Tuesday 2026-11-10
12:00 AM
Ted Cruz Rushes To Illegally Stock The FCC With Trump Lackeys Before GOP Loses Congress [Techdirt]
Despite already enjoying a voting majority, the GOP has simply flat out refused to appoint any new Democratic Commissioners to the nation’s top media and telecom regulator, the FCC.
They’ve also refused to begin the process of appointing Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez to another term despite her term technically ending on June 30 (in part because she’s aggressively criticized Brendan Carr for trampling the First Amendment).
Historically, the FCC is supposed to see a 3-2 partisan split depending on which party controls the White House. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, is now rushing to appoint Brendan Carr’s long-time personal legal aide Danielle Thumann Severs as a new FCC Commissioner, securing a 3-0 voting majority over the agency:
“Confirming Thumann Severs would give Republicans an unusual 3-1 advantage on the FCC. That could become a 3-0 advantage at the end of 2027 because FCC Democrat Anna Gomez would have to leave the commission at that time if Trump does not agree to renominate her.”
Senator Ron Wyden recently warned the Trump administration that securing a 3-0 partisan domination over the FCC is technically illegal under the Communications Act:
“The U.S. communications sector represents hundreds of billions of dollars in economic valuation, and relies on the legal validity of these FCC actions. Under an all-Republican commission, every single license renewal, equipment certification, spectrum transfer, or other delegated action would be legally defective, casting a cloud of crippling legal uncertainty over the entire communications industry.”
Twenty-one Democratic lawmakers on the House Commerce Committee also wrote a letter last week to Cruz and Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointing out that any new appointment to the FCC must be accompanied with the appointment of a corresponding Commissioner from the opposing party.
With the dramatic wins by Democrats in the midterms, these warnings suddenly carry real weight, so Cruz wants to accelerate Severs’ appointment before the end of the year.
Trump authoritarians aren’t just keen to dominate (and disembowel) federal consumer protection regulators, they’re so threatened by the mere thought of open debate that they’ve illegally fired commissioners at agencies like the FTC.
Carr’s “leadership” at the FCC has, of course, centered on an endless array of illegal attacks on the First Amendment, journalism, and free speech. But Carr’s assault on journalism and free speech has often obscured his equally illegal attacks on stuff like broadband consumer protection or media consolidation limits (the latter of which has even angered traditional Republican allies like giant cable monopolies).
Carr’s eager to have a full 3 commissioner majority to take full advantage of Trump’s remaining two years and accelerate “deregulation” (read: the brutal elimination of all corporate oversight across everything from your broadband bill to annoying robocalls). There’s definitely still a lot of harm Carr can do whether or not Severs survives the congressional appointment process.
Severs is likely to see her rushed appointment succeed. Contrast that to what happened to popular telecom and media consumer rights reformer Gigi Sohn, whose appointment to the FCC you might recall was ratfucked by a bipartisan array of bad faith captured lawmakers. Captured lackeys get rushed appointments. Actual reformers get ratfucked. That’s been the name of the game for decades.
That said, on the free speech front, Carr has very clearly enjoyed being portrayed by the press as an important person doing important things, but as Trump’s health and power wanes you’ll increasingly see companies standing up and fighting back (see: ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC for trampling the First Amendment), exposing Carr as the weak, yipping, and performative culture warrior he always was.
Monday 2026-11-09
11:00 PM
Kanji of the Day: 今 [Kanji of the Day]
今
✍4
小2
now
コン キン
いま
今回 (こんかい) — this time
今年 (ことし) — this year
今後 (こんご) — from now on
今まで (いままで) — until now
今週 (こんしゅう) — this week
今月 (こんげつ) — this month
今季 (こんき) — this season
今度 (こんど) — this time
今日 (きょう) — today
今でも (いまでも) — even now
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Kanji of the Day: 但 [Kanji of the Day]
但
✍7
中学
however, but
タン
ただ.し
但し (ただし) — but
但し書き (ただしがき) — proviso
但書き (ただしがき) — proviso
但書 (ただしがき) — proviso
但し付き (ただしつき) — conditional
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Pluralistic: America cannot undo Trumpism (09 Nov 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]
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Top Sources:
None
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Today's links
- America cannot undo Trumpism: The only way out is through.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Bruces x Pokemon; Rich countries and WIPO conspire to kill developement agenda; Wired photos go CC; "Mortality Bridge"; Drones over Disney; CBC v podcast apps; Realtor x election eschatology; Right-clicker mentality; "Victories Greater Than Death"; Facebook's fraud files; Zune v Universal; Ben and Jerry's x OWS; Nudging is bunk; History of Chinese sf; How Audi cheated; Trump runs the surveillance state; Stockholm v interop.
- Upcoming appearances: Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
America cannot undo Trumpism (permalink)
True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a "rupture" in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through:
This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world's cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.
We can't trust Americans to buy the things we make:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
We can't trust them not to interfere with the interconnections between fiber lines that slither out of the oceans and onto the US landmass:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack
We can't trust them not to weaponize the US dollar to undermine sovereign nations' legitimate activities:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
And we absolutely can't trust them not to spy on, steal from, and shut down governments, firms and households around the world by cutting off access to US software and cloud services, and by bricking the world's devices, from tractors to smartphones:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Despite Carney's assertion that this rupture represents a welcome (if too cruel, sudden and painful) departure of the old (never very good) system, no one (not even Carney) is acting like the world has truly changed. Take Carney's answer to the Trump tariffs: retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs have a place in sheltering a nascent domestic industry from better-developed, deeper-pocketed foreign competitors, so a tariff wall between Canada and the US could make sense, if it was paired with the massive domestic investment we'd need to rebuild the manufacturing industry that Brian Mulroney sold out with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (and later NAFTA).
But Carney is no Carneyist. When it comes to massive domestic spending, Carney is a bog-standard, austerity-addled Reaganomics guy; a central banker and technocrat whose idea of "industrial policy" is firing tens of thousands of skilled civil servants who thwart his agenda and replacing them with defective (but obedient) chatbots running on US hardware:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole
Carney's retaliatory tariffs aren't what you'd do if the old order had "ruptured." They're what you'd do if you hoped that your American cousins would come to their senses, evict their mad king from the White House, tear down the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, and roll back the clock to 2016. Like a lot of liberals, Carney just wants to go back to brunch.
But as any true Carneyist knows, brunch is canceled forever. Brunch ruptured. There's no going back to the old America, and there's no going back to the old American order that had dominated the world since the end of WWII. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play."
This is something we're all struggling with, including Americans. The Republicans' midterm wipeout has corporate Democrats hoping that after a few years' tinkering, they can elect a Newsomdroid or give Harris a do-over and win back the trust and reliance of the world and the American people. Even for a true Carneyist who never liked the old order very much (like me), this is a comforting prospect. No one knows what the next world will look like, and no matter how screwed up the old world was, I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me (more or less).
But there is no going back. Trump I didn't have a plan, it only had Trump, whose One Big Idea was issuing Executive Orders. Many of these were meaningless bloviating. Some were illegal and were swiftly suspended or never went into effect. Biden overturned nearly all the remaining EOs (that were both substantive and not totally illegal).
But Trump II had Project 2025. The point of Project 2025 and the ambition of the wreckers who wrote it was to push America through a series of one-way transformations that cannot be undone, and that's what's happened, over two short years. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's much easier to destroy than to build, so Project 2025 hasn't led to the creation of permanent, load-bearing fascist institutions that cannot be shuttered without bringing down large parts of the USA.
Start with values. Trumpism is a denial of democracy and the rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans have been marinated in a belief system that says that the way to win power is to claim all the elections you lose are rigged and that these "stolen elections" are best addressed by staging a coup. These people are in a cult that embraces its leader's naked corruption. They're in a cult whose doctrine treats political triumph of as divine direction to embark on looting sprees. It's a cult whose members mutilate their faces so that they can't ever leave, and the reward for this permanent disfigurement is endless influence-peddling:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6136101-ambassador-guilfoyle-wire-request/
Even without ritual scarification to mark them out forever, millions of these people will never come back from this cult indoctrination. They will forever be democracy's enemies, treating the idea of laws, rules and honest service as shucks for the rubes. What's more, these people's neighbors, family members and co-workers will never be able to fully trust them.
Unfortunately, those values aren't just diffused through the population: they are concentrated in the organs of state. DOGE and Federalist Society judicial appointments have created a stay-behind cadre of life-tenured fascists who now dominate America's federal judiciary and permanent civil service, including and especially the nation's law enforcement and national security agencies, from the FBI to the FDA, the NSA to the Bureau of Prisons.
Worse: DOGE also chased away hundreds of thousands of skilled, principled public servants. Those people have retired, retrained, emigrated or exited the workforce. They can't simply be re-hired and restored to their old roles. From finance regulation to the national education system, America has lobotomized itself, swapping people who understand how things work and use that understanding to enforce the laws and safeguard the American people for end-times fascists, caliper-wielding eugenicists, and Ayn Rand LARPers.
Much of the work DOGE's victims did is also gone forever. When DOGE's muskrats killed long-running NIH research projects, they pulled the plug on studies, some of which had run for decades. Many of these experiments are unsalvageable. DOGE didn't just throw away the contributions that cancer patients, people with genetic disorders and other volunteer research subjects gave to science: in halting these research projects, DOGE shredded this selfless sacrifice. Why not? When one NIH official begged his DOGE invaders not to kill long-running, valuable cancer research, the DOGE child laughed and said it didn't matter, because AI was going to cure cancer.
Then there's the NIH's research partners: the elite institutions who buckled so quickly in the face of Trump's antisemitism/DEI witch-hunts. These universities now face the same crisis as the DOGE-gutted civil service, with their best and brightest gone, grad students chased back to their home countries, and the trust of their students and faculty permanently squandered.
It's not just grad students who got chased out of America. Immigrants – documented and undocumented alike – have been terrorized for two years and many of them have fled. ICE got what it wanted: they robbed aging, stagnant America of the dynamism, aspiration and youthful vigor of the most ambitious people from every corner of the globe, people who proved their resourcefulness and bravery by making dangerous crossings. Then they navigated the US immigration system's impenetrable bureaucracy, often working without legal representation, in a language they were just learning, and still managing to clear every bureaucratic hurdle. This alone is a breathtaking demonstration of intelligence, resourcefulness and diligence. Those brilliant, hardworking people aren't coming back: some other country will get the benefit of their life's work and care. Their children will become citizens of other nations.
Now think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been transferred from ordinary working people who are still here, to America's oligarchs. Trump's tax cuts, corrupt policy subsidies and no-bid pork contracts have supercharged the wealth (and thus the power) of America's most corrupt elite. It will be the work of a generation to tax away their stolen loot, and much of it may never be recovered. These people will spend that time working to transform their wealth into permanent power, buying and installing politicians at every level of office.
Trumpland is a coalition of wreckers of every kind. Think of how MAHA undermined the nation's herd immunity to a host of communicable diseases, many of which can result in permanent disability. Long after MAHA is forgotten even as a punchline, the people whose health they destroyed forever will still be struggling. After a century of painstaking work to corral measles and other killer diseases, MAHA immunocompromised America itself, in just two short years. Any attempt to bring back evidence-based preventative medicine must now overcome the deep mistrust of medical science that an army of supplement-peddling quacks has sunk deep into Americans' psyche.
Speaking of mistrust: Americans must now and forever live with the knowledge that tens of thousands of their neighbors joined ICE, an armed, masked kidnapping squad that occupied US cities, murdering US citizens and noncitizens alike in the streets with impunity. Even if we try and imprison every one of those war criminals, it will take years and will shatter families and communities.
ICE proved that America is awash in small arms, but it's a different story when it comes to significant warfighting materiel. Trump's Iranian disaster used up the largest part of Pax Americana's arsenal of missiles and anti-missile interceptors. Putin doesn't need to convince Trump to cut off Ukraine's access to America's long-range arsenal. Trump shot his wad, and re-arming America is the work of decades, and it will cost billions, and it will require access to things America no longer knows how to make. Worse: the places where they do know how to make those things are no longer America's allies.
Can they be America's allies again? Well, sure, but only in a limited, Carneyist, "minilateral" way, in which countries form temporary alliances to accomplish specific goals. Biden spoke of "friendshoring" production of key goods and services. Friendshoring implies a reliable form of friendship, the sort that is built on decades of trust and interdependence. Friendshoring only works if the friends you friendshore to can be relied upon to stay your friends. Do we really think that if Venezuela deposes the puppet regime Trump installed after kidnapping the country's leader that it will remain America's "friend?"
That's the problem with weaponized interdependence: it only works for so long as the country America is screwing remains dependent on America, and now every country in the world is moving heaven and earth to break their dependencies on America, its institutions and products:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
As Nate Bethea says on this week's Trashfuture podcast, airports outside of the USA are now filled with large, splashy ads urging businesses to move their IT out of America's cloud and off of American apps:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
After Microsoft obliged the Trump regime by taking away the online accounts of foreign officials who made Trump angry, will any other country ever voluntarily trust them with their industrial capacity, let alone their government?
I'm not saying America is a write-off: I'm saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged "prediction markets" that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life's savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information.
When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world's finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world's hyperpower. Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place – and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- GROTESQUE TABLES II FIRST EDITION https://www.paperposts.me/oblique-strategies/
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The New York Times Doesn’t Understand AI’s Role in Suppressing Wages https://gizmodo.com/the-new-york-times-doesnt-understand-ais-role-in-suppressing-wages-2000836392
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Into the Blueniverse https://catvalente.substack.com/p/into-the-blueniverse
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Scamwich: Inside a Restaurant Delivery Payment-Skimming Campaign https://www.infohawk.com/news/2026-11-05-scamwich-restaurant-skimming
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Customer or product? https://customerorproduct.org/
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Open wifi saves traveler from hotel dial-up gouging https://memex.craphound.com/2001/11/09/i-just-wanna-say-that/
#25yrsago Why Cryptosystems Fail https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/wcf.html
#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on Pokemon https://web.archive.org/web/20050908070521/https://www.wired.com/news/audio/interviews/sterling_11.mp3
#20yrsago Fred von Lohmann’s talk at USC https://web.archive.org/web/20061110090032/https://centeronpublicdiplomacy.com/podcasts/061107_von_lohmann.mp3
#20yrsago Secret WIPO memo: rich countries to kill Broadcast Treaty, Development Agenda https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/11/07/developed-country-strategy-on-wipo-development-agenda-governance-revealed/?res=1024_ff&print=0
#20yrsago Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes https://web.archive.org/web/20101018194506/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1521&Itemid=125
#20yrsago Copyright explained through a wild west metaphor http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/
#20yrsago Why Zune shouldn’t pay blood money to Universal https://cdm.link/universal-microsoft-screw-over-artists-set-absurd-and-dangerous-precedent-with-zune/#more-1719
#15yrsago New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild https://web.archive.org/web/20111110191030/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1
#15yrsago Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat https://web.archive.org/web/20111109225513/https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/08/363692/occupy-atlanta-encamps-in-neighborhood-to-save-police-officers-home-from-foreclosure/
#15yrsago Ben from Ben and Jerry’s serves ice-cream to Occupiers https://www.fastcompany.com/1678825/the-ice-cream-man-of-zuccotti-park-ben-cohen-on-his-work-with-occupy-wall-street
#15yrsago Identity theft marketplace sells mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, etc https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/
#15yrsago Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic https://web.archive.org/web/20111112154542/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html
#15yrsago Wired.com photo policy: all staff-produced photos will now be Creative Commons licensed https://web.archive.org/web/20111111051330/https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1365&pageid=6275
#15yrsago “Piracy-stricken” Viacom CEO tops pay-raise charts https://www.techdirt.com/2011/11/07/viacom-decimated-piracy-its-ceo-got-biggest-raise-any-exec-anywhere/
#15yrsago Boyett’s Mortality Bridge: Rock n’ roll Dante meets Orpheus https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/08/boyetts-mortality-bridge-rock-n-roll-dante-meets-orpheus/
#10yrsago FAA okays use of semi-autonomous drones for Disneyland and Disney World fireworks displays https://web.archive.org/web/20161110065859/http://thedisneyblog.com/2016/11/07/disney-drones/
#10yrsago Glenn Beck’s “decency” doesn’t extend to answering questions about why he was such an asshole https://wnyc.org/story/beck-changed-man
#10yrsago CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/5bmzuj/cbc_are_blocking_podcast_apps/
#10yrsago Winter Denial of Service attack knocks out heating in Finnish homes https://web.archive.org/web/20161109214609/https://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter
#10yrsago Women are flocking to Susan B Anthony’s grave to cover it with “I Voted” stickers https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/susan-b-anthonys-grave-will-be-open-until-the-polls-close.html
#10yrsago Edward Snowden to Trump campaign: “old laptops” could vet 800,000 emails in “minutes-to-hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20161107235120/https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-crushes-conspiracy-theory-053349259.html
#10yrsago My neighborhood realtor is determined to turn a buck on electoral eschatology https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/08/my-neighborhood-realtor-is-determined-to-turn-a-buck-on-electoral-eschatology/
#10yrsago A history of Chinese science fiction, from 475 BC to Cixin Liu https://web.archive.org/web/20161105172922/http://mithilareview.com/wang_11_16/
#10yrsago How Audi cheated emissions tests: if (steering) then (pollute) https://www.jalopnik.com/america-figured-out-a-new-way-audi-cheated-on-emissions-1788630969/
#10yrsago Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers https://web.archive.org/web/20161108210544/http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-11-03_Wells_Fargo_FINRA_Violations_Letter_Final.pdf
#10yrsago A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-keys-to-the-surveillance-state/
#5yrsago Stockholm's war on interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/#privacy-without-monopoly
#5yrsago Right-Clicker-Mentality https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#spoilsports-r-us
#5yrsago Charlie Jane Anders' Victories Greater Than Death https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones
#5yrsago Imagining the end of capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass
#1yrago Facebook's fraud files https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ -
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ -
Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ -
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html -
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation -
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ -
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ -
Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow -
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 -
Life After AI (Brain Bar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI -
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 -
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ -
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"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.
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"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
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).
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"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.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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ISSN: 3066-764X
Movistar Blocks Its Own Support Forum Under LaLiga Anti-Piracy Order [TorrentFreak]
Every LaLiga match weekend, Spanish Internet providers must block hundreds of IP addresses that are linked to pirate football streams.
These blocks are the result of a December 2024 court order, obtained by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, which broadcasts these matches on Movistar Plus+. The order targets Spain’s largest ISPs, including Telefónica’s own.
LaLiga is pleased with the blocking measures and said that they work as intended. However, they are not without controversy, as IP address blocks previously hit broader infrastructure including shared Cloudflare servers. On Saturday, this collateral damage landed in Telefónica’s own backyard.
Movistar Blocks Movistar
On Saturday evening, Movistar’s official forum became unreachable through several Spanish ISPs.
This Comunidad Movistar forum is where the ISP’s customers go for help with their routers, Movistar Plus+ programming, or to report outages. Shortly after 22:00, this support community became unreachable.
According to RedesZone, X user Alvaro Canteiro was the first to notice. At 22:17, he posted that LaLiga appeared to have blocked Movistar’s official forum, presumably as a side effect of its anti-piracy blocking.
Those who tried to visit the forum through rival ISP DIGI saw a blocking notice. It explained that the IP address was blocked under the December 18, 2024 ruling of the Commercial Court No. 6 in Barcelona, requested by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital.
DIGI wasn’t alone. Bandaancha reports that Telefónica routed the forum’s IP address into a black hole, leaving visitors in the dark, without any response at all.
Based on data from blocking tracker HayAhoraFútbol, RedesZone reports that all operators blocked the two Cloudflare IP addresses the forum used at the time. That included Movistar, which effectively blocked access to its own community.
Blocked Cloudflare IP addresses are nothing new in Spain. LaLiga started targeting them in February 2025, and site owners have complained about collateral damage on match days ever since.
‘Focused, Precise’
Under the court order, LaLiga identifies IP addresses that it associates with pirate streams, which ISPs are then required to block. This order is dynamic, allowing LaLiga and Telefónica to add new successor IP addresses based on their own assessment.
These blocks typically start shortly before a match starts and are removed again after the broadcast ends.
Why the forum’s IP addresses ended up on the blocklist is unknown. Neither LaLiga nor Movistar has confirmed the cause of the outage.
LaLiga has consistently defended this blocking approach. The league previously told TorrentFreak that its blocks are backed by judicial resolutions and are not indiscriminate. Third parties who believe they are affected can report this through a dedicated complaints mailbox, LaLiga clarified.
Forum Moves to CloudFront
By Sunday, the forum had moved to a different CDN. Both Bandaancha and RedesZone noticed that the domain no longer pointed to Cloudflare, but was linked to Amazon’s CloudFront instead.
A DNS lookup by TorrentFreak today shows that comunidad.movistar.es now points to movistar.lithium.com, which is indeed served through CloudFront. Who made the switch, and whether it was a direct response to the blocking, is not known.
Whether affected Movistar users will complain about the apparent overblocking has yet to be seen.
Last year, LaLiga told TorrentFreak that it hadn’t received any formal complaints, while stressing that the blocking system was “focused, precise, and without collateral impact on legitimate services.”
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
11:00 AM
08:00 AM
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt [Techdirt]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Just Word Me with a comment about Sam Altman’s case against people “inefficiently” owning their own RAM:
This can be said about most things that make the world’s economies run “Consumerism”. How many of us need a lawnmower seven days a week or a wood chipper or a camping tent or whatever we have sitting around unused.
But also highlights how narrow a point of view Sam Altman has that he is just worried about the one thing that’s costing him a lot of money this week.
In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about what the midterm results mean about how Americans feel, and how it’s pretty clear regardless of whether the Democrats are going to do better:
He didn’t do that. People voted that way because they are sick of this shit, which is what was pointed out. Whether anyone steps up to do an actually good job is another matter entirely.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two more comments about Altman’s attack on people owning RAM. First, it’s an anonymous reminder that RAM has a lot of uses:
It’s also, I think, notable that RAM has uses other than ‘running an AI’, which are, you know, still kind of important to people, like having their phones and computers work in the first place.
That alone makes the “so I should have all the RAM and rent it back to you” argument kind of stupid. But it looks like it never even crossed his mind.
Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reminder that efficiency isn’t everything:
Humans do a lot of things inefficiently. Would you prefer to never own a computer of your own again because Altman and his buddies thought it would be more “efficient” to rent you access to even the smallest amount of computing power for the rest of your life? Would you want to have an OpenAI terminal installed in your home (for a modest fee, naturally), constantly pay for the privilege of using that terminal to watch Netflix, and have that terminal ripped out of your home if you miss even a single payment or access content OpenAI doesn’t think you should be seeing?
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is a much simpler anonymous quip in response to Altman:
Sam is a paperclip.
In second place, it’s Volunteer Troll with a reply to the weird and false claims that Techdirt or our commenters have said “multiple times” that Trump would cancel the midterms:
In fact, Trump was going to cancel the midterms.
Now, one other person has to post it for the multiple part.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one final anonymous response to Sam Altman, this time passing on a joke from Slashdot:
I was very fond of a Slashdot remark along the same subject that pointed out they were wildly over-toileted.
That even if they spent an hour every day using the toilet, that’s 23 hours it’s not being used, and is so miserably inefficient.
That it would be much more efficient to have one toilet for every 24 people (and a constant line – without people lined up there may be idle time), thus maximizing toilet efficiency.
(And, perhaps more apropos to this article, you should have a centralized toilet company that charges you rent every time you use the toilet…)
Finally, it’s a quick anonymous quip in response to a post in which we mentioned “crossing t’s and dotting i’s”:
This always makes me cry – what about the under-respected, often-overlooked lower-case j’s?
That’s all for this week, folks!
04:00 AM
01:00 AM
Ambiguity or clarity? [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]
This is a choice we rarely name.
Putting effort into how much ambiguity we can handle can define a career and give us a path forward in our social and cultural interactions as well.
Our desire for clarity is based on safety and how we think about risk. If you know exactly what to expect, you won’t be held responsible for things that feel like they’re out of your control.
Clarity pushes us to put things in a category, a predictable box, well-labeled.
Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the nature of the future. All interactions with other people, with complex systems and with what hasn’t happened yet are somewhat unpredictable.
That range of outcomes is where possibility lies.
“I’m not sure.”
“This might not work.”
“We’ll be okay.”
Pretending that the ambiguous is certain is a short-term sort of bravado that works in the movies and politics but not in real life.
For the rest of us, there’s the chance to embrace the soft edges of ‘perhaps’ on our way to make things better.
HT to Seth B.
Sunday 2026-11-08
11:00 PM
Kanji of the Day: 破 [Kanji of the Day]
破
✍10
小5
rend, rip, tear, break, destroy, defeat, frustrate
ハ
やぶ.る やぶ.れる わ.れる
突破 (とっぱ) — breaking through
破壊 (はかい) — destruction
破る (やぶる) — to tear
破綻 (はたん) — failure
爆破 (ばくは) — destructive blast
破産 (はさん) — bankruptcy
撃破 (げきは) — crushing
破たん (はたん) — failure
大量破壊兵器 (たいりょうはかいへいき) — weapon of mass destruction
破棄 (はき) — tearing up and discarding (e.g., documents)
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Kanji of the Day: 餌 [Kanji of the Day]
餌
✍14
中学
food, bait, prey, tempting profit
ジ ニ
え えば えさ もち
餌付け (えづけ) — artificial feeding (of wild animals)
餌場 (えさば) — feeding ground
餌食 (えじき) — prey
食餌 (しょくじ) — food (esp. for a medical diet)
食餌療法 (しょくじりょうほう) — medical diet
好餌 (こうじ) — bait
撒き餌 (まきえ) — scattered animal feed
生餌 (いきえ) — live bait
擬餌 (ぎじ) — lure
鳥餌 (とりえ) — bird feed
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
OSM/Wikimedia Meetup in KOF2026 [OpenStreetMap Japan]
OpenStreetMap や Wikimedia の基本を紹介しながら、地域活動、まち歩き、趣味、情報発信などにどう活かせるかを一緒に考える会です。専門知識がなくても大丈夫で、「こういう世界があるんだ」と知るところから始めていただければと思います。 毎月開催しているこのミートアップは、まず概要を知り、活用例を聞いて、興味のあることを気軽に話し、参加者どうしで交流する時間を過ごします。初めての方はもちろん、すでに編集や活用をしている方も歓迎します。 今回は関西オープンフォーラム2026（KOF）のセミナー企画として、大阪南港ATCの会場で開催します（通常は「みんなの図書館さいくる」での開催ですが、今回はATCでの開催です）。 ## 開催概要 - 日時：2026年11月14日（土）11:00〜13:00（11:00〜11:50 と 12:00〜12:50 の2枠、関西オープンフォーラ
02:00 PM
01:00 PM
Just for Skeets and Giggles (11.7.26) [The Status Kuo]
Leading up to the election, no one was quite sure what would happen.
Trump had spent the final month campaigning in red states, as if he were genuinely afraid of losing them. But he seemed off his game, even for Trump, as Jimmy Fallon noted.
He chose to deliver his final speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, because Americans apparently needed to be reminded of his weird obsessions, total incompetence and heavy-handed prosecutions tied to it.
Then, just to raise our blood pressure, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers two days before the election.
It had an unintended consequence.
She doubled down on her bizarre, career-destroying move.
Once the awkward interviews began and she had no ready answer for her betrayal, it was clear the 11th-hour attack was fizzling.
It brought back some old Twitter classics.
The art of self-deprecation. No one does it quite like Tom Arnold.
There was one grateful gubernatorial candidate in Ohio…
The comparison was inevitable.
The wordplay was top-notch.
Keep it going!
Credit: Jesse Duquette
It even got a bit creepy.
When Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed turned Stevens’s betrayal into a multimillion-dollar, single-day haul, it was *chef’s kiss*.
In the eyes of the Democratic Party in Michigan, Stevens was now persona non grata.
The late-breaking polls were terrible across the board for Republicans, so they began smoking some serious copium.
Fearing Alaska could really flip, Trump and his cronies tried to make political hay out of the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot.
Obama’s Cheesecake Factory comparison still had legs.
If that last line above gets a “huh?” then you may have missed Elon Musk’s latest weirdness.
Do the Muskovites even know the Sith were on the bad and losing side?
Need they be reminded,
Then, at long last, it was Election Day. Or as Pooh and Piglet put it,
Then everyone voted, held their breath and wondered: How big a blue wave?
As the returns came in, it was clear something massive was underway. Georgia went so quickly that the networks called it within an hour of polls closing.
For “The White Lotus” fans:
The House rout had begun as it became clear the Florida and North Carolina GOP gerrymanders had utterly collapsed.
Hold up. South Carolina is going down, too?
Then came the results from the Midwest—Ohio, Iowa… Kansas?! It was time to bring back this gem.
As the blue wave swept the land, Republican incumbents fell everywhere.
Or as my friend David asked,
Vivek Ramaswamy paid dearly for his loathsome attack ad on Amy Acton.
Then the networks called the House for the Dems.
I’ll take Moses Mike simply heading back to Louisiana as he had suggested. But still,
This was the moment when the Texas Senate race was called:
But it wasn’t just the U.S. Senate seat. Democrats also flipped the state House and swept every statewide executive office, including governor.
I bow to the screenwriters of “Civil War.”
This was a saucy but astute point.
Oh, rub it in, Chris Hayes!
James Talarico preached unity, but
Miller wasn’t happy about the results at all.
Speaking of thirst, the need for accountability was real.
This Texas voter had a message for Gov. Greg Abbott:
And another:
Here’s to the mean girl in all of us…
The Jon Hamm meme saw perhaps its best use yet.
I’ve already deployed this next one in two meetings this week.
As the reality of the huge wins set in,
After all that effort to get here, too.
The funniest thing was watching MAGA completely miss lefty political humor.
Those Democrats are out of control!
And we need to see this, truly.
See? Communists!
Then suddenly it was the day after, and morning in America. LOTR fans will appreciate this happiest of moments.
Grab a cup of Joe and smile.
America woke up to a completely blue-ified map.
The message U.S. voters sent was clear: “Quiet, Piggy.”
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Trump’s “very fine people” have got to go.
The mood of the country:
Up in Michigan, it was clear that all the GOP ever had was racism and Islamophobia. That was true even in the primaries.
But that, and Stevens’s backstab, weren’t enough to stop this absolute unit of a man, whose win came after midnight Eastern time.
You laugh, but this might actually work.
El-Sayed took this thinking seriously, saying he’d even let the president call it Trumpcare if it meant truly universal health care.
It’s funny if you’re smarter than most.
With El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ascendant,
Fallon returned to seek comment from the president about his stunning loss.
As the nation processed the wins, numbers revealing the scale of the rout became clear. And we got some tasty schadenfreude.
We realized that Black women had won seven of Georgia’s eight statewide executive offices, including the governorship, a first for any state.
This is really a dad joke masquerading as highbrow humor.
Time to let your Talafreako flag fly.
Another much-reviled MAGA troll is about to go down as final votes are counted.
Bye-bye, Boe-Boe!
Right-wing media and GOP officials weren’t exactly leaping to defend Trump after Tuesday.
Trump began by sounding conciliatory and accepting the results, then quickly turned defiant, threatening to veto Democratic legislation.
But will Trump even last another two years?
With the midterms over, the 2028 election has sadly already begun. Here to talk about the GOP front-runner is comedian Josh Johnson.
All eyes are now on Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom is leading Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by a couple thousand votes, but the race has yet to be called and the count is proceeding slowly…
It wasn’t just a blue wave. Miranda Priestly would like a word on that.
Listen up! I’m running a sale for new subscribers this week. Take 20 percent off your first year’s subscription to The Status Kuo and help support independent journalism! I hope I’ve done enough to earn your trust and loyalty.
Free subscriptions are for those on fixed income or disability. If you can afford to buy me a cup of coffee a month, take advantage of the sale today!
On to the pets! Love this first-time voter vibe.
I’ll tumble for ya!
The guilt trip works.
I don’t think this was supposed to happen.
Best to commit fully before taking the plunge.
Another clip from Halloween weekend:
Your awwww moment of the week.
The soundtrack here is everything. Sound up!
Okay, so why does he say it this way?!
Don’t mess with mom and dad’s favorite holiday.
Best parenting award goes to…
I seriously watched this a few times while cackling.
Idea for my kids, who already love games like this.
Best hide-and-seek moment contender.
Sure, we groan at dad jokes. But kid jokes get a real laugh?
I feel this.
PSA from Merriam-Webster.
This typo is unfortunate.
Time for some British humor! It’s been a bit.
This got a rise out of the audience.
This story had me gobsmacked.
This is really a dad joke, but for when my kids are older.
This next one is just a plain groaner.
OK, just one more…
It’s been a fantastic week for democracy and, by extension, the world. There was a lot of ground to cover, so if you’d like to tip the writer, remember I’ve got a sale going! Click the offer in the box below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making The Status Kuo possible!
Have a great weekend. And rejoice! There are finally better days ahead.
Jay
08:00 AM
This Week In Techdirt History: November 1st – 7th [Techdirt]
This Week in 2016
- Supreme Court Asks White House To Weigh In On Dancing Baby Fair Use Case
- My Talk At Wikimedia: Copyright Impacts Everything
- Copyright Office Fucks Over Thousands Of Sites With Plans To Remove Their DMCA Safe Harbors
- Hey, You Can Hack Your Car Without Violating Copyright Law (For A Little While)
- Finally Come The Calls In Major Media To Rethink Canada’s ‘Notice And Notice’ Copyright System
- Adobe Asked Google To Censor Techdirt’s Story On How Adobe’s DRM Got Cracked
This Week in 2011
- Go Daddy Supports E-PARASITE Legislation Even Though Its Own Site Is Dedicated To Theft Of Property Under Terms Of The Bill
- Do The Authors Of The Felony Streaming Bills Even Know What The Details Of Their Own Bills Mean?
- Content Industry Insists E-PARASITE Won’t Rewrite DMCA, But Co-Author Of The Bill Admits That’s The Plan
- The Article On The E-PARASITE Act That You Need To Read
- Joe Biden On The Internet: ‘If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It… Unless Hollywood Asks You To’
- Fight The Power: Chuck D Sues Universal Music For Hundreds Of Millions In Unpaid Royalties
This Week in 2006
- Greece Still Having Trouble Figuring Out The Internet: Arrests Blog Aggregator For Aggregating Content It Doesn’t Like
- Record Labels Not Planning On Sharing YouTube Windfall With Musicians
- NY Times Comes Out Against The Broken Patent System
- Internet Bill Of Useless Rights Proposed
- Remember How Shutting Down The Pirate Bay Was A Huge Victory For The Entertainment Industry?
- If HTML Were Invented Today, Someone Would Try To Patent It
02:00 AM
Pluralistic: JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (07 Nov 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]
->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->
Top Sources:
None
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Today's links
- JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy": Inventing a new labor playbook for a unique and powerful industry.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: EMI x Gnutella; ETCON photos; Piracy loss claims are "self-serving hyperbole"; Shareholder supremacy let Google conquer and enshittify the world; Cat causes kernel panic; HK erupts; National Guard x 1 weed plant; Enshittification of labor.
- Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (permalink)
JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are veterans of a string of hard-fought unionization drives at tech workplaces that started with some astounding successes but ran up against ferocious resistance in the second Trump term; their book about tech labor, Against Tech Oligarchy, is a superb analysis of the challenges and potential for tech labor organizing:
https://againsttecholigarchy.com/
For decades, tech workers enjoyed extraordinary power, despite the fact that virtually no tech workers were in unions. That's because tech workers were both extremely valuable to their employers (each engineer hired by a Silicon Valley firm added about $1m to the company's bottom line) and extremely scarce.
This won tech workers very favorable working conditions, high compensation, and a great deal of control over their employers' products (because if a worker refused to work on a project, it was hard to find someone else to do the work). What's more, there has always been a sizable cohort of tech workers whose own lives were profoundly improved by access to digital networks and wanted more than anything to distribute those benefits to everyone else. I call these workers "Tron-pilled," because they fought for the user:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism
During the era of tech worker scarcity, few tech workers saw themselves as workers at all – rather, the tech worker's self-conception was as an entrepreneur in waiting, a temporarily embarrassed founder. Tech bosses played on this perception, promoting the idea of tech workers and managers as peers and/or family members. Tech CEOs affected hoodies and jeans and hosted company-wide meetings where they allowed engineers to pepper them with impertinent questions about the company's technical and commercial direction.
But scarcity-based power only lasts until supply catches up with demand. As the number of workers outstripped the number of jobs, bosses showed their true colors. That's what happened at Kickstarter, when one of the bosses forced out his co-founders and declared himself CEO and proceeded to override the decisions of the company's Trust and Safety team. This sparked one of tech's first unionization drives, and it was a bitter fight, with management pulling out every dirty tactic in the union-busting playbook:
https://kickstarterunited.org/oral-history/
The labor militancy at Kickstarter United wasn't an isolated incident. Workers at much bigger companies like Google and Microsoft had a long tradition of pushing back against management through internal channels, open letters, and, starting in 2018, mass walkouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts
But post-Trump, bosses at these companies were much less willing to countenance dissent, and waves of vicious retaliation and reprisals radicalized many workers at these companies, driving them to more traditional, organized forms of labor activism. At the same time, workers at smaller, "mission-driven" shops like Bandcamp were inspired by the success of Kickstarter United and they started their own drives. All this attracted the interest of the "internationals" – big, established unions like the Communications Workers of America – who trained union organizers at all kinds of tech shops and started laying the groundwork for traditional union drives.
Most of Against Tech Oligarchy tells the story of these drives in a gripping you-are-there style (it helps that both of the authors are veterans of several of these campaigns). The stakes got much higher during the pandemic, of course, as tech came to play a more central role in the lives of hundreds of millions of locked-down workers, and as the tech companies themselves went on uncontrolled hiring sprees, putting workers on the payroll without any duties or responsibilities, often just to ensure that a rival company couldn't hire them.
The pandemic also prompted many tech bosses to express far more worker-hostile sentiments than they'd ever let slip in public before. Fully remote workforces both frustrated tech bosses and also significantly reduced the opportunities for in-person labor organizing. All of this built to a series of rising crescendos, such as Musk's Twitter takeover and mass layoffs, and Israel's tech-fueled genocide in Gaza. Confrontations between tech workers and bosses grew more bitter and direct, even as solidarity between white-collar tech workers and their blue-collar peers (notably Amazon warehouse workers) increased.
If all Against Tech Oligarchy did was lay out the cut-and-thrust of these labor struggles during these momentous years, it would be worth the price of admission. But it's in the final chapters that the book really distinguishes itself, because it's here that the authors embark on a pitiless postmortem of their own failed campaigns and the failures of their peers, and ask themselves what it will take to unionize tech workers.
They start with the observation that most American union organizing is built around maintaining "labor peace" (by swiftly moving to recognition and a contract) but that tech bosses are ready to wage "labor war" (through illegal union-busting and retaliation). A labor peace strategy avoids costly and dangerous risks to established unions, such as decertification of locals and expensive and bruising court battles. But for tech bosses, labor war pays off, because their workforce is transient, fragmented, and skeptical of the very idea that they are workers. They have little to no experience with unions and can barely imagine how a union might improve their working lives.
The traditional labor playbook calls for workers to quietly build their power, taking no overt action while conducting a series of personal, one-to-one conversations that contribute to an eventual quorum of workers that's large enough to win a unionization vote. This strategy is like building a bonfire, where the pieces of fuel are piled one atop the other, but not lit until the pile is done.
But in a tech shop where workers turn over frequently and work in isolated teams, often from home, this strategy fails. Workers who have been won to the union side leave or grow demoralized in their isolation. Reaching new workers is difficult, and since the whole union drive occurs in secret, new workers don't know to reach out to organizers in their shops.
For Tan and Redwine, this fact militates for a strategy that revives some of the pre-labor activism of tech workers, noisy public/private fights whenever product decisions and management conduct violate some mix of worker rights and workers' values. They see this as a way to build momentum within a shop, bringing workers off the sidelines and giving organizers chances to bring those workers into a sustained, structured labor drive.
Tan and Redwine see tech worker organizing as the frontrunners of an age of new labor militancy and labor war, of the sort that pre-dated the labor peace that arose after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. That labor peace was the result of bosses learning that hardball tactics would be met with equally hardcore responses.
This is especially important for tech workers, whose strikes cannot inflict the same pain on their bosses as earlier industrial workers' strikes did. Digital systems are designed to operate themselves after they are built, so when the workers involved in those systems withdraw their labor, the systems continue to run, often for a very long time, before needing maintenance (this is also the lesson of Musk's mass layoffs at Twitter).
Tech bosses have metabolized this lesson, and they are increasingly willing to wage all-out war at the first sign of labor unrest, with waves of retaliatory firings. These bosses have figured out devilish tactics for constructive dismissal, like the CEO of Mapbox, who retaliated against union supporters by targeting them with "return to office" mandates that forced them to report in person to offices that were in distant states. This prompted many of these workers to quit, which spared Mapbox from even paying them a severance package.
Against this backdrop, strikes need to be seen not as a way to bring the business operations to a halt, but rather as a way to galvanize workers and bring them into the union drive. As New York Times Tech Guild organizer John Cruickshank put it, Action builds capacity for action.
This is the ethos of the Microsoft workers who have campaigned tirelessly to halt the company's participation in the genocide in Gaza. They barricaded themselves in executives' offices, livestreaming the confrontation; they disrupted Microsoft's livecast 50th anniversary celebration; and they paddled a flotilla of protest kayaks outside of top Microsoft executives' waterfront homes. All of this paid off, with Microsoft halting sales of its tools to a particularly notorious unit of the Israeli military who had been using the company's products to conduct surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank.
Tan and Redwine see these novel tactics as a rewilding of the labor movement, a return to the militant roots that led to the labor peace, but only after all-out labor war. They cite the 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers' strike, where workers invented the "flying picket" by swarming scab trucks far from the factory gates, defeating the trucks' police protection, which led to a general strike and a total victory for labor.
This is important historical context. The genteel business of getting everyone's cards signed and having the NLRB certify your union was the compromise bosses agreed to after they learned that the alternative was far worse for them. Today, it's not just bosses who've forgotten that lesson – many workers have, too. Against Tech Oligarchy aims to rekindle those old boilers and get the unstoppable labor train running again.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Text Watermarking https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/08/24/Text-Watermarking
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Every Past and Tomorrow: The Physical Landscape of AI https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenvoss/every-past-and-tomorrow-a-survey-of-virginia-data-centers
-
Reflecting on Digital Rights Wins and Losses in Sacramento https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/reflecting-digital-rights-wins-and-losses-sacramento
-
Join EFF to Celebrate the Life of Aaron Swartz https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/join-eff-celebrate-life-aaron-swartz
-
Goodbye from Salon https://www.salon.com/2026/11/05/goodbye-from-salon/
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago EMI will distribute music on Gnutella
#25yrsago Photos from O'Reilly P2P Con https://web.archive.org/web/20011124163254/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/05/monday_photos.html
#20yrsago Aussie Institute of Criminology calls piracy losses “self-serving hyperbole” https://web.archive.org/web/20061208043648/http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20713160^15306^^nbv^,00.html
#20yrsago UK airport cop: gun-shaped shirt decoration is illegal https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/07/uk-airport-cop-gun-shaped-shirt-decoration-is-illegal/
#15yrsago Bug report: “Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic” https://web.archive.org/web/20120112020023/https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110
#10yrsago Hong Kong erupts after Beijing refuses to allow dissident lawmakers to re-take oath https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/06/street-protests-as-beijing-preempts-hong-kong-courts-with-new-interpretation-of-basic-law/
#10yrsago “Massive scale” shut-down of polling places in districts known for suppressing Black voters https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/04/voting-rights-protections-gutted-polling-places-shuttered-massive-scale
#10yrsago Donald Trump’s campaign takes away his right to tweet without supervision https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html?_r=1
#10yrsago National Guard helicopter, 7 cop cars sent to warrantlessly seize a single marijuana plant from an 81-year-old grandmother https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/national-guard-one-plant.html
#5yrsago Bait and Switch https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/07/bait-and-switch/
#1yrago The enshittification of labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts
#1yrago The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/ -
Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ -
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ -
Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ -
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html -
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation -
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ -
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ -
Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow -
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 -
Life After AI (Brain Bar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI -
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 -
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ -
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"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.
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"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
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 532 (33976 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.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
ISSN: 3066-764X
Inside a French Piracy Blocklist: Expired Domains, a Seized Site, and Hong Kong Servers [TorrentFreak]
On October 22, DNS resolver Quad9 announced that it will stop serving users in France, after a Paris court ordered it to block pirate tennis streams or pay a daily penalty.
The underlying order, which beIN Sports obtained in May, initially listed six domains. That number has since grown considerably, with the latest additions coming in late October.
To take a closer look at the evolution of this blocklist, we compiled it from the notices that Google files with the Lumen database when it receives a blocking order. Today, 118 domains are listed under this order.
From 6 to 118 Domains
The pirate site blocklist, which is one of many in France, expanded in batches. The first update, reported by Google on June 15, added 22 domains. Three more updates followed on September 21, October 16 and October 26, each adding exactly 30.
| Reported to Lumen | Domains added | Running total | Blocked by Google DNS in France (Oct 28) | Blocked by Cloudflare DNS in France (Oct 28) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 13 (court order) | 6 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| June 15 | 22 | 28 | 22 | 0 |
| September 21 | 30 | 58 | 30 | 0 |
| October 16 | 30 | 88 | 30 | 0 |
| October 26 | 30 | 118 | 3 | 0 |
Nothing appears to have been taken off the list. The notices only add domains, and the ones that no longer work were still blocked when we checked. The blocking measures remain in effect until November 14, when the WTA tennis season ends.
Transparency is limited and it’s hard for the public to see what is blocked and on what grounds. Arcom doesn’t publish blocking updates. Google’s Lumen notices are the only public record we found, and they take some digging. The later notices don’t mention the case number, so a search for the order only turns up the first few, and the full domain lists are only shown to people who request access from Lumen.
This example shows the value of the Lumen Database when governments or courts don’t provide transparency.
Quad9 didn’t block any of the domains before the court ruled on the penalty on October 21, according to the ruling, which records the foundation’s statement to that effect and beIN’s objections to it.
Expired Domains, Seized Site
ISPs, online intermediaries, lawmakers and rightsholders all have different views on the effectiveness and proportionality of site blocking. However, logically speaking, all should agree that there is no need to block a domain that no longer links to anything infringing. That’s not necessarily what happens.
We checked all 118 domains on October 28, from the Netherlands and through a French server. Most still resolve to an IP address. However, the exceptions are more interesting.
Four domain names no longer resolve at all. Two of these, predb.click and line.golden-iptv.in, aren’t registered anymore; the latter was one of the six domains in the original court order. Meanwhile, 4kib.xyz has been suspended by its registrar, and fermin37.com stopped working after we first checked it on October 23.
Another domain, fr4.sportplus.live, now loads a page titled “THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED”. Its main domain was among the pirate sports domains that U.S. authorities seized in July.
The mgntv-nexon.xyz domain, meanwhile, points to an IP address that belongs to domain marketplace Sedo.
In France, none of this makes a difference. Google’s DNS resolver blocks 91 of the 118 domains and NordVPN’s DNS blocks 89, dead names and all. The domains that aren’t blocked yet mostly come from the latest batch; only three of those 30 were blocked on October 28, two days after Google reported them. The exception is Cloudflare, whose 1.1.1.1 resolver blocks nothing. Cloudflare applies French blocking orders through its CDN instead, which a Paris court accepted as a reasonable effort in September.
We know all this because we looked at the DNS responses directly. Users that try to access these sites through a browser have no idea what is going on. They simply see an error message noting that the site can’t be reached. That also applies to rktv.top, which TorrentFreak owns today.
Under New Ownership
On October 23, two names on the list were free to register for anyone, as they had expired. These are rktv.top, which was added to the blocklist in June, and ap-live.top, one of the six domains in the court order itself.
We registered both domains and put up a short page on each, stating that TorrentFreak owns the domain for research and that it doesn’t offer, link to, or promote any streaming service. That’s all.
From the Netherlands, this page loads as expected. In France, however, Google refuses to resolve rktv.top. “The requested domain is subject to a judicial injunction or other governmental blocking order for FR,” its DNS response reads. The response carries extended error code 16, which the DNS standard labels “Censored”.
Some French ISP resolvers go a step further and redirect the DNS response. When we queried rktv.top through Bouygues Telecom and Free, the answer wasn’t a refusal but a different IP address, 54.246.190.12, which serves offrelegalesports.fr, a page that links visitors to licensed sports broadcasts. Completel, a business provider that belongs to SFR, gave the same answer. Orange’s resolvers, meanwhile, answered with 127.0.0.1, the address of the user’s own computer, or reported that the domain doesn’t exist.
In other words, a visitor who types in a domain that TorrentFreak owns, and that hosts a plain research notice, lands on an anti-piracy page instead.
The two research domains have been in place for two weeks and it seems that nobody noticed. We are not aware of an official appeal process for domain owners, as there apparently is no direct route to complain.
A Hong Kong Server
Finally, it is worth pointing out that most of the domains on the list point to Hong Kong. Of the 118 entries, 74 resolve to two IP addresses in a single Hong Kong range, and all of these domains return an “unauthorized” error when we try to load them.
Another 19 domains point to a second Hong Kong IP range. These all show the same page, titled “Service Premium — Online.” Together, that’s 93 of the 118 entries.
| IP range (Hong Kong) | Addresses, anonymized (domains per address) | Domains | What loads |
|---|---|---|---|
| 103.211.100.x | A (13), B (61) | 74 | “unauthorized” error |
| 103.175.129.x | A (3), B (2), C (2), D (2), E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N | 19 | “Service Premium — Online” |
| All other addresses | 19 addresses | 21 | varies |
| No address | 4 | nothing |
What is hosted on these servers is unknown, as we didn’t try to access them. However, they are likely linked to a pirate streaming service, given beIN’s complaint. If anything, it shows that this blocking effort largely targets one or two streaming operations.
Thus far, the blocking efforts haven’t stopped them, in part because the operators can easily register new domains, as if it were Groundhog Day.
Meanwhile, France is preparing to step up its blocking efforts. In July, the French Parliament adopted a law that allows new domains to be added automatically during live broadcasts, with Arcom reviewing them afterwards. As far as we know, that doesn’t come with a transparency layer.
The current blocking order expires on November 14. Whether the domains on the list, including our two research domains, will be unblocked after that has yet to be seen.
A copy of the Paris Judicial Court’s October 21 ruling (RG 26/11882) is available here (pdf).
Method: DNS checks were carried out on October 28, from a Dutch connection and through a French NordVPN server. Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS were queried over DNS-over-HTTPS, NordVPN’s resolver through the VPN connection. ISP resolvers were tested on November 6 through Globalping probes in French consumer networks and through whatsmydns.net. The figures are a snapshot and will change as blocking continues and resolvers update. Landing pages and open ports were checked from the Netherlands on October 23 and 28. Registration data is from WHOIS lookups on October 23 and 24.
The full list of 118 domains, by the date Google reported them to Lumen:
May 13 (court order), 6 domains: ap-live.top, line.golden-iptv.in, mrctop.net, tennis-open.ru, tennistream.com, thetvapp.to
June 15, 22 domains (19 + 3): 32740-defend.tx-4kott.com, 4kib.xyz, activefrance.net, akkaouiz.xyz, asokax6.com, balentv.xyz, bestp55.xyz, buffnetwork.sbs, djamel.site, dru4.xyz, erw55.xyz, faraka.xyz, fr4.sportplus.live, mgntv-nexon.xyz, neomixtv.xyz, partner.nonamejose.sx, predb.click, premium999.xyz, rktv.top, suphotte.xyz, supralf.xyz, zikotv.cc
September 21, 30 domains: allinone.cx, almaksor.pro, babadedachannel.online, celltvsoftware.com, cherry-tv.net, chrixkl4s2cls234lumopxlwyc234y.com, cleptomania.xyz, cmax.space, eztvclub.live, forstreem.com, ftv-live.win, hosttach.xyz, jtowntv.com, mag1311.net, maguland.xyz, neomspeaks.com, nexus-cdn.xyz, nionni.net, portaltivi.shop, redvisionstreamz.com, s416k.online, seee.info, sehpie.xyz, smartliststg.online, smartott.store, strongbow.online, strongtv.org, tatan.xyz, tvplanetstore.com, waseemiptv.com
October 16, 30 domains: 86862944.cdnmax.pro, 8k-super.xyz, albastrong.top, alveropro.online, bfeplex2.sbs, bilelhosting.info, blackboxiptv.vip, bus8kservice.store, ciptvservices2021.xyz, daso2026.xyz, datedriver.com, discovery8k.org, dramily3.xyz, ewmedia69.org, fermin37.com, higher8k.xyz, invictus667.com, iva-ehe.com, latvroom888.xyz, niko05451.com, ossytv.net, pandoratv4k.site, powerwatchy.com, rachatducredit.com, rachid4k.top, tdigi.store, tudiptv.xyz, unstabletv.xyz, vfmbx.com, yhiuhv.com
October 26, 30 domains: 0213422.eu, 131233.xyz, 159premium.com, angli8k.xyz, beachwavestv.com, cable.directory, chahinplay.com, cw-32.com, dannly.xyz, eliteprovip.com, elitestream.cc, eumatrix.xyz, goldenpro.xyz, goldenyass.com, greentv.xyz, gstatic.top, headbussa423.com, host-strong.sbs, iptv-anas.sbs, kekol235.xyz, new2026.online, opencableco.net, samyx-ott.me, tvgreece.site, tvkudoplayer.de, ukchannels.xyz, v1nland.xyz, vpn.xtreme-gold.ink, xhd1337.xyz, zieiptv.me
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
12:00 AM
Start [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]
The cultural impresario has always had leverage.
Invest time and money and put on a show. Start a cable network, a book publishing company or become a concert promoter. You’re the gatekeeper, an adjudicator of status, a person who can transform people’s lives simply by amplifying and spreading ideas and allowing art to reach its audience.
Time and money were apparently the gating factors. It takes a while to turn a profit, and it’s uncertain and hard work.
Except…
New platforms and tools remove both time and money as barriers.
Penn and Teller needed their fame and the CW network to launch their cable show Fool Us. But now, anyone can start a competitor on YouTube in a weekend.
A radio pundit needed to spend years to build a syndicated network of terrestrial stations, but now you can start a podcast, in your basement, for free. In a weekend.
Gallerists don’t need galleries, and you don’t even need a building to coordinate a foster-home-based pet shelter.
So what’s the impediment?
I’m guessing that if you got the call today, you could put together your ideas for a book, or five minutes of standup or even the software you’d code.
But we don’t need the specific call. We’ve all been called.
The barrier is simple: fear. The fear of beginning and of sticking with it. The fear of succeeding (or failing). The fear of impostor syndrome. And the fear of going forward without a guarantee.
So let’s call it that. Fear is real, but fear might not be rational.
Begin.
Saturday 2026-11-07
11:00 PM
Kanji of the Day: 打 [Kanji of the Day]
打
✍5
小3
strike, hit, knock, pound, dozen
ダ ダース
う.つ う.ち- ぶ.つ
二塁打 (にるいだ) — two-base hit
安打 (あんだ) — safe hit
本塁打 (ほんるいだ) — home run
打撃 (だげき) — blow
打線 (だせん) — batting line-up
打者 (だしゃ) — batter
三塁打 (さんるいだ) — three-base hit
打ち上げ (うちあげ) — launch (of a rocket, satellite, etc.)
適時打 (てきじだ) — timely hit
打球 (だきゅう) — hitting (a ball with a bat, racket, golf club, etc.)
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Kanji of the Day: 旺 [Kanji of the Day]
旺
✍8
中学
flourishing, successful, beautiful, vigorous
オウ キョウ ゴウ
かがや.き うつくし.い さかん
旺盛 (おうせい) — lively
好奇心旺盛 (こうきしんおうせい) — brimming with curiosity
気力旺盛 (きりょくおうせい) — being full of energy (drive, motivation, vitality)
旺然 (おうぜん) — prosperous
士気旺盛 (しきおうせい) — morale being very high
元気旺盛 (げんきおうせい) — brimming with vitality
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
€1M from Sovereign Tech Agency to Fuel Post-Quantum Readiness at Let's Encrypt [Let's Encrypt]
Sovereign Tech Agency is investing in the development of a Merkle Tree Certificate Authority at Let’s Encrypt through the end of 2027 with a contract totaling more than €1M. This is the largest single investment in post-quantum readiness at Let’s Encrypt to date. This investment will help pave the path for free post-quantum Merkle Tree Certificates for people globally.
Every time you open your bank, your tax portal, or your medical records, a certificate confirms you reached the website you typed in. Quantum computers put that confirmation at risk. Whether the web stays trustworthy shouldn't depend on who can afford to upgrade first. With ISRG, we invest in making post-quantum security the default for everyone, built on open standards and open source software.
Merkle Tree Certificates
Merkle Tree Certificates are a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. Replacing today’s certificate signatures with post-quantum equivalents would push a single TLS handshake well past 10 kilobytes, slowing connections and causing some to fail; MTCs keep the handshake small by covering a whole batch of certificates with one signature.
This investment supports ISRG’s efforts to prepare Let’s Encrypt for the post-quantum era by researching, developing, and deploying post-quantum Merkle Tree Certificates across its Certificate Authority infrastructure. Through 2027, this initiative will help ISRG:
-
Contribute to standardization of Merkle Tree Certificate Authorities at the IETF, the body that develops the Internet’s technical standards; in C2SP, a community project that publishes precise specifications for cryptographic protocols; and with root programs, the policies that decide which certificate authorities browsers and operating systems trust.
-
Transition the Merkle Tree Certificate Authority from initial standardization and staging tests to a fully reliable, compliant production launch.
-
Develop documentation, conduct outreach, and roll out Merkle Tree Certificates globally to subscribers.
We applaud the Sovereign Tech Agency and the German Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation for recognizing the connection between strong, well-supported digital infrastructure and innovation and economic growth.
With better and more secure tools people, companies, and institutions can focus more on the task at hand. We hope to see more public and private organizations who rely on open source critical digital infrastructure to step up and support it. If you or your organization would like to come on board as a funder of ISRG, we would be excited to begin a conversation with you at donate@abetterinternet.org.
03:00 PM
America Records Its 8th Measles Death Of The Year In Wisconsin [Techdirt]
The national embarrassment that is America’s measles problem continues to have devastating effects. While the federal government generally, and RFK Jr. specifically, blissfully ignores the thousands getting sick from a disease that was declared eradicated more than two decades ago, it all continues to get worse and worse. We have the tools at our disposal that would have precluded all of this sick and suffering, of course, but we’re currently being governed by ignorant anti-vaxxers that have spent decades driving down vaccination rates. Only days ago, we learned that a 7th person died just this year from measles.
If you thought this was purely an East Coast problem, you were wrong. The country now has its 8th fatality from measles this year, this time in Wisconsin. The anti-vaxxer movement puts everyone in danger, not just the unvaccinated. If you need a reminder of that, well, this latest fatality in Wisconsin was that of an infant, too young to be vaccinated.
An infant in Wisconsin has died of measles, the state health department said Thursday — the third measles-related death reported in the U.S. this week. It’s Wisconsin’s first measles-related death since 1990, the Health Service Department said, adding that a coroner had listed measles as the infant’s immediate cause of death.
None of the eight people who have died were vaccinated, according to state health departments; some were ineligible because of their age or health status. Typically, the first dose of the vaccine is administered around a child’s first birthday.
The deaths of every one of these people is on the heads of the anti-vaxxer movement. But there is a special flavor of anger that should be reserved for infants — infants! — who are dying as blameless victims, killed before they could be vaccinated. That this is occurring is abhorrent. That the current administration is staring down the deaths of children and doing nothing about it is criminal. We went 30 years without a measles death in the entire country. Now we have 8 so far in one year, along with thousands of confirmed infections and climbing.
Around 85% of kindergartners in Wisconsin have been vaccinated against measles — below the national average of 92%. Experts say 95% is the threshold needed to keep the population protected.
“We can actually eliminate transmission of measles in the community by getting enough people vaccinated,” said Dr. Ryan Westergaard, the state epidemiologist for communicable diseases. “We have the opportunity to take a disease that could affect everybody and essentially make it go away.”
Go away again. Damn it, we did this already. Fire or impeach RFK Jr. and show the country that you’re serious about fixing this.
01:00 PM
11:00 AM
Resisting The Menace Of Federal Data Consolidation [Techdirt]
In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information.
This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls.
We all deserve to live in a world where the data we use to pay our taxes, receive benefits, and vote is not combined and weaponized against us. The amalgamation of data leads to mistakes, abuses, and a lack of trust in institutions meant to protect us. Overall, it can chill our participation in society. This is particularly true for groups disfavored by this administration—especially immigrants and protesters.
Congress highlighted similar abuses—including the creation of enemies lists and snooping on activists and federal employees—following the McCarthy and Watergate eras. And the increasing use of computers to magnify those harms led Congress to pass a slate of protections like the federal Privacy Act of 1974.
The good news is that many people have stepped forward to resist the federal government’s unprecedented and unlawful data consolidations. Many groups, including EFF, have filed lawsuits to enforce our data privacy laws, and many states have, too. Legislators at the federal and state levels have worked to expose and oppose these surveillance programs. And many people have protested for their right to data privacy.
Existing data privacy protections have been essential in the past two years, but they can be improved. This should include: narrowing loopholes and increasing enforcement in existing laws, limiting the government’s purchase of data on the commercial market, and passing a comprehensive consumer privacy law.
Data Consolidation by DOGE
Starting on January 20, 2025, President Trump created DOGE—essentially renaming an existing agency originally meant to modernize government technology. Rather than engage in modernization, DOGE quickly obtained high-level access to sensitive databases across the government that store millions of people’s personal records—including at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury Department.
DOGE was staffed with people with little government or cybersecurity knowledge and who often had conflicts of interest. DOGE’s early aim was not always clear, aside from gaining “prompt access to all unclassified agency records” and the “sharing and consolidation” of those records.
The result? The indiscriminate firing of government employees and the decimation of important agencies that focused on consumer protection and foreign aid. It also resulted in clear misuses of data. For example, while working with DOGE at the Social Security Administration, one individual signed an outside agreement with an advocacy group with the aim of using SSA data to find evidence of alleged voter fraud and “overturn election results in certain States.”
DOGE’s data access and consolidation violated the federal Privacy Act, which limits the sharing and consolidation of government databases. Many groups stepped in to sue. For example, EFF and our co-counsel at Lex Lumina LLC and Democracy Defenders Fund, on behalf of two public employee unions (AFGE and AALJ), sued the OPM for unlawfully disclosing federal workers’ information to DOGE. After EFF and others secured early victories, the government sought to end the lawsuits by firing many DOGE agents and removing their access to records. A great deal of damage remains in need of a judicial remedy.
Data Consolidation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Even as DOGE’s influence diminished, federal agencies have attempted to share, compare, and seize large databases, in order to target immigrants. In some cases, they have succeeded. This happened with tax records at the IRS, Medicaid data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and public housing data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Agriculture also sought to collect databases regarding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) from states.
Many groups have filed lawsuits to block this anti-immigrant-motivated data consolidation, alleging it violates privacy protection laws. EFF filed amicus briefs in support of two of these lawsuits: Centro de Trabajadores v. Bessent, which concerns IRS data; and California v. HHS, which concerns Medicaid data (and where we teamed up with EPIC and Protect Democracy). Most recently, states have stepped up to challenge the federal government’s attempted seizure, for immigration enforcement purposes, of state commercial driver’s license data held by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a non-profit organization.
This data consolidation for immigration enforcement has also included government purchase of commercial products. This includes ICE’s purchase of commercial location data without a warrant, and its interest in “Big Data and Ad Tech providers.” ICE also has contracts with companies like Palantir, which help organize all the datasets the agency collects.
Data Consolidation for Voter Purges
The right to vote is fundamental to every democracy. That’s why EFF has long advocated for cybersecurity in voting systems, to make sure every vote is properly counted.
Voter purges are a longstanding threat to the right to vote. State and local officials regularly delete people from the voter registration rolls, often for bad reasons and without adequate notice. This has a disparate impact against people of color.
Now the federal government is trying to purge voters, too. To do so, it has consolidated our data in three ways. First, it is using an old data system called SAVE for a new purpose: checking voter eligibility. Second, it has seized voter information from states. Third, it has created a federal list of eligible voters.
As a direct result, people with a right to vote will be purged from voter rolls because of erroneous data. Others will be intimidated from voting or registering. And all registered voters suffer a violation of their data privacy rights: information collected for one purpose is being used against them for another purpose.
Expansion of SAVE
Since 1986, the federal government has operated SAVE, which stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It is not a database, but it facilitates easy access to databases. It is used to determine whether immigrants and naturalized citizens are eligible for various government benefits, such as food stamps.
In 2025, the federal government started using SAVE for a new purpose: checking voters’ eligibility. Further, SAVE now provides access to new databases and allows bulk searches. More than 60 million voters have been run through SAVE, and 21,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens who are ineligible to vote. Erroneous flags have caused purges of lawful voters – such as Anthony Nell.
A case called League of Women Voters v. DHS challenges this expansion of SAVE. The plaintiffs are represented by CREW, Democracy Forward, the Fair Elections Center, and EPIC. A federal judge held this program unlawful and set it aside. DHS appealed and asked for a stay of this order, and a federal appellate court denied the stay. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the stay, exercising its controversial “shadow docket” authority by a six-to-three vote.
Federal employees in DHS’s “Fraud Detection and National Security Unit,” which ordinarily investigates alleged immigration fraud, have been re-assigned to examine voter eligibility. A whistleblower alleges that employees have been directed to go to state election agency websites, enter some of a voter’s personal information, and thereby access more of it. This may violate state laws requiring a person, before accessing a voter’s information, to attest they are that voter or have that voter’s authorization.
Federal Seizure of States’ Voter Information
Since 2025, the federal government has demanded that at least 48 states hand over their voter information. At least 16 states have complied. The federal government is running this information through SAVE, searching for voters to purge.
The federal government has sued 30 states for refusing to comply. So far, courts have dismissed 25 of these suits. There’s also a lawsuit against this data grab, titled Common Cause v. DOJ, brought by CREW, Protect Democracy, and the ACLU.
The New Federal Voter Eligibility List
In March 2026, President Trump issued an executive order requiring DHS to create a list of people who are U.S. citizens, aged 18 or older, and residents of the state. The order also requires DOJ to prosecute anyone, including state and local officials, who provides a ballot to a person who is not eligible to vote in federal elections.
In California v. Trump, 24 states allege that this executive order violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. A federal judge enjoined this program, and an appellate court denied a stay. But the U.S. Supreme Court by a six-to-three vote granted a stay, which allows the program to move forward. (By a seven-to-two vote, the Court denied a stay of an injunction against a different part of the same executive order, which concerned mail-in ballots.) Another legal challenge, titled EPIC v. USCIS, alleges that the new federal voter eligibility list violates the Privacy Act as well as the separation of powers.
Next Steps
It is encouraging to see so many people, groups, and states step forward to protect our data privacy from these unlawful waves of federal data consolidations. Still, more work remains. For example:
- The Privacy Act of 1974 has proven a critical bulwark. But after a half century, it could use a refresh. For example, Congress should close its loopholes and expand its enforceability.
- Law enforcement agencies must be prohibited from avoiding the Constitution’s warrant requirement by buying our personal data from brokers. For example, Congress should pass the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.”
- We need a comprehensive consumer data privacy law, among other reasons to reduce the flood of our personal data that corporations provide to law enforcement agencies. Legislators should check out EFF’s “privacy first” framework.
In the meantime, there’s no time like the present to practice surveillance self-defense, like using strong passwords and disabling your phone’s ad identification.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Enjoying The Warm Blue Wave [The Status Kuo]
Greetings from the West Coast! I’m here through the weekend to help lead the Convening For Change summit of the Human Rights Campaign. So I’m giving myself a much needed day off from writing to enjoy the energy and company of my fellow board members and HRC staff. We’re all smiles from Tuesday night, and I hope you are, too!
We did it! We really did it!!
…
10:00 AM
Judge Tosses Trump’s Epstein Letter SLAPP Suit Against Murdoch, For Real This Time [Techdirt]
Last year when Donald Trump sued Rupert Murdoch over the WSJ’s article revealing the… um… birthday card he sent Jeffrey Epstein, we pointed out that it was a pure SLAPP suit (and also that it was against a guy who, you could argue, is one of the main reasons he ever got elected). Trump insisted, both publicly and in the lawsuit, that the letter was “a fake thing” and that he never wrote it. So, of course, after the lawsuit was filed, the birthday card was released by the House Oversight Committee that had subpoenaed the Epstein Estate. You’ve seen it by now in all its creepiness.
As we pointed out, the lawyer who brought the suit, Alejandro Brito (who has become the latest of Trump’s go-to lawyers) didn’t seem to have much experience with defamation law, and it shows. Earlier this year, the judge in the case, Darrin Gayles, dismissed the lawsuit while pointing out its many faults. But he gave Trump leave to file an amended complaint, and Trump (of course) took it.
But, no more. Last week Gayles dismissed the lawsuit — with prejudice this time, making sure Trump can’t refile — and the order makes clear that Gayles absolutely knows this lawsuit is bullshit. He opens with a Justice Brandeis quote (from his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California) that the Supreme Court leaned on in NY Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 ruling that established our modern-day understanding of how the First Amendment and defamation law work:
Those who won our independence believed * * * that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law—the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.
Famously, the Sullivan case (which includes this quote of the earlier Brandeis concurrence) established the “actual malice” standard for defaming public figures. And, as we repeat every time “actual malice” comes up, it does not mean what people think it means in plain English. Actual malice means that the content was published knowing that it was false or with “reckless disregard” for whether or not it was false — which, in practice, means they had to have entertained serious doubts about whether what they were publishing was true. Judge Gayles had explained the actual malice standard to Brito in the original dismissal, noting that the complaint “comes nowhere close” to meeting the actual malice standard.
Brito, it appears, learned little in his second attempt.
As Judge Gayles notes, the amended complaint still fails to show actual malice:
Here, the Amended Complaint falls short of pleading actual malice. Indeed, the allegations regarding malice are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Article, and often irrelevant to whether Defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the Article were purportedly false.
As the court points out, just claiming that the WSJ “should have known” the content was false is not enough for actual malice. Similarly, the fact that Trump told the WSJ that the story wasn’t true doesn’t make it actual malice. This comes up in all sorts of defamation cases. The plaintiff claims “well I told them it was false, and therefore it’s actual malice.” But that’s not how it works, because people often deny true things.
In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a “fake,” Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story. But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment. Indeed, were that the law, any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press—a result that flies in the face of the “American privilege to speak one’s mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions[.]” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 269 (quoting Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 270 (1941)). Moreover, the Article did not ignore or minimize President Trump’s denial. Rather, it informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it. By “allowing readers to decide for themselves what to conclude from the [Article], . . . any allegation of actual malice [is] less plausible.” Turner, 879 F.3d at 1274; see also Michel, 816 F.3d at 703 (holding that “reporting perspectives contrary to the publisher’s own should be interpreted as helping to rebut, not establish, the presence of actual malice”).
On top of that, the court points out that merely claiming the reporters didn’t do enough investigation is not enough to show actual malice:
As detailed above, a failure to investigate, without more, does not establish actual malice. Id. Rather, “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.” Reed, 2025 WL 1874638, at *3. The Amended Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard. Indeed, the Article details a thoughtful and detailed investigation. Before running the story, Defendants contacted President Trump and his team, Justice Department officials, and the FBI for comment. President Trump and his team responded with his denial, the Justice Department did not respond at all, and the FBI declined to comment. Defendants also attempted to speak with Maxwell; she did not respond to their request and her attorney stated that she was focused on her case before the Supreme Court. In addition, Defendants reached out to other individuals named in the Birthday Book, including Leslie Wexner and Alan Dershowitz, and to individuals involved in binding the Birthday Book, who confirmed that Weitz put the book together. In short, President Trump’s allegation that Defendants failed to conduct an adequate investigation is rebutted by the Article and is insufficient to establish actual malice
The judge accuses Trump and his lawyers of “grasping at straws” to “manufacture flaws with the investigation” but again points out that none of that meets the actual malice standard:
Grasping at straws, the Amended Complaint attempts to manufacture flaws with the investigation. First, it alleges that the investigation was lacking because Defendants only reviewed the Letter but did not have a copy in their possession. The Court cannot discern any substantive difference—and certainly not one that would establish actual malice—between Defendants reviewing the Letter before publication and obtaining a copy of the Letter. Defendants reviewed the Letter and later reported on its contents. Nothing in the law suggests that Defendants needed to obtain, retain, or publish a copy.
Also, when the judge has already made clear that your lawsuit is bullshit, maybe don’t play games like pretending the WSJ didn’t report on Trump’s denial when they actually did:
Finally, the allegation that Defendants intentionally omitted President Trump’s denial that he signed the Letter or a discussion on whether the signature on the Letter is authentic, [ECF No. 67 ¶¶ 57-60], is belied by the Article. It states, multiple times, that President Trump denies writing the Letter and that “[i]t isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared.” [ECF No. 68-2]. This is more than sufficient to encompass any denial that he “signed” the Letter or that the signature on the Letter is authentic.
While Murdoch and the WSJ asked for fees under either Florida or New York’s anti-SLAPP laws, Judge Gayles says it’s unclear which state’s laws apply to the claims here, and that matters, given that they have very different procedural postures. So he reserves that issue to explore separately.
Of course, Donald Trump and Alejandro Brito are not one to give up lightly. They’ve already told the judge they’re appealing to the Eleventh Circuit. Good luck finding an Eleventh Circuit panel that sees actual malice in a complaint this thin.
Meanwhile, Brito, who is also representing Trump in Trump’s even more disastrous lawsuit against the BBC, might want to spend a bit more time focusing on that case? The BBC turned around and decided to use the discovery process to demand all sorts of info on Trump’s businesses and he’s been running and hiding, even backing out of a scheduled deposition citing “other matters of national importance” on a day he spent at a political rally and Mar-a-Lago. But the magistrate judge in that case, Enjolique Lett, has said that Trump has until December 11th to give a deposition or he could face consequences. And the DOJ is also running around trying to block former special counsel Jack Smith from testifying as well.
So, while the bullshit SLAPP suit against Murdoch and the WSJ is dead (pending an appeal that looks doomed), the one against the BBC seems to be blowing up in Trump’s (and Brito’s) face spectacularly.
And this is why we don’t file SLAPP suits.
It’s also why we need more and stronger anti-SLAPP laws in every state and at the federal level. The very fact that this court can’t even deal with the attorney’s fees issue at this point, because of the complex interplay of different state anti-SLAPP laws (and how they work in federal court) is all the more reason to fix our anti-SLAPP laws across the entire country. And maybe, with this new incoming Congress, we can finally get that.
05:00 AM
ICE Officer Turns Himself In After Being Indicted For Deliberately Running Over A Random Person [Techdirt]
All good things come to those who wait? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes, you need to take action to make good things happen. Other times, you just have to hang back and wait for the slow-moving wheels of justice to do their thing.
It’s the latter here. Last month, an ICE officer deliberately (allegedly) ran over a fleeing person with their ICE-mobile. The whole thing was caught on camera, albeit not by any of the cameras ICE officers are supposed to be wearing. Instead, it was caught by a CCTV camera operated by a local business.
ICE claimed migrant Miguel Parra-Hernandez “ran in front of an ICE vehicle,” which resulted in the severe injuries one might associate with being run over by an SUV. This narrative lasted less than a day before CCTV footage showed an ICE vehicle crossing a street and accelerating through a parking lot before accelerating through Miguel Parra-Hernandez. (It also showed ICE officers moving crime scene evidence — the vehicle Parra-Hernandez exited — from the street where it stopped to the parking lot where he was run over.)
As anyone can see from the footage, the ICE vehicle swung in and took the man down, even though there was no “public safety” reason that might possibly justify running over some random fleeing person.
Local Houston (TX) prosecutors felt the same way, especially after it was revealed that the person ICE was actually hunting had likely been dead for nearly a decade. They moved forward with criminal charges, resulting in a grand jury indictment of ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales. This indictment was especially unique, given where it happened.
The agent, Mario Alberto Morales, 33, is facing state charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, said Sean Teare, the district attorney in Harris County, which includes Houston. He added that Mr. Morales has not surrendered. Efforts to reach Mr. Morales were not successful, and it was unclear whether he had legal representation.
Mr. Morales is the first federal agent to face charges in Texas as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Things have changed since this October 30th report from the New York Times. Mr. Morales has now surrendered, as NBC News reports:
ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales turned himself in Monday after being indicted last week in connection with running over a man who was on foot.
“In connection” is an extremely generous interpretation of the incident caught on tape by an entity ICE officers apparently didn’t expect to be engaged in always-on recording. For now, though, Officer Morales remains more free than the man he (allegedly) ran over, who is presumably still recovering from multiple surgeries to repair his crushed legs. Morales was hit with a $30,000 bond, but has reportedly bonded out, which puts him back on the streets, but presumably not back in an ICE uniform.
More digging into this officer’s time as an ICE goon has managed to highlight pretty much everything that’s wrong with ICE’s current hire-now-worry-about-it-later surge that began shortly after Trump took office for a second time.
Training has been minimized and hiring standards have been lowered. Morales was part of that surge, hired by ICE in August 2025. Texas prosecutors highlighted this lack of experience and presumed lack of training during their statements following the indictment. Morales is represented by an idiot, which doesn’t mean he’s representing himself. Instead, he’s represented by an actual idiot, who thinks actions by red state prosecutors are politically motivated — a wild-ass claim buttressed by even more wild-assed claims about what Morales was doing when he (apparently and [still] allegedly) decided to run over a fleeing person.
“This Democratic district attorney has great issues with the conservative Republican Party government’s ICE agenda, and he’s trying to pick a fight with them, but he’s smashing this individual to do so,” [David] Lindenmuth said.
Lindenmuth said the car strike was accidental and happened as Morales reacted to avoid hitting a car that was in front of him.
I’m not sure what “smashing this individual” means in this context. I assume it’s a Freudian slip that refers to his client “smashing” an “individual” — an act that led to his client being indicted on vehicular assault charges.
As to the rest of his statement — that his client was just trying to avoid hitting another car in the parking lot — well, let’s go back to the recording and let it speak for itself:
Then there’s this new fact, which was not captured by the CCTV camera: Morales not only didn’t care what happened to the person he decided to deliberately/allegedly strike with his vehicle, but he also didn’t care about the other detained migrants that were involuntary passengers when he decided to turn his car into a guided missile:
According to the DA’s office, Morales had two handcuffed arrestees sitting in the back of his car without seat belts when the vehicle hit Parra.
According to public records and other information obtained by prosecutors, Morales’s law enforcement experience is limited to a stint as a military police officer (less than 2 years) and seven months as a prison guard. Those seven months mean even less than the less-than-illustrious career that saw Morales exit the military with pretty much the same rank he entered it with (Private First Class).
Here’s the upshot of the seven months Morales spent as a Texas correctional officer:
He resigned in 2018 while on probation with the agency for falsification of records, specifically documenting security rounds as completed when they had not been conducted…
That apparently led to seven years of unrelated employment. No wonder Morales took a shot at ICE’s $50,000 signing bonus, especially when he had a few years of law enforcement-adjacent “experience,” even if that experience was vastly overshadowed by his inability to do his job honestly and/or remain employed in the law enforcement field.
Morales isn’t a poster boy for ICE misconduct. He’s just another contributor, which makes him as unique as an involuntary reflex. The only thing that’s different is that he got caught. Now, we just have to hope that it sticks.
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