This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) “No Kings” protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a “get out the (early) vote” campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of it, suddenly it was reported that the No Kings Instagram account was suspended for about an hour, with admin access locked out for a few more hours. Many supporters of the protests immediately suspected foul play, highlighting that Mark Zuckerberg has gone in hard in supporting Trump over the past couple of years. So, the implication was that Zuck must be fiddling the dials to help the guy he supports in the White House. For a variety of reasons, this is unlikely to be true.

I’ll explain some of those reasons towards the end of this article just to be thorough, but the point of this article is to highlight the argument that Will Robinson and Tim Chambers recently made in response to this, which is that it doesn’t even matter if it was done on purpose or not. Even if you believe that Zuckerberg and Trump were laughing their heads off and jointly pressing the button to silence the No Kings account, the real problem was that this was possible in the first place.

Our response should be the same either way.

Robinson and Chambers focus on the very practical lessons for anyone engaged in digital organizing, which is how to prepare for the possibility that a centralized provider takes down your account. And their advice is good and practical (read the whole thing!): make sure you have communication channels that a third party can’t easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook on how to respond (mostly getting out the word) if your account gets shut down.

But it’s also a reminder of the larger point that I have been harping on for some time about the importance of decentralization and user control over their online experiences. Centralized systems create a natural gravity that leads to control over your speech. My friend Danny O’Brien (who also helped inspire Techdirt’s very existence) wrote a few years ago about how decentralization is not an end in and of itself, but rather part of the means to guarantee we have “cognitive liberty.”

When we hand over the control of our speech to a third party, with no ability to exit (with all of our content and connections intact) we have given up a fundamental element of our liberty. O’Brien describes it here:

Right now, if you wrote a note to yourself and put it on your personal computer’s hard drive, you could say whatever you want, draw whatever you want. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t have that guarantee: even if you kept it in your own Google Drive or DropBox, it could be found wanting, and deleted. I don’t know about you, but my notes are my memory, most of the time. My search engine searches are as much me talking to myself about my worries and interests, in a way that I would rarely disclose even to my closest companion.

[….]

Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that’s physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others’ hardware.

That’s the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that’s free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.

Achieving that kind of freedom for “cognitive liberty” requires us to recognize the threats of centralized systems. And Meta shutting down the “No Kings” Insta account is one such example no matter if it was on purpose or an accident. This was the very thinking behind my original Protocols, Not Platforms paper in the first place. If you hand control of your digital spaces to someone else, they get to decide whether those spaces exist at all.

And they might be bad at it, whether through incompetence or malice.

And sometimes that means your account gets shut down — whether for good reasons or bad. Many people seem to not want to grapple with this issue. They say “the people are there,” and that is true, but only because the “people” have agreed to give Mark Zuckerberg and whoever else that power.

Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.

Is it bad that Meta pulled down that account? Sure. Do you fix it by demanding Zuck “be better”? No. That just gives him even more power, while reducing some of our own power. Whoever has the power over the systems — whether it’s a billionaire CEO or a government official — has the ability to cut you off (or to force others into your feed).

Even if it gets people you support back on the platform you want them on, you’re just setting yourself up to be angry the next time someone you don’t trust is in power. The answer is to make sure they don’t have that power in the first place.

When I discussed this on Bluesky, some people claimed that it was fine for Congress to “investigate” what happened with the No Kings account to find out if Zuckerberg was told by government officials to remove the account. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy announced he intends to have Congress investigate Meta over this.

But the right way to look into that is for Congress to use its oversight powers over the executive branch to find out whether any administration officials contacted Meta about the account. This is also where something like the JAWBONE Act would be handy. But any approach that has elected officials (or any government officials) pressuring companies to moderate the way they prefer is only going to blow back on you the next time people you don’t like are in power. As far as I can tell, there is no one who supported Jim Jordan’s investigation into Meta & Twitter’s moderation practices in taking down Trump’s account who are equally excited about Murphy now investigating this.

And that should be a warning. When you choose if you agree with the policy based on which “team” is pushing for it, that’s not a principled take.

But we don’t have to live in that world where we pingpong between this or that government official and which billionaires they can bully (even when you agree with the bullying). This is why supporting decentralized tools like atproto or ActivityPub is more than a matter of taste. Those systems make this kind of takedown far harder and far less damaging, giving you the same kind of reach while you retain the “cognitive liberty” and the ability to truly own your own account.

As for this particular case, as far as I can tell, there’s very little likelihood that this was done deliberately. First, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Most people who haven’t worked in trust & safety at a large platform cannot fathom the sheer scale of what’s happening on any given day. Hundreds of millions of pieces of content show up every single day. If less than 1% are incorrectly moderated, that’s still a huge absolute number.

And, yes, people are pointing to other stories of bad Meta moderation in the past week to find some sort of pattern, but the key pattern is Meta will always be bad at this. It was bad at it before — back when MAGA folks insisted Zuck was “censoring conservatives” — and it’s bad at it now. Because getting this right at that scale is not something that is humanly possible.

And an account like No Kings probably saw a massive upswing in attention the day of its protest — the first No Kings protest in a little while — which is the sort of thing that often trips the automated sensors. Meta’s explanation is unsatisfying to many, who are quite sure there’s a conspiracy afoot, but it fits with the pattern. The company initially claimed increased activity by the account, and then later clarified that the real trigger had been a surprising jump in “reading” other posts from that account, which matched the pattern of “automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our system.”

That’s not surprising. Even as the No Kings organizers say they hadn’t posted that much, it’s not about the posting. Meta’s explanation for the jump was that they detected “a Claude tool” (which, yeah, is odd phrasing):

“Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. “

That seems entirely reasonable. Someone with access to that account (and it may be multiple people) may have been using Claude to try to monitor posts and mentions, or looking for protest photos and videos from around the country to share and repost.

Or, it could just be that Meta’s automated systems suck.

Indeed, another complaint that people made is that “it shouldn’t have taken them that long to reinstate the account.” And, yes. That’s true. But the underlying assumption behind this is that the one hour response time to reinstate and the four-ish hours to return access is somehow out of the ordinary. Chances are it’s actually quicker than normal. And we have no idea how many other mistakes Meta’s crap automated systems were making at the same time, many of which probably also needed to be reviewed. Just because you only were aware of one in the one area you were paying attention to does not mean it is not happening to thousands of others as well.

On Bluesky, someone argued that Meta “should know” to keep an eye on “big political accounts” like this, which is nice in theory, but as I explained, Meta actually did that for years, in a program they called XCheck, which flagged high-profile accounts (i.e., “big political accounts”) for secondary human review before any action was taken against them — exactly what this commenter suggested. But.. when Frances Haugen leaked that to the WSJ, it was presented as Facebook having “a secret elite that is exempt” from its rules.

There’s even a movie in the theaters right now, by Aaron Sorkin, with this as one of the subplots.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But the biggest reason I don’t think this was deliberate is because… why would anyone think it would help in any way? Of all the accounts the Trump admin might want to ban, does anyone actually think they would suggest this one account on Instagram of a protest that was already happening across the country, with people involved who would immediately notice the account was taken down and use other means to get the word out?

If the Trump admin were actually telling Zuck to take down accounts, you’d expect it to be happening a lot more frequently, to much more meaningful accounts, in ways that wouldn’t so immediately draw way more attention to the original account. The story just doesn’t hang together in any sensible way.

Still, some will argue, perhaps it wasn’t the White House reaching out. Perhaps it was just Zuck or a Zuck minion thinking “gosh I hate all these protestors, and now that we’re all in for Trump, let’s show these libs a thing or two….” While possible this seems incredibly hamfisted and unlikely, and generally not at all how these systems work.

Either way, if you think I’m hopelessly naive, and that this was obviously government intervention, or even just Zuck deciding on his own to show the protestors who’s the boss… the outcome doesn’t change. And what we do it about it doesn’t change. The intent barely matters here at all.

In either scenario the problem is that Zuck has too much power, and the answer should be to make sure Zuck has less power by moving to systems no single billionaire, no single politician, no single entity anywhere can control. Yes, that will involve some form of collective action. But it starts with you. If you are continuing to rely on such platforms yourself, then don’t whine about how Zuck might not have your best interests in mind.

We already know that.

Any plan that involves demanding billionaires become better people to make your life easier is destined to fail. Instead, we now have the power to build our own tools on our own systems that we control — and we can make them billionaire resistant, which makes them enshittification resistant. And then we don’t even have to worry about Zuck or Trump or Musk or anyone putting their fingers on the scale in a way that goes against our own interests.

But it only happens if people agree to stop giving those billionaires the power over us.

Whether Zuck or Trump or anyone had anything to do with deliberately taking down the No Kings account should be the least of our concerns. The fact that anyone is relying on a system where there is a central provider who can do that — by accident or not — is the underlying problem. Because the fact that a single provider can do it, means that eventually someone will try to pressure them to do it, even if that didn’t happen in this case. Or it will go down by accident at exactly the wrong moment. Either way, you avoid that by moving to systems where no single provider gets to make that call.

No kings is a great slogan, but it should apply to the people who control our communications infrastructure as well.

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At best, most Trump administration officials can be called “sycophants.” At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic Peter Principles… the list goes on and on.

FBI director Kash Patel fits into many of these shoes, even if he may not fit quite as well into his pair of Trump-purchased Florsheims. “Charlatan” fits the most here, but it’s a direct byproduct of Patel’s narcissism and sycophancy.

It behooves Patel to pretend his FBI is the best FBI that has ever been. And if he can’t do that, he should at least pretend the FBI is the most Trump that it has ever been. He’s done a lot for the latter part of the previous sentence. This time, he’s trying to both, but focusing on portraying his leadership as the most leader-y the FBI has ever seen.

But he can’t do it alone. It’s a team effort, even though most of the team’s contributions won’t be publicly recognized. This is all about elevating Patel and his Trump-subservient FBI to a level that might be publicly recognized by a guy who rarely has anything good to say about anyone other than himself: the President of the United States.

Those who can’t, steal... apparently.

Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.

Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.

I would like to see more detail on what is considered to be “present” in this context. Some agent on FaceTime? An arrest culminating in a Teams meeting with a nearby special agent? Somebody just wrote an FBI agent’s name on the paperwork at some point? This one time a cop got an email?

Even if someone from the FBI was physically present before, during, or after the arrest, it’s not really an FBI case if the FBI isn’t handling the arrest and processing and handing it over to the US DOJ for prosecution. The FBI may assist to a limited extent in hundreds or thousands of criminal arrests. But just because someone talked to a fed at some point during the investigation, it’s absolute bullshit to claim these arrests as your own, especially when you don’t really care about the arrests, but rather that the numbers seem higher than those produced by the previous administration.

And those numbers aren’t actually higher, not when you strip out Patel’s stolen valor.

In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.

And you do know why this is, right? Tons of federal crimes happen every day. But the Trump DOJ and FBI only care about certain crimes — things like alleged voting by non-citizens, whatever new awful iteration of immigration enforcement is taking place, and anything that can possibly be wielded against Trump’s personal and political enemies. Everything else can sit quietly in the back and stfu until the next regime change.

Even if we decide this FBI is better than all the FBIs that have come before it, chortling on main about these arrests is like congratulating yourself for composing a social media post without a noticeable typo. This “contribution” — as bogusly exaggerated as it is — only shows that the FBI remains operational, if only barely:

Patel’s count of the FBI making or participating in 54,000 arrests shrinks in significance when taken into broader context. There have been 11.3 million arrests nationwide since January 2025, according to the same FBI data.

If you’re bragging about contributing to 0.5% of all arrests, you’re doing bragging wrong. If you’re just trying to look better than Biden’s FBI, you’re still failing because the increase you’re touting is imaginary. It can’t be claimed without claiming work by local law enforcement as your own. But what else would we expect from a guy who thinks he’s entitled to drink with Olympic champions just because he’s got a free ride to the arena?

I’ve documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”

Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the massive debt load results in layoffs, corner cutting, higher prices, and lower-quality service for everyone. It simply doesn’t matter what the companies promise; the end result is always carnage. A country with functional regulators would simply enforce antitrust law to protect markets, labors, and consumers. We aren’t that.

Paramount’s recent $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers is poised to be even worse than deals’ past. Paramount had barely beaten back a flimsy state antitrust enforcement effort before it began talking about mass layoffs to try and pay down the massive $80 billion in debt from the Ellison family’s recent merger spree.

The company’s massive debt — combined with higher interest rates from a tumultuous bond market — and a dying (intentionally exploited and destroyed?) traditional film and TV industry — has scared even “growth-for-growth’s sake” obsessed Wall Street.

It’s clear that Paramount execs think the high interest rates (attached to a historic debt sale) are worth it because they think they’ll cleverly be able to create a hugely profitable Harry Potter and Batman AI slop machine. And, just like the AT&T execs before them, have deluded themselves into believing they can turn the whole soggy mess into a new “tech company” that rivals Google:

“Are we paying a little more in interest?” Cinelli said in an interview. “We are. But we’d much rather get the deal done and then manage that accordingly.”

But again, by “manage,” they mean fire thousands of people, dramatically cut corners on production, reduce employee perks and pay, and raise rates hand over fist on consumers, as per tradition. That sort of con used to be easier to sell back when traditional and streaming TV was seeing growth; but now that these markets have saturated (and consumers are balking at constant rate hikes) the game has changed.

And it will get all significantly worse if the economy tanks and consumer disposable income spending drops off a cliff.

Amusingly, investors’ jitters (combined with an automated sell off triggered by confusion over warrant distribution) have already resulted in the new company technically being worth less than half of what Paramount and Warner Brothers were worth separately:

“As of Oct. 5, the last day of trading for WBD and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) on Nasdaq, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value.”

Great stuff! Should the AI bubble well and truly pop thanks to the industry’s ongoing financial fraud, Larry Ellison’s likely to take a significant brunt of the blow. While his gambit for nepobaby media domination simultaneously falls flat on its face. As usual, consumers and labor will be the ones paying the price.

The most likely outcome remains that a tech giant like Netflix, Google, or Amazon just buys the whole soggy mess in a few years, and all of the execs responsible (as well as all of the people and lawmakers that defended the deal) will simply pretend none of this ever happened.

The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass legislation in the EU, one which gained 1 million signatures for its petition, ultimately failed to progress into law. Allies in California are attempting similar state legislation, despite heavy and disingenuous lobbying from the likes of the ESA. This is all a lesson in the old saying that progress isn’t linear, as the public becomes more and more aware of the issue even as old and monied interests keep laws from being passed for now.

But this isn’t going away. And now we’re bypassing the state level in attempt to craft federal American legislation for digital games ownership, with Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York introducing a bill that would grant ownership rights to the public when it comes to the purchase of digital video games.

The bill, known as The Power to the Players Act, would direct the Fedral Trade Commission (FTC) to establish regulations that would protect gamers and their digital libraries. In short, Torres wants to ensure that when you buy a digital game, you actually own it, as opposed to getting a license that can be revoked. Additionally, the bill would require online games to have offline functionality, so that when servers are shut down, the content can still be played by those who own the game.

“Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy,” Torres said in a press release. “A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale. Families in the Bronx and across the country save up to buy these games, and they deserve better than a license that can vanish at any time. The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on.”

The power in a bill like this is chiefly how it entirely bypasses the question of indecipherable language buried in EULAs and TOS notices that come with digital games. It’s not saying the public needs to be better informed. It’s not a law about disclaimers, or the language that comes with documents for a digital game. It’s far more simple than that: this temporary license bullshit ends and it ends now.

Were it to be passed, this would have huge ramifications on the industry and where it’s currently trending. More and more games aren’t bothering with physical releases. Sony is nixing physical media for the next PlayStation console entirely. The industry has, in large part, decided that digital games will be the future of its business, which puts enormous emphasis on what a buyer’s rights are when it comes to those games.

Conferring what is essentially right of first sale rights for digital purchases is perhaps a step even further than the Stop Killing Games movement went. But it’s also one that makes a ton of sense. If these games bought are truly bought, then of course the public has a right to resell their own property. That has implications for storefronts like Steam as well, which will need to work with publishers to figure out how to manage such transfers. Making it so games remain playable after the publisher decides a game’s lifespan has ended has become table stakes to those larger ownership questions.

The lobbying against this bill will be furious. I very much doubt that this first attempt will result in codified law. But this version of the Overton window appears to be shifting, or at least widening. The public and lawmakers are becoming more and more aware of the questions about, and problems with, the digital games economy. With enough momentum, it’s hard to imagine that some version of legislation doesn’t pass eventually.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part IX — When the Reckoning Reaches the Courts
Part VIII questioned whether regulation alone can alter the balance of power between Big Tech and society. Part IX asks what happens when accountability moves beyond legislation and into the courts and users themselves begin to demand answers.

There is a revealing assumption embedded in much of the debate about Big Tech: that the companies will eventually reform because political pressure, public criticism, and increasingly sophisticated regulation will persuade them to do so. Perhaps. But history suggests a less charitable and probably more realistic explanation for corporate change.

Powerful companies rarely abandon profitable business models because they have suddenly concluded that those models are incompatible with the public interest. They do so when the legal, financial or reputational costs of maintaining them become impossible to ignore. The tobacco industry did not transform because it discovered the importance of public health. Financial institutions did not fundamentally rethink their practices because criticism alone persuaded them that markets required greater responsibility. In industry after industry, public pressure mattered enormously, but the decisive moment often arrived when pressure acquired legal consequences.

That may be where Big Tech is now heading. For years, the debate surrounding the platforms was framed primarily as a regulatory problem. Were governments moving fast enough? Were legislators sufficiently technologically literate? Should companies be treated as publishers, utilities, common carriers, or something else entirely? What new obligations should be imposed upon recommendation systems, advertising models, app stores, artificial intelligence or the collection of personal data?

Those questions remain important. But there is another question beginning to emerge beneath them: what happens when users stop waiting for governments to solve the problem and begin asking courts whether the companies themselves can be held accountable?

This changes the nature of the debate. Legislation generally operates prospectively. It tells companies what they must do in the future. Courts can also look backwards. They ask what happened, who knew, what could reasonably have been anticipated and whether an organization’s choices contributed to a particular harm. That is a much more uncomfortable form of accountability.

A company can lobby against a bill. It can seek changes to legislation before it is passed. It can influence regulatory guidance and negotiate implementation. None of this guarantees success, but large corporations have spent decades developing the institutional machinery required to participate effectively in the political process.

Courts are different. Once a legal dispute has reached the question of responsibility, the argument is no longer only about what policymakers might require in the abstract. It becomes a question about evidence. Internal documents. Design decisions. Warnings. Risk assessments. Corporate knowledge. The relationship between what a company knew and what it chose to do.

The burden of explanation begins to shift. For the platforms, that shift may prove more consequential than another round of hearings in Washington or Brussels. The first major test of this new pressure may be child safety and there are obvious reasons why.

Few questions are as politically powerful as the safety of children. Abstract arguments about freedom of expression, innovation, and technological progress become considerably more difficult when confronted with evidence that children may be exposed to foreseeable and preventable harm. The question changes from whether a platform is generally beneficial to society to whether a company knew that particular features, systems or incentives created specific risks for vulnerable users and failed to take reasonable action.

That is not merely a regulatory question; it is a question of responsibility. And it may become the point at which the existing model of platform governance begins to change.

Yet child safety cannot be the end of the story. Indeed, it would be a mistake to treat children as the only people whose relationship with digital platforms deserves meaningful protection. Children may provide the clearest and most politically compelling case, but the deeper principle is broader. Adults also deserve protection from business models designed around asymmetries of information and power. Users also have interests in privacy, autonomy, and agency. Citizens also have interests in digital environments that do not systematically exploit vulnerabilities merely because those vulnerabilities can be measured and monetized. Communities also have interests in systems that do not treat social cohesion as collateral damage in the pursuit of engagement. And society as a whole has an interest in ensuring that the companies which increasingly mediate its public life cannot simply define responsibility according to the limits of what legislation has explicitly prohibited.

This is the larger reckoning. The argument is not that technology companies are uniquely evil; nor is it that every social problem produced online can be traced to corporate malice. That is neither accurate nor particularly useful.

The platforms built extraordinary technologies. They solved real problems. They connected people across distances that previous generations could barely imagine. Their success was deserved, at least in part, because they made the internet more accessible, more useful, and more powerful.

The question is what happens when the institutions that produced those achievements become sufficiently powerful that their own understanding of responsibility becomes one of the principal constraints on their power. For too long, the answer has been: very little. Platforms investigated themselves. Companies commissioned their own research. Executives appeared before legislatures. Regulators announced new inquiries. Governments threatened action. And the underlying model continued largely unchanged.

This is why the current moment may be different. The reckoning will not come because Big Tech has suddenly come to Jesus. It will not come because the companies have collectively discovered that human flourishing is a better objective than engagement. Nor will it come simply because legislators have finally written sufficiently strict rules, although legislation can and should play a crucial role in establishing the boundaries within which digital power operates.

The more profound change will come when Big Tech no longer controls the terms of the conversation about the harms it creates. That is what users and courts can do. Users can withdraw the legitimacy that platforms have long assumed their scale provides. They can demand alternatives, organize and bring claims. They can transform the experience of harm from an abstract policy problem into a question of accountability.

Courts, in the meantime, can ask questions that corporate public relations and political lobbying are designed to avoid. What did the company know? When did it know it? What did it do with that knowledge? Were risks foreseeable? Were warnings ignored? Was a particular outcome simply an unfortunate consequence of innovation, or was it connected to choices that could reasonably have been made differently?

These questions are more difficult to absorb into a compliance department. They may also prove more difficult to solve through lobbying.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Last year, Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called “mini-subscriptions,” allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks who don’t want, or can’t afford, increasingly costly monthly subscriptions.

But alas, the “day pass” idea immediately resulted in a lawsuit by Disney and Warner Brothers, which stated the more convenient viewing options violated existing license agreements. While a federal judge ruled against Disney in the company’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the new option, the lawsuits seem to have had their intended impacts all the same.

Sling TV announced that it’s shuttering the option for lower-cost day streaming passes:

“Sling was built to give our customers the ultimate control over their entertainment, and Sling Passes delivered on that promise for millions,” Sling TV says in a statement on its website. “Though Sling Passes are no longer available, we look forward to continuing to innovate and showing our customers new ways to experience the content they love.”

It’s an unfortunate end to a rare bit of actual industry creativity.

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Streaming TV prices hikes in particular are coming so fast and furious, they’re outpacing many of the ridiculous traditional cable TV price hikes we saw during the cord cutting revolution.

This refusal to listen to consumers and truly innovate will result in the same backlash we saw then; namely more users simply flocking to free alternatives or piracy. A trend media giants will blame on absolutely everything (generational entitlement! VPNs! China!) but themselves.

We’ve been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of “Reckless” Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM”), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which it seems quite clear, BAM corporate illegally held onto after taking back that franchise. BAM settled and claims it gave back the remaining sets to the original owner, Bryan Mansell, but Mansell says he got back about 35 sets out of hundreds, some of which weren’t even his — not exactly what he was expecting.

But if you’ll recall, in those original videos, at one point there was a bizarre scene where the American Fork Police Department had a SWAT team (or equivalent) raid the AirBNB where Ben and some of the people helping him were staying, arresting all of them.

There were a number of other sketchy moves by the American Fork Police Department, including pulling over the car Ben was a passenger in on totally pretextual claims, accusing another of Ben’s colleagues of trespassing on a property she hadn’t been on, and then arresting another colleague for pressing the power button to lock his phone after being ordered to hand it over.

Soon after this, prosecutors charged Schneider with misdemeanor stalking charges and (even more bizarrely) “targeted residential picketing.” That case is still ongoing, though a scheduled hearing last month was recently postponed until December, apparently to give the two sides a chance to come to a “potential resolution.”

The American Fork police responded to the original coverage with one of the most bizarre videos I’ve ever seen: a 26-minute production featuring the police chief standing in what appears to be a white void, doing a weird ASMR defense of his police force. Later on the bodycam footage from the American Fork Police Department leaked, which poked massive holes in the AFPD’s claims.

Independent journalist Daniel Sroka then sat down with that same police chief, Cameron Paul, and American Fork Mayor Brad Frost in August, and then with Paul alone again in September. Sroka recorded both meetings, and got Paul to admit that he made mistakes in what he said in that video. But he also seems to have admitted to a lot of unconstitutional mistakes made by the police force he oversees.

All of that has now resulted in four of Ben’s colleagues (but not Ben himself) suing American Fork and 13 of its police officers in federal court for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The full 52-page complaint is worth reading (though, bizarrely, I’ve seen six separate news articles on this lawsuit and not a single one includes the complaint!).

In short, it seems quite clear that (as many people suspected upfront) the AFPD cut all kinds of corners, abused their powers, and violated the rights of a group of young adults in the false belief that the local residents (connected to BAM) must be correct, and the “kids” were causing trouble. There seemed to be a pervasive belief among the AFPD that they could effectively scare the young people straight by detaining and threatening them, which is not how policing is supposed to work.

From the complaint:

Plaintiffs were helping an investigative journalist and YouTuber, Benjamin Schneider, document and pursue a civil dispute over an Oregon family’s LEGO collection. Plaintiffs tried to serve court papers, drove a car, filmed, raised money on GoFundMe, and hung a sign on a neighbor’s fence with the neighbor’s permission. That is lawful, constitutionally protected activity.

In response, AFPD officers stopped Plaintiff Tyler Shaw for a stop-sign violation that AFPD’s own Chief of Police now admits never happened; held Mr. Shaw for roughly two hours, ran him through field sobriety tests, and brought a drug dog to his car after he blew a .000 on a breath test, while the officer in charge, explained: “I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go”; ripped Plaintiff Sheldon Norcross’s phone from his hand and arrested him because, in the officer’s own words, Mr. Norcross invoked his right to remain silent; and then obtained a search warrant for “stolen . . . Lego merchandise” on a sworn affidavit that the Chief now calls “one of the biggest places where we screwed up,” and used it to storm a basement rental with guns drawn including a rifle, handcuff every occupant—including a 16-year-old—and haul them all to the police station.

The Chief of Police, Cameron Paul, initially defended all of this in a 26-minute YouTube video. After an outside review, he conceded in a recorded meeting that “we didn’t do this perfectly,” that “several issues . . . weren’t handled well, or were handled outside of policy,” that “it was clearly not a stop sign violation,” that the reasons written for seizing Mr. Norcross’s phone “would not be a justification for seizing the phone,” that “[t]his didn’t really have anything to do with Legos. We weren’t going in to look for Legos. We didn’t even search the residence for Legos,” that the affidavit “did not get reviewed by a supervisor” despite “a clear directive and policy” requiring it, and that what the officers “would have needed to have . . . is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals.”

Those admissions confirm what the body-worn camera footage, dash camera footage, and AFPD’s own reports show: the individual Defendants violated Plaintiffs’ clearly established First and Fourth Amendment rights, and they did so because the City of American Fork staffed its patrol division with inexperienced officers, failed to train them on the constitutional limits that govern traffic stops, phone seizures, warrant affidavits, and warrant execution, and failed to enforce even the safeguards its own written policies require.

I guess kudos to police chief Paul for effectively admitting to much of this in the interviews with Sroka. That certainly makes life easier for those whose rights were violated by the AFPD.

The details Paul admitted to are pretty damning. On AFPD pulling over Shaw’s vehicle (with Schneider as a passenger):

Officer Richardson then stopped Mr. Shaw’s car, claiming he “observed the vehicle fail to stop before the stop line at a stop sign, as well as failure to come to a complete stop.”

That was false. Mr. Shaw stopped properly at the stop sign. There was no traffic violation and no other lawful basis to stop the car.

AFPD’s Chief of Police agrees. After reviewing the footage, Chief Paul stated of Officer Richardson: “I understand that he thought he knew what the statute said, but he didn’t”; “It’s hard to justify any type of a stop sign violation here”; “I do not believe there was a stop sign violation”; and “he clearly misremembered, and it was clearly not a stop sign violation.” Chief Paul further stated that AFPD has “since gone over the statute with him.”

Chief Paul contends that Officer Richardson had reasonable suspicion for some other reason, which Plaintiffs deny, but he acknowledged that Officer Richardson “should have based his stop on that reasonable suspicion to begin with and not try to have drummed up some kind of other offense.” The only basis Officer Richardson ever gave for the stop was a traffic violation that did not occur

Also, I hadn’t realized from the videos that police stopped Shaw a second time, the very next day. That’s the stop where they held him for two hours, and where the bodycam caught officers admitting they wanted to scare him. Knowing these were two separate stops on consecutive days makes it look even more like deliberate intimidation.

On the evening of March 9, 2026, Mr. Shaw was again driving his car with Mr. Schneider as a passenger. Mr. Shaw stopped to pick up an acquaintance, Christian Morgan, who had been dropped off near Mr. Johnson’s residence.

Officer Hawkins had just told Mr. Morgan he was “trespassed” from Mr. Johnson’s property. Mr. Morgan had left the property as instructed. Officer Hawkins then saw Mr. Morgan “attempt to get into” Mr. Shaw’s car, activated his emergency lights, and stopped Mr. Shaw’s car.

Officer Hawkins did not tell Mr. Shaw why he was stopped, there being no lawful reason for the stop. Walking toward a car after leaving a property when told to leave is not a crime, and Mr. Shaw had committed no traffic violation.

Officer Hawkins opened by demanding: “I’ll ask again because I wasn’t born yesterday. Why are we harassing people?”

Instead of addressing any traffic matter, Officer Hawkins accused Mr. Shaw and Mr. Schneider of “harass[ing]” Mr. Johnson. He then had Officer Fraughton look at Mr. Shaw’s eyes, and the two officers claimed that Mr. Shaw’s eyes “were glossy and seemed to have a red layer of tint in them.”

That claim was false, and the officers knew it was false. Officer Hawkins’ in-car camera recorded him explaining the stop to another officer in his patrol car before the sobriety tests began. He said he had stopped the car because “I watch them try to get in this car,” and that “[t]he main reason was I smelled alcohol on the other guy’s breath. So I was hoping he just got caught.” Asked whether “these guys” were good “to drive,” the answer recorded was: “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t see anything clear as day with Tyler that I noticed.”

Officer Hawkins then described his plan in his own words: “I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go.” When the other officer asked, “do we have . . . charges or are we just tired of them being annoying?”, Officer Hawkins answered that he would “try to link it to” Mr. Schneider: “So if I can get Ben to say, yeah, well, I did tell him to go over there and do that, then I have harassment charges on [him]. . . . I don’t care that much, it’s more of just the fact that they’re trying to be sneaky.” He added, “we don’t really have a harassment code in Utah.”

Officer Hawkins therefore knew, before he ever removed Mr. Shaw from the car, that he had no reasonable suspicion that Mr. Shaw was impaired or had committed any crime. He prolonged the stop anyway: to “scare him a little bit,” and to try to build a case against Mr. Schneider.

Scaring someone is not a lawful basis to stop him or to prolong a stop.

There’s also this:

Officer Hawkins’ report on the sobriety tests twice refers to the subject of the testing as “Johnny,” a person who was not present, indicating that the narrative was likely copied from another report rather than written from what Officer Hawkins observed of Mr. Shaw.

Yeah, apparently the AFPD officers who held Shaw and Schneider for hours had so little evidence that they copy and pasted the report on the field sobriety test of someone totally different.

Again, the Sroka interview gets AFPD’s chief to admit that the two hours of detention on zero basis is, as you probably already know, not actually allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged each of the governing rules the officers ignored: “I can’t prolong a stop just for a canine sniff unless I have something more”; “We can’t extend the time of a stop beyond what we would normally spend just to be able to deploy a dog”; and, as to the officers’ claim that a different person smelled of alcohol, “it wouldn’t give articulable suspicion . . . . It’s got to be individualized just because someone else has the odor of an alcoholic beverage on their breath [it] doesn’t justify it.”

Chief Paul’s attempted defense — that the sniff “was done . . . at the same time they were doing field sobriety tests” — is contradicted by Officer Hawkins’ own report, which shows that the dog was summoned only after the tests were finished and Mr. Shaw had blown .000.

When shown AFPD’s written canine policy, Chief Paul did not dispute that it contains no statement that a stop may not be extended for a canine sniff absent independent reasonable suspicion, responding that “[w]e clearly don’t have every single piece of . . . precedent in department policy.” He has also defended “scar[ing]” citizens as an accepted AFPD practice: “There are times we will do that where we’ll go out and we’ll help somebody understand the gravity of the situation and make it appear very serious to them or as serious as it is. And then we will use our discretion and cut them loose.”

Then there’s the story of Sierra Lauts, the woman Schneider had asked to be the process server for his attempted lawsuit against one of the guys who took over the franchise, Josh Johnson. As shown in Ben’s original video, she was seated in a car waiting outside of Johnson’s property for him to leave the house. She never entered his property. And the police took the papers from her, showed them to Johnson but did not complete the service, saying he refused them (which is not how any of this works). And then they “trespassed” Lauts, which is kinda crazy given that she was never on Johnson’s property.

Officers Sumbot and Somerville, among others, arrived, approached Ms. Lauts’s car, demanded her identification and address, and questioned her about why she was there and whether she was a “legal” process server. Ms. Lauts answered truthfully and provided her driver’s license. She was not free to leave. Officer Somerville stayed posted at the car, explaining: “We just try to have at least one officer to kind of stick around with every group,” because “you never know when people are going to try and . . . take off.” He was present when the occupants were told that Mr. Johnson “wanted you trespassed.”

Mr. Johnson told the officers the court papers were fake and that Ms. Lauts was a fake process server, and he asked that she be arrested for “impersonating a process server.” Officer Sumbot then called the Marion County Circuit Court, which confirmed that the case was real, that it had been filed, and that Mr. Johnson still needed to be served.

Even with the court’s confirmation in hand, the officers continued to treat lawful service of process as criminal conduct. Officer Sumbot carried the papers to Mr. Johnson’s door but did not deliver them, and Mr. Johnson was allowed to refuse them.

The officers then discussed among themselves, on camera, whether to have Ms. Lauts “trespassed” from a property she had never entered: “I’m just gonna see if he wants the girl trespassed.” An officer then asked Mr. Johnson, “So what do you want done today, do you want her trespassed?” Mr. Johnson replied: “no, I want them for stalking.”

Officer Sumbot then told Ms. Lauts that Mr. Johnson “wanted her trespassed from the property and not to return,” and Ms. Lauts was formally trespassed even though she remained in her car on a public street the entire time

This section concludes with the understatement of the year:

Chief Paul has since conceded that “even between officers, there’s some confusion on what can be done? What can’t be done? What needs to be done? What should be done?” when it comes to civil process, and that “it’s pretty apparent that we need to make sure we’re doing some additional training.”

Ya think?

Then there’s the seizing of Sheldon Norcross’s phone, which is also covered in detail in Schneider’s video. The complaint explains how ridiculous that all was, with the cops literally making up reasons on the spot for why they could seize the phone, claiming they could just take it because Norcross initially told them he wouldn’t give them the phone (again, not how any of this works). The different officers who arrested Norcross also gave different — and conflicting! — reports on what happened. Again, the Chief admitted to the journalist that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work:

Chief Paul has conceded that the stated basis for the seizure was invalid: “destroying evidence is different than a locked phone, right? . . . So, if we’re destroying evidence, that’s very different than someone locking his phone.” He added that he had “heard Lieutenant Adamson’s explanation. It differs from what’s in his report, but what’s written in his report would not be a justification for seizing the phone.”

And then, later:

Officer Richardson transported Mr. Norcross, in handcuffs, to the AFPD station. Although he had been told “you are under arrest,” officers at the station called it a “detention.” Chief Paul has since acknowledged that “to detain and transport really it does turn into a de facto arrest. There’s very limited circumstances where it can remain a detention,” and he does not “believe that necessarily applied in our instance.”

Then we finally get to the crazy SWAT team raid. As was suspected, the warrant they obtained to raid the house was bullshit:

At 5:11 p.m., Officer Richardson — a POST-certified officer of roughly one year’s experience — swore out an affidavit for a warrant to search the basement apartment, Mr. Schneider’s person, and the Chevy Malibu. The only “property or evidence” the affidavit identified was “Any stolen merchandise, specifically Lego merchandise.”

To supply probable cause that stolen LEGO merchandise would be found inside, Officer Richardson swore: “The homeowner also disclosed that he could hear multiple individuals inside the residence speaking about possible stolen Lego toys that they had taken. The officer would like to search for said items.”

That statement was false. No one inside the residence discussed “stolen Lego toys that they had taken.” Whatever the homeowner may actually have said about LEGO — and there is no recording, because no officer recorded the conversation — the affidavit converted it into what amounted to an overheard confession that the occupants possessed LEGO “that they had taken.” No one inside had taken any LEGO toys. The phrase “they had taken” appears in no recording. The statement was either fabricated or recklessly embellished, and Officer Richardson knew, or recklessly disregarded, that it was false.

Officer Richardson and Lieutenant Adamson also knew facts that made the statement implausible on its face and that the affidavit omitted: that AFPD had known for days that the dispute concerned a LEGO collection in Oregon that Mr. Schneider was trying to recover through the Oregon courts, not LEGO in Mr. Schneider’s possession; that, upon information and belief, AFPD had never received any report of LEGO stolen in Utah by anyone in the residence; and that the conversation with the homeowner was not recorded.

The affidavit contained other false or misleading statements, including that the March 11 sign incident occurred on “March 3rd of 2026”; that Mr. Schneider was “arranging various amounts of individuals to go to the victim’s residence and enter his property,” when none of the Plaintiffs had entered Mr. Johnson’s property; and that the sign was “defaming.” It omitted that the owner of the fence had given permission for the sign, that Officer Richardson himself had confirmed that permission, and that Officer Richardson had already concluded that the people with Mr. Norcross had no “malicious intent.”

And then this part, which seems pretty important:

The affidavit established no probable cause to believe that any of the occupants other than Mr. Schneider had committed any crime, and it sought no authority to arrest, detain, or search anyone other than Mr. Schneider.

The lawsuit notes that a magistrate judge signed the warrant, saying that cops could search for stolen Lego merchandise (which again, the cops knew was nonsense). And, now the police chief (who originally defended these events) admits it was all a big fuck up:

Chief Paul has admitted the affidavit was a failure: “I will say that the search warrant affidavit presents one of the biggest places where we screwed up.” He continued: “This didn’t really have anything to do with Legos. We weren’t going in to look for Legos. We didn’t even search the residence for Legos.” And: “in my opinion, we should have never even put Legos in this affidavit.”

Chief Paul has also admitted that AFPD’s written safeguard failed: “a new officer wrote this affidavit. We have a clear directive and policy that search warrant affidavits have to be reviewed by a supervisor in our department, and in this case . . . [t]his did not get reviewed by a supervisor.” He summarized: “Basically what I’m getting at is we failed here.”

Um. Considering the supposedly stolen Legos (which the police already knew Schneider was looking to recover, not steal) were the entirety of the argument for the warrant, to now say that they shouldn’t have even mentioned them is a huge fucking deal.

The warrant only gave the cops permission to search for Legos, which they have now admitted they did not do. But the complaint also details that the cops laid out a plan before the raid to arrest everyone in the house, even though it was a search warrant, not an arrest warrant.

Officer Richardson prepared an operations plan for serving the warrant. By his own account, the plan was “to open the door which was presumed unlocked, and call out any present individuals one at a time, and take them into custody.” The plan thus called for taking into custody every person inside, whoever they were, before any officer knew who was there.

There’s also the issue that they burst into the house with guns drawn with no announcement:

The officers did not knock. They did not announce their authority and purpose and wait for the occupants to respond. Officer Richardson’s report claims that “[o]fficers announced ‘Police Search Warrant,’” but no announcement was made and no time was allowed for the occupants to respond before officers were in the doorway ordering them out at gunpoint. They opened the door and entered. Officer Richardson’s own body-worn camera records the team’s cue — “You ready? On you.” — followed immediately by “Everybody step out. Stand up and come outside. Right now. Let’s go. Step outside. Step outside, everybody.” The footage of the entry itself has been blacked out in the released versions of Officer Richardson’s and Officer Laycock’s footage.

Chief Paul has conceded the point: “even if the door’s propped open you, you still announce, right? . . . Just because the door’s open does not allow you on a knock-and-announce warrant to just enter the premises. Like, there’s no debating that. So, yes, that’s an issue I’ve identified as well.”

The whole thing is not how any of this is supposed to work:

Officer Richardson “held lethal coverage with [his] Patrol rifle” — that is, he pointed a rifle at the occupants — while Officer Tonga called them out one at a time and handcuffed them. Other members of the entry team likewise had firearms drawn and directed at the occupants

None of the occupants was armed. None was suspected of a violent crime. AFPD’s own Transparency Entry reports that no one other than officers brandished a weapon. Officer Richardson admitted that “[d]ue to NLETS not working, a criminal history of Benjamin Schneider was not conducted.” There was no information suggesting anyone inside posed a threat.

Ms. Lauts, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Allen complied with every command. Each was nevertheless handcuffed, searched, and held at gunpoint and in handcuffs outside the residence. So was the 16-year-old.

And the precious, made up “stolen Legos” that the police used to get the warrant which only gave them the authority to search for those non-existent Legos?

Officers did not even search the apartment for LEGO merchandise. They spent only a few minutes inside, opened a single closet, and opened no cupboards. The return Officer Richardson swore to the next morning states: “Benjamin Schneider was arrested. No items siezed.”

Oh, but there was one other thing they were careful about while inside the house. Making sure they weren’t being recorded:

Before entering, officers discussed the occupants’ cameras. On entry, an officer turned a GoPro camera that was recording on a desk face down, and Lieutenant Adamson grabbed and twisted Mr. Schneider’s arm when he attempted to record with his phone and stopped the recording.

Then, after they arrested all of these people on zero basis, zero probable cause, zero anything, they held them for over two hours. Once again, Chief Paul told the reporter that’s not allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged that this was unlawful: “[W]e don’t have a categorical authority to just put . . . everyone in hand[cuffs] because of the scene of a search warrant”; “that detention mixed with transport . . . in almost every case . . . is going to turn into an arrest”; and “[w]hat these officers would have needed to have, I mean, just speaking frankly, is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals.”

The plaintiffs (in various combinations) claim that their First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated multiple times in multiple ways throughout all of this. Suing the police for violating your rights is generally pretty difficult (unfortunately). But it gets a lot easier when you have the bodycam footage, the dashcam footage, the officers’ own reports, and the Police Chief on tape repeatedly admitting to the very unlawful behavior you’re suing over.

So this whole mess started because a group of young adults were trying to help someone else get back Lego sets that BAM held onto (and which, many months later, BAM finally returned only some of). While their actions may have been a bit awkward and goofy, the basic details were easily available to the AFPD. Instead, AFPD’s response was to — largely because of questionable claims from people connected to BAM — stop the participants with made-up traffic violations, detain them illegally for hours, seize phones on no basis, raid the home they were staying in on false pretenses, hold them at gunpoint, and drag them all to the police station. The Chief now admits that much of this was clearly wrong.

The reality seems to be what one of the AFPD cops said early on: the cops decided to abuse their power (including their guns and ability to obtain search warrants) to “scare him a little bit.” Right now, it kinda seems that the people who should be scared of the legal liability they have created for themselves are the AFPD officers who created all this legal liability for themselves by trampling the constitutional rights of the people they’re supposed to serve.

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If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn’t be cops. By that I mean that there’s little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don’t have that, this is the sort of thing that happens.

Canadian YouTuber Anthony Sistilli cobbled together a very rudimentary approximation of Flock’s ALPR tech, using off-the-shelf hardware and his personal laptop. A pinch of AI was added to the mix to “train” the camera to focus on probable cop cars, rather than every car that passed by.

He uploaded a couple of shorts to YouTube briefly explaining what he was using and what he was attempting to do. (Here and here.) The recordings honestly explained the limitations of the tech Sistilli was using, while still demonstrating that it did work, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the local PD (the Peel Regional Police of Ontario, Canada) decided this simply could not pass without comment. And that would be the sort of “comment” that involved officers arriving at Sistilli’s house in the apparent hopes of intimidating him into abandoning this project.

After Sistilli produced two short-form videos about his project for his 140,000 subscribers, officers from the Peel Regional Police in Ontario showed up at his home on Sept. 20. Sistilli said the visit lasted roughly 30 minutes, with officers focusing on his intentions and whether he planned to build a map tracking police movements.

“Their concern was that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help people committing crimes,” Sistilli said. “They also made the case that their own cameras and ALPR technology weren’t as concerning as I was suggesting. My impression was that they weren’t familiar with many of the controversies or examples of misuse in the United States.”

This interaction was also posted to Sistilli’s channel. The entire conversation — which should really be considered a professional embarrassment for Peel Regional Police — can be viewed below (albeit interspersed with commentary and interviews):

While it’s true that Canada as a whole hasn’t experienced the perpetual abuse of ALPR cameras by law enforcement officers that we have in the US, that doesn’t excuse the officers’ inability (or refusal) to recognize the irony attendant in claiming persistent surveillance “puts officers at risk” while obtusely refusing to recognize that it creates the same risks for citizens. In fact, the risk posed to citizens is inherently more dangerous than the risk posed to officers due to the imbalance of power.

When a cop misuses cameras, they do so from behind a web of opacity with almost zero accountability. When a single person aims cameras at cop cars — one that can’t handle 24/7 surveillance and operates (very clunkily) only when physically manipulated by the camera operator — there’s nothing approaching the round-the-clock from all over the city surveillance cops insist keep us safer, but somehow would be harmful if the ALPRs decided to focus on cop cars instead.

Sistilli’s experiment (and unwanted interaction with police officers) makes a good point. And because it’s a good point, it was almost entirely lost on the officers who decided this somehow posed a risk to them.

“I never intended to create a giant network mapping every police officer, and I still don’t,” Sistilli told Straight Arrow. “I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point. Sometimes it’s easier to show people what this kind of surveillance means by turning it around than by simply explaining what companies like Flock are doing.”

Even if the cops are unable (or simply unwilling) to comprehend this point, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve watched these videos certainly do. Cops need to learn they can’t simply “because we said so” their way through interactions like these — ones they initiate but immediately make clear they’re not actually interested in an honest conversation.

Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse’s rough last few weeks), it didn’t go well.

Mac soon found that Grok not only posted his financial information and bank balances to his company’s Slack channel, the Grok Bot leaked the information while posing as Mac. Mac quickly headed over to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website to share his recent learning experience:

Grok Bot agents are designed to “sign in and work across apps, tools, and websites, including platforms with no clean API or MCP, and come back with the work finished,” according to SpaceXAI.

In Mac’s case, he states the Grok Bot he used to oversee his finances was read-only and didn’t have access to Slack, but another Grok Bot he was using did — so the software “collaborated” to “help.” Mac didn’t understand that other Grok Bots on the same machine have different permissions. Grok Bot didn’t “understand” that it wasn’t being very helpful.

This is, so we’re clear, not software gaining sentence and “going rogue.” This is software that isn’t ready for prime time, hasn’t been fully cooked, and is operating in a country that’s too corrupt to pass meaningful modern privacy laws or to regulate data brokers. Combined with people rushing to integrate the technology into sensitive accounts without really understanding how it works (or the interactions not being made clear by the company itself due to bad instructions or no transparency).

Keep in mind this is a tech CEO and software developer. You can probably imagine how many ordinary people won’t really understand what they’re signing up for — especially in the way that similar products from Meta (Muse) and OpenAI (Dots) are designed to appear harmlessly cute — and in the way that most major tech companies are overstating these chatbots’ level of fit, finish, and “awareness.”

Elon Musk had previously stated that the company would compensate people who suffer financial losses due to Grok Bot, but there’s no real reason to believe that’s actually true:

The dramatic expansion of tech industry access to sensitive systems and accounts in a surveillance-profit-obsessed country without meaningful corporate oversight, privacy standards, or operational consumer protection regulators (thanks in large part to the same companies selling you AI assistants) is going to cause no limit of chaos and headaches in 2027 and beyond.

This particular orchestra of dysfunction is just getting warmed up, and neither the tech industry nor the federal government will be there to help people who can’t afford to make these kinds of mistakes.