredibly dumb, and I mean that in the most endearing, praising way possible, because it’s also quite smart. It’s a creative way to advertise a brand and, yes, a specific model of shelving from a furniture store. The delivery is done with Monty Python-esque silliness, a motif which fits quite comfortably in the realm of Skyrim, an otherwise very serious game. The voice production is a nice touch. It doesn’t in any way take itself seriously.
And, if you’ve played Skyrim yourself for more than an hour, you’ll know that encumbrance and inventory capacity are major, and to some annoying, challenges within the game.
So, this is advertising on a relatively low budget in a game still widely played and modded to this day, with a mod that actually addresses something some players find annoying, and does so with absurd humor and self-deprecation. And a meatball helmet.
Whatever else you think of this advertising, there’s no denying that it’s also content.
Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.
In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with 52 states and territories regarding the use of Instagram and Facebook by young people. The settlement will require Meta, and pressure other non-Meta owned platforms like TikTok and YouTube, to embed age gating practices into every product while also requiring restrictions on the accounts of people under-18, such as a two-hour daily time limit and content restrictions.
Youth Power on Social Media
Young people have been using social media for political advocacy and community organizing for more than a decade. From organizing protests speaking out against police brutality, to organizing nationwide school walkouts demanding safety in schools from gun violence, and striking to demand lawmakers take action to protect the climate, social media has become an instrumental tool for youth to both speak out and connect with other young activists.
Instagram has become especially useful for activism online by young people. The features on the app make it a helpful tool for being able to efficiently and quickly spread awareness, which is especially important when people need to share real-time information. For example, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video on Facebook showed the world the murder of George Floyd.
The impact of youth activism online is also evident on non-Meta owned platforms, with services like TikTok and YouTube being particularly prevalent spaces for young people to share their stories, build movements, and amplify collective engagement.
However, in a digital world operating under the settlement’s new guidelines, young people risk not being able to read crucial news due to the content being labeled as “age-inappropriate,” which has already happened for teenagers in Australia under its social media ban.
A two-hour daily time limit and a block on Meta’s apps between midnight and 6am leaves little room for young activists to organize rapid response efforts. Being unable to see likes on a post will make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Add to this what we already know about Meta’s content policies which claim to “protect children” and keep sites “family-friendly” but instead label content like LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” youth will be left with no choice in what content they see once the ‘age-appropriate’ content filter is turned on by default. One recent report noted that Meta had hidden posts that reference LGBTQ+ hashtags like #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, and #queer for users with the sensitive content filter on. This would specifically curtail the efforts of young activists doing work on comprehensive sex education.
Global Trends
Measures like this are being discussed across the globe, but not all courts have taken such a short-sighted approach. In August, the French Constitutional Council got a lot right in its decision to strike down the country’s legislation banning under-15s from social media for infringing free expression and communication for everyone online, not just young people.
The French Court also called attention to its infringement on privacy as the legislation would have forced people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information to prove their age and access online content.
Requiring this much data from users puts activists in danger of even more surveillance. Meta has already previously complied with demands from law enforcement to hand over the messages of users. The amount of personal information that will be logged and that could be demanded via a warrant from police to stifle or investigate activists’ actions or plans could cause a chilling effect, forcing advocates to pause or terminate their work.
This is egregious because these systems misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their chosen name or align with what the system expects them to look like upon verification. And it’s often these communities that benefit from online organizing the most, especially for marginalized youth as social media can often be the only place to organize and build community.
What Young People Deserve
The settlement generates headlines, but it will not solve the core problem. Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism business model that turns all online content into potential profit and centers lining the company’s pockets over protecting the speech and privacy of users, this settlement gives the tech giant an opportunity to carve out a new digital world that prioritizes its own needs, not those of young people.
Young people deserve a better internet than one regulated through panic. They deserve better than the government or Big Tech getting to decide how they use social media and what they can or cannot be exposed to or learn about. They deserve better than having their right to free expression minimized. This must not be lost in the pursuit of building a better and safer online ecosystem and environment.
Ever since Trump’s return to office, almost every federal law enforcement agency has been ordered to treat illegal immigration as their first priority. This is why the administration is gutting FEMA to direct more dollars to detention and removal efforts. And that’s why ICE is now the administration’s largest law enforcement budget line item.
To keep up with moving (and ever-increasing) deportation targets, the government has done everything from dismissing pending immigration hearings to stripping temporary protected status from thousands of vulnerable people to the very thing that has been rejected by hundreds of federal judges in thousands of cases.
The administration claims the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA or IRA, depending on which titles judges choose to use) gives it the power to treat any migrant — no matter how long they’ve been in the country — as someone who has been accosted while attempting to cross the border. Migrants who are slated for removal are generally given due process rights if they’re not arrested while attempting border crossings. Trump’s DOJ and DHS have constantly pushed the theory that due process rights do not apply to undocumented immigrants, no matter where they’re arrested or how long they’ve lived in the United States.
As the law stands — at least in terms of how it has been interpreted for the past 30 years — arrested migrants are supposed to receive a bond hearing and be released if they pose no threat of flight or to public safety. The administration goes hard in the other direction, pretending constitutional rights don’t apply to migrants. But it has repeatedly demonstrated it doesn’t even believe its own bullshit. That’s why arrested migrants are swiftly moved from where they’re arrested and shuffled from detention center to detention center to prevent them from filing habeas motions, which must be filed in the jurisdiction in which they were initially arrested.
So far, eight of eleven appellate circuits have ruled in favor of due process rights and against the administration’s desire to pretend the Constitution no longer exists simply because it has expressed a very novel interpretation of the 1996 law.
This loss in the Fourth Circuit brings the total to nine of eleven circuits. And this means the Supreme Court is going to be asked to sort this out, which isn’t exactly heartening. But here are some details on the latest, rather large loss by the Trump administration, as summarized by Politico’s Kyle Cheney:
A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected ICE’s effort to detain millions of people without bond, comparing it to the “historical stain” of Japanese internment during World War II.
“Mass detention of marginalized individuals without due process harkens back to some of the darkest moments in our country’s history,” 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee, wrote in a 2-1 majority opinion joined by Judge Barbara Keenan, an Obama appointee.
There it is. The same people who excuse past racism as being a product of a “different time” are doing everything they can to revive this “different time” in the present and make it the “new normal” going forward.
The decision [PDF] notes that this legal action has been brought by two migrants who cannot truly be considered “recent” crossers of the border who were caught in the act of illegal entry. One of the plaintiffs has been here since the law the administration is now deliberately misquoting was first enacted (1996). The other plaintiff is far from a US rookie, having lived here peacefully and productively since 2005.
The government could not be more wrong. And this court isn’t willing to bless a self-serving interpretation that seeks to Make America 1942 Again.
Putting all of our tools of statutory construction to work, we hold that Section 1226, not Section 1225, applies to noncitizens who, like the Petitioners, have been present in the United States for years regardless of how they entered our country. Our holding accords with the text, structure, context, and purpose of the INA [1952’s Immigration and Nationality Act] as well as its universally accepted application for the past three decades. Though the Government’s construction finds some support in the text, it suffers several fatal defects. It renders entire portions of the INA meaningless, calls into question amendments to the statute in the intervening decades, including the recent passage of the Laken Riley Act, and raises significant constitutional concerns.
If we were to agree with the Government’s construction, we would need to conclude that, in passing IIRIRA thirty years ago, Congress intended to direct the single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation’s history. Section 1225 simply “cannot bear the weight of the millions of noncitizens it would potentially subject to detention without bond.”
This administration unabashedly does want courts to agree with its interpretation of the law and it definitely wants to engage in the “single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation’s history.” It doesn’t see this as problematic. Instead, it considers the courts’ nearly-100% rejection of its theories to be the real problem here. In response, it has chosen to directly insult and threaten judges, rather than craft any better arguments in support of its openly racist actions.
While this does put almost every circuit in opposition of the president and his efforts, it does make it clear a showdown in the Supreme Court is all but inevitable. Unfortunately, this iteration of the Supreme Court has repeatedly demonstrated that it believes the president should be able to unilaterally declare how laws should be interpreted, if not able to override them completely by simply issuing an executive order. The conservative majority of the court will undoubtedly do everything it can to prop up decisions delivered by the appellate exceptions to the rule.
When Elon first took over Twitter with grand plans to “bring back free speech,” I tried to help him run through the standard content moderation learning curve that basically every site created by a clueless tech bro runs through. They all start with “we’re the free speech site, we allow everything!” and very quickly someone points out that “everything” includes blatantly illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM). I’ve since been told by multiple former X employees that Elon definitely saw that article and… absolutely hated it.
Anyway, soon after that Elon announced that “removing child exploitation is priority #1,” though also suggested people point out CSAM in replies to him if they saw it (which is not how that should be done at all, since it would just point more people to CSAM).
There was also little to no evidence that stopping CSAM was actually “priority #1” seeing that he fired most of the trust & safety team so that at one point there were fewer than 10 specialists working on CSAM. This caused X’s attempts at stopping CSAM to completely fall apart, with experts in the space seeing plenty of evidence that the problem was growing on the platform, rather than shrinking. It probably didn’t help that Musk personally intervened to reinstate the banned account of a conspiracy theorist he really liked after that conspiracy theorist posted one of the most infamous, and most horrifying CSAM images known to authorities.
Of course, that was in the early days. One would hope that a few years further up the learning curve, he’d have learned something. But this is Elon we’re talking about. Last year there was a report that one of the major tool providers for CSAM detection, Thorn, had cut off X, because Elon refused to pay the bill. At the time, X responded angrily to anyone asking about the Thorn situation by claiming that they had put in place their own, better technology to spot CSAM.
How’s that going? Not too well, according to the NY Times, which worked with the Canadian Center for Child Protection to scan X for known abuse imagery. The report covers two separate findings, both of which are alarming. First, there have been obviously lots of reports (and a growing number of lawsuits) regarding claims of Grok producing CSAM. Much of the early reporting, though, didn’t clearly distinguish between actual CSAM and images that are still horrifying and problematic, but probably don’t legally qualify as CSAM.
However, the Canadian Center for Child Protection is certainly able to determine what is actual CSAM, and they were able to find dozens of images that Grok created that appeared to qualify:
In December and January, Grok’s X account produced millions of images ofpeople with their clothing removedin response to prompts from users. After a public outcry, X said it would halt the account from producing those images.
Later, the Canadian center found 65 instances in which Grok created sexualized or exploitative images of children before X halted the bot. During that time frame, users also prompted the chatbot to edit clothed photos of known victims of childhood sexual abuse and depict them in lingerie or bikinis.
Equally as concerning, though, was that the NY Times was able to use PhotoDNA, the baseline tool that many web services use to identify known CSAM via hash matching, and found even more examples this year:
The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.
The Times found more than 75 images between January and June. The program The Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.
This matters because stopping CSAM is a never-ending game of whac-a-mole when it comes to new material. But, for the most part, that’s not true for old material. PhotoDNA and a few similar offerings have gotten quite good at catching the set of “known” images that circulate over and over, and blocking those before they ever hit a site is baseline competency in trust & safety. These images should never have made it to the site, let alone “viewed hundreds of times.”
One explicit photo The Times’s automated program found on X, which has been known to authorities for at least seven years, showed a young girl with fluid on her face being raped orally. The post of the photo, which advertised the sale of similar illegal content, was publicly available for over an hour in March and received 16 likes and nine reposts from other users before The Times found and reported it.
The person depicted in the image, now an adult, said in an interview that she believed X profited from her abuse and further victimized her by not stopping the image from being shared.
“They’re getting benefits from my abuse, and it just feels like it’s never going to stop,” the woman said of X. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she has been stalked by people who viewed images of her abuse online. “I get angry that I’m still having to go through this decades later, and that there doesn’t seem to be real-life consequences for people.”
The whole joke in that speedrun piece from four years ago was that Level One lasts about five minutes. You announce that anything goes, someone points out that “everything” includes CSAM, and you quickly learn how to start fighting CSAM — because that’s the one bit of content moderation that everyone agrees on. And the easiest version of that, catching the known images via hash-matching, has had obvious battle tested tooling for years. Elon chose not to use them, insisting he’d built something better himself (perhaps with Grok?). Yet, what he built appears to have been outperformed by a NY Times reporter with a script and access to the PhotoDNA API.
Four years in, and Elon still hasn’t cleared Level One of the curve. Yikes.
Pirate streaming apps have been popular on Android-based devices and Amazon’s Fire TV stick, which in itself became a go-to tool for pirates.
Responding to the pirate stigma and pressure from rightsholders, last year Amazon stepped in and disabled several popular pirate apps that were sideloaded onto users’ devices.
Amazon’s targets included LiveNetTV, a popular TV streaming app that had been around for a decade. This ad-supported app offered access to hundreds of channels in dozens of countries and was one of the most popular of its kind.
The block didn’t stop the app though. The developers released new versions that slipped by Amazon’s countermeasures and LiveNetTV was still working as usual at the start of the year.
LiveNetTV
Then, in late February, LiveNetTV’s channels went dark for another reason. The app still opened and the thumbnails were still there, but the streams were dead. The operators never offered an explanation but many people simply assumed that the developers had quit, possibly under legal pressure.
With the developers remaining silent for months, the shutdown of the popular app remained a mystery, until now.
LiveNetTV Shutdown and Settlement
In a press release shared with TorrentFreak, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) takes partial credit for the app’s demise. The anti-piracy coalition identified and tracked down the two operators in Istanbul, Turkey, and reached a settlement that shut it down for good.
The two operators are identified only as A.B. and R.B., and the release notes that the settlement followed “legal proceedings,” without going into detail. It does highlight a mea culpa from the two, which they agreed to share after signing the settlement.
“What started as a way to make money online quickly got out of hand. We didn’t fully appreciate the legal consequences or the impact our actions would have.”
“Looking back, the financial gains were simply not worth everything we’ve lost,” they conclude.
Police Raid in February
The public statement reads as a cautionary tale. What it doesn’t say is what prompted it, and the press release doesn’t either, besides thanking the authorities in Türkiye and mentioning “legal proceedings.” However, ACE filled in the blanks when we asked.
“A search & seizure was executed in February by the local police and a court appointed expert,” an ACE spokesperson informed us. The shutdown that followed “was the operators’ decision after the search & seizure was executed and before settlement discussions.”
The raid was the result of a criminal complaint that MPA member companies filed at the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul, ACE says. The eventual settlement was signed in late June, four months after the operators were raided.
This means that the app wasn’t shut down by the police or ACE directly. Instead, the operators pulled the plug back in February, after the police came knocking on their doors.
Domain Name Takeovers
The LivenetTV Domain records fill in the rest of the timeline. Most of the transferred domains were originally registered in 2016, when the app first entered the scene. Ten years later they were signed over to the Motion Picture Association, which manages the ACE coalition.
The domains no longer point to an APK but instead they refer visitors to ACE’s Watch Legally page. The first domains were signed over late June, some others followed in August, and livenettv.xyz eventually switched earlier this month.
Registrant contact
The press release notes that the domains had 2.4 million annual visits at the height of their popularity. That’s a small number compared to streaming sites, but ACE confirmed that this only counts website traffic, not the app’s actual usage, which was likely much higher.
ACE could not say whether the settlement involved financial compensation. That said, for a coalition whose press releases often include a million-dollar damages figure, the mea culpa from two pirate operators may be worth more than the money.
—
The ten domains transferred to the Motion Picture Association, as shared by ACE, with the date each record was last updated according to WHOIS:
I’ve built a simple website that facilitates the conversations that can help us get unstuck.
In The Knot, I describe how we get entangled, hoping for two things to co-exist that cannot. We hide behind the entanglements, refusing to see them, and so our problems can feel permanent.
Working with thousands of people over the last few months, I’ve found that a few simple questions can unlock a deep conversation about what’s holding us back. But these conversations are easier with someone else. In person is great, Zoom works too.
This week, I’ll be posting some of the KnotChats I’ve hosted.
If you’d like to be part of one, you can organize one in just a few minutes. I hope you’ll check out the free site I built. It’s at TheKnot.chat.
Optimized for the phone, the key is that you’ll want to do it with someone who needs you. It’s 1:1, private and powerful. Who can you help?
I’m posting a simple video with instructions below:
First, the good! Since Sunday, we have raised an incredible $35,973 from 801 contributors for Dr. Amish Shah’s campaign, helping him at a crucial moment in his quest to flip the toss-up district of AZ-1 for the Dems. Thank you all for your help! You’re making a smart, strategic difference in the battle for control of Congress and doing so in a district we can flip with the right resources. If you’d still like to donate, you can do so here!
Now, the ban. I’m writing today for The Big Picture about Trump’s attempt to exclude CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. Since the ban was announced Friday, every network in the White House pool, including Fox (!), has walked off in solidarity.
And that has already produced some ugly and truly karmic consequences.
So, some real talk. Can Trump really get away with this? What about the First Amendment?! It turns out this isn’t the first time a president has tried this kind of ban. The law governing White House press exclusions emerged from a 1977 case that still controls these fights today. And if that precedent is followed, as even conservative legal commentators expect it will be, Trump will fail.
Look for my piece this afternoon if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture. If you’re not yet, you can sign up for free or become a valued paid supporter of our work here: https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/subscribe
I’ll be back tomorrow with my regular, if possibly abbreviated, edition, of The Status Kuo. I’m heading out in the wee hours to attend the Human Rights Campaign National Gala and board of directors meeting in D.C. My tenure as board chair officially begins in one month! And we have 75 million equality voters to turn out this November—and congressional majorities to win back.
I love everything about this. I love the way this ICE officer was picked up. I love the fact that his lawyer claims an arrest is the same thing as “surrendering.” And I especially love the fact that this officer is in state custody only a day prior to scheduled court appearance to face federal criminal charges.
The ICE officer is Christian Castro. Castro was one of many, many ICE officers sent to Minneapolis to wage revenge on behalf of Trump. The administration knew it couldn’t just order federal officers to start shooting people in the street, even if they had the gall to impede ICE efforts or, you know, vote Democrat.
But Trump and his posse did know that flooding the streets with federal officers most likely would result in people being shot in the streets by immigration officers. Two murders have already been committed in Minneapolis. Multiple other assaults have also happened. As for Officer Castro, he shot Julio Sosa-Cellis through the closed door of his house. Then he started lying about what happened.
Having discovered the federal government was mostly uninterested in punishing federal officers, Minnesota law enforcement secured an indictment against Castro for assault. An arrest warrant was obtained. At some point, Castro turned himself in to Texas law enforcement. He was jailed and Minnesota tried (unsuccessfully) to have him extradited to Minnesota to face charges, ultimately being rejected by none other than Texas governor Greg Abbott.
With the extradition waiver rejected, Castro was allowed to go free. But that didn’t last long. Less than a week after being released from jail, Castro was hit with federal charges related to the shooting, albeit charges that are far less serious than felonious assault. The feds want Castro brought in to face “false statement” charges which are far less likely to see the officer jailed again.
Irony of ironies, my friends. Castro hasn’t even had a chance to start making false statements again. He was picked up by Minnesota law enforcement only a day before he scheduled to appear in (federal) court, as the the Minneapolis Tribune reports.
Minnesota law enforcement arrested an ICE agent Wednesday in the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge last winter, culminating months of delays and legal maneuvers in efforts to bring him to the state to answer to charges.
Christian Castro, 52, was stopped by agents with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in a traffic stop near his attorney’s office in Minneapolis and taken to the Hennepin County Jail, where he is currently being held. Castro was scheduled to make a federal court appearance on Friday and will now make a first appearance in Hennepin County District Court on Thursday afternoon.
There’s a lot to enjoy here, including the fact that Castro was apprehended during what was clearly a pretextual stop. Yeah, just sit with that for awhile, every cop ever. The BCA knew who it was looking for. Castro had to return to the scene of the crime to face federal charges and ended up getting picked up by the locals for a state warrant. Hilarious!
Of course, Castro’s lawyer is trying to spin this:
Daniel Gerdts, who is representing Castro, said his surrender was prearranged and voluntary.
“The BCA agent took him into custody, as planned,” Gerdts said.
Um, when people surrender, they tend to do it in person at a law enforcement office. Getting picked up during a traffic stop (even one that was obviously pretextual) isn’t “surrender.” It may be that Castro planned to surrender after his federal court appearance (if he still felt he needed to), but I can pretty much guarantee he didn’t plan on being stopped by locals prior to an appearance in a case featuring far less serious criminal charges.
So, the Hennepin County DA will have the first laugh, if not the last one. Texas’s governor may have tried to keep Minnesota from going after a violent ICE officer, but the officer’s federal trouble complicated things to the point where the (local) law got its man anyway. And, since the charges brought against Castro by both levels of the government don’t overlap, there’s no double jeopardy claim to be made. With any luck Castro will get to spend time in both levels of prison.
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There was a four year span where Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr simply couldn’t stop hyperventilating about the fact that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese. Carr would appear on cable news pretty much every week to endlessly rant about the potential propaganda, privacy, and NatSec impact of what was (at best) fairly murky Chinese government influence over TikTok.
You might also recall that “we” “fixed” the “TikTok problem” by forcing a sale of the company to Donald Trump’s billionaire friends like Larry Ellison, who are every bit as bad — if not worse — than previous ownership. Carr never mentioned TikTok again. TikTok’s previous ownership at least tried to behave to remain in the U.S.; guys like Larry Ellison face no such oversight concerns.
Fast forward a few years. Larry Ellison is about to close a massive $111 billion merger between CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers. Almost 50 percent of that deal’s financing is coming from the Saudi government (you remember, the bone saw guys), Qatar, and the Chinese, raising all sorts of valid questions about potential foreign impact on news coverage and U.S. media.
Hypocritically, Brendan Carr and his Republican allies at the FCC see absolutely no problem with this, and have rubber stamped their approval of the deal (and the funding from autocratic governments). Paramount and Trump underlings say it’s all fine because the foreign governments won’t technically have voting rights.
The problem: there’s nothing that prevents them from obtaining voting rights later, and they’ll still have influence. The Communications Act technically prohibits foreign governments from owning more than 25% of the capital stock or voting rights in a parent company controlling broadcast licenses. But it also allows the FCC to ignore this cap if the agency feels that doing so “serves the public interest.”
To Brendan Carr, cementing a corrupt authoritarian global right wing propaganda alliance serves authoritarian, corporate, and government interests, so that’s good enough — apparently.
Understandably, consumer rights groups like Free Press were unenthusiastic about yet more U.S. media consolidation and the potential for foreign influence over our already propaganda-heavy news:
“Control over for-profit, commercial domestic news media by any government is an extraordinary situation that would surely strike most Americans as unseemly, precisely because of the utility of the news media as a propaganda tool for those governments.”
There is simply nothing that’s ideologically consistent about Brendan Carr outside of his feckless obedience to Trump Incorporated. He’ll wax poetic about free speech while destroying free speech. He’ll ramble endlessly about a healthy media ecosystem while illegally destroying media consolidation limits. He’ll pay lip service to innovation while dismantling all competition safeguards.
With Democratic state AGs pathetically folding to demands for settlement, Larry Ellison’s (and his global autocratic allies’) dreams of dominating what’s left of U.S. corporate media are full steam ahead.
携帯 (けいたい) — carrying (on one's person or in the hand) 携帯電話 (けいたいでんわ) — mobile telephone 世帯 (しょたい) — household 時間帯 (じかんたい) — period of time 一帯 (いったい) — whole area 地帯 (ちたい) — zone 価格帯 (かかくたい) — price range 世帯主 (せたいぬし) — head of the family (esp. as recorded in the resident register) 酒気帯び運転 (しゅきおびうんてん) — drunk driving 連帯 (れんたい) — solidarity
Object permanence: Warren on taxing the rich and class warfare; Psychology v reproducibility; Copyright troll sentenced for beating Uber driver; "Halloween Moon"; Enshittification of solar.
Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (permalink)
Well, fuck. California Attorney General Rob Bonta just surrendered to the Trump-aligned Ellison billionaires who want to take over and destroy Warners, merging it with the chudded out husk they've made of Paramount, leaving these two colossal, corrupt, useless assholes to control Warners, Paramount and Tiktok:
In announcing the settlement, Bonta's office touted a long list of concessions the AG had wrung from the Ellisons before greenlighting this indefensible, illegal and dangerous merger. Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit. Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot.
For a breakdown of how fucking useless this settlement is, read (who else?) Matt Stoller, whose piece breaking it down is titled "Happy Oligarch Day!"
The first thing Stoller points out is that every one of the "commitments" in the settlement only matter if Bonta's office enforces them. Bonta's office will never have as much leverage over Warnermount as it has today, when the company is paying a $7m/day "ticking fee" while the merger is stalled (thanks to an injunction secured by the Hollywood unions, whom Bonta has just royally fucked, because they can't afford to litigate this case without the AG office's backing). So even if any of these conditions meant anything (which they do not), they won't be enforced. If Bonta can't bring Warnermount to heel today, when they have to pay $7m/day for so long as they're crosswise with him, how will he ever get them to do shit?
He.
Will.
Not.
But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter! Because the Ellisons have given Bonta nothing. Take the guarantee that Warnermount "will make 30 films" for the next two years, and 32 films thereafter. That's what's been announced, but when former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya dug into the actual wording, he discovered they are only committing to distributing 30 films, and to making 15 films, which they are allowed to co-produce with other studios. They made 18 movies last year. Under the terms of this deal, they have "committed" to making fewer movies than they make today:
They've committed to not selling the Warner lot. For five years. But they are allowed to move it out of LA, which is something my neighbors in Burbank are doubtless delighted to learn. After that, they can move it to whatever state offers them the biggest sweetheart tax deal and the weakest union protections.
They are prohibited from gouging the theater chains and putting them out of business to promote their streaming business. For three years. After that, they can let 'er rip.
Then there's the "editorial board" that will oversee the Ellisons' management of CNN and MSNBC, nominally to keep it from getting the CBS treatment and going 24/7 Great Replacement/Haitians eating dogs/Charlie Kirk funeral pyrotechnics spectaculars. Guess who chooses the members of the editorial board? The Ellisons. As Stoller writes, "it’s downright comical [that] they demanded that David Ellison not corrupt CNN by having David Ellison appoint a board ensuring that David Ellison not do that."
But you can ignore everything you've just read, because the settlement includes a clause that says they don't have to do any of the things it says they have to do. This is the "force majeure" clause, which is not like a normal force majeure clause (which allows the parties to back out of their commitment in case of war, wildfires, etc). This force majeure clause lets Warnermount tear up the entire agreement if there's a strike or a recession.
So: if (when) the Hollywood unions go on strike over this betrayal (which they absolutely should do), the agreement becomes null. And if (when) the AI bubble bursts and there's a massive recession, the agreement becomes null. And if (when) Trump's War on Oil plunges the US into Jimmy Carter-style oil economic tsunami, the agreement becomes null.
As Stoller points out, 12 State Attorneys General signed this piece of shit. Every one of them is a lawyer, and every one of them has a staff of lawyers. None of the glaring, catastrophic, utterly disqualifying defects in this "settlement" can possibly be a surprise to them. These Democrat warriors surrendered to Trump's oligarchs, giving them everything, including control over the American film and TV industry for so long as it limps along. They just assumed you wouldn't notice.
Stoller says he's "in a strangely good mood" about this because of all the political capital it took to get this over the line (unlike, say, Disney-Fox, which sailed through with nary a hitch), saying that it indicates that the public is fed up with monopolies. He's right, they are fed up with monopolies. Everyday Americans, Democrats and Republicans, are telling pollsters they'd back a politician who campaigned on shattering monopoly power:
So this leaves us to wonder why Bonta (who talked tough in public about this merger and insisted he would never settle for this kind of weaksauce) stabbed the state, the country, Hollywood workers, and the American public in the back like this? Stoller's theory is that Bonta was isolated by "Democratic insiders" who wouldn't back his play.
OK, fine. As Stoller writes, there's no ambiguity here, this is just straight up corruption, oligarch pals of the President getting to roll up and gut the industry's globally important, culturally essential media sector. The "teachers' pets" of the Democratic Party have once again sold out working people in a bid to be liked by the rich and powerful.
This will fuel (more) distrust of America's political class, a distrust that has been repeatedly earned over decades and especially in this decade. Our leaders are "malevolent liars." It's been true for a very long time, but we can no longer pretend otherwise. Perhaps Stoller's right and this means we'll finally get some real change. I hope so. But for now, I'm just furious.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 508 (17556 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Windows Package Signature Issue
The DigiCert EV code-signing certificate we use to sign Windows installation packages is expired since September 1st and we are currently in the process to renew it. Unfortunately, this process is delayed and not yet complete.
Therefore, trying to install Tor Browser 16.0a12 or 16.0a11 from scratch will cause a "bad signature" warning on Windows.
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Bug tor-browser#45100: Regression in #43229 "Buttons that open links can be accessed before torbrowser is bootstrapped, leaving the app in a bad state"
Bug tor-browser#45172: Move our "Connect to Tor before opening links" code from the deprecated openToBrowserAndLoad to the recommended loadUrlOrSearch
Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The idea is to cut back on the amount of video content available to the company, and thus potentially available to law enforcement. But while it might technically add a speed bump to accessing full video content, it doesn’t deliver nearly the level of privacy we should be demanding from video doorbells and other security cameras.
TAKE introduces a new way for Ring to manage encryption keys, where the user’s device has its key, then the company holds encryption keys temporarily within its own cloud infrastructure. Ring’s servers receive the keys temporarily so it can offer a variety of the features it says it can’t offer when a user chooses to use end-to-end encryption, like video descriptions, smart alerts, video search, and more, then deletes the key after 24 hours.
This differs from how it works now, where footage is encrypted in transit and at rest, then decrypted by Ring, which always has access to the footage, to process those features.
Comparatively, this is an improvement to the default settings Ring has now, because it at least puts some restrictions on historical footage, but it has some serious holes worth exploring.
Ring Gets Access to Unencrypted Video for a Short Period
Ring has designed its service so many of its camera features, including smart alerts and video search, need cloud processing to work. That means to provide those features, Ring needs to decrypt the footage while it’s stored in Ring’s cloud servers.
With TAKE, in order to decrypt footage to offer these features, Ring gets access to footage stored in the cloud for 24 hours. TAKE adds some small measures using secure enclaves to make base key material harder to directly export, but keys are still released to services that can be modified. With access to the keys, the cloud processing does its thing and delivers the requested feature to the user. The key is then deleted 24 hours later—until the user wants to watch an old video or use other so-called “smart” features, at which point the keys are sent back to the server.
In practice, that makes the system as a whole barely different from encryption at rest where the server holds the keys. The client device essentially takes the place of a hardware security module (HSM), including making those keys available to the server whenever they’re needed. The end result is an improvement from the status quo, but still not even close to the privacy protections of end-to-end encryption.
The company says it does not keep backups of the keys and there’s no way for a Ring employee to access footage. It also claims that any decrypted content is deleted from its servers.
But that doesn’t mean much when user actions send the keys back to the server. And making features like “Video Search” and “Smart Video Descriptions” available to the device owner means that while the footage can’t be seen by Ring, descriptions are readily available to the company. In response to a question about capability, Ring responded to us that, “As Ring continues to expand and further strengthen TAKE’s protections, video descriptions will be included.”
Plus, account recovery keys are stored in the camera itself by default. When that’s paired with the fact that currently, indices of video contents are available to the company, it means that TAKE isn’t even a protection against mass surveillance. Law enforcement could request a mass search across cameras for certain terms, then delve into further details by seizing cameras of interest from the device-owner, decrypting account backups, and using that information to decrypt encrypted videos.
Law Enforcement May Still Seek to Compel Access to Footage
Because of the ways the access and key rotations work, it’s technically still possible for Ring to alter its current practice if compelled to do so by law enforcement, in much the same way as other existing encryption-at-rest systems where the company holds the keys. For example, Ring could receive an order that demands they save content encryption keys or unencrypted videos from memory to disk, which would mean they’d retain some level of access.
In an email to EFF, Ring stated, “By design, under TAKE, Ring will not be able to provide encryption keys or decrypted content. With TAKE, Ring will only preserve and provide encrypted video files in response to valid legal process. It has been and continues to be Ring’s policy to object to overbroad legal requests.” EFF specifically asked about the possibility of complying with law enforcement orders to modify existing practice to turn over or preserve unencrypted video, which appears to be technically possible, but the company did not address it.
End-to-end encryption works to maintain trust by its user base because the company that employs it never has access to the keys at any point, making it impossible for itself to access the encrypted contents. This also means law enforcement can’t demand the service retain keys or choose not to rotate them. As described, this level of protection isn’t offered with TAKE.
Ultimately, Ring is the one managing this software and its implementation, and beyond a white paper, “trust us” is the only level of verification they’re offering outside observers. While it doesn’t fix the issues, at the bare minimum, the company needs to open the entire infrastructure up to third-party auditors to verify its claims. Ring seems to agree, as they told us that, “Ring conducts rigorous security reviews of all products before launch and critical components of TAKE’s infrastructure underwent independent security testing prior to launch. We are exploring options for further independent review.”
TAKE is not end-to-end encryption, where Ring would never have access to the keys, and the company thankfully doesn’t claim it as such. Ring already offers the option for end-to-end encryption, and turning that on by default would offer the real sorts of privacy improvements we all want from video doorbells.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part I — History Rarely Announces Itself
The series begins with a simple question: are we witnessing a collection of problems with Big Tech, or a deeper change in the role these companies play in our lives? Part I sets out the argument that the most important transformations are often the ones we recognise only in retrospect.
There is a peculiar habit that history shares with nature. Neither announces profound change with the drama we imagine when looking back. Revolutions rarely begin on the day they enter textbooks, and civilizations do not wake one morning to discover that they have entered decline. Instead, transformation arrives quietly, almost politely, concealed beneath the reassuring continuity of everyday life. Markets continue to function, institutions retain their familiar names, and people carry on believing that tomorrow will resemble yesterday because, on the surface, it usually does.
Only later do historians perform the act of compression that history itself resists. They identify the battle that changed an empire, the financial crisis that exposed an economic model, the speech that captured a political era, or the invention that divided one age from another. Looking backwards, the narrative appears inevitable but living through it is altogether different. Those who inhabit moments of profound transition rarely experience them as decisive. They experience them as a succession of disconnected events whose significance is impossible to measure because the larger pattern has yet to reveal itself.
The French historian Fernand Braudel devoted much of his career to challenging precisely this tendency. History, he argued, unfolds across different scales of time. There are events, the spectacular moments that dominate newspaper headlines and collective memory, but beneath them lie slower currents that shape societies over generations. These structural transformations are difficult to perceive precisely because they unfold so gradually. They resemble continental drift more than earthquakes. Entire worlds rearrange themselves while the people living within them continue to believe that the landscape is essentially unchanged.
Climate science has taught us a remarkably similar lesson that weather is immediate. We notice storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts because they interrupt the ordinary rhythm of life. Climate, by contrast, is almost invisible. It changes through accumulation rather than spectacle. A fraction of a degree each decade scarcely registers in human experience, yet over time it alters migration patterns, agricultural systems, coastlines and ecosystems with a force that no single storm could ever achieve. Focusing exclusively on weather can obscure the far more consequential transformation taking place beneath it.
It is tempting to interpret these episodes as isolated crises, each demanding its own explanation. Yet taken together they begin to resemble something else entirely. They suggest that we may have been paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.
The story, in other words, is probably not about content moderation, or data protection, or recommendation algorithms, or artificial intelligence, even though each of these matters enormously. Those are symptoms of a deeper transformation whose outlines are only now becoming visible. What appears to be a succession of corporate controversies may, in retrospect, come to be understood as the slow exhaustion of an idea that shaped the first quarter of the twenty-first century: the belief that a small number of private technology companies could become the primary architecture through which humanity communicates, learns, debates, connects, entertains itself and increasingly understands the world.
The remarkable thing about this idea is not simply that it became commercially successful. It became culturally invisible. Platforms ceased to feel like products and instead became environments. Like roads, electricity or running water, they receded into the background of everyday life. Their ubiquity created the illusion of permanence. It became difficult to imagine social life without them, just as it had once been difficult to imagine commerce without railways or politics without newspapers. Every era eventually mistakes its dominant infrastructure for a natural feature of the landscape.
History suggests otherwise.
The nineteenth century was convinced that the telegraph would permanently eliminate misunderstandings between nations. Journalists described it as a technology that would bind humanity together by making ignorance impossible. A century later, television was heralded as the medium that would create an informed democratic citizenry by exposing millions of people to the same events simultaneously. The early internet inherited that same optimism, although in a more ambitious form. It would not simply transmit information more efficiently. It would redistribute power. Hierarchies would flatten. Gatekeepers would disappear. Geography would matter less. Knowledge would become universally accessible. Participation itself would become the defining characteristic of public life. For a while, the optimism seemed entirely justified.
It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to forget how extraordinary the early internet felt. To describe it merely as a technological innovation is to misunderstand the scale of the cultural shift it represented. The internet altered our relationship with distance, authority and possibility all at once. Suddenly, a teenager in Athens could collaborate with a programmer in São Paulo, learn from a professor in California, debate politics with someone in Nairobi and publish an idea that might reach readers in Tokyo, all without asking permission from anyone. The network did not simply connect computers; it dissolved assumptions that had shaped communication for centuries.
This openness was not accidental. It reflected the philosophy embedded within the Internet’s architecture. Unlike earlier communication systems, the internet was designed around protocols rather than ownership. No single company controlled email. No one owned the web itself. Innovation occurred at the edges because the center remained deliberately thin. Anyone who understood the protocols could build something new. Permission was replaced by interoperability; central planning by distributed experimentation. The Internet’s greatest achievement was not any particular application. It was creating conditions under which applications could proliferate without requiring approval from whoever had built the network in the first place.
That distinction is easy to overlook today because we have become accustomed to experiencing the internet through platforms rather than protocols. Increasingly, our digital lives unfold inside environments that are carefully designed, privately governed and algorithmically curated. We enter through an application rather than a browser. We consume what is presented rather than wandering where curiosity might otherwise lead. We spend hours online without ever really encountering the web as earlier generations understood it.
This transformation did not happen suddenly, nor was it imposed upon unwilling users. Quite the opposite. People embraced these platforms because they solved genuine problems. They simplified complexity, reduced friction and made participation effortless. They arrived at precisely the moment when the Internet’s overwhelming openness had begun to create its own challenges. Search engines helped us navigate an expanding web. Social networks made finding people easier than remembering email addresses. Video platforms lowered the barriers to publishing. Recommendation systems rescued us from abundance.
Good technologies almost always begin this way. They reduce uncertainty, they make difficult things easier and, they solve problems that people actually have. The difficulty comes later, when the solution gradually becomes the environment itself.
There is a moment in the life of every successful system when it stops merely serving society and begins quietly reorganizing society around its own internal logic. Railways changed where cities grew. Highways reshaped suburban life. Electricity transformed working hours. Financial markets altered corporate governance. Technologies rarely remain neutral infrastructure for long; their assumptions seep into the cultures that adopt them.
The question, then, is not whether digital platforms became too powerful. That observation has become almost banal. The more interesting question is whether they have reached the point that every dominant system eventually encounters: the moment when the conditions that produced their success no longer resemble the conditions of the world they helped create.
Empires have reached this moment. Economic doctrines have reached it. Political ideologies have reached it. Entire civilizations have discovered, often too late, that success can become a form of intellectual inertia. The institutions that once understood society begin instead to interpret society through assumptions that are increasingly outdated. They continue to optimize for a world that no longer exists.
There are reasons to think that something similar is happening now. Not because the platforms are collapsing. They are not. Not because people have abandoned them. They have not. But because, perhaps for the first time since the commercial internet emerged, it has become possible to ask whether the companies that mediate so much of our digital lives still understand the societies they claim to connect or whether they have become so immersed in their own models of human behavior that they have begun to mistake prediction for understanding.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
Satire is dead. But it’s been dead since the first Trump administration, back when people were “owning the libs” with a combination of horse dewormers and willfully contracting COVID. Bleach consumption was discussed. It was a whole thing.
Not enough of those people died, apparently. We somehow got a second season of Trump and at this point, it looks like farce may finally have been killed off.
In addition to forming a white Christian nationalist death cult, Trump really wants history to remember him as one of the most self-aggrandizing people to ever serve as President of the United States. He would rather raze the Kennedy Center to the ground than have it continue without his name splashed all over it. He has literally gilded the lily all over DC, sending out his Parks and Rec folks to splash a bunch of gold paint over a bunch of monuments and statues.
He also wants his own Arc de Triomphe. But while the French version celebrates the country’s military victories (both of them!) and is generally representative of national pride, Trump’s version would be all about Trump.
The problems are several. First, it’s the subject of litigation. Second, even his own National Park Service has pointed out that it would have an “adverse effect” on nearby historical monuments, including the Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial (the one with the misbehaving pool). Trump’s own FAA expressed some concerns about the proposed arch’s interference with flight paths but ultimately did the let’s-give-Trump-what-he-wants thing and suggested the only alteration be some sort of a warning light on top for planes… perhaps some sort of “eternal flame.” [Vomits involuntarily.]
Trump is struggling to justify building a gaudy piece of white-and-gold bullshit as a paean to his superior mediocrity. So, he’s doing what he always does in situations like these: fire up Truth Social to deliver rants/statements that look like they were composed by someone on a cocaine-and-151 bender.
If you can’t read/see the embed… oh man. You’re in for a treat. I’m just going to post the whole thing here because any cherry-picking of the best/worst parts might lead some people to believe that I’m just making this shit up.
Buckle up, buttercups:
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
You’re seeing this too, right? It’s not just me who may or may not be on a cocaine-and-151 bender? This is a guy who thinks everyone respects him just out there on main claiming the “United States Military” has requested he turn his ego stroke of a monument into some sort of immobile war machine.
This sounds like it was written by a seven-year-old to explain the massive amount of hand-drawn violence currently covering the notebook paper he was supposed to be using to show his work during math class. I cannot imagine any healthy adult actually claiming a “triumphal arch” can — or even should! — house “large numbers of drones, plus Snipers… and… large quantities of sniper ammunition.”
Are we supposed to believe the “roof” of the monument will just be launching pads for drones — drones, I might add, that will be launched directly into the flight paths of descending commercial flights arriving at Dulles? Are the snipers just going to live there? Will the two towers of the arc act like extended clips for sniper ammo? Will it just be 250+ feet of belt-fed ammo accessed directly through “Freedom Slits” or whatever the fuck?
And what even is a “top grade Military Complex” in the context of self-gratifying embarrassment of a monument? And if it is actually going to be all of these things, why are we telling everyfuckingbody that we’re building a drones-and-bullets centerpiece in Washington, DC? Won’t that just make it one of the first targets in any invasion/terrorist attack/rummaging for pawnable goods after its erection? Speaking of erections, why can’t we have a president who gets off to normal things, like Marilyn Monroe? Or being cucked by Lorena Hickok?
All I can see now is some sort of drone-encircled, twin-towered .50 cal with Trump branding and a bunch of pissed off guys dressed like Solid Snake doomscrolling social media 250 feet above the ground. If for no other reason than Trump’s own Truth Social post, this abomination should never be constructed. But if we’re going to get blighted by the blightiest of self-declared urbanites, we may as well make it something everyone in the world will instinctively want to destroy.
California AG Rob Bonta has caved to what was a relentless, bipartisan pressure campaign to settle the 12 state antitrust lawsuit against Paramount. The AGs sued Paramount last July, arguing (correctly) that the $111 billion deal would largely be anti-competitive, resulting in mass layoffs as the even bigger Larry Ellison-owned company forces labor and consumers to pay down the deal’s mammoth debt load.
The final settlement language hasn’t been made public, but a Bloomberg report indicates there’s not much to it. It will feature some sort of board that will purportedly try and keep CNN from going the same direction as CBS under Bari Weiss (good luck), and some language holding Paramount’s feet to the fire in terms of its promise to deliver 30 traditional big studio releases per year.
It doesn’t sound like Paramount will be forced to sell any assets or provide labor promises of any kind.
Reports suggest that at least 4 of the state AGs weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea of settling. It also sounds like California Governor Gavin Newsom was a key player in pushing for a settlement:
“Golden State Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been advocating for a settlement publicly over the past month, was in “constant contact” with the parties as talks ebbed and flowed over the weekend. Very much aware of the harsh backlash to a settlement that erupted among Congressional Democrats, A-listers like Mark Ruffalo and others as deal talks accelerated, potential 2028 POTUS candidate Newsom is said to have cautioned both sides to find terms that addressed “core concerns” for Hollywood and the state.
“It’s jobs, job, jobs, that’s what this all about,” a source close to power players in Sacramento told Deadline.”
Generally conditions don’t mean much, aren’t permanent, and aren’t consistently enforced. They don’t do much of anything to combat the larger trend of media consolidation; particularly at the hands of autocrats who have taken a hatchet to regulatory autonomy and state authority via the courts as they look to dominate media and supplant journalism with propaganda.
Consumer and media watchdog groups like Free Press were not impressed by Bonta’s decision to fold:
“These minor concessions are largely unenforceable behavioral remedies that Bonta had previously denounced, and in some cases promise less than the two companies are already doing as standalone competitors. They came after Paramount owner David Ellison made multiple threats to move the studio out of California unless the attorneys general dropped their lawsuit. Previously, Bonta had maintained he’d only accept structural remedies, which block the merger or involve companies selling off significant parts of the combined businesses.”
Bonta and Newsom were intimidated by Ellison’s threat that he would move Paramount out of Hollywood if states tried to enforce antitrust law. Though that’s the thing about antitrust enforcement: if you actually enforce antitrust law — and ensure markets are heavily populated with small to mid-sized competitors — they lack the kind of consolidated power to make those kinds of threats.
What happens next? Well, the same thing that always happens. The deal moves forward, then Paramount will begin forcing labor, creatives, and consumers to pay down the massive debt load in the form of massive layoffs, higher prices, and the kind of corner cutting that results in lower quality product. This is literally what happens every single time a deal like this is approved. There’s not really any debate.
Once the layoffs come en masse the folks, like Newsom, who advocated for a settlement, will suddenly be nowhere to be found. Again, we know this because this is what always happens. There are literally fifty years of indisputable evidence that these deals always end badly for markets, consumers, and labor. And the dysfunction is frequently infuriatingly bipartisan.
In addition to the antitrust angle, this was an opportunity for Democrats to try and kick back against the right wing effort to dominate media for propaganda purposes. But Democrats generally have proven to be feckless and pathetic when it comes to both media reform generally, and fighting right wing information warfare specifically.
If there’s a positive note for the whole thing (and assuming you ignore all the human carnage that’s coming), there’s very little indication that Paramount executives and the Ellisons have any earthly idea what they’re doing; Bari Weiss’ makeover of CBS continues to be a disaster, and there’s endless financial and logistical minefields awaiting the Ellisons just over the horizon.
It remains very possible that this company simply won’t survive the evolutionary market challenges it faces in the social media era. Every single time Warner Brothers mergers it results in mass layoffs, higher prices, shittier product, and a lot of whimpering before the acquiring company gives up entirely (see: AT&T). There’s no reason to believe this time will be any different.
Pirate streaming apps have been popular on Android-based devices and Amazon’s Fire TV stick, which in itself became a go-to tool for pirates. 
