Back in March I noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Several router manufacturers (like Amazon’s Eero and Netgear) have subsequently received exemptions from the Trump administration, but because there is zero transparency to the process, we have no idea what they agreed to. Did they pay the Trump administration a bribe? Did they agree to surveillance backdoors for ICE operations? Who knows? Great stuff.

Now the cable lobby appears to be balking at the purported foreign router ban. In a petition filed with the FCC last week (spotted by Ars Technica) NCTA (The Internet & Television Association) — the cable industry’s biggest lobbying org — asked for a massive exemption from the restrictions, noting that they’re simply not practical in real-world practice:

“NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose.”

So basically you’ve got a ban on foreign routers that is more about extortion than protecting national security. Which the cable industry says it can’t adhere to because AI hype, tariffs and unnecessary wars have driven up the costs of many internal router components, making adherence expensive if not impossible. Great stuff, very savvy policymaking by people who definitely know what they’re doing.

Part of the “foreign router ban” was supposed to involve forcing hardware manufacturing to return to the states. But because Trump and much of his administration have a fourth-grader-level understanding about how this stuff works (like his desire to suddenly have smartphones built in the U.S.), the cable industry’s filing notes that the “onshoring” of manufacturing and supply chains isn’t realistically possible either:

“Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.”

These companies, many of which supported and enabled Trump, now have to pretend this all makes sense as they navigate a costly minefield of weird bullshit that won’t accomplish any of its purported goals.

This is all exceptionally chaotic and dumb, and it’s unlikely that Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time trying to censor comedians and whining about “wokeness,” is capable of managing the scale of this sort of overhaul — even if it were practical, which it isn’t.

When you read most press coverage of this router ban, they don’t really make it clear to readers that this is all very unworkable and stupid. Trump and his administration are given undeserved credit on competency and policy, as the press, companies, and policymakers all try to trip over themselves to normalize the sheer pointless stupidity and expense of it all.

If the country cared about national security we’d focus on corruption. We’d pass a meaningful modern internet privacy law. We’d shore up, staff, and properly fund cybersecurity regulators. We’d regulate data brokers. Instead we get a giant pile of unworkable extortion slop being overseen by weird zealots.

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy’s background is as an MD and many of his GOP colleagues reportedly looked to his vote as to whether to support Kennedy’s nomination, despite Kennedy being perhaps the loudest evangelist for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the planet. He voted to confirm Kennedy, leading several others to follow suit. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Kennedy has his position because Cassidy voted for him.

Despite his attempts to lick Trump’s boots so clean that he could perform surgery with them, Cassidy lost his primary because his love for Trump went unrequited. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Cassidy rediscovered his own backbone and flipped his vote from no to yes on the war powers resolution that went before the Senate. While that was bad enough for Cassidy to get a big ol’ middle finger from me, listening to him now try to poke a finger in Kennedy’s eye is a bridge too far.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) directly blamed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses Thursday.

On the social media platform X, Cassidy shared a New York Times article reporting on hospitals seeing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses, with doctors telling the outlet they’re frequently seeing illnesses they used to rarely encounter.

“A terrible outcome from RFK and others promoting vaccine skepticism,” wrote Cassidy.

This has to be one of the most tone-deaf things a sitting senator has ever uttered. And for several reasons. Chief among them is that Cassidy is the one who helped promote vaccine skepticism by literally promoting a brain-addled anti-vaxxer into a cabinet position in charge of Americans’ health. To crow about the consequences of the very HHS administration Cassidy helped to put in place is befuddling in the extreme. Cassidy has ownership of this, whether he wants to admit it or not.

And, again, Cassidy had every opportunity to try to do something to correct his own mistake before he fumbled his incumbency so badly. There were impeachment efforts around Kennedy that he could have helped bolster. He could have crafted legislation to try to mitigate Kennedy’s worst actions in his role. He could have done literally anything other than complain publicly that Kennedy lied to him during his confirmation hearings and then just leaving it at that.

Cassidy has a few months left in office and then he will disappear into the vapor. If he wants to do something, then he should do something. This very much isn’t that and the fact that it’s coming in the wake of his no longer having any stakes in electoral politics is pathetic.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The American academic research engine has long been the envy of the world. Generally well-funded, labs in the United States have been able to attract the best minds who generate breakthroughs and train the next generation workforce that powers the U.S. economy. But since the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025, new federal policies have destabilized the American scientific enterprise.

The disruption generated by the Trump administration’s funding, DEI and visa policies has been well reported by the media. On an individual level, though, what do academic researchers think of all these changes and how have they been directly affected?

We are researchers affiliated with Arizona State University’s scientist opinion panel survey, known as SciOPS, a 5-year research program designed to monitor, understand and improve how scientists communicate with the public. We wanted to know more about the reality inside today’s universities as researchers grapple with Trump administration policies.

Along with our colleagues, we fielded a survey of randomly sampled members of the academic science community participating in the SciOPS panel. We obtained responses from 280 scientists from several fields, including biology, chemistry, civil and environmental engineering, computer and information science engineering, geography and public health from 131 universities.

Our results show dramatic, mostly negative, effects of federal policy changes on researchers, the research system and American competitiveness.

How research in US universities has changed

Any research enterprise thrives because of its ability to fund cutting-edge science and thus attract highly motivated, well-trained people. Since the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, just over half of the scientists in our survey report that their overall funding has declined.

Declines in federal funding have had knock-on effects. Around one-quarter of scientists reported that state and local and university internal funding have also declined. Another 9% reported that internal funding has increased, presumably as universities have provided emergency funds to researchers to support critical studies.

According to the scientists who responded to our survey, Trump administration policies have also affected the scientific workforce pipeline, hampering their ability to recruit internationally and domestically.

We hypothesize that these hiring issues can be related to visa and immigration policies, which make it difficult for international graduate students and postdocs to work in the U.S. or attend international conferences. Just over half of scientists in our survey reported that international students or postdocs have expressed concerns to them about deportation.

Concerns about longer-term career impacts are also to blame for trouble recruiting the next generation of researchers. Over 80% of surveyed scientists reported that graduate students or postdocs on their research team have increased concerns about future job prospects.

These impacts have taken a toll on scientists’ professional work environment and overall outlook. Over two-thirds reported more work-related stress and almost half reported increased workloads since January 2025. About half reported decreased work motivation.

How are scientists and engineers reacting?

We found scientists’ responses to be a mixture of resilience, acquiescence and considering an exit.

While many scientists said they were less motivated at work, most reported no change in their efforts to obtain federal research funding. Small proportions did report successfully increasing their efforts to obtain funding from non-federal sources.

Our survey also asked scientists whether they had taken any self-censoring actions since January 2025 due to concern over potential negative consequences for their work or career. Over half reported having reviewed or adjusted key words in research proposals, and almost half said they’d reframed research topics. Forty-three percent had also cautioned students or collaborators to be careful what they say publicly and more than a third had abandoned plans on one or more research topics.

Although scientists are adopting strategies to cope with the new challenges, nearly two-thirds of the scientists in our sample appear to be considering one or more other career options.

Scientists look to the long term

Scientists and engineers in our sample have strong opinions about the impacts of current U.S. science policy. A large majority (87%) believe the administration’s actions have influenced research priorities more than previous administrations. Most scientists in our survey had a negative opinion of the Trump administration’s overall changes to science policy.

Scientists in our sample believed that administration policies have had a negative effect on the future scientific workforce and the ability of scientists and engineers in the U.S. to produce breakthroughs and discoveries and contribute to national welfare.

Large majorities believe these policies have harmed public perceptions of the integrity of U.S. scientists (85%) and hurt public trust in science (84%).

Academic scientists’ reactions to the Trump administration’s changes to science policy are perhaps not surprising given the perceived level of threat these actions represent to the research community. What is less certain is whether the dramatic changes we are currently witnessing – cuts to grant funding, politicization of research, downsizing of federal agencies, restrictive immigration policies, attacks on the autonomy of higher education and more – are temporary or if they represent the initial phase of a transition to a new research environment with less federal support for American science.

Eric Welch is Professor and Director, Center for Science, Technology & Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University and Timothy P. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of Public Administration at University of Illinois Chicago

To lose one speech-suppressing SLAPP suit may be regarded as thoughtless. To lose two looks like you’re a censorial hack.

Last month we wrote about how supposed “free speech warrior” Matt Taibbi (who spent years misrepresenting the work of people who study disinformation as inherently censorial, while getting pretty basic facts wrong) had lost his speech suppressing SLAPP suit against author Eoin Higgins. In that case, he argued that some rhetorically hyperbolic metaphors used on the book’s cover defamed him. The court pointed out that’s not at all how defamation works.

Taibbi, who also claimed he somehow had to sue to “protect free speech” (also not how it works) apparently wasn’t satisfied with just a single SLAPP suit. He also had sued congressional Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove in a separate action, claiming that her calling him a “serial sexual harasser” (and entering into the record two articles to support that claim) during a congressional hearing was defamation. If you’re interested, the two articles that were entered into the record were the Chicago Reader’s “Twenty years ago, in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist asshole—and possibly worse” and the Washington Post’s “The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow.“

The hearing in question was yet another in a ridiculously long line of congressional hearings (multiple ones where Taibbi has appeared peddling nonsense) about the supposed “censorship industrial complex,” a mostly made-up concept pushed by political hacks trying to shield online trolls and bullies from ever facing consequences from private actors for breaking the clearly stated policies of online platforms.

Kamlager-Dove chose to question Taibbi’s credibility. You could argue she could have focused on the factual problems with his continued confused claims about how disinformation research and trust & safety work — but she went for the more salacious (and widely reported) claims about his time in Moscow from a few decades ago, along with a characterization that reads as a clear opinion based on disclosed facts, which (by definition) cannot be defamatory.

As you may be aware, things said in Congress tend to be protected by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution. Taibbi’s lawyers claimed that because Kamlager-Dove reposted videos of her remarks on social media, that somehow took them outside the clause’s protection. For her part, Kamlager-Dove pointed to the Westfall Act which (as we’ve discussed in the past) allows the government itself to substitute in as a defendant in cases filed against government employees if the lawsuit was based on government work they were doing. In defamation cases, this is fatal: once the federal government substitutes itself in as defendant, the case collapses, because you simply can’t sue the federal government for defamation thanks to sovereign immunity.

Here, the case fails on those grounds exactly. Judge Evelyn Padin finds that the Westfall Act does apply, effectively dooming the case. Taibbi’s lawyers tried to argue that Kamlager-Dove’s statements weren’t part of her job as Congress… because her comments were “partisan communications” and were for “self-aggrandizement on Twitter” rather than serving her constituents. Except politicians making self-aggrandizing partisan communications is (unfortunately) part of their job these days.

Representative Kamlager-Dove’s Statements and republications, however, are precisely the kind of conduct that is “a central part of the job for members of Congress.”…. Indeed, a “primary obligation of a [m]ember of Congress in a representative democracy is to serve and respond to his or her constituents.” …. As the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee holding the Hearing. Representative Kamlager-Dove’s remarks mentioned “taxpayer time and resources” and “foreign policy” topics that are important to members of Congress and that are top-of-mind for their constituents….

Republishing the statements online does not change the analysis. Taibbi claims that the “republications on X, BlueSky, and [Representative Kamlager-Dove’s] website were not legislative work, [and] occurred outside the legislative setting.” …. But members of Congress routinely engage with the public on social media and on the internet as part of their jobs…. (“There is no meaningful difference between tweets and the other kinds of public communications between an elected official and their constituents that have been held to be within the scope-of-employment under the Westfall Act.”). As Taibbi concedes, Representative Kamlager-Dove was simply “talking to voters on Twitter.” …

Thus, while the judge doesn’t get a chance to dismiss the censorial SLAPP suit for being a censorial SLAPP suit, the court does make it pretty clear you can’t sue over this kind of thing.

Two SLAPP suits filed to silence critics. Both dismissed. This is a guy who built his recent brand on the Twitter Files and the “censorship industrial complex” — and who has been a key cog in helping the government suppress speech in the process. He’s now spent quite a lot of time trying to use the courts to shut people up for criticizing him — and failing at that, too.

Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (although its results may be getting worse.) More recently, it has been adding to its search engine more features based on generative AI, first with its AI Overviews in 2024, and then a year later with its AI Mode in Search. Now it has announced the latest stage in that evolution with what it calls “A new era for AI Search”:

It’s more intuitive than ever, dynamically expanding to give you space to describe exactly what you need. Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete. And you can search across modalities, using text, images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as inputs.

This new incarnation effectively turns search into a chatbot:

You can easily ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview, and flow into a conversational back and forth with AI Mode. Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant. This seamless experience is live today across desktop and mobile, worldwide.

As the the screenshot of the new interface above shows, the traditional search result links that are currently placed under the AI Overview have now been confined to a small panel on the right-hand side of the screen, which shows a cut-down version of today’s list. Users are encouraged to ask follow-up questions from the AI search chatbot, rather than exploring the links themselves.

What this is likely to mean in practice is that even fewer people will follow links to sites, something that was already happening last year; instead, they will engage with Google’s chatbot to gather information indirectly. This is terrible news for access to knowledge because it frames the Google AI search engine as the fount of all knowledge – one that will do all the hard work of finding information and combining it into an easily digested answer that can be interrogated further. It can do that because it has already ingested billions of Web pages and other information sources as part of the Large Language Model (LLM) training process. But search engine users will no longer know what some of those sources are unless they painstakingly click on the links in the new panel.

Most people will not bother, because the AI-generated results will be good enough – or at least will appear to be good enough. Unless visitors to the site take the trouble to follow the links to the sources they won’t really know how reliable those results are. For example, it is possible that the sources are wrong, or misleading; moreover, Google’s LLM may itself introduce new errors and distortions. There is also the question of how Google will insert ads into this AI-generated information, and to what extent advertisers will be able to buy preferential treatment in results.

This new mediated approach is clearly terrible news for Wikipedia – an issue already discussed on Walled Culture earlier this year – and for creators. Google will use the information found in their works, but will not actively encourage people to visit the originals. For many people, summaries will be good enough, and they will never discover the greater riches of the sites and creations that Google’s LLM is based on. Worse still, the original creators such as Wikipedia may not even be mentioned in answers that involve aggregating information from a large number of sources.

Similarly, the new Google search is the publishing industry’s worst nightmare. Not only is Google drawing on material they have published, but it is pushing links to those sources into the background. It seems inevitable that the Web traffic to publishers will fall yet further, making already struggling business models based on advertising even more precarious. That will have knock-on consequences for the funding of many sites – particularly newspapers and magazines – and for the commissioning of work from journalists and other creative professionals. Users won’t even need to visit Google Search much in order to keep up-to-date with topics of interest thanks to Google Search’s new agentic capabilities that will do the work for them in advance:

With information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, like blogs, news sites and social posts, plus our freshest data, such as real-time info on finance, shopping and sports, to monitor for changes related to your specific question.

In this case, not only will people not visit sites, but the latter will be constantly bombarded by various AI bots seeking information on behalf of users – increasing site running costs, and making sites less usable by humans. Another key announcement from Google will lead to a further flood of agentic activities that will pose new challenges to businesses:

We’re also expanding agentic booking capabilities in Search to a wide range of new tasks, including local experiences and services. Just share your specific criteria — like finding a private karaoke room for six on a Friday night that serves food late — and Search brings together the latest pricing and availability with direct links to finish booking through the provider of your choice. And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf.

What emerges from Google’s latest announcements is less of a search engine, and more of an immersive virtual environment that is designed to keep people engaging with Google’s services, asking them for information, advice and even delegating actions to them. There is no doubt that many users will find these new features attractive, not least because they can use “conversational voice features” in Gmail, Docs and elsewhere. These are the digital assistants that have been promised for many years, able to understand spoken commands, provide information verbally, and carry out complex operations on behalf of users without the need for any complex training. For many people, that will be a boon, and they will doubtless migrate from the traditional search page, which will still be the default – at least for now – to the latest AI-infused version.

But these impressive technical features come at a high price, even leaving aside issues such as the environmental impact of the huge server farms they require. With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analyzing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it.

There’s another, more subtle issue. The new Google search features make finding information and carrying out actions very easy in many ways. Leaving aside the problem that this will require people to trust what is in effect a huge black box, where the internal workings cannot be examined, with all the loss of control this implies, there is another danger. People who use Google’s powerful new AI search services to offload many of their day-to-day actions may gradually lose the ability to understand the world and to act within it without that constant help. Such a dependence may be great for Google and its advertisers, but it surely cannot be a good thing for the future of society.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to WalledCulture.

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If federal officers are going to murder another person, it will likely happen here.

Newark, New Jersey is the newest battleground for the administration, as Trump goes to war with his own constituents. The foundation was laid months ago, when ICE officers assaulted, arrested, and illegally refused to grant access to detention facilities to congressional reps.

Now, there’s a war being fought at the Delaney Hall detention facility, overseen by ICE and run by private prison contractor, GEO Group. The protests have been steadily getting more intense. The city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, has been on the Trump administration’s radar ever since officers arrested him for… um… standing on a public sidewalk as New Jersey congressional reps demanded access to the facility.

Things aren’t exactly being made better by Governor Mikie Sherrill. On one hand, she has passed laws that forbid local police cooperation with ICE’s anti-migrant efforts. On the other hand, she’s decided to expend state resources to protect federal resources from protesters.

The crisis remains a volatile, early test of Ms. Sherrill and her administration, with the potential for political fallout that could reverberate far beyond Newark. Ms. Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, has already faced criticism from the left, which has pointed to her decision to send in New Jersey State Police troopers to quell disturbances outside Delaney Hall as evidence of cooperation with the Trump administration’s divisive immigration crackdown. 

Seems like that might be a job that would be better handled by vastly better-funded federal agencies, like the Federal Protective Service which is overseen by the flush-with-cash DHS.

But given what’s happening outside of Delaney Hall, it might make more sense to expend state resources on protecting protesters, legal observers, and (especially!) journalists from federal officers, not to mention the locals who are supposed to be serving and protecting.

It’s nothing new to hear that federal officers are assaulting journalists or anyone else attempting to document their actions. But the specificity of these attacks makes it clear federal officers are deliberately seeking to do as much damage as possible to the tools journalists use to make a living.

According to a report by amNewYork, there have been allegations from multiple photojournalists who say they were injured while documenting clashes near the detention center, with some reporting damaged camera equipment and physical injuries, including broken fingers.

Reuters photojournalist Ryan Murphy tells amNewYork that he was struck with a baton over several nights of coverage and said agents targeted his camera during an incident on Thursday. Murphy said he believes the strike broke one of his fingers.

[…]

Photographer Madison Swart, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, also alleged that she was deliberately pushed to the ground while documenting the protests. Swart says an agent struck her with a baton during the confrontation. According to amNewYork, another photographer was reportedly seen curled in the fetal position as agents moved over her, while another prominent photographer, who requested anonymity, says the top of his camera was smashed.

Here’s another account that comes with photos of the damage done:

Mostafa Bassim, a photojournalist for Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, was struck with a baton by a federal officer, damaging his camera lens, while covering protests outside a private immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, on May 28, 2026.

[…]

Bassim told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he arrived at the detention facility shortly before nightfall. He said that even before he was able to start documenting the scene, federal officers noticed his camera and began shining high-powered lights directly at him.

“The second they see you with a camera they just start doing that to you,” Bassim said.

Any officer who’s only interested in doing what’s necessary to maintain the peace wouldn’t deliberately target journalists, especially before the protests themselves start to get out of hand. And when it is actually time to step in to protect federal employees (or government contractors), force should be applied to those whose actions demand a forceful reaction. Deliberately targeting journalists and the tools of their trade is nothing more than being shitty just because you know no one will stop you.

And speaking of being shitty, this is still the high water mark for law enforcement response to the Delaney Hall protests:

[P]hotojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.

The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.

On top of the theft (which is a felony, given the value of items stolen), there’s the officer’s attempt to cover up the crime:

From a hospital bed, she watched on her phone as the AirTag in her camera bag traveled across northern New Jersey — on the highway, then to a private residence, and then to a bar close to that home, she said.

Ms. Katsanis said her boyfriend and the other photographer went out to track the AirTag and found that it had been removed from her bag and was on the side of the road. She said that her name and contact information were still clearly written on the AirTag.

Unfortunately, the officer is still employed, albeit not working at the moment… and better yet not being paid for not working. Suspended without pay. It’s a start. Somehow, the prosecutor’s office can’t help but shift into the exonerative tense when discussing this alleged crime, even as moves forward with its prosecution:

The prosecutors also received footage from Sergeant Brown’s body-worn camera, which they said “shows him interacting with a dark-colored bag consistent with the description of the victim’s belongings.”

“Interacting” is a pretty coy term for “rifling through a bag’s contents before deciding to steal the bag and everything in it.” It’s like describing molestation as “interacting with a minor” or a carjacking as “interacting with a vehicle’s driver.” Tell it like it is: the officer was digging through someone’s bag and shortly thereafter took it back to his home where it was recovered during the execution of a search warrant.

Only one of these two things looks like a trend, that being the deliberate targeting of journalists and their expensive equipment. The camera theft is probably a one-off, but possibly only because federal officers are making sure journalists’ cameras are too broken to be worth stealing.

I’ve noted repeatedly how the Trump administration is going out of its way to not only destroy all oversight of the country’s shitty and predatory telecom monopolies, but to eliminate any and all systems that try to ensure that U.S. broadband access is actually affordable. This stuff often runs in parallel to the administration’s brutal attacks on free speech.

For example, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr and Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently joined forces to destroy a bipartisan, popular FCC program that made sure rural school kids could get access to free Wi-Fi. They made up a bunch of bullshit reasons for the attack (falsely claiming these programs were “censoring Conservative viewpoints and content”), but the real reason is big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the government giving people free broadband they might otherwise have to pay for.

Trump cronyism, corruption, censorship, and ideological extremism just keep intermingling in new and creative ways.

Last week Carr announced he’s now taking aim at the broader FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” E-Rate is another historically bipartisan and uncontroversial program that helps bring affordable broadband to rural libraries, schools, and communities. Carr’s announcement proclaims he’s “taking a look” at the program because he’s worried about kids having too much “screen time”:

“Over the last several years—and especially during COVID—many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day. Research has now been pouring in that America’s experiment with heightened screen time in schools may be related to the negative educational outcomes we are now seeing in classrooms across the country—from declining academic performance to diminished reading comprehension skills.”

Obviously, having the guy who illegally censors comedians and journalists at the behest of Donald Trump determining what kids should or shouldn’t be seeing is problematic, though it probably won’t get as much press attention as it should. It’s worth noting that lot of the “harm” science Carr is referencing — and even the term “screen time” — is based on a lot of misleading bullshit.

Other Republicans, like Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn, have also been focusing a lot on sudden concerns about “screen time,” but they’re using the term as a trojan horse to mask other goals — like forcing tech companies or schools to coddle far right wing ideologies. Unfortunately, the corporate U.S. press is too broken to inform people that nothing these folks do is in good faith.

They’re all so pickled in their own propaganda, most Trumpies genuinely believe that existing systems are currently filling kids’ heads with trans rights activism and “wokeness.” But they’re not interested in educational programming or internet access filters that necessarily work and are broadly fair, they’re interested in systems that give right wing ideology an advantage.

The E-Rate program spends about $3 billion a year driving affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. While there is sometimes fraud in programs like this, the vast majority of the time it’s caused by private companies Carr, again, refuses to competently regulate and is afraid to stand up to.

So if you were to seriously reform these programs, you’d start doing audits of major companies like AT&T, who have a long history of defrauding these and other initiatives. Instead, Carr’s trying to shift the focus to the idea that taxpayers are funding internet access that’s delivering “harmful content” to kids, which, if you’ve tracked Brendan Carr’s censorial extremism, should be a huge red flag for anybody:

I suspect there’s several motivations here. One being big telecoms like AT&T that want E-rate revamped in a way that financially benefits them. The other being Carr and the right wing extremist mission to extend their censorship and ideological dominance into every aspect of American life, starting with the classroom, where they’re compelled to root out any and all criticism of right wing ideology.

This is how he framed his new plan for E-Rate reforms on a recent appearance on Fox News:

“There are school districts that have read our law as only requiring them to put Internet safety procedures in place on the devices that the school owns. If you bring your own device to a network supported by this program, you don’t necessarily have any filters on where you can go. Kids are ultimately finding pornography, and that’s a problem.”

To be clear schools already employ filtering systems. Some work, some don’t. The nature of these systems is such that they not only tend to over-filter content, but they’re generally easy to bypass.

Still, it’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content is acceptable, or even to manage kid “screen time” on personally-owned devices. That’s not only an unworkable game of whack-a-mole that would waste a lot of taxpayer money, that’s the precise sort of weird overreach Carr (and Republicans, and “free market” Libertarians) have whined about for as long as I’ve been alive.

When Carr demolished the program that brought free Wi-Fi to school kids, he and Cruz simply made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how the free Wi-Fi systems (and firewall systems) being implemented were “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Feeling emboldened from that weird performance, it’s clear he’s looking to expand his “reform” more broadly to other FCC programs.

If it’s not clear yet, nothing Carr does is in good faith, his government “efficiency reforms” always mask harmful, unpopular ideological extremism or cronyism (sometimes both), and like Trump often does, he’ll exploit our shitty press to drive a news cycle about “screen time” that will downplay or ignore all of Carr’s actual goals.

Cases of measles in American continue to rise. As of June 5th of this year, the official case count in the country stood at 2,030 confirmed cases. In 2025’s record breaking year for measles cases, the most we’d had in 3 decades, there were 2,288 confirmed cases. We’re going to speed right past that number in 2026, given that we’re nearly there already and we’re only half way through the year.

It was just weeks ago in April when RFK Jr. decided to wash his hands of the measles problem, literally saying it has nothing to do with him and was instead the fault of dirty immigrants invading our country.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

This anti-immigrant trope when it comes to disease is as old as time, of course, and plainly stupid. But because the measles outbreak isn’t going to go away on its own, Kennedy had to address it recently during a trip to Virginia, where measles is becoming a growing problem. And in addressing it, Kennedy managed to pack more wrong into two sentences than I’ve ever seen before.

“There’s a global measles epidemic right now, we’ve done better than any country in the world in controlling it,” Kennedy said. “At [the] CDC we encourage people to get their measles vaccination, that’s the best way to prevent yourself from getting measles.”

Stating that there is a global measles epidemic is a sneaky statement to make for a number of reasons. First, I’ll note that there is no definition of terms that comes along with the claim. Second, much of the global data on this comes from the WHO, which, to date, has published global case counts only up to 2024 on its main tracking page, though it does have some surveillance data that goes up to the current month. And that data suggests that there is an uptick of global measles cases, to be sure, but nothing like there was only a few decades ago. In 2024, for instance, the WHO counted roughly 700k global cases of measles, compared with 1.5 million cases in 1993.

But regardless of how true it is that this is a global problem, it doesn’t matter. Kennedy’s job is to keep Americans safe from disease, not the world. Hand-waving away our own measles problem by globalizing it is a non-sequitur. And claiming that America is doing better than any other country on the measles problem is so wrong as to be laughable. The WHO has a handy presentation on the current measles problem and you can see that we aren’t even handling it the best in our own region.

That chart pretty clearly shows that Brazil and Canada are both doing a far better job than us in keeping measles cases low and combating outbreaks, if nothing else. Canada has a much lower total population compared with America, but Brazil is much closer. Besides, as we stated before, Kennedy has already said that the measles outbreak has nothing to do with him. So why is he now taking credit for how great we’re doing combating it, even though we’re not. By the way, the entire European region is kicking the America region’s ass when it comes to combating measles currently.

And I don’t even know how much I have to say about Kennedy’s baffling claim that he and the CDC are huge advocates for getting vaccinated to prevent measles. As I’ve stated repeatedly, one of the tricks Kennedy pulls is to say all kinds of things about the same subject. On measles, he has said, begrudgingly, that people should get vaccinated. He’s also said it would be better for everyone to just get measles for natural immunity, not to mention that he’s attempted to blame the infected for getting the disease as well.

Telling the public to get vaccinated, but also to not get vaccinated, and that it’s their fault if they catch measles, does not distill to something so simple as “we encourage everyone to get vaccinated.”

Kennedy is a liar and a charlatan. As is common with a person like that, he’s all over the place with his public comments when it comes to the measles and what we, and he, should be doing about it. He thinks that allows him to pretend like he’s been very pro-vaccination. It doesn’t.

Remove this man from his post before he gets more people killed.

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained. 

EFF submitted an opposition letter to the California Senate Privacy Committee explaining why we continue to believe A.B. 412 is simply unworkable. To the extent developers do follow this law, it will have the effect of locking in the power of the largest companies in AI. 

A Burden That Can’t Be Met

A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

The bill effectively asks developers to continuously cross-reference massive batches of online data against a copyright system that simply wasn’t designed to do so. If California passes A.B. 412, its impact will go far beyond the large AI companies we read about in the headlines. 

Not Just Big Tech

Supporters often frame this bill as a way to help creative workers have some leverage against Big Tech, but the bill reaches much further than the big AI companies. 

Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians. That includes indie developers tinkering with an existing model, open-source initiatives, nonprofits, and other non-commercial efforts. Recent amendments added exemptions for universities and government entities, which is important, but that still leaves out a vast swathe of non-commercial tech work that’s done by people without full-time jobs in government or academia. 

Large companies will hire compliance teams and lawyers to navigate these requirements. Smaller organizations and independent developers usually can’t. The result will be fewer opportunities for startups and new entrants. Faced with this massive compliance burden, some won’t even try. 

Courts Are Already Deciding These Questions

The bill is premised on the idea that copyright owners currently don’t have good remedies if they’re mistreated by AI companies. That simply isn’t true. And the growing wave of federal court filings in this space proves it. Content companies that want to sue tech companies, large or small, have no problem doing so. Those courts are still working through important questions about fair use and transformative use. Some courts have already concluded that many AI training activities qualify as fair use. Others continue to evaluate the issue.

California lawmakers should not rush to impose new state regulation while those questions remain unresolved. This is why copyright is governed at the federal level: both creators and fair users benefit from a single set of nationwide rules. 

At this point, the bill remains a solution in search of a problem. Rights holders already have powerful tools to protect their interests under existing federal law. What this bill adds isn’t clarity or transparency, but a costly and essentially impossible compliance burden that will discourage small developers and researchers. 

California has been able to support both artistic creativity and tech innovation for decades now.  But A.B. 412 does not strike the right balance. 

If you are a California resident and interested in speaking out about this bill, you can find and contact your representatives through this website. 

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. That could be said of anywhere in this country, now that the Trump administration is trying to turn the clock back to 1940, if not 1840.

But it’s especially true in Los Angeles, where law enforcement agencies have apparently learned nothing, despite being the ignition source of two riots. The 1965 Watts riot was provoked by racist, abusive actions of the LAPD. The 1992 riots were similarly provoked by the racist, abusive actions of the LAPD.

Before, between, and after, Los Angeles law enforcement agencies haven’t done much to improve. When not actively thwarting federal investigations and running illegal jailhouse informant programs, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has hosted any number of “gangs” composed of officers who are more willing than others to engage in violence and rights violations.

The LASD’s gangs have made headlines for most of the last decade, including stuff that would otherwise seem to be the broadest of satires:

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Allegedly Removed ‘Unauthorized” Sheriff’s Gang Tattoo With A Bullet

It’s admittedly hilarious, but only in the darkest sense. While absolutely absurd, it also indicates that LASD officers (especially those who are in LASD gangs) feel the solution to every problem — including tattoo removal — is to start blasting.

A handful of people who’ve run on “reformer” platforms have either failed to be elected, or have been elected only to renege on their reformation promises.

The LAPD covers less area and has fewer officers than the Sheriff’s Department. But it still has nearly 9,000 officers, which is only about a grand short of the LASD total (10,000 officers). If nothing else, basic mathematics would strongly suggest the LAPD would be just as receptive to internal gangs as the Sheriff’s Department.

The LAPD internal investigation leveled a troubling allegation: Officers in a specialized unit tasked with combating street gangs had themselves behaved like a gang.

In 2023, officers in the San Fernando Valley were accused of making dozens of improper traffic stops and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body cameras.

When confronted by Internal Affairs detectives, according to the findings of a months-long probe, officers in the Valley’s “gang enforcement detail” said they were engaged in a “gun hunting competition,” with each firearm-related arrest tracked on a whiteboard in their office. Cops with the most seizures would pose for pictures with pro-wrestling-style championship belt that had “Mission GED Pistoleros” emblazoned on the buckle.

And so it is. While this opening salvo of paragraphs merely suggest some members of the LAPD were more prone to doing bad stuff than others, the Internal Affairs report makes it more explicit.

The report said the Valley unit was a “law enforcement gang.”

That report was buried by the LAPD for almost three years. But that burial proved temporary. The report — which had previously only been seen by LAPD officials and some city lawmakers — prompted further inquiries. And those further inquiries generated answers that raised even more questions:

LAPD leaders said at the time that the problems were confined to that one division. But a new case involving similar allegations against anti-gang officers operating out of South L.A.’s 77th Street patrol area has reignited questions about whether there are deeper issues across the department.

Oh, the fucking irony. An anti-gang squad that behaves like a gang. Wow, imagine if we’d ever seen this anywhere else multiple times. I mean, say the first thing that comes to mind when I say “rampart.”

It’s tempting to simply say that no one cares. But I don’t think that’s true. I do think a lot of people care, including LA lawmakers who want to see real reform. The problem is that the people with the most power don’t care. That not only includes law enforcement unions, law enforcement officials, elected officials (including sheriffs), but also the handful of lawmakers who actually think law enforcement officers should be allowed to violate rights while performing their duties.

That’s the headwind reform efforts face. While thousands (or millions, in this case) may recognize the problem and want reform, it only takes a handful of powerful people to prevent their voices from being heard. And while it’s easy to tell people to vote their way back into power, we only need to look to the White House to see how facile and futile the “vote the bastards out” suggestion is. It’s something that should have been addressed years ago, because if you give the bastards an inch, they’ll entrench a mile. If Los Angeles is going to fix this, it will require the concerted efforts of people who are more motivated to protect their paychecks than serve the public. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put there by companies seeking to extract more and more from you. It’s a great read and here’s just a snippet:

The internet you grew up on is not gone.

Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends.

The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

It was not demolished.

It was buried under a louder layer for a while.

Go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it. This is why I wrote Protocols, Not Platforms, it’s why I’ve been so focused for years on helping more people understand the inherent power of distributing technological power.

But, as Godier’s piece notes, protocols are… boring. They change slowly (for a good reason, because you need stability to build on). They tend to change by consensus, which is messy. And rather than having billion dollar companies throwing a whole massive engineering team at making everything work, in the protocol world, we rely on constant experimentation by anyone who wants to experiment.

Sometimes that produces silly things. Sometimes it produces things that only kinda work. And sometimes, it produces wonderful new things that would never have existed in a world of fully centralized services.

But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future. The important thing for people to understand, though, is that while the amazing new breakthroughs in the protocol world may not get giant headlines in the NY Times or flashy stories about trillion dollar IPOs, they are building real things for real people, in which the people are the most important part, rather than the bankers or the billionaire execs looking to get richer.

So I was excited recently to take part as a juror for the Open Social Awards, put on by New_Public and Public Spaces, reviewing a wide range of projects looking to build on open social protocols (mostly ATproto and ActivityPub). The energy among developers right now for what they can do on open social systems is real, and it’s building fast. Tim Trautmann recently wrote about this, saying “the nerds are building a new internet.” As he wrote:

The open web of the nineties didn’t win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it. Slowly, unglamorously, in rooms that looked a lot like this one.

Whether atproto ends up being the thing, or a stepping stone to the thing, I don’t know. Nobody in the room claimed to know. But the work is real, the apps are shipping, and the people building them are taking it seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination is rare, and historically, it’s the one that wins.

You can see that kind of excitement as well in this recent video of a bunch of developers doing an ATproto hackathon, where you see people realizing in real time how powerful ATproto is in allowing you to build a better internet:

It’s so easy these days to get down on the state of the larger internet, increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies trying to extract more and more from you. But if you look beneath all of that, genuinely interesting, important things are being built, some of which was celebrated at the Open Social Awards last week.

The grand prize winner was the Newsmast Foundation, which has been helping mission-driven organizations build their own social spaces online, using ActivityPub. They’ve been building some amazing community apps for news organizations, non-profits, and more. Enabling those organizations to have their own social spaces, but built on top of an open protocol.

The two “Excellence Award” winners were equally strong — there was a real argument that either of them could have taken the grand prize. First there’s Blacksky Algorithms, which has built out an entirely separate and differentiated ATproto experience, where thousands of users can have a social media experience interoperable with Bluesky and others on the network, but without ever touching Bluesky hardware or software. The company keeps doing really fascinating things as well, including its use of pol.is for community decision-making, and offering up its ability to build entirely independent ATproto powered communities to others via Acorn.

And there’s one of my personal favorites, Sill, which is a wonderful cross-protocol newsreader app. You login with your Atmosphere (ATproto) handle and/or your ActivityPub handle, and it will find the news that is being discussed among your followers and format it in a nice digest format. I use it as a daily review of what’s happening in the world that’s interesting to me.

And then all of the “honorable mentions” were doing interesting things as well, figuring out ways to make open social more useful: Bounce (a tool for migrating between AcitivtyPub and ATproto while bringing your community with you, from the team who also does BridgyFed, a tool for communicating across protocols). Dandelion, an events platform built on ATproto. Streamplace, which does video streaming on ATproto. Leaflet, which has become one of the go to places for long form blogging within the ATproto world, and Bonfire Networks, which is also working on helping communities build their own communities online.

There were many other entries as well, and the energy developers are bringing to open social projects right now is genuinely contagious. People are learning that they can just build stuff, and specifically the kind of stuff that you had to rely on the goodwill (or perhaps commercial agreements) of a large company to build.

Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.

We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future.

In the meantime, congrats to the winners (and all the entrants) of the first ever Open Social Awards.

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