The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially a World Cup for baseball, 20 nations are playing against one another in a banger of a tune-up for the Major League Baseball season. It’s a flamboyant delight, with cultural celebrations such as the Italian team doing a shot of espresso after they hit home runs in the dugout.

The American team is managed by former major leaguer Mark DeRosa. While I won’t bore you with too many gory details, DeRosa royally fucked up during the tail end of pool play. Through a complicated series of winning scenarios and tie-breaker rules, the American team headed into its game with Italy needing to win to secure its place in the playoffs. DeRosa, it appears, was under an entirely different impression. These were his comments before the game with Italy.

After the game, he mentioned that some of his players were “dragging” on the field and he essentially put in a lineup that didn’t include many of the normal starting players. If you don’t know professional baseball culture, there’s a reason for the dragging. With nothing at stake, it’s pretty clear DeRosa thought the playoffs were already secured… and told his players to go out and celebrate that night. They likely did, late into the night and with the help of plenty of alcohol. Then they lost to Italy, which meant they needed Italy to win or to get into tie-breaking scenarios against their next game with Mexico. They got lucky in that Italy did beat Mexico in the next game, but the fuck up took things out of the hands of Team USA, leaving it up to their rivals.

You may not care about any of the above, but baseball fans do. DeRosa, in his day job, is also an employee of MLB, serving as a commentator on the MLB channel. MLB itself took down the original video of DeRosa’s comments and put up a version in which you don’t hear DeRosa’s mistake nor his admitting later that he screwed up.

Also, this reporting from The Athletic doesn’t actually make things look better for DeRosa and Team USA:

“The league appears to have taken down video that included DeRosa’s mistaken comments from MLB.com, with attempts by The Athletic to access it yielding error messages early Wednesday morning. A version of the interview that remained on MLB Network’s Facebook page appeared to be condensed and did not include the now-scrutinized remarks.”

I really don’t know what MLB was thinking here. American baseball fans would somehow forget what they heard DeRosa say? A screw up that could have bounced the American team from the WBC entirely would somehow fly under the radar?

Regardless, the Streisand Effect took over and now then the reporting on all of this went into wide circulation. In discussing MLB’s attempt at the hidden ball trick, reporting on DeRosa’s fuck up went through another, and larger, round of reporting. By trying to hide what DeRosa did, MLB made it public all the more.

This is classic Streisand Effect stuff at work and I can barely believe that Major League Baseball thought this isn’t exactly what would occur.

We’re a couple weeks late to this one, but it deserves more attention than it received. As the Washington Post first reported, a federal judge has found that the IRS violated federal law 42,695 times when it handed over confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE last summer. But the raw number, staggering as it is, undersells how absurd this whole thing was. The details of how it happened are so much worse.

Federal law has a pretty basic safeguard built in: before the IRS can hand over a taxpayer’s home address to another agency, the requesting agency has to provide the name and address of the person they’re looking for — specifically to prevent the government from using tax records as a fishing expedition against people it hasn’t already identified.

Can you guess how the Trump IRS’s actual verification process worked when ICE wanted addresses? I’m betting you absolutely can.

The judge, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, laid it out in devastating detail. When ICE sent over its massive datafile of 1.28 million records, the IRS ran two different matching processes. For requests where ICE included a Social Security number, the IRS used something called “TIN Matching” — which checked that the name and SSN matched IRS records. What TIN Matching did not do was verify that ICE had actually provided a real address. The only address-related check was an automated filter that looked for whether the address field contained something resembling a zip code — meaning, any five-digit or nine-digit number.

That was it. That was the safeguard.

As Judge Kollar-Kotelly pointedly observed:

A zip code is not an address, and a zip code proxy, as the IRS would define it, might as well be a set of random numbers. For instance, ICE could have submitted a request with an “address” like, “Don’t Care 12345,” or, “00000,” and still received a taxpayer’s address through the IRS’s TIN Matching process.

And this was the process used for the overwhelming majority of the disclosures. Of the 47,289 taxpayer addresses the IRS shared with ICE, 90.3% — those 42,695 — went through TIN Matching, the process that never actually checked the address. Only 9.7% went through a process that bothered to verify ICE had provided a matching address.

So when the IRS’s own Chief Risk and Control Officer, Dottie Romo, filed a supplemental declaration with the court admitting the agency “may have supplied last known addresses to ICE” in cases where the data was “either incomplete or insufficiently populated,” that was putting it generously. The judge’s opinion catalogs what ICE actually submitted as “addresses” in many of these cases:

In other words, the IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient. The IRS, for example, disclosed to ICE the last known addresses for taxpayers in situations where ICE supplied an “address of the taxpayer” in its request that contained “language indicating that the address was not complete, such as ‘Failed to Provide,’ ‘Unknown Address,’ or ‘NA NA.’” ….The IRS also disclosed to ICE the last known addresses of taxpayers where the ICE-supplied address was missing essential information, such as “a street name or street number.” … Still more, the IRS disclosed to ICE the last known addresses of taxpayers where the ICE-supplied address “referred to, described, or named specific locations”—examples of which are “jails, detention facilities, or prisons”—and “the corresponding city, state, and zip code” for those locations, but did not include “the street names and street numbers where the buildings or facilities are located.”

“Failed to Provide.” “Unknown Address.” “NA NA.” The system was designed not to catch these deficient requests. The TIN Matching process, as the judge noted, “was not designed to identify the additional types of data insufficiencies.” Of course it wasn’t. Because the process never looked at the address field in any meaningful way to begin with.

Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights (which brought the suit), told the Washington Post there was no precedent for anything like this:

“I don’t know of any opinion about the IRS like this. The kinds of mass requests that are coming in are unprecedented.”

And then there’s the timeline of what happened after the government figured out what it had done, which is deeply disturbing as well. The Department of Treasury identified the problems on January 23, 2026. That very same day, it notified DHS. Also on that very same day, the sole ICE official who had access to the illegally disclosed taxpayer data gave two additional ICE officials access to it. The stated reason was “for the purpose of allowing [them] to create an adequate system of safeguards for the data.”

So on the day they found out the data was obtained in violation of federal law, the first move was to give more people access to the illegally obtained data.

And when did the government get around to telling the court and the plaintiffs about these 42,695 violations of federal law? Nearly three weeks later, on February 11. As the judge noted, Defendants “informed DHS right away, but they waited nearly three weeks to inform Plaintiffs and the Court.” The opinion goes on to observe that this, along with the broader pattern, “undercut many representations made by Defendants during this litigation” and reflects, “at the very least, a disconnect between the agency clients and counsel, which leads to some concern regarding the completeness of the administrative record.”

“Some concern.” That’s judicial restraint doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The case is now before the DC Circuit, where the government is appealing Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s earlier order blocking the data-sharing arrangement. In the meantime, DHS has been defending the program as essential to immigration enforcement, with a spokesperson offering the standard line to the Washington Post about how “information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals.” Which might be more compelling if the agency’s actual implementation hadn’t involved waving through requests with “NA NA” where the address was supposed to go.

A judge has now formally documented that the IRS broke federal taxpayer confidentiality law tens of thousands of times in a single data dump, using a verification process so hollow that literal gibberish would have passed muster — and when the government discovered this, its first move was to expand access to the illegally obtained data and wait three weeks before telling the court. And yet the government is still fighting to keep the underlying program alive.

The power of the latest generation of AI systems is such that previously impractical applications are not just possible, but scalable. For example, moving beyond basic early AI text translation tools, it is now possible to use live translation to communicate in another language in real time. For many people that will be a real boon, especially when they are traveling. But here’s something that is likely to prove more controversial: real-time rephrasing of profanity within chat. It’s a new AI-powered feature from Roblox that is designed to “keep gameplay fluid while maintaining civility within chat”:

Roblox is leveraging AI to automatically rephrase profanity. Rather than displaying only hashmarks, filtered text will be translated into more respectful language that remains closer to the user’s original intent. For example, a message that violates Roblox’s profanity policies, such as “Hurry TF up!” would previously have appeared as “####” within experience chat. That will now be rephrased to “Hurry up!” This new layer is designed to maintain civility by rephrasing the language and replacing “stop signs” with real-time guidance.

Specifically:

When a message violates Roblox’s profanity policy, everyone in the chat is notified that the text has been rephrased to keep things civil. While rephrasing reduces some of the disruption in the chat, Roblox’s multilayered safety system remains in effect for more serious behavior. Rephrasing is available exclusively for in-experience chat between age-checked users in similar age groups and is supported in all languages currently available through Roblox’s automatic translation tools.

Alongside this new AI-based capability, Roblox is also tweaking its text filtering system:

Early results from Roblox’s testing show significant improvements in detecting leet-speak, or letters replaced with numbers or symbols, and more sophisticated attempts to bypass filters.

Parents may applaud real-time rephrasing as a way for the service to nudge younger users away from bad language in their interaction with others, without stopping them playing altogether. But it creates a dangerous proof of concept that others may build on, particularly in jurisdictions that want stricter controls on what people say online.

It’s easy to imagine situations where Chinese AI systems, for example, rephrase people’s language on social media in real time to promote “social harmony”. Not only the style but even the content’s details could be subtly changed away from controversy towards conformity. It would be possible for rephrasing to be visible only to others, so the person making a comment might not even be aware that their words were being subverted in this way. Something similar is already happening with Chinese AI chatbots that censor their own answers, without acknowledging that fact. As Chinese AI companies become increasingly important players in the online world, this kind of covert rephrasing by them — and others — is another issue people will need to watch out for in our brave new AI world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Bluesky and on Mastodon.

Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that equated opposing Trump and his open bigotry with hating America.

But the administration gave some antisemites a free pass… if they were white enough.

One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.

Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.

A number of Kleinhaus’s posts also promote the conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being particularly persecuted.

Trump apparently believes white South Africans are so extremely persecuted (after decades of subjugating Black South Africans), they deserve to avail themselves of everything offered by the Land of the Free. Trump wants incoming whites so badly he’s willing to rewrite the rules to flood the zone with new bigots.

The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.

The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Notably, this isn’t a free pass for any South African. The document apparently extends this to whites only, which is a hell of a thing to do in this day and age. I have to imagine even the most racist of Afrikaners might balk a bit at boarding a plane where non-whites are being ejected over whatever country the plane flies over on its way to Land of Opportunity.

No one ever said this administration is clever. But it’s not accurate to call it stupid. It’s something else entirely: a collection of shitbirds who are so contemptuous of everyone else in the nation that it will stroke itself off publicly and shrug off complaints with non-sequiturs liberally peppered with phrases like “leftist media” or “activist judges.”

This administration will not only piss down your leg and tell you it’s raining, but swing by later to bitch about people “illegally” benefiting from the uninvited precipitation. It’s shit stacked on shit stacked on shit topped off by wedding cake figurines standing on the necks of fallen lawn jockeys.

If you want this to be your nation, please get the fuck out. Get your Fourth Reich on elsewhere, you absolute mooks. And I dare you explain how THIS isn’t pure racism, especially when you’ve gone all in on the “get the foreigners out” purge this government has been engaged in since Trump returned to the Oval Office.

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It’s been a little while since we last wrote about California’s deeply problematic “Age Appropriate Design Code,” which tried to force internet companies into taking blatantly unconstitutional steps to pressure companies into magically preventing all “harms” to kids. The law has bounced between the district court and the Ninth Circuit multiple times — and yesterday, once again, most of the law was deemed effectively unconstitutional and tossed out. The ruling is procedurally messy in annoying ways, but most of that we can blame on the Supreme Court. But we’ll get to that.

The bill, in somewhat troubling fashion, was drafted and heavily pushed for by a British Baronness/Hollywood director who made a documentary about kids and smartphones and got so freaked out by her own documentary, that she decided that she would single-handedly destroy the open internet for children, First Amendment be damned. Trade association NetChoice challenged the law (as it has challenged many state laws) and has been mostly successful.

As I explained to a court myself, the law was both impossible to comply with and a clear attack on free expression. The court agreed and threw out the law as unconstitutional. It went to the Ninth Circuit which mostly agreed that the law was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, right before the Ninth Circuit ruled, the Supreme Court’s Moody decision made a mess of things. While that ruling effectively killed unconstitutional bills in Florida and Texas that sought to regulate social media, the ruling went deep into the silly weeds, arguing that challenging an entire law as unconstitutional on its face (a “facial challenge”) required a nearly impossible set of standards to meet, preferring parties challenge the law “as applied” (i.e., once it actually violating people’s rights directly).

Because of that, part of the law was sent back to the lower court, where it was again deemed unconstitutional and blocked by injunction. And then that ruling was appealed again, leading to this Ninth Circuit ruling, which lifts part of the injunction, sending the case back down to the lower court yet again. But it effectively wipes out large parts of the Age Appropriate Design Code as clearly unconstitutional. Basically, all the parts in the law that actually do things are dead, because they pretty clearly regulate speech in violation of the First Amendment. The case — and what remains of the law — lives on as a procedural zombie, still technically breathing but stripped of its real teeth.

It’s a good ruling, though made slightly annoying by the procedural situation created by the Supreme Court’s Moody ruling.

Digging in: the court struck down most of the scary problematic provisions of the law, rightly noting that they violated the First Amendment on vagueness grounds. First up, there were provisions that tried to limit how websites could handle a child’s personal information, but this was a smokescreen. While it was dressed up to look like a “privacy” bill, the law really sought to impact what content kids could read, saying you couldn’t use data in a way that harmed the “well-being” of a child, and that the use had to be in the “best interests” of the child. There was also a provision regarding whether or not the data was used in way that was “materially detrimental” to the child. These are all super vague terms that were clearly really meant to be “don’t show kids content that might make them sad.”

The court said this is a problem:

NetChoice persuasively argues that the risk of subjective enforcement is particularly high because, as it contemplates “material detriment” to “a child,” the provision must be assessed as to any single child whose personal information is accessed by a covered online practice.

California argued there was no problem with requiring sites to create systems in the “best interests” of children, but the court rightly notes that you can’t just create general rules that accomplish that:

When evaluating the “best interests of the child” in family law proceedings, California courts recognize that “bright line rules in this area are inappropriate” and that “each case must be evaluated on its own unique facts.” In re Marriage of LaMusga, 88 P.3d 81, 91 (Cal. 2004) (citation modified). The standard operates through a specific child’s circumstances and factual record. See id. The data use restrictions ask something categorically different: covered businesses must determine prospectively whether a given practice is in “the best interests of” not any one child but “children”—a class of users that includes every child anywhere who can access a covered online practice. Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.99.31(b)(1)⁠–⁠(4) (emphasis added). Then covered businesses must tailor their practice accordingly. Applied at that scale, without the individualized, highly specific factual record giving the standard meaning in contexts such as a family law case, “best interests of children” cannot provide “sufficient notice of what is proscribed,”

Then there’s the issue of “dark patterns,” which is one of my least favorite terms that has become popular over the last few years. In practice it’s become a catch-all for ‘anything on any website that makes people do things I don’t like,’ and it’s not remotely well-defined. And that’s a problem when you have to get past the “vagueness” bar to be acceptable under the First Amendment:

As with the data use restrictions, the State’s plain-meaning argument is unconvincing where the range of harms that could plausibly qualify as “materially detrimental” is vast, spanning everything from financial exploitation to sleep loss, distraction, or hurt feelings. The fact that “dark pattern” is a defined term in the CAADCA does not help a covered business distinguish between these harms. And the prohibition’s use of the singular “child,” like in the data use restrictions, suggests that it is actionable based on a single child’s response to an online interface, meaning that a business designing a product accessed by millions of child users could face liability whenever any one of them experiences a harm that a regulator deems “material.”

So that’s gone too.

The court also highlights how the state does a lot of fear-mongering on edge cases that would clearly and somewhat obviously lead to mass censorship to avoid potential liability:

The State cites examples like “using a child’s information to connect them to a person that seeks to abuse the child, such as through sexploitation,” or “[u]sing a child’s information to recommend illegal products such as tobacco, alcohol, or gambling[.]” But these are extreme examples at the margins of what might be materially detrimental to a child’s well-being. The more difficult questions arise with examples like sleep loss, distraction, or hurt feelings. As the district court reasoned, and NetChoice argues on appeal, the CAADCA does not provide any guidance as to the breadth of conduct that “material[] detriment[] to the physical health, mental health, or wellbeing of a child” may reach.

This is what happens when headline-chasing regulators write laws based on moral panics and feel-good concepts like ‘well-being of children,’ assuming that either websites will nerd harder and somehow make it work, or the courts will sort it out on the back end.

But that’s not how the First Amendment works. There’s a reason why there’s a vagueness doctrine that is used to throw out laws that try to tapdance around it this way.

That said, not all of the ruling goes NetChoice’s way. Indeed, early on, the ruling gives a bit of a benchslap to NetChoice for continuing to challenge this law “facially” without meeting the near impossible standard setup by the Supreme Court in Moody:

NetChoice has been a party to many such cases—several before our court and the Supreme Court—and is presumably aware of the expectations for a facial challenge. At the risk of repetition, we offer similar guidance to NetChoice today.

The Moody ruling basically said that if you’re doing a facial challenge, you need to detail every possible application of the law and then show that a “substantial majority” are unconstitutional. That’s effectively impossible, especially since the law is written so broadly as to encompass things that go beyond just speech. That means, because the law also applies to commerce and other things, the facial challenge parts fail:

First, the State persuasively argues that whether “it is reasonable to expect” that a business’s “online service, product, or feature would be accessed by children,” … “says nothing about the nature of the business providing that service, product, or feature.” Indeed, as the State proffers, children “are capable of using ride sharing service[s] like Lyft or Waymo, electronic ticketing services such as StubHub or Ticketmaster, financial transaction services such as Paypal or Venmo, fitness products such as NFL Play 60 or Peloton, health-related services such as iHealth, or education-related products such as Wolfram Mathematica.” The CAADCA’s substantive requirements would “appl[y] evenhandedly” to any of these businesses if they are likely to be accessed by children, regardless of the content available through their online service.

This seems silly, but it’s what the Supreme Court now requires. Send your complaints to them, not the Ninth Circuit. The court effectively admits that the Supreme Court set an impossible standard in Moody:

To be sure, as we observed in NetChoice SB 976, “[d]oing so would entail the ‘daunting, if not impossible’ task of canvassing how the Act applies to an ‘ever-growing number of apps, services, functionalities, and methods for communication and connection.’” Id. at 1021 (first quoting Moody, 603 U.S. at 745 (Barrett, J., concurring); and then quoting Moody, 603 U.S at 725 (majority opinion)). We recognized that “such a showing” might be “unrealistic.” Id. But we nevertheless stated then, and maintain now, that “[i]t is a mystery how NetChoice could expect to prevail on a facial challenge without candidly disclosing the platforms that it thinks the challenged laws reach” and whether the coverage definition unduly burdens those platforms’ expression.

There is, also, a separate question of how a facial challenge to a law like this could even be possible with the sort of page limits courts require.

What this means, in practice, is that for states to survive a facial challenge, just make laws as crazily broad as possible, meaning it would be impossible to catalog all the many, many ways it might be enforced. That seems really bad. But, thanks to this Supreme Court, it’s what we’ve got.

The court does send the “age estimation” part back to the lower court, mostly because they say the record isn’t well enough developed (meaning we get to go through all of this yet again). There is some troubling language regarding last year’s ruling in FSC v. Paxton regarding age verification. As you’ll recall, the very prude conservative wing of the Supreme Court effectively overturned a couple decades worth of precedent to say “age verification online is fine for porn because porn is not protected by the First Amendment when kids see it.”

Many people insisted that this ruling was okay because it was limited to adult content, but so far we’ve seen state after state — and a few courts — suggest that it’s now “open season” on age verification laws. The language that shows up here is at least worrisome that the Ninth Circuit is open to a broad reading of the Supreme Court’s ruling:

NetChoice’s reading of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025), also does not persuade. Free Speech Coalition considered a statute that required covered entities to make adult website visitors submit to an age verification system using either “government-issued identification” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data.” Id. at 467 (quoting Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 129B.003(b)(2)). The Supreme Court observed only that, with respect to that system, there is an “incidental burden that age verification necessarily has on an adult’s First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene only to minors.” Id. at 495. The Court said nothing about the effect of age estimation on First Amendment burdens generally, especially where age estimation is not required as a precondition to access content. To the contrary, the Court observed that “adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification, and the [challenged law] can readily be understood as an effort to restrict minors’ access.”

To the extent NetChoice argues that the age estimation requirement “require[s] consideration of content or proxies for content,” see NetChoice I, 113 F.4th at 1118, the age estimation requirement may impliedly regulate speech—but we cannot confidently draw that conclusion on this record, either.

More and more for the courts to argue about, I guess.

There’s also another bit of the lawsuit that has been revived, regarding “severability,” specifically regarding whether or not you can keep some parts of the law even as the bigger parts are struck down as unconstitutional. It’s another bit for them to argue about in more detail at the lower court, but not really the main point of all of this. The specifics here are that the law has a “notice-and-cure” provision if the Attorney General found a website to be violating the law. So there’s a question of whether or not that specific provision can be left alive, though I’m unsure what good it does if the rest of the law is found to be unconstitutional. But also, as the appeals court notes, this is basically all just on an underdeveloped record, so they’re sending it back to the lower court for more.

Either way, the key elements of California’s AADC have now been struck down as unconstitutional at the Ninth Circuit — for the second time — after two prior rejections at the district court level. The data use provisions and the dark patterns nonsense are gone on vagueness grounds. In some ways, that’s actually a stronger outcome than if the initial facial challenge had succeeded: there’s now clear appellate language explaining why this kind of vague “well-being” language can’t survive First Amendment scrutiny. California could theoretically go back and try to define things more narrowly, but chances are they’d find themselves right back at the First Amendment wall, because their ultimate goal has always been censorship dressed up as child safety.

The annoying part is the procedural mess the Supreme Court’s Moody decision created. We’re heading into round three at the district court, burning more time and resources on a law that should have been dead on arrival. This is exactly what we warned Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta would happen when they first backed this law. They got the political headlines. Everyone else got years of litigation. And the law they championed is now a procedural zombie — technically still breathing, but stripped of everything that made it dangerous in the first place.

Last election season, you might recall how the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)

This last year has truly revealed the con: Trump not only has demolished regulatory independence, media consolidation rules, and consumer protection standards, he’s rubber stamped every shitty merger his administration has come into contact with (provided companies promise to be more racist), and fired the few Republicans in his administration that even vaguely cared about antitrust.

Trump’s latest betrayal to the the MAGA antitrust movement (that never really existed outside the skulls of rubes) is his DOJ’s surprise blindsiding of states by striking a pathetic settlement with Ticketmaster that doesn’t really fix the actual problem: monopoly.

The Biden DOJ and most US states sued Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary back in 2024, alleging that Live Nation has a monopoly on “the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”

But while a new Trump settlement with the company requires $280 million in civil penalties and a 15% cap on service fees for people who want to use their amphitheaters, it backs off any attempt to pursue a break up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the one move that would actually (more permanently) help protect consumers, artists, and the live music market from predatory behavior.

The Trump DOJ and pedophile protector Pam Bondi struck the deal behind closed doors and didn’t bother to tell any of the 27 states (including many Republican ones) currently fighting Ticketmaster in court. It’s another win for Bondi loyalists (whose function is to blindly serve our mad idiot king) and the final middle finger to Gail Slater and Mark Hamer types that at least sometimes cared about antitrust.

States are, you may be unsurprised to learn, pissed off and planning to continue the fight alone, though they say the Trump DOJ has caused potentially irreparable harm:

“The case went to trial, and testimony began last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. But the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement on March 8, taking state attorneys general by surprise. The judge presiding over the case reportedly said in court today that the way the settlement was announced “is absolutely unacceptable.

States reserving the right to continue litigation filed a motion for mistrial, saying they need time to prepare for a new trial and evaluate the terms of the settlement between the US and Live Nation. The “sudden disappearance” of the US from the case will likely give the jury the incorrect impression that Live Nation’s “antitrust violations have been cured or resolved, or that Proceeding Plaintiff States’ claims lack merit,” the states said.”

This was always going to be the outcome. There were constant signs. Trump is an autocrat, fascist, and opportunist who believes in nothing beyond his own pursuit of power and wealth. The corruption and autocracy was always going to dominate any serious Republican interest in antitrust (which, let’s be honest, even among Gail Slater types was historically inconsistent at best).

The MAGA base belief in this line of bullshit was one thing, but Trump’s antitrust bona fides were also propped up by folks like purported progressive antitrust expert Matt Stoller, who praised guys like JD Vance and Josh Hawley for being serious anti-corporatists, when the entire thing was always a con designed to give phony populist credibility to autocrats who never had to actually earn it.

The U.S. press also played a giant role here. They spent years propping up Trump’s false claims he “wanted to rein in big tech,” when what the authoritarians really wanted was to abuse government power to scare (quite successfully as it turned out) tech companies away from doing even the most basic content moderation of right wing race-baiting propaganda online.

Now, unsurprisingly, here we are, staring down the barrel of democracy demolishing authoritarianism, with unchecked corporate power in full alignment with the effort.

If you agree with me that what RFK Jr. has done at HHS — particularly when it comes to altering vaccine schedules, approvals, research, and access — is bad well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Kennedy rode Trump’s coattails, building his own Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement on the back of the wider MAGA orgy of fascism Trump has constructed. The MAGA people are generally those who have followed Kennedy’s checkered career for years and not only act as his public ally for all the crazy shit he says and does, but also serve to push him even further than he’s already gone. And while not every idea coming out of the MAHA people is horrible, the majority certainly are.

So, back to vaccines. Kennedy has already done immense harm to vaccination policy and research in America, particularly when it comes to children. But the MAHA Institute, a D.C. think tank that pushes Kennedy’s wider agenda, would like to please just do away with all childhood vaccine schedules until each shot can “be proven” to be safe.

Leaders of the MAHA Institute, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-allied think tank pushing Make America Health Again movement policies, stated their position on vaccines unequivocally on Monday: “The childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated,” the policy group’s president, Mark Gorton, said.

“All vaccines need to be removed from the market until they can be proven to be safe and effective,” Gorton told an audience of supporters gathered in the Willard Hotel’s Crystal Room for a panel discussion on the “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury.”

Now, Kennedy didn’t attend the event. He doesn’t determine its agenda. He isn’t directly responsible for what is said by this group. But if you go through all the other nonsense these people are saying, you will recognize that much of it aligns directly with claims Kennedy has made over the years and into the present. And the history of MAHA Institute events and its guests certainly portrays a sense that the government listens to these people.

The event, just a block from the White House, comes at an interesting time for the MAHA movement in Washington. It is clear that the institute, and the movement it is part of, have the administration’s ear; attendees of past events have included senior HHS adviser Calley Means and Food and Drug Administration official Sara Brenner.

And that should be particularly terrifying, given that you can very easily get these same people to admit that they just make shit up when it suits them.

Gorton displayed slides with titles like “The Polio Fraud” and “The flu shot has given 1,900,000 Americans Alzheimer’s,” and, simply, “VACCINES ARE THE GREATEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY.”

At another moment, Gorton claimed that HHS had commissioned more than 100 studies into vaccine injuries. When asked by NOTUS where he got that number, he said Kennedy had previously stated his desire to further study vaccines.

“I don’t know much more than they’re commissioning a bunch of studies,” Gorton told NOTUS.

So what would eliminating approval for childhood vaccinations in a full sweep in America mean if it happens? Healthcare facilities would be entirely overrun. Hospitals would have to exponentially increase the size of their pediatric wards. Trillions of dollars would need to be spent to deal with the illnesses that would result. Real estate would have to be set aside to serve as graveyards filled with tiny little coffins.

This is from the CDC’s own website in 2023.

Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.

Gone are the days of any of us thinking that an idea or plan is just too crazy for this particular administration to enact. We simply can’t afford to bet on that sort of minimal sense-making occurring any longer.

So sit up and pay attention, because anything that remotely looks like the eradication of childhood vaccines in America would be no less than a childhood healthcare holocaust.

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.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it (Platformer)
• Grammarly has disabled its tool offering generative-AI feedback credited to real writers (Engadget)
• Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature (Wired)
• Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? Take Our Quiz. (NY Times)
• Molly vs the Machines review – a powerful story of love, loss and the dangers of social media (Guardian)
• UK: New Molly Russell documentary provides further evidence that social media needs complete redesign (Amnesty International)
• WhatsApp is launching parent-linked accounts for pre-teens (TechCrunch)
• Meta urged to boost oversight of fake AI videos (BBC)

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s 2026 Bingo Card and get in touch if you win!

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, [and] FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

Trouble is, the U.S. government doesn’t believe “consistent with applicable laws” means “no domestic surveillance.” Instead, for the most part, the government has embraced a lax interpretation of “applicable law” that has blessed mass surveillance and large-scale violations of our civil liberties, and then fought tooth and nail to prevent courts from weighing in. 

“Intentionally” is also doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. For years the government has insisted that the mass surveillance of U.S. persons only happens incidentally (read: not intentionally) because their communications with people both inside the United States and overseas are swept up in surveillance programs supposedly designed to only collect communications outside the United States. 

The company’s amendment to the contract continues in a similar vein, “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, “deliberate” is the red flag given how often intelligence and law enforcement agencies rely on incidental or commercially purchased data to sidestep stronger privacy protections.

Here’s another one: “The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.” What, one wonders, does “unconstrained” mean, precisely—and according to whom? 

Lawyers sometimes call these “weasel words” because they create ambiguity that protects one side or another from real accountability for contract violations. As with the Anthropic negotiations, where the Pentagon reportedly agreed to adhere to Anthropic’s red lines only “as appropriate,” the government is likely attempting to publicly commit to limits in principle, but retain broad flexibility in practice.

OpenAI also notes that the Pentagon promised the NSA would not be allowed to use OpenAI’s tools absent a new agreement, and that its deployment architecture will help it verify that no red lines are crossed. But secret agreements and technical assurances have never been enough to rein in surveillance agencies, and they are no substitute for strong, enforceable legal limits and transparency.

OpenAI executives may indeed be trying, as claimed, to use the company’s contractual relationship with the Pentagon to help ensure that the government should use AI tools only in a way consistent with democratic processes. But based on what we know so far, that hope seems very naïve.

Moreover, that naïvete is dangerous. In a time when governments are willing to embrace extreme and unfounded interpretations of “applicable laws,” companies need to put some actual muscle behind standing by their commitments. After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time. OpenAI promises the public that it will  “avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power,” but we know that enabling mass surveillance does both.     

OpenAI isn’t the only consumer-facing company that is, on the one hand, seeking to reassure the public that they aren’t participating in actions that violate human rights while, on the other, seeking to cash in on government mass surveillance efforts.  Despite this marketing double-speak, it is very clear that companies just cannot do both. It’s also clear that companies shouldn’t be given that much power over the limits of our privacy to begin with. The public should not have to rely on a small group of people—whether CEOs or Pentagon officials—to protect our civil liberties.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public “will be stunned” to learn what the NSA has been doing. If you’ve followed Wyden’s career, you know this is not a man prone to hyperbole — and you know his track record on these warnings is perfect.

Just last month, we wrote about the Wyden Siren — the pattern where Senator Ron Wyden sends a cryptic public signal that something terrible is happening behind the classification curtain, can’t say what it is, and then is eventually proven right. Every single time. The catalyst then was a two-sentence letter to CIA Director Ratcliffe expressing “deep concerns about CIA activities.”

Well, the siren is going off once again. This time, Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.

You can see the full video here if you want.

Here’s a sitting member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — someone with access to the classified details — is telling his colleagues and the public that there is a secret interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans,” that he’s been asking multiple administrations to declassify it, that they’ve all refused, and that when it finally comes out, people will be stunned.

If you’ve followed Wyden for any amount of time, this all sounds very familiar. In 2011, Wyden warned that the government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to mean something entirely different from what Congress and the public understood. He couldn’t say what. Nobody believed it could be that bad. Then the Snowden revelations showed the NSA was engaged in bulk collection of essentially every American’s phone metadata. In 2017, he caught the Director of National Intelligence answering a different question than the one Wyden asked about Section 702 surveillance. The pattern repeats. The siren sounds. Years pass. And then, eventually, we find out it was worse than we imagined.

Now here he is, doing the exact same thing with Section 702 yet again, now that it’s up for renewal. Congress is weeks away from a reauthorization vote, and Wyden is explicitly telling his colleagues (not for the first time) they are preparing to vote on a law whose actual meaning is being kept secret from them as well as from the American public:

The past fifteen years have shown that, unless the Congress can have an open debate about surveillance authorities, the laws that are passed cannot be assumed to have the support of the American people. And that is fundamentally undemocratic. And, right now, the government is relying on secret law with regard to Section 702 of FISA. I’ve already mentioned the provision that was stuck into the last reauthorization bill, that could allow the government to force all sorts of people to spy on their fellow citizens. I have explained the details of how the Biden Administration chose to interpret it, and how the Trump Administration will interpret it, are a big secret. Americans have the right to be confused and angry that this is how the government and Congress choose to do business.

That’s a United States senator who has a long history of calling out secret interpretations that lead to surveillance of Americans — standing on the Senate floor and warning, once again, that there’s a secret interpretation of Section 702 authorities. One that almost certainly means mass surveillance.

And Wyden knows exactly how this plays out. He’s been through the reauthorization cycle enough times to know the playbook the intelligence community runs every time 702 is up for renewal:

I’ve been doing this a long time, so I know how this always goes. Opponents of reforming Section 702 don’t want a real debate where Members can decide for themselves which reform amendments to support. So what always happens is that a lousy reauthorization bill magically shows up a few days before the authorization expires and Members are told that there’s no time to do anything other than pass that bill and that if they vote for any amendments, the program will die and terrible things will happen and it will be all their fault.

Don’t buy into that.

He’s right. Every time reauthorization is on the table, no real debate happens, and then just before the authorization is about to run out, some loyal soldier of the surveillance brigade in Congress will scream “national security” at the top of their lungs, insist there’s no time to debate this or people will die, and then promises that we need to just re-authorize for a few more years, at which point we’ll be able to hold a debate on the surveillance.

A debate that never arrives.

But even setting aside the secret interpretation Wyden can’t discuss, his speech highlights something almost as damning: just how spectacularly the supposed “reforms” from the last reauthorization have failed. Remember, one of the big “concessions” to get the last reauthorization across the finish line was a requirement that “sensitive searches” — targeting elected officials, political candidates, journalists, and the like — would need the approval of the FBI’s Deputy Director.

This was in response to some GOP elected officials being on the receiving end of investigations during the Biden era, freaking out that the NSA appeared to be doing the very things plenty of civil society and privacy advocates had been telling them about for over a decade while they just yelled “national security” back at us.

So how are those small “reforms” working out? Here’s Wyden:

The so-called big reform was to require the approval of the Deputy FBI Director for these sensitive searches.

Until two months ago, the Deputy FBI Director was Dan Bongino. As most of my colleagues know, Mr. Bongino is a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for specious investigations of his political opponents. This is the man whom the President and the U.S. Senate put in charge of these incredibly sensitive searches. And Bongino’s replacement as Deputy Director, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office in an effort to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories. I don’t know about my colleagues, but this so-called reform makes me feel worse, not better.

So the grand reform that was supposed to provide meaningful oversight of the FBI’s most sensitive surveillance activities ended up placing that authority in the hands of a conspiracy theorist, followed by a partisan election denier. And just to make the whole thing even more farcical, Wyden notes that the FBI has refused to even keep a basic record of these searches:

But it’s even worse than it looks. The FBI has refused to even keep track of all of the sensitive searches the Deputy Director has considered. The Inspector General urged the FBI to just put this information into a simple spreadsheet and they refused to do it. That is how much the FBI does not want oversight.

They won’t maintain a spreadsheet. The Inspector General asked them to track their use of a sensitive surveillance power using what amounts to a basic Excel file, and the FBI said no. That’s the state of “reform” for Section 702 after the last re-auth.

Wyden has also been sounding the alarm about the expansion of who can be forced to spy on behalf of the government, thanks to a provision jammed into the last reauthorization that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider” to cover essentially anyone with access to communications equipment. As Wyden explained:

Two years ago, during the last reauthorization debacle, something really bad happened. Over in the House, existing surveillance law was changed so that the government could force anyone with “access” to communications to secretly collect those communications for the government. As I pointed out at the time, that could mean anyone installing or repairing a cable box, or anyone responsible for a wifi router. It was a jaw-dropping expansion of authorities that could end up forcing countless ordinary Americans to secretly help the government spy on their fellow citizens.

The Biden administration apparently promised to use this authority narrowly. But, of course, the Trump administration has made no such promise. As we say with every expansion of executive authority, just imagine how the worst possible president from the opposing party would use it. And now we don’t have to wonder any more.

Wyden correctly points out that secret promises from a prior administration are worth exactly nothing:

But here’s the other thing – whatever secret promise the Biden Administration made about using these vast, unchecked authorities with restraint, the current administration clearly isn’t going to feel bound by that promise. So whatever the previous administration intended to accomplish with that provision, there is absolutely nothing preventing the current administration from conscripting those cable repair and tech support men and women to secretly spy on Americans.

So to tally this up: Congress is about to vote on reauthorizing Section 702 with a secret legal interpretation that Wyden says will stun the public when it’s eventually revealed, with “reforms” that placed surveillance approval authority in the hands of conspiracy theorists who won’t even keep a spreadsheet, with a massively expanded definition of who can be forced to help the government spy, with secret promises about restraint that the current administration has no intention of honoring, and with a nominee to lead the NSA who won’t commit to following the Constitution.

The Wyden Siren is blaring. And if history is any guide — and it has been, without exception — whatever is behind the classification curtain is worse than what we can see from the outside.