As we wrote just yesterday, the defamation trial brought by seven Adams County, Ohio deputies against rapper Afroman was going about as well for the officers as their original botched raid on his home. Today we can report the inevitable conclusion: the jury sided entirely with Afroman, clearing him of all liability after just hours of deliberation.

To recap briefly: deputies raided Afroman’s home in 2022 with guns drawn, found essentially nothing, filed no charges, broke his door (and his gate!), and got caught on his security cameras doing embarrassing things — including one deputy who appeared to cautiously eye a delicious-looking lemon pound cake. Afroman turned the footage into multiple viral music videos. The deputies, upset about being mocked, sued him for $3.9 million claiming defamation and emotional distress. The jury took just a few hours to say: nah.

The best part might be the closing argument from the officers’ attorney, who told the jury:

“Mr. Foreman doesn’t get to wrap himself in the American flag and say you can’t touch me, I can say what I want, no matter how untrue it is, no matter how much pain it causes people, because I have freedom of speech. He can’t do that.”

Afroman’s lawyer quickly responded that he can, in fact, do exactly that. That’s how the First Amendment works. Especially when talking about public officials. And then the jury agreed. This is especially delicious given that Afroman literally wrapped himself in the American flag for the entire trial, showing up each day in that wonderful suit.

Afroman’s own testimony summed up the whole case more concisely than any lawyer could:

“All of this is their fault, and they have the audacity to sue me.”

And through all of this, Afroman never stopped making music mocking these officers — right up to the trial. Here he is calling out Deputy Randy Walters:

And here he is set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, reminding everyone that the proof of everything he’s saying is right there on the internet for anyone to see:

So the deputies sued because they were embarrassed by viral music videos, and, in doing so, created a three-day trial that generated a whole new wave of viral content about them, drew national media attention, and ended with a jury telling them they had no case. The Streisand Effect remains undefeated.

As Afroman’s lawyer told the jury in closing, citing NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” and Richard Pryor’s comedy:

“I’m sorry they feel the way they do, but there’s a certain amount that you have to take as a public official, it’s part of the duties of the job. What chilling effect does that have on the world we live in? You don’t like what a public official does and you make a joke, and you’re dragged into court?”

There’s a serious point underneath all the absurdity. Public officials who raid your home for no good reason, find nothing, and break your stuff don’t get to then use the courts to punish you for talking about it. That’s the whole ballgame on the First Amendment, and the jury understood it perfectly.

Afroman summed it up outside the courtroom saying:

I didn’t win. America won. America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people, by the people!

Well said. And I hope the Adams County Sheriff’s Department is looking forward to Afroman’s next release.

Brunchlords can only fail upward. It’s physics.

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount:

“Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 million in equity in the combined company; and $44,195 in continued health coverage reimbursement benefits, per a WBD filing with the SEC.”

The Wall Street Journal suggests his payout could top $800 million, though I think they’re double counting potential tax reimbursement.

Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and a steady wave of overall dysfunction. And that’s before we even get to this latest merger with Paramount, which is expected to see more layoffs and chaos than ever.

Variety, as is generally the tendency for Hollywood trade mags, can’t be bothered to mention literally any of the real world consumer and labor costs of pointless consolidation. That’s just not of interest to editors there. They can’t even muster the interest to suggest Zaslav’s reign was controversial or that his payout might not be commensurate with any sort of actual real world competency.

If you visit the comment section of this story however, you can tell the public has… thoughts. You can find the same lack of interest in real world labor and consumer harms (and the public’s seething, palpable anger) at outlets like Deadline.

I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting.

Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, pointless consolidation has promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, shittier product, higher prices, the death of a ton of well-loved brands and IPs, decades of chaos, a decline in quality journalism at places like CNN, and a bottomless well of shit.

It’s the extraction class abusing the rules of the game to pretend to be good at business. They’re not actually building anything useful, nor are they remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

Now, we’re poised to see what could be the grand master of dysfunction with the Ellison family’s whopping $110 billion acquisition, backed heavily by Saudi cash. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to predict this latest deal could make all the past chaos and dysfunction look positively adorable. And at some point, the entire shell game will come crashing to the ground, with guys like Zaslav nowhere to be found.

It was mere days ago that we were discussing an interesting lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, challenging RFK Jr. and HHS for violating the Administrative Procedures Act in making changes to the CDC’s ACIP panel and immunization schedules. If you’re not up on what the APA is and does, the text of the law reads:

To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action. The reviewing court shall-

(1) compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed; and

(2) hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be-

(A) arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law;

(B) contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity;

(C) in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right;

(D) without observance of procedure required by law;

(E) unsupported by substantial evidence in a case subject to sections 556 and 557 of this title or otherwise reviewed on the record of an agency hearing provided by statute; or

(F) unwarranted by the facts to the extent that the facts are subject to trial de novo by the reviewing court.

In other words, the law outlines how actions brought by federal agencies must follow certain established procedures and be based in facts, as well as how upon challenge the courts could review and enforce those requirements on said agencies. Remarkably, in that same case, the DOJ argued to the court that Kennedy’s actions were “unreviewable”. At one point, Judge Murphy asked the DOJ if that meant that Kennedy could advise the public to get a shot to get measles, instead of preventing it, without review or challenge. The DOJ somehow answered that question in the affirmative.

It was all very stupid on the part of this particular government, but stupid appears to be the only thing on the menu these days. But it turns out that the actions of Kennedy and HHS are in fact reviewable, as evidenced by the preliminary injunction the court just issued blocking the recent changes to the vaccination schedule and put a stay on the 13 new members appointed to ACIP by Kennedy last summer.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Boston put a hold on the decisions made by an influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory committee, ruling that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had improperly replaced the entire committee.

The ACIP, whose members Kennedy fired and replaced largely with new members who also criticized vaccines, had issued a series of contentious recommendations, including a recommendation that not all babies should get vaccinated against hepatitis B at birth. The judge’s ruling stays the appointment of 13 committee members appointed by Kennedy since June 2025, when the previous members were fired.

Several health NGOs, including the AAP, are celebrating the ruling, understandably. Before we pop any champagne bottles, though, the government has already said it plans to appeal the ruling. This is lining up like one of those classic whipsaw legal situations where one court will rule sanely, the next will rule in favor of executive power, and then it’ll go to the Supreme Court and we’ll all learn if that compromised group of black robes will just hand more destructive power over to Trump in ignoring a law it doesn’t like, in this case the APA.

But in the meantime, this is at least delaying some of the damage Kennedy has attempting to foist on the American people. ACIP was set to meet this very week to talk about how else to make us less safe from preventable diseases, but that meeting has now been postponed. In the ruling itself, Judge Murphy opens with a blistering recitation of how science and process are all supposed to work.

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997). History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny. Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.” In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up). Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government…Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions. First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee. Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law.

Chef’s kiss; no notes.

This administration doesn’t care much for law or procedure, of course, hence the appeal of an obviously correct decision. Kennedy all the moreso, either because this is all some flavor of grift anyway, or he’s a true-believing zealot, or both. Either way, this isn’t over.

But finally someone has drawn first legal blood on Kennedy and the chaos he’s created at his post when it comes to vaccinations.

We’ve been following the saga of Afroman (real name Joseph Foreman) and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for a few years now, and I’m delighted to report that the defamation trial is currently underway and it is delivering everything you could possibly hope for, starting with this absolutely astounding suit that he’s wearing in court and on the stand (as well as in recent videos):

For those who need a refresher: back in 2022, the Adams County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio conducted a raid on Afroman’s home with a warrant for drug trafficking and — hilariously — kidnapping. (Kidnapping. Afroman.) The search turned up a couple of joints, some legal hemp, and a vape pen. No arrests were made. No charges were filed. The warrant itself appeared to have been sloppily assembled from boilerplate, with the kidnapping allegation looking a whole lot like someone forgot to delete an irrelevant paragraph before submitting it to a judge.

What the deputies did manage to accomplish was breaking Afroman’s door and gate, apparently pocketing $400 in cash (later explained away as a “miscount”), and getting captured on Afroman’s home security cameras doing a series of things that made them look absolutely ridiculous — including, famously, cautiously approaching a lemon cake sitting in a glass container on the kitchen counter.

The deputies, naturally, tried to cut power and unplug the security cameras during the raid — because surely that’s what the good guys do. But they didn’t get to them fast enough. Afroman took that footage and did exactly what you’d hope a musician would do: he turned it into a pair of songs — “Lemon Pound Cake” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” — complete with music videos featuring the actual raid footage. The videos went massively viral. In fact, here, watch them again:

And then the deputies did what we’ve come to expect from law enforcement officers who love power but hate the accountability that very occasionally accompanies it: They sued Afroman, claiming his use of their images in his music videos caused them “emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation, and humiliation.”

At the time, we noted that this lawsuit was profoundly stupid and predicted it would only make things worse for the deputies. Three years later, the trial has begun, and I am pleased to report: it is making things so much worse for the deputies.

Let’s start with the visuals. As mentioned above, Afroman showed up to court in a full American flag suit. This is a man who understands exactly what kind of stage he’s been handed, and he’s performing brilliantly. If you want to see the entirety of his testimony, that’s on YouTube too, and it’s glorious (click through as they’ve disabled embeds on that one).

Legal reporter Meghann Cuniff has also been posting astounding video clips from the courtroom to Instagram, and they are a gift, so we’ll include a few of the best cuts here.

First, here’s Afroman on the stand making the single most devastating argument in the entire case, which is also the most obvious one: none of this would have happened if they hadn’t raided his house in the first place.

That’s it. That’s the whole case. The deputies created the raid. The raid created the footage. The footage created the songs. The songs created the “emotional distress.” The lawsuit created this trial, which is now creating a whole new wave of viral content about these deputies. Every single thing these officers are complaining about is something they set in motion themselves.

When the plaintiffs’ lawyers kept pushing him about how unfair he was being to these poor deputies, Afroman’s response was wonderful:

Don’t miss the “you’re welcome” at the end of that one.

Then there’s Afroman explaining what should be pretty obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the First Amendment: this is his freedom of speech, he makes humorous songs for entertainment, and — oh yeah — he needed to pay for the door and gate these deputies broke.

But the real fun starts when the deputies themselves take the stand. Sgt. Randolph Lee “Randy” Walters Jr. managed to admit, on the witness stand, that many of the things people have been saying about him are statements of opinion rather than fact.

For those keeping score at home: opinion is a complete defense to a defamation claim. When one of the plaintiffs in a defamation case casually concedes on the stand that the allegedly defamatory statements are opinion, that’s… not great for the plaintiffs.

And then there’s Deputy Shawn Cooley, who is apparently quite upset that people have been calling him “Lemon Pound Cake.” Yes, a law enforcement officer is in court, under oath, complaining about a nickname derived from the fact that he was filmed treating a dessert as a potential threat during a drug raid that turned up essentially nothing.

But wait, it gets better. Afroman’s defense team called Cooley’s ex-wife to the stand, where she testified that Cooley knew the song was a joke and even made fun of it himself.

So we’ve got a deputy claiming severe emotional distress over a nickname, while his own ex-wife is testifying that he was laughing about it. Outstanding.

As Defector noted in its recap of the trial’s early days:

This suit is certain to just make things worse for the department. Afroman’s videos may have gone viral but they were mostly contained, their reach, outside of the initial wave of virality, more than likely limited to Cincinnati, its surrounding areas, and whatever colleges at which Afroman goes around performing. But the trial has brought all new visibility to these videos, putting Afroman on the brink of going platinum again. There is no winning here for the cops, no matter how many distressed tears you try to pull out of these officers.

We called this three years ago when the lawsuit was filed. The deputies were upset that Afroman’s videos made them look foolish, so they filed a lawsuit that would guarantee far more people would see those videos and learn their names. The Streisand Effect remains undefeated.

There’s a serious point underneath all the absurdity. These are public servants who conducted a search of a private citizen’s home under a warrant, found essentially nothing, broke his property, possibly took his money, tried to disable his cameras, and then — when he had the audacity to use his own security footage to make fun of them — decided to use the legal system to try to shut him up and get paid for their hurt feelings.

The message they were trying to send is the same one law enforcement sends in so many of these cases: we can do whatever we want to you, and if you embarrass us for it, we’ll make your life even harder. It’s the same impulse that leads cops to arrest people for filming them, or to seize phones during protests, or to charge people with “resisting arrest” when there’s no underlying crime. The whole point is to make the cost of accountability so high that people stop trying.

But Afroman showed up in an American flag suit and explained, calmly and clearly, that he makes funny songs, that these officers raided his house for no good reason, that they broke his stuff, and that he has every right to talk about it. And the deputies’ own testimony is undermining their case in real time.

As Defector’s recap put it:

As for Afroman himself, this may not be Uncle Luke on trial or anything, but it is another case in which people must decide how much they actually like freedom of speech, as well as whether or not the police are justified to behave however they like under the auspices of “doing their job.” Actually, he explains it a lot better than I could. It’s a trial about a principle and fighting unfairness, with some funny videos making it all that much more entertaining. Justice the Afroman way is a lot more satisfying than what the system usually gives.

It sure is. The deputies wanted to punish Afroman for making them look bad. Instead, they gave him a bigger platform, a better story, and a courtroom full of cameras capturing every moment of their continued self-own. If you wanted a textbook example of why you shouldn’t use a lawsuit to silence criticism of your own embarrassing behavior, this is it.

Though I suppose we should thank the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for one thing: If they hadn’t filed this lawsuit, we wouldn’t have gotten to watch Afroman testify in an American flag suit while a deputy complains about being called Lemon Pound Cake. Sometimes the legal system truly delivers amazing moments.

Obviously, this headline owes everything to The Onion, which generated this masterpiece years ago:

And so it is here: someone you’d never think would oppose fascism and bigotry deciding to speak up, despite knowing he could have just kept his head down and maintained his position as Sheriff For Life in Polk County, Florida.

I’m of course talking about Grady Judd. The sheriff of Polk County is a resolutely terrible person — someone who has routinely used the misery he inflicts on people not just in his own county, but across the nation, to elevate himself. He’s a guy who loves to hear himself talk. He loves being the center of attention, even if the attention is negative. And he’ll never turn down an opportunity to get in front of news cameras and get his id on.

Judd likes to send sex workers to jail (while pretending he’s saving them from sex traffickers), has used natural disasters to bump up arrest numbers, waged a misguided, illegal war on alleged pedophiles located well outside of his jurisdiction, and threatened to arrest Apple CEO Tim Cook for refusing to decrypt iPhones on demand.

So, it comes as a genuine surprise that Sheriff Grady Judd would say the things he’s saying about Trump’s anti-migrant actions. After all, he’s overseen directly and indirectly by a political party that’s more than willing to indulge and protect him, no matter what godawful thing he might choose to do. It’s certainly worked for him so far, given his abhorrent track record.

Nevertheless, here’s Grady Judd, pre-midterm election, airing his grievances about an administration. Here’s a man known for going too far expressing his concerns that the Trump administration has crossed a line in its immigration enforcement efforts. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)

Florida’s Republican sheriffs want President Donald Trump to end mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes, a striking shift from law enforcement in the nation’s most aggressive anti-undocumented immigration state. 

“While Congress sits on their hands and does nothing about this, we are on the ground floor with this day in and day out — looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately. But some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Monday during a State Immigration Enforcement Council meeting. 

Judd is simply saying what non-bigots have been pointing out for years: immigrants pay more taxes, work more hours, commit fewer crimes, and are a net benefit not just for governments’ bottom lines, but for America itself.

This is coming from one of the Florida GOP’s handpicked members of its recently formed “immigration enforcement council.” Judd was no doubt chosen because the GOP expected wholehearted support of whatever it chose to do. But here’s the thing: the GOP-picked panel is seeing plenty of dissent, with Judd simply being the most-recognizable critic of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts.

At least six of the eight council members echoed Judd during Monday’s Microsoft Teams meeting — a seventh, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, was not present for the call. One said the state has cast “too wide of a net;” another urged Judd to write to Congress, and a third offered harsh criticisms of ICE tactics.

“I wholeheartedly agree that Congress, they need to get off their butts and they need to fix it,” Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell agreed. “We’re not out … just raiding business and homes, but, unfortunately, when ICE gets involved, you have the collaterals.”

While some of the other board members might just be in the “stopped clock is right twice a day” category, Judd isn’t. He’s on another level completely when it comes to being a sheriff. He’s a clock that adamantly refuses to tell time at all, and is now perhaps as surprised as anyone else that he might have (however momentarily) told time correctly.

And that’s why it looks like he’s already trying to walk some of this back.

And while that’s disappointing, it must be noted that the walkback does not include every bit of his criticism. Judd still wants immigration enforcement limited to criminals, while expressing his support to paths to citizenship for migrants who may have come here illegally, but have done nothing but contribute to their communities since their arrival.

Judd’s in a safe space. He can level this criticism and know he can’t simply be fired for going against the GOP grain, ranging from the state governor to the Commander in Chief. He’s in an elected position, which means he’d need to be voted out. And that hasn’t happened yet, despite Judd’s casual disregard for constitutional rights and jurisdictional limits. I don’t think this is the sort of thing that’s going to end his law enforcement career — not just because most voters tend to vote for incumbents, but because even some people on the far right are recognizing Trump’s anti-migrant efforts are not only bad for polls/public perception of the party, but bad for America itself.

EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah’s Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society — the organizational arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask the anonymous operator of a website called JWS Library. If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu here, that’s because we’ve written about Watch Tower doing this exact thing more than once before, and they keep coming back to the same playbook.

EFF’s client, identified as J. Doe, is a current member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who got curious about the history of the organization’s public statements and how they’ve changed over time. So Doe did something pretty straightforwardly useful. As EFF explains:

They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. Doe and others discovered prophecies that failed to come true, erasure of a leader’s disgrace, increased calls for obedience and donations, and other insights about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices. Doe also used machine translation on a foreign-language document to help the community understand what the church was saying to different audiences and also to help understand potential changes in the organization’s attitudes towards dissent.

That’s about as clearly transformative and non-commercial as fair use gets — it’s for research and commentary, after all. But Watch Tower doesn’t care about whether the copyright claim is actually viable. It cares about finding out who Doe is. And everyone involved knows exactly why. Again EFF’s Kit Walsh explains:

Within the church, dissent or even asking questions has often been punished by labeling members as apostates and ostracizing—or “disfellowshipping”— them. As a result, Doe and others choose to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation that could cost them family, friend, and professional relationships.

Watch Tower knows all of this, of course. That’s precisely the point. They’re not sending DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare because they have a genuine interest in protecting their copyrights — they’re using the subpoena process as a surveillance tool with a built-in punishment mechanism waiting at the other end.

We know this because we’ve watched the pattern play out in extraordinary detail multiple times. When Paul Levy of Public Citizen’s Litigation Group dug into Watch Tower’s history back in 2022, he found that the organization had filed an astounding 72 copyright subpoenas since 2017. And how many of those subpoenas resulted in an actual copyright infringement lawsuit? Essentially zero. As Levy documented:

As can be seen from this list of Watch Tower copyright infringement lawsuits, Watch Tower has never used the information obtained from these subpoenas to file an infringement action. The only infringement lawsuit that Watch Tower has filed against the target of one of its DMCA subpoenas is a current case (discussed below) in which enforcement of the subpoena was denied!

So they file subpoena after subpoena claiming they need to identify alleged infringers to bring a lawsuit, and then they never bring the lawsuit. What they do with the information, as Levy uncovered, is identify critics and then initiate disfellowship proceedings against them. The copyright claim is just the crowbar they use to pry open the door.

The one time Watch Tower actually did file a lawsuit — against a critic using the pseudonym Kevin McFree — things went badly for them. Once a judge started paying close attention to what was actually going on, Watch Tower fled the case, dismissing with prejudice. Among the more remarkable moments in that case: Watch Tower’s counsel tried to claim the organization lacked “significant funds” to pursue litigation — despite Watch Tower’s publicly available tax filings showing it has more than a billion dollars in assets. The organization also tried to use the infringement lawsuit as a vehicle to investigate how McFree had obtained leaked unpublished videos — something that had nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with plugging leaks and identifying internal dissidents.

Which makes the history here so galling. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have one of the most impressive First Amendment track records of any organization in American legal history. Starting with Lovell v. City of Griffin in 1938, they brought a string of landmark cases establishing core free speech protections that benefit all of us today. They fought for the right to go door-to-door without identifying themselves, and against compelled speech. Watch Tower’s own in-house counsel, Paul Polidoro — the same lawyer who has been issuing many of these DMCA subpoenas — successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to speak anonymously.

And now that same organization is systematically using copyright law’s cheapest, lowest-bar procedural tool to strip anonymity from its own members who dare to ask questions. As EFF puts it:

The First Amendment does not permit the unmasking of anonymous speakers based on such weak claims. Indeed, the First Amendment protects anonymous speakers precisely because some would be deterred from speaking if they faced retribution for doing so.

Watch Tower got caught doing this in 2019. They got caught again in 2022 and ran away from court once a judge saw through the scheme. And here they are in 2026, right back at it. There’s no honest way to treat these as isolated incidents — this is a deliberate, ongoing policy of abusing copyright as a weapon against internal dissent. The DMCA subpoena process — designed to be quick and cheap — is working exactly as Watch Tower wants: a low-cost intelligence-gathering operation that most targets can’t afford to fight.

EFF is pushing back, at least. But it shouldn’t require EFF — or, as in the last case, Paul Levy and Public Citizen Litigation Group — to show up every single time before a court will acknowledge that an organization with a billion dollars in assets and a decade-long pattern of filing subpoenas it never converts into actual lawsuits is abusing the process. At some point, courts should be able to connect these dots on their own.

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The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.

And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.

Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.

Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”

That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.

The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.

Human rights organizations — including those recognized by international governing groups — are making this point as forcefully as possible.

Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.

[…]

Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”

“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”

Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.

Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.

Here’s how this is adding up so far, according to the tally generated by the New York Times:

The U.S. military has blown up 45 small vessels, killing at least 157 people, in six months of strikes since September. 

This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.

The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.

It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:

The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.

A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. authoritarian right is buying up all of our new and old media companies because they’re trying to mimic what Viktor Orban created in Hungary. Namely, a media where all the major outlets are owned by rich autocratic allies, who spew propaganda 24/7 while the government strangles real, independent journalism just out of frame.

Of course, you’re supposed to try and have some subtlety in this so the public isn’t fully aware of the con. But the Trump administration doesn’t do subtlety.

Last week Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently got upset by the fact Trump’s war in Iran isn’t going very well. Poor Donald clearly didn’t understand the evolving nature of modern and inexpensive drone warfare (despite all the brutal evidence in Ukraine), and has gotten the country bogged down in precisely the sort of clusterfuck the fake populist pretended he opposed last election season.

Even our soggy corporate press has occasionally been making this clear to the public, something that upsets Pete Hegseth very much. Hegseth apparently got particularly upset with CNN recently insisting that the Iran War had “intensified.” It made him so upset that he openly pined for the moment when Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son) control CNN, so they can cheerlead for war:

One of the funniest parts about this is that claims the war had “intensified” was made by his own agency in a press release!

It’s very clear that the U.S. right wing won’t be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media is owned by a handful of rich right wingers like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, allowing them to create a North Korea bullhorn of daily, uniform propaganda that does nothing but lavish praise upon them. To build something like that here in the States requires a level of subtlety they’re simply not capable of:

Democrats historically suck on media policy and reform (even the progressive wing of the party is fairly incompetent on the subject), so you can’t expect much help there.

But there are several things working in our favor, including America’s sheer size (it’s very difficult to maintain the kind of control they’re looking for), our diversity, the decentralized nature of the modern internet, and the fact that most of the nepobabies (David Ellison) and brunchlords (Bari Weiss) integral to their plans appear to have absolutely no Earthly idea what they’re actually doing.

For example, all the debt Ellison has adopted from the purchase of CBS and Warner Brothers is going to force them to engage in massive, unprecedented cost cuttings and layoffs, making it hard to maintain informational control and build an effective, ratings-grabbing propaganda operation (even if Bari Weiss knew what she was doing, which she assuredly does not).

And the public still has agency. Larry Ellison can buy TikTok and Elon Musk can buy Twitter, but they can’t control the flow of the public as they flee to other, less white supremacist, right wing friendly alternatives. It’s sheer hubris to think they can maintain information control in a country this massive and diverse, and there will be some useful entertainment value in watching them set money on fire trying.

It’s been a long and winding road to mostly get us right back to where we started in the battle between pop star Katy Perry and Aussie clothing designer Katie Perry. If you’re not familiar with this saga, here is a brief summary. Note that I will be mostly using only Katy and Katie when naming the players here to avoid confusion.

Katie Taylor is the real name of the Aussie designer, but she began selling clothing under the name “Katie Perry” in 2008 and secured a trademark for the name in Australia for clothing. While Katy’s team initially sent a C&D to Katie’s business around that same time, it appears nothing came of that C&D, even as the singer went on a worldwide tour that included Australia in 2014. That’s when Katie sued Katy, arguing that clothing merch sold on her local tour constituted trademark infringement, as the public might be confused between the two entities and who was producing what and for whom. She won her initial lawsuit, but Katy appealed and won, with the court not only clearing her of trademark infringement but also canceling Katie’s trademark entirely. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Katie appealed that ruling to Australia’s High Court.

And that brings us to an unlikely present, in which the High Court partially agreed with Katie’s appeal, reinstating her trademark, but not ruling that Katy Perry infringed upon it. I’m going to stay away from the first part of CNN’s post on the matter, because it does a horrible job of framing all of this, mostly in that in paints Katie Perry as some kind of underdog victim in all of this when she very much is not. But as for the ruling itself:

But on Wednesday, Australia’s High Court overturned the ruling, arguing the cancellation of the trademark was not warranted, and the use of the “Katie Perry” trademark was not likely to deceive or cause confusion.

Taylor said the court battle was a long and difficult process, but she did it to show that trademarks are there to protect small businesses, not just large brands.

“So many people said to me, like, why don’t you just give up? It’s not worth it. I really believe in standing up for your values. Truth and justice are part of my core and my values.”

And this is where I’m once again frustrated with CNN’s posture in its reporting. Katie sued Katy. That’s how this whole episode really started. Katie talking about how she is glad this all isn’t hanging over her head when she started the lawsuit that led to all of this is insane. This was a self-inflicted wound of epic proportions on a timeline equally crazy.

But the key part to me is that the logic behind ruling that Katie can have her trademark back is that Katie’s and Katy’s trademarks can coexist without any real concern for deception or confusion. That same logic is what I stated at the start of this whole ordeal as the reason this trademark lawsuit battle never should have been started in the first place.

Started by Katie Perry, I’ll remind you. And so we’ve come full circle, with both groups having their trademarks but without any actual infringement having occurred. It’s been a wild, stupid trip, but I guess we got where we were going: right back to where we started.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.

Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.

But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.

“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.

Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.

Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.

Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government. 

Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.

“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.

Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”

Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.

Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.

“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.

A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.

National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.

In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.

President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.

More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.

The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.

Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.

The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.

On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.

The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.

The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.

That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.

Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.

Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.

However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.

The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.

The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.

The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.

“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”

The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”

Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.

The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.

Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.

“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”

Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.

But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.

Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.

The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.

Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.

The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.

In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.

Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.

In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.

“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.

When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.

The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.

Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.

While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.

The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.

The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”

In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.

At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.

The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.