This Week in 2016

• Warner Bros. Issuing Takedowns For Its Own Site Is No Laughing Matter
• Roger Ailes Hires Peter Thiel’s Favorite Lawyer To Threaten NY Mag For Its Stories About Him
• ICE Denies FOIA Request From Lawyer Because It Might Help Her Better Defend Her Client
• After Massive Cable Industry Lobbying And Disinformation Effort, The FCC Is Forced To Weaken Its Cable Box Reform Plan
• Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement
• The Copyright Office Acts As Hollywood’s Lobbying Arm… Because That’s Basically How It’s Been Designed

This Week in 2011

• MPAA’s Bogus ‘Piracy’ Numbers Mean It Thinks Downloaders Would Buy 200 More DVDs Per Year
• How Sweden Dismantled Many Of Its Online Civil Rights At The Orders Of US Content Industries
• Europe’s Copyright Strategy: Have Europeans Send As Much Money As Possible To US Companies
• Puerto 80 Responds Forcefully To DOJ’s Claims Concerning Domain Seizures
• Sarkozy Routes Around Parliament, Ditches Net Neutrality, Forces Copyright Clauses Into All ISP Terms Of Service
• EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright

This Week in 2006

• Surveillance Gets Smarter
• Is It The Job Of HP’s Chairperson To Spy On Other Board Members?
• Judge Sees Through Federal Face-Saving Attempt, Tosses Out Phone Unlocking Charges
• HP Board Spying Not Just Limited To HP Board Members
• Bertlesmann’s Napster Settlement Could Make Things Difficult For Investors
• There’s A Good Reason Why Online Sites Shouldn’t Be Liable For The Actions Of Its Users

There’s enshittification, and then there’s enshittification. Allow me to give you an example of each. For what we’ll call enshittification classic, there’s Xbox’s Game Pass service. A mere two years ago, Microsoft made all kinds of changes to Game Pass to coincide with a serious slowdown of subscriber adoption. Those changes included doing away with previous service tiers, introducing new tiers that came in at higher prices, the removal of day-1 access to first party titles for some of the tiers and some hardware even at those higher prices. So, Microsoft shifted the offering for Game Pass in a way that made it cost significantly more, while providing less value.

But for the next tier of enshittification, there’s… Xbox’s Game Pass service. If you thought the devaluing of the service the last go around was shitty, wait until you get a load of Microsoft’s plan to slap an hours limit for its cloud gaming onto those same subscriptions.

Microsoft has announced big changes to Xbox cloud gaming, including a switch to monthly hour limits. From November, Game Pass plans will include a set number of cloud gaming hours each month:

• Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential: 5 hours

Now, if confronted, Microsoft has a couple of things to say about all of this and why you shouldn’t worry about it. First, anyone that exhausts their subscription hours can, you guessed it, simply buy more. Want to engage in as much cloud gaming as you did before? No problem! Fork over even more money than the already raised tier prices and you can go right ahead.

Second, and this is where I’ll engage in some blatant speculation, Microsoft said these changes will barely effect anyone at all.

The change means those who use cloud gaming most via Game Pass will end up having to pay more, although Microsoft said this impacts 4% of Game Pass subscribers.

See? It’s only 4% of subscribers that will run out of these tiered hours. Where does my speculation come in? Oh, simple: I think Microsoft is full of shit on that number. What informs that speculation? Oh, simple: Microsoft also says more people are engaging in cloud gaming and playing it for longer periods of time.

In a blog post, Microsoft said it was making the changes because the cost of providing cloud gaming has grown as more people use it and play for longer. The monthly limits, Microsoft continued, will mean it can invest in reliability and performance.

So, to summarize, Microsoft had to put in these hours limits because more and more people are gaming in the cloud for longer and longer amounts of time… but those limits are no big deal because very few people game long enough to exhaust those hours? I’m no mathematician, but I don’t think those two statements can exist in the same reality.

What’s really driving all of this is a combination of the predictable enshittification process tech offerings like this tend to travel down and the explosion in cost of the hardware needed to run the backend of it all, thanks to the adoption of A.I. platforms. And, hey, those rising additional costs to Microsoft are very real.

But so is the reduction in value of Game Pass as a result of all of this. Cloud gaming is likely the future of gaming. But I’m no longer sure Game Pass is going to be a player in that future.

Whatever wasn’t already going poorly for Flock Safety is just going to keep getting worse. Data collected by privacy activist group Secure Justice pointed out what Flock already knows: it’s losing customers at an unprecedented rate. More than 214 cities and counties have dropped Flock since 2021. More than 90 of those have done that in the last month alone.

It’s not just the persistent surveillance angle working against Flock. While Flock insists its cameras increase public safety, there’s no data out there that supports those claims. The bigger problem is how easily its tech can be abused. Flock allows officers to search a nationwide network of cameras — one that collects 20 billion plate reads a month — while providing very little in terms of restrictions.

In the last month, Flock has attempted to respond to persistent criticism of its tech. It will now limit retention periods and install some mandatory reporting features, most of which are being put in place to prevent cops from committing crimes. That’s how bad it’s gotten. Cops have dragged Flock into their ex-stalking gutter for years and only now is Flock attempting to distance itself from the miscreants it has enabled.

While it must be noted there are several competitors absolutely loling at Flock’s misfortune and slurping up tax dollars to deliver taxpayers more of the stuff they thought they had voted down, the upside of all of this is that Flock has now realized it can’t do business the way it always has.

What’s even more surprising about this backlash is that even cops are turning against it. And it’s not just cops. It’s the people running some of the most MAGA, pro-cop states in the US.

Welcome to the resistance, Ron DeSantis:

Florida has banned local police from placing cameras that read license plates on its state highways in response to growing divisions over law enforcement’s use of technology ​supplied by Flock Safety and others to track vehicles in many parts of ‌the U.S.

Florida’s Department of Transportation said it would revoke previous permits for the cameras and no longer issue new permits within its jurisdiction.

[…]

The memo ⁠followed remarks from Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who last week said the use of ​automated license plate readers has “gotten out of control.”

The caveats are plainly apparent. This only affects state-level cameras, allowing towns and counties to decide whether or not they want to subject their residents to surveillance and stalking. As long as the locals keep their cameras on local streets, the ban does not apply.

But it’s something. And it’s far more than we might have expected from a state where every cop is sacred and every person who doesn’t like the current management an antifa.

The same thing can be said for Texas, which has also delivered its own quasi-ban of Flock products. This one may have less to do with Flock’s enabling of officer-involved crime and more to do with the governor getting caught out by his own appointees’ misuse of public funds:

Abbott’s order blocking state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras came Aug. 27, amid the Tribune’s inquiries about a small state agency tapping at least $30 million from a fund dedicated to catalytic converter theft to help pay for at least 3,200 Flock cameras for law enforcement agencies across the state. Six of the seven board members of the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority are appointed by Abbott.

Caveats all over, starting with the fact that there’s nothing retroactive about this “ban.” Flock cameras obtained with misappropriated funds will apparently still be allowed to operate. This only prevents the CPA from misusing more public funds to buy more Flock cameras.

That obviously means cities and counties can still do whatever they want when it comes to Flock products. And the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is making it clear the governor’s memo doesn’t change a damn thing:

Asked if Abbott’s directive affected the state police force’s camera network, a DPS spokesperson said it will pause installing additional cameras. But a spokesperson said the agency will continue using existing cameras for a variety of “legitimate public safety efforts.”

That’s a bit much to take when the root cause of the quasi-ban was the misuse of funds that were supposed to be used to address a specific “public safety effort.” The fact that more than 206 Texas law enforcement agencies have access to DPS cameras is similarly concerning, considering (by its own admission) DPS has done nothing whatsoever to limit access, much less track abuse of its database.

Still, it’s notable that these two states are doing anything at all to address public concerns about law enforcement misuse of surveillance tech. That’s never seemed to bother them before as neither has shown any resistance to giving federal officers unauthorized access to hunt down migrants or utilizing the surveillance network to do things like track people who are seeking abortions.

These aren’t wins. And the “bans” are so limited you can’t even call them “ties.” But it’s more than we had before Flock repeatedly shot itself in the proverbial foot. Hopefully, this is just the beginning, rather than a “will this do” act of lazy performance that refuses to address real, ongoing problems in favor of “looking busy” for a week or two until the next news cycle rolls through.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• Australians will be able to switch off social media algorithms under planned legislation (BBC News)
• Australia’s social media ban has an enforcement problem. These new laws aim to fix it (The Conversation)
• The Netherlands forced Meta to let users ditch algorithmic feeds. Here’s what happened (The Conversation)
• What We Know About Prosocial Feed-Ranking Algorithms (Prosocial Design Network)
• Anthropic researcher quits over AI labs ‘gambling with our lives’ (Financial Times)
• AI Agents Are Not Going “Rogue,” But Recent Developments Lead Increasingly-Concerned Researchers To Call For AI Slow Down (Techdirt)
• “We will not be silenced”: Imran Ahmed responds to court ruling (Center for Countering Digital Hate)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• USA: Terrorism designation has global consequences for open internet and free expression (Article 19)
• Rubio Uses Terrorism Law To Ban Secure Email Service (Reason)

Our fun links this week include the multi-view website browser and the internet roadtrip. 

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from this week’s episode!

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

As we move closer to mid-term elections, the Trump administration continues to lie about election integrity, sowing the seeds for bullshit “rigged election” claims should the GOP fail to win the elections Trump wants them to win.

There’s another reason this administration lies constantly about elections, voters, and anything related to it: Trump still thinks he won the 2020 election and won’t take facts for an answer. That’s why there have been so many efforts to re-litigate the 2020 election results by Trump and his party members. And this is something that continues despite this supposedly rigged system somehow managing to deliver an election win for Trump in 2024.

It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone believes Trump or his enablers. All that matters is that Trump believes it. And if he does then a whole lot of his voting base will be willing to do anything from raid the Capitol building in DC to ask ICE to engage in voter suppression this November.

Trump is leveraging the bigotry he’s stoked with his anti-migrant efforts and the billions his budget bill has added to the DHS’s bottom line to make the case (without any facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of non-citizens voting in every election.

So far, the administration has yet to demonstrate that the number of non-citizen voters is enough to be concerned about at all, much less evidence of a deliberately broken system the libs are using to keep the GOP out of office.

When facts aren’t conducive to the preferred narrative, the narrative takes the lead. That’s how things started in Nevada, when the DHS claimed thousands of illegal voters recently participated in elections. Here’s the current DHS boss making outlandish claims on X, which is where this government does most of its social media business:

Of that 250,000 total, Mullin and the DHS claimed more than 190,000 were detected in California. Nevada’s total came in as nearly 16,000 illegal voters, according to the DHS. Things have drastically changed in the last month, as NPR reports, based on public records it has obtained, including a recent video conference involving both DHS and Nevada state officials.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was “the ceiling” and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. 

Holy shit. That’s a false positive rate that puts Flock to shame. That means the DHS is about 99% wrong when it comes to “illegal” voters.

But even after admitting it could possibly only pinpoint 185 of the alleged 16,000 non-citizen voters, the DHS continues to pretend it will somehow get a lot closer to 16k than it is to zero at this point.

Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that “need additional review,” and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were “higher confidence” matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Read that through carefully. Not only is the DHS continuing to pretend it still needs to re-review 14,000 voters and claiming it may have located another 6,000 voters of dubious citizenship, it won’t even provide Nevada with information pertaining to the 185 voters it insists have actually voted illegally.

And there’s a good chance the DHS will never turn over any information to any of the states it has accused of permitting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of non-citizens to vote. Doing so would mean undoing Trump’s narrative, so the DHS will maintain the upper hand by regularly “citing” its made-up number (250,000+ “illegal” voters) while stiff-arming, sand-bagging, and stonewalling any requests for data that might support these obvious lies.

What makes this even stupider, more corrupt, and more dangerous is that even if the DHS is right (it fucking isn’t) that there are 16,000 non-citizens casting votes in Nevada (and — in addition — only casting votes for Democrats), it still wouldn’t make up the difference in Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in that state. He lost that state by more than 35,000 votes in 2020, which means he still would have lost, even if every non-citizen had voted for Joe Biden.

What makes it even stupider is that Nevada flipped in 2024, giving Trump a win by 46,000 votes. Even if we assume — using the same bad faith arguments as Trump uses — that every “illegal” vote was cast against Trump, he still would have won by 30,000 votes.

This bitter husk of man still wants the entire nation to join him in his psychosis and firmly believe, with their entire American hearts, that the 2020 election was rigged, but the two elections he won were fair and square.

What follows from here will just be voter suppression in whatever form this administration thinks it can get away with. By pretending nearly 250,000 illegal voters are on the nation’s rolls, Trump can start prepping ICE deployments to “blue” states — something that’s going to be a lot easier to do since they’ve already been flooded with federal officers and National Guard units.

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Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had happened in New York and to turn on the TV. She said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center, and I assumed it was a small Cessna or something that went horribly off-course. It was only once I turned on the TV news (and started searching the internet) that I began to comprehend what was happening.

I’m guessing there aren’t many Techdirt readers from back then still reading today, but after a few hours of staring blankly at the TV — scared by what had happened and already uneasy about what the world would do in response — I put up a post saying that I had nothing else to say and wouldn’t be posting (other than to link to some resources). The next day, I was already expressing concern about how the world would respond, and calling out the people rushing to play the blame game. I pointed to a quote from a New Yorker saying “we aren’t in a state of war, we’re in a state of mourning.” But it wasn’t difficult to see where things were heading. Late that night I warned (in a poorly written, rambling post) about how people blindly reacting via ignorance was going to lead to bad outcomes, and how mass surveillance of the internet was likely coming.

A few days later, I pointed to a satirical piece on a now defunct website, entitled: “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics,” which can be found here in the Internet Archive. It does a great job of showing how basically everyone saw the attack as a chance to push forward their own existing political views:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.

That satirical take turned out to have been pretty prescient, right? The politics that won out almost immediately was the pure politics of fear from power-hungry politicians, many of whom squeezed 9/11 for every political desire they had already wished for regarding surveillance, control, and expanded governmental powers. They had plans ready to go in a drawer, and pointed to 9/11 as the reason they had to be enacted. And quick. And much of that is still with us, leading to a much greater cynicism and distrust in government.

That alone helped the grievance politics of MAGA succeed — though, as I’ll get to below, the Mamdani administration in NYC is demonstrating something that’s been sorely lacking for years: a politics that doesn’t need you to be afraid of anything and is built on real love for the place and its inhabitants.

Still, it was obvious from the day it happened that the attacks were going to set in motion a bunch of horrible ideas from the political class. The always thoughtful Radley Balko has a piece in the NY Times looking back at the past 25 years, and noting that almost every prediction made by those warning about how the political reaction would erode our civil liberties turned out to be true.

Civil libertarians questioned these new powers’ connection to the 2001 attacks. Some provisions had long been on the wish lists of federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarily for routine law enforcement. They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.

The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, “lone wolves” — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters. With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.

And, as he notes, we’ve arrived at the worst-case scenario: a president handed every one of those powers by a frightened nation, abusing them at every opportunity. Many of us who warned about the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance apparatus it made possible were dismissed and ignored. When we pushed back on centralized monitor and control points of the internet, the “adults in charge” mocked us as “internet shut-ins.” But, as Balko points out, the internet shut-ins had a point. As he says, “welcome to the worst-case scenario” that lots of us were, in fact, worried about.

The piece is long and thorough, and we’re only scratching the surface here. But Balko draws a straight line from the entirely predictable overreaction of September 2001 to today: the media and the political class sold a narrative of fear, Congress handed over a sweeping set of powers without even the slightest concern for potential risks, and those powers have since curdled into one abuse after another.

If the ratcheting diminishment of our liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush, Obama and Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now. Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.

Mr. Trump has used the president’s post-9/11 “national emergency” loopholes more than any other president. He claimed the country faced an emergency caused by crime to justify sending National Guard troops to Washington, and he used a 1903 law concerning “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” to deploy them to Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles. (He also sent active-duty Marines to Los Angeles.) It was the first time since the civil rights era that a president had sent troops over the objections of a state governor. When Mr. Trump tried to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants to a notoriously inhumane prison in El Salvador, a federal judge asked for information about deportation flights and Mr. Trump invoked the State Secrets Privilege.

Mr. Trump has tried to categorize leftist activists, as well as advocacy and funding groups, as terrorism supporters in an effort to use antiterror tools to shut them down, despite no evidence that those groups have any ties to terrorism. The administration has called Americans protesting against the deployment of militarized ICE officers “domestic terrorists.” It has claimed that activities protected by the First Amendment, including criticizing, naming and recording ICE officers, are acts of terrorism.

Mr. Trump and his team are taking full advantage of the immunity granted by the courts. The administration’s summary executions of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean have been denounced by legal scholars as illegal under both domestic and international law, and as likely crimes against humanity. The strikes have not only continued; the administration celebrates them. Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, according to multiple reports, has openly encouraged immigration officers to use more violence and force more confrontation with protesters while regularly reminding them of their “immunity,” even after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. After Ms. Good’s death the “border czar,” Tom Homan, went on Fox News to warn that “there’s still gonna be more bloodshed” unless ICE critics “shut their mouth,” a threat that’s likely a First Amendment violation in and of itself.

These are the abuses of post-9/11 powers we know about; there are almost certainly more that we don’t. The expanded surveillance authorities have such restrictive rules for disclosure that only a handful of people will know if they are being deployed against Americans. Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutors are going after the kinds of leaks that helped reveal abuses in prior administrations, which means more disclosure today is even less likely. And under Mr. Trump, the intelligence agencies have at times abandoned the post-Watergate practice of telling Congress what secret powers they are using.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s a good reminder of why we’ve spent so much of the last two and a half decades calling out these issues, and warning about further government control and intrusion into platforms and attacks on our privacy. It’s why we were concerned about draconian command-and-control copyright laws fifteen years ago just as much as we’re concerned about age verification laws today.

They’re all tools for control and surveillance, built to shrink what the public can do and expand what the government can get away with. And every single one of them was sold to the American public based on fear.

But there’s an important thing to understand about a ratchet built entirely out of fear: it only turns as long as people stay afraid. Which brings me back around to New York City. This past week there has been an entirely ridiculous and fabricated culture war-driven dispute regarding whether or not NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani should attend NYC’s commemorations of 9/11. There is no fathomable reason for him not to attend other than rank ignorance and bigotry against him for being Muslim.

For all the fuss and fear — much of it driven by a former NYC mayor who spent many years (including while mayor) leading by spreading fear across the city — the whole spectacle is the post-9/11 playbook running one more time, just scaled down: declare an out-group, never quite say that they did wrong, and insist that “they” are inherently opposed to “us.”

But also, Mamdani is running a fundamentally different kind of politics than the one 9/11 left us with. He has quite high approval ratings, in part because he is governing from a position of love for New York City and all its residents and visitors, rather than one of fear. This is what we saw during his campaign, when he did things like run a massive, fun, and educational scavenger hunt across NYC. But campaigning like that is one thing; carrying it into an actual administration is quite another — and somehow he’s done it.

Over and over again Mamdani has focused on what’s amazing about NYC and the ways he can and is improving it on a daily basis, from the little things to the big things. After years and years of expecting politicians to try to scare you into supporting them with “only I can protect you” rhetoric, it’s astounding to be reminded of what politics of love and community can actually be like. Sometimes it looks like this:

Or this:

You can argue Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation political talent, and that what works for him won’t work for everyone. Fine. But plenty of what he’s doing is entirely replicable, and the rest of the political class should be taking notes. He clearly loves New York City and the people there, and still believes in ways to make it better, not through fearmongering and hate, but through putting in the hard work of actually listening to people and helping them with real problems. It’s also a reminder of what good government can look like.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I had two fears: what had just happened in NY and DC, and what the world was going to do about it. The second one was the one that stuck. Over the past twenty-five years, that fear has helped write dangerous laws, many of which are still on the books, and drive more and more division in our society. And where we’re at now is that a uniquely dangerous president has all those tools at his disposal, and is using them to anger and divide us further.

NYC’s mayor can’t repeal those laws. He can’t stop a president hell-bent on rancid politics of hate and fear. But that ratchet only ever turned because enough Americans were scared enough to let it, and because no one was offering them anything else as an alternative. This week, in the very city that was the primary target that morning, the guy running the city isn’t telling anyone to be afraid of anything. He’s showing up, doing the work, and reminding us of what’s good.

Twenty-five years is a long time to be told that’s naive.

May the next twenty-five years be more the politics of community building and hope, over the politics of fear and division.

It says nothing good about America how easily Elon Musk convinced the press and public he was a supergenius engineer who could cobble together complicated rocket machinery wearing coveralls in his backyard shed.

Hindsight continues to illustrate how Elon Musk’s real skill sets are opportunism, taking singular credit for the innovations of real engineers, the manipulation of a very broken media, and taking legal, regulatory, environmental, labor, and consumer protection “shortcuts” wherever possible.

Enter the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is investigating Musk’s automated-taxi Cybercab deployments in Austin for violating public safety guidelines.

The Trump NHTSA is updating existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to help companies speed toward automated cars and taxis. But until then our previous (already fairly lax) standards still apply. This being America, companies self-certify whether they’re adhering to the rules in order to get a two-year exemption (Amazon’s Zoox got approval last month).

Tesla, owned by a man who doesn’t believe in coherent governance, is facing a new NHTSA investigation for simply refusing to participate in the process

“Ann Carlson, a former acting NHTSA administrator who is now a professor of environmental law at UCLA, says the investigation is likely “an indication that NHTSA is super frustrated with Tesla.” The agency made clear through the Zoox case that it expects driverless vehicle developers to go through the exemption process. “For Tesla to slap them in the face and ignore that—that is gobsmacking,” she says.”

It’s not really all that gobsmacking for a company run by a man who has been extremely proud about his clumsy role in fatally dismantling U.S. federal government functionality — particularly when it pertains to corporate oversight and public safety. This is always who he was. He has a twelve-year old libertarian boy’s understanding of what government does and why it’s necessary.

Of course, this isn’t the first time NHTSA has promised accountability and then delivered the policy equivalent of a wet farting sound. The agency announced it opened an inquiry last year into Musk robotaxis clearly failing to adhere to traffic laws and making constant navigation mistakes.

The NHTSA is also purportedly investigating all the people killed by “full self driving” (FSD) technology and Tesla’s very intentional misrepresentation of what the tech is capable of. That inquiry also appears to be perpetually stuck in neutral, like most of the legal and regulatory inquiries into the country’s richest fake engineer.

Pick your favorite zombie movie or television show and you’ll eventually be confronted with dialogue justifying the killing of the zombies with the idea that they are no longer human.

“They aren’t people, Rick. They’re just bodies. We have to stop thinking of them as if they’re still alive.” – The Walking Dead

“They’re not human. Look at them. They’re just… meat.” – Shaun of the Dead

The point is that there should be no ill feelings towards the treatment of a zombie, because they aren’t like us any more. They aren’t worthy of compassion. They deserve no quarter, only violence. They are a threat to our very survival and doing away with them, or at least keeping them away from where humanity exists, is the only solution.

Or, if you’re the Trump administration, you use this same justification as a bank-shot for immigration policy by hosting a Tetris clone game on the White House website.

The White House’s “Build the Wall” game asked players to stop a “Zombie Border siege” by stacking Tetris-styled bricks in an attempt to “hold the line.” Unlike in Tetris, though, the blocks in “Build the Wall” don’t disappear when you complete a line, meaning each brick contributes to an impassable barrier for the pixel-art “zombies” marching in from the “Southern Border.” That change makes the gameplay pretty uninteresting for anything but cheap propaganda, and it also means that every game quickly and ironically ends with a “Border Breached” message when the blocks inevitably fill up the well.

Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Texas migrant rights group Frontera Federation, told AFP last week that the makers of the game “have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others.”

The game is now thankfully gone from the site, though several other obvious game clones remain. This is not new ground for this administration, of course. Team Trump has made a habit when campaigning and while in office of using video game imagery for all kinds of things, such as touting MAHA nonsense, shitposting about the horrors of its own immigration activity, or bragging about the body count of the wars Trump promised he’d never start.

So, why did the game get taken down? Did someone in the administration realize how horrible and racist the whole thing was? Did Trump himself suddenly suffer from a spasm of moral clarity?

Doubtful. More likely it was this.

In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for The Tetris Company said it was “reviewing the matter” and that the company “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’ and did not authorize or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game.” The company reiterated that message in a social media post Friday afternoon, writing that it “believe[s] in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.”

Now, I’m not going to sit here and cheer on the enforcement of our overly broad copyright system. But I sure as hell understand why the Tetris people don’t want there to be even the barest chance for them and their game to be associated with something as disgusting as Trump’s Build The Wall “game.” And ArsTechnica is right to note that the Tetris Company has a long history of being very protective of its intellectual property rights, which government lawyers almost certainly are aware of.

Whether taking the game down will be enough to keep the Tetris Company from acting, I do not know. What I do know is that this administration is filled with deeply unserious, racist, and troubled people. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are not zombies. They shouldn’t be compared with zombies. Whatever immigration policy you prefer, they are people.

And that really shouldn’t have to be said out loud.