It’s been a long and winding road to mostly get us right back to where we started in the battle between pop star Katy Perry and Aussie clothing designer Katie Perry. If you’re not familiar with this saga, here is a brief summary. Note that I will be mostly using only Katy and Katie when naming the players here to avoid confusion.
Katie Taylor is the real name of the Aussie designer, but she began selling clothing under the name “Katie Perry” in 2008 and secured a trademark for the name in Australia for clothing. While Katy’s team initially sent a C&D to Katie’s business around that same time, it appears nothing came of that C&D, even as the singer went on a worldwide tour that included Australia in 2014. That’s when Katie sued Katy, arguing that clothing merch sold on her local tour constituted trademark infringement, as the public might be confused between the two entities and who was producing what and for whom. She won her initial lawsuit, but Katy appealed and won, with the court not only clearing her of trademark infringement but also canceling Katie’s trademark entirely. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Katie appealed that ruling to Australia’s High Court.
And that brings us to an unlikely present, in which the High Court partially agreed with Katie’s appeal, reinstating her trademark, but not ruling that Katy Perry infringed upon it. I’m going to stay away from the first part of CNN’s post on the matter, because it does a horrible job of framing all of this, mostly in that in paints Katie Perry as some kind of underdog victim in all of this when she very much is not. But as for the ruling itself:
But on Wednesday, Australia’s High Court overturned the ruling, arguing the cancellation of the trademark was not warranted, and the use of the “Katie Perry” trademark was not likely to deceive or cause confusion.
Taylor said the court battle was a long and difficult process, but she did it to show that trademarks are there to protect small businesses, not just large brands.
“So many people said to me, like, why don’t you just give up? It’s not worth it. I really believe in standing up for your values. Truth and justice are part of my core and my values.”
And this is where I’m once again frustrated with CNN’s posture in its reporting. Katie sued Katy. That’s how this whole episode really started. Katie talking about how she is glad this all isn’t hanging over her head when she started the lawsuit that led to all of this is insane. This was a self-inflicted wound of epic proportions on a timeline equally crazy.
But the key part to me is that the logic behind ruling that Katie can have her trademark back is that Katie’s and Katy’s trademarks can coexist without any real concern for deception or confusion. That same logic is what I stated at the start of this whole ordeal as the reason this trademark lawsuit battle never should have been started in the first place.
Started by Katie Perry, I’ll remind you. And so we’ve come full circle, with both groups having their trademarks but without any actual infringement having occurred. It’s been a wild, stupid trip, but I guess we got where we were going: right back to where we started.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
There’s a notion that pops up in the comments here on Techdirt that Mike and our writer Karl Bode are deeply opposed in their opinions on AI and engaged in an epic ongoing debate. Alas, the truth is a little less spectacular: while they might have some differences of opinion here and there, they actually agree on most things, and would both prefer to hear (and have) more thoughtful and nuanced discussions about the technology without going to the extremes. By way of demonstration, Karl joins this week’s episode of the podcast for a long conversation with Mike all about AI, its role in our society, the challenges it raises, and where things go from here.
The SAFE act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee and Dick Durbin, is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008—and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and much-needed reforms of Big Brother’s favorite surveillance authority.
The irresponsible 2024 reauthorization of the secretive mass surveillance authority Section 702 not only gave the government two more years of unconstitutional surveillance powers, it also made the policy much worse. But, now people who value privacy and the rule of law get another bite at the apple. With expiration for Section 702 looming in April 2026, we are starting to see the emergence of proposals for how to reauthorize the surveillance authority—including calls from inside the White House for a clean reauthorization that would keep the policy unchanged. EFF has always had a consistent policy: Section 702 should not be reauthorized absent major reforms that will keep this tactic of foreign surveillance from being used as a tool of mass domestic espionage.
What is Section 702?
Section 702 was intended to modernize foreign surveillance of the internet for national security purposes. It allows collection of foreign intelligence from non-Americans located outside the United States by requiring U.S.-based companies that handle online communications to hand over data to the government. As the law is written, the intelligence community (IC) cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.
We live in an increasingly globalized world where people are constantly in communication with people overseas. That means, while targeting foreigners outside the U.S. for “foreign intelligence Information” the IC routinely acquires the American side of those communications without a probable cause warrant. The collection of all that data from U.S telecommunications and internet providers results in the “incidental” capture of conversations involving a huge number of people in the United States.
But, this backdoor access to U.S. persons’ data isn’t “incidental.” Section 702 has become a routine part of the FBI’s law enforcement mission. In fact, the IC’s latest Annual Statistical Transparency Report documents the many ways the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses Section 702 to spy on Americans without a warrant. The IC lobbied for Section 702 as a tool for national security outside the borders of the U.S., but it is apparent that the FBI uses it to conduct domestic, warrantless surveillance on Americans. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data.
The Good
Let’s start with the good things that this bill does. These are reforms EFF has been seeking for a long time and their implementation would mean a big improvement in the status quo of national security law.
First, the bill would partially close the loophole that allows the FBI and domestic law enforcement to dig through 702-collected data’s “incidental” collection of the U.S. side of communications. The FBI currently operates with a “finders keeper” mentality, meaning that because the data is pre-collected by another agency, the FBI believes it can operate with almost no constraints on using it for other purposes. The SAFE act would require a warrant before the FBI looked at the content of these collected communications. As we will get to later, this reform does not go nearly far enough because they can query to see what data on a person exists before getting a warrant, but it is certainly an improvement on the current system.
Second, the bill addresses the age-old problem of parallel construction. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, parallel construction is a method by which intelligence agencies or domestic law enforcement find out a piece of information about a subject through secret, even illegal or unconstitutional methods. Uninterested in revealing these methods, officers hide what actually happened by publicly offering an alternative route they could have used to find that information. So, for instance, if police want to hide the fact that they knew about a specific email because it was intercepted under the authority of Section 702, they might use another method, like a warranted request to a service provider, to create a more publicly-acceptable path to that information. To deal with this problem, the SAFE Act mandates that when the government seeks to use Section 702 evidence in court, it must disclosure the source of this evidence “without regard to any claim that the information or evidence…would inevitably have been discovered, or was subsequently reobtained through other means.”
Next, the bill proposes a policy that EFF and other groups have nonetheless been trying to get through Congress for over five years: ending the data broker loophole. As the system currently stands, data brokers who buy and sell your personal data collected from smartphone applications, among other sources, are able to sell that sensitive information, including a phone’s geolocation, to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That means that with a bit of money, police can buy the data (or buy access to services that purchase and map the data) that they would otherwise need a warrant to get. A bill that would close this loophole, the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act passed through the House in 2024 but has yet to be voted on by the Senate. In the meantime, states have taken it upon themselves to close this loophole with Montana being the first state to pass similar legislation in May 2025. The SAFE Act proposes to partially fix the loophole at least as far as intelligence agencies are concerned. This fix could not come soon enough—especially since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has signaled their willingness to create one big, streamlined, digital marketplace where the government can buy data from data brokers.
Another positive thing about the SAFE Act is that it creates an official statutory end to surveillance power that the government allowed to expire in 2020. In its heyday, the intelligence community used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the mass collection of communication records like metadata from phone calls. Although this legal authority has lapsed, it has always been our fear that it will not sit dormant forever and could be reauthorized at any time. This new bill says that its dormant powers shall “cease to be in effect” within 180 of the SAFE Act being enacted.
What Needs to Change
The SAFE Act also attempts to clarify very important language that gauges the scope of the surveillance authority: who is obligated to turn over digital information to the U.S. government. Under Section 702, “electronic communication service providers” (ECSP) are on the hook for providing information, but the definition of that term has been in dispute and has changed over time—most recently when a FISA court opinion expanded the definition to include a category of “secret” ECSPs that have not been publicly disclosed. Unfortunately, this bill still leaves ambiguity in interpretation and an audit system without a clear directive for enforcing limitations on who is an ECSP or guaranteeing transparency.
As mentioned earlier, the SAFE Act introduces a warrant requirement for the FBI to read the contents of Americans’ communications that have been warrantlessly collected under Section 702. However, the law does not in its current form require the FBI to get a warrant before running searches identifying whether Americans have communications present in the database in the first place. Knowing this information is itself very revealing and the government should not be able to profit from circumventing the Fourth Amendment.
When Congress reauthorized Section 702 in 2014, they did so through a piece of policy called the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA). This bill made 702 worse in several ways, one of the most severe being that it expanded the legal uses for the surveillance authority to include vetting immigrants. In an era when the United States government is rounding up immigrants, including people awaiting asylum hearings, and which U.S officials are continuously threatening to withhold admission to the United States from people whose politics does not align with the current administration, RISAA sets a dangerous precedent. Although RISAA is officially expiring in April, it would be helpful for any Section 702 reauthorization bill to explicitly prohibit the use of this authority for that reason.
Finally, in the same way that the SAFE Act statutorily ends the expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act, it should also impose an explicit end to “Abouts collection” a practice of collecting digital communications, not if their from suspected people, but if their are “about” specific topics. This practice has been discontinued, but still sits on the books, just waiting to be revamped.
The DOJ is filled with grossly incompetent prosecutors these days. It’s a bunch of subservients acting in obeisance to the zenith of gross incompetence: the current President of the United States.
When not being sidelined by judges for not being legally appointed, the handpicked losers of Trump’s DOJ Revenge Squad are being shut out by the grandest of juries: grand juries. Asked only to hear the government’s side and nod obediently, grand juries have been rejecting a record number of presentations, leaving prosecutors scrambling to find something anything! to charge Trump’s enemies with.
More of the same is happening here. On two non-consecutive occasions, the Trump administration has attempted to equate unaffiliated people with a shared worldview to domestic terrorist organizations. It didn’t work with Black Lives Matter. And, for the most part, it hasn’t worked with Antifa, which is a semi-acronym that means nothing more than “anti-fascist.”
Not to go all Jeff Foxworthy years past his sell-by date, but you might be a fascist if you think people opposed to fascism are terrorists. So, of course, this administration firmly believes people opposed to fascism are terrorists.
In Texas, following a protest that ultimately resulted in the shooting of a law enforcement officer, the DOJ has somehow made terrorism charges stick against a bunch of protesters, despite its reliance on things that should never have been considered evidence.
A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.
Imagine how much credulity you’d have to hope for if you trotted out the phrase “antifa cell” in open court. It’s a lot. Lots of actual terrorist groups may have “cells,” but antifa is pretty much anything but organized or centralized. It’s just people cohering around a central concept: an opposition to fascism.
The government charged and tried nine defendants following a protest that involved the setting off of fireworks and culminated in Benjamin Song (now convicted on attempted murder charges) shooting an officer in the shoulder. The government claimed the fireworks were part of distraction attempt in hopes of setting up an ambush. But it failed to connect enough dots to get any of the other protesters nailed on murder charges.
However, it did manage to convince a jury that some of the nine arrested were providing material support for terrorism. The rationale? Antifa is a terrorist group and people that represent as antifa (mainly through the wearing of black clothing) or act in support of its goals (opposing fascism) are engaged in material support of the kind of terrorism that… opposes fascism?
It’s all deeply stupid. And yet it has real consequences. While the jury wasn’t sold on most of the government’s wilder claims, it still sided with enough of them to net five protesters with terrorism-related charges that mean they’ll likely spend at least 10 years in prison if their convictions aren’t overturned.
For instance, there’s this nonsense, which managed to rope in someone who wasn’t even there when this all went down:
Sanchez-Estrada was the only defendant not at the protest, and was only charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, after prosecutors say he moved leftwing zines following the arrest of his wife…
That is fucking wild. Someone moved stuff written by someone else and the government claims its concealment.
That’s not even the worst/stupidest part of the government’s evidence presentations. This is:
During the trial, the government offered a slew of circumstantial evidence aimed at convincing the jury that the defendants were part of an antifa terror cell. They showed the jury zines and reading lists with incendiary titles that were seized from the defendants. One zine seized was titled The satanic death cult is real. The zine is an essay analyzing the films Hereditary and Midsommar.They also displayed anti-Trump stickers seized from one of the defendants that said “Make America not Exist Again” and a pamphlet from the Socialist Rifle Association that showed someone putting a swastika into a garbage can.
A magazine discussing films is evidence. Anti-Trump stickers are evidence. Someone putting a swastika into a trash can is evidence. This is shit even Lionel Hutz might consider too unreasonable to present to a judge, much less a jury.
Even if the zine dealt with an alleged, real-life US satanic death cult, how is that evidence of anything… unless the government is tacitly admitting it’s possibly the satanic death cult these antifas are informing each other about?
Everything here is easily covered by the First Amendment and is evidence of nothing but the administration’s desire to illegally punish people for not supporting Trump. And the government should know better than to claim a picture of someone literally trashing a swastika is evidence of criminal intent, because when it does make that claim, it’s admitting that it views speech against Nazis as something that must be met with criminal charges.
Then there’s the Second Amendment. Prosecutors insisted that the mere possession of legally obtained weapons by some of the arrestees was evidence of their malicious intent. But this DOJ in particular has never made that accusation against Trump supporters who wear/brandish weapons. They only pretend it’s unlawful when it involves people opposed to this administration.
With any luck, these convictions will be overturned. While it’s unlikely a review of the convictions will erase the charges facing the person who actually shot an officer, everything else included here is so far beyond the pale (no pun intended?) that it can’t possibly survive judicial review. Even the judge handling this prosecution made it clear he felt the government was seeking to punish protesters merely because they opposed the same administration that appointed him.
Mark Pittman, a US district judge nominated to the federal bench by Donald Trump in 2019, appeared to gesture at the irrelevance of antifa in the closing moments of the trial, asking prosecutors why he should mention it in his instructions to the jury, underlining the gap between the emphasis on antifa and the technicality of the criminal charges they faced.
“Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” Pittman said.
The courts are doing what they can to hold back the daily onslaught of rights violations and vindictive prosecutions engaged in by this administration. But Trump (or, at least, his enablers) knows how limited that resistance is when the administration dares it daily to try to hold it accountable. For now, these ineptly-obtained convictions stand. And they will serve the purpose the administration intends them to: a latent threat that deters future opposition to it and its goals.
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Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That’s a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending by bringing the vaunted “efficiency” of the tech world to the government, a lot of people — not just MAGA diehards, but regular people who’d spent time cursing at a federal website built in 2003 or waiting on hold with the DMV — thought: sure, maybe give it a shot. A decade of fawning tech press coverage about Elon Musk will do that to your priors.
We now have the receipts on how that went. And they’re absolutely damning.
Let’s start with the most basic question: did DOGE save the government money? Because that was, you know, apparently the whole point (or so we were told).
The answer, as the Times bluntly puts it:
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
Spending went up. Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts during the campaign, started walking that back almost immediately after the election, and the actual result was that the government spent more money. The entire exercise was supposed to pay for itself many times over. Instead, the taxpayer funded an $81 million operation that produced negative returns.
But DOGE had that website — the “Wall of Receipts” — proudly tallying up all those billions in savings, right? About that. The Times went through the 40 largest items on DOGE’s claimed savings list:
In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.
Two fake line items on a spreadsheet claimed more “savings” than 25,000 other entries combined. Of the 40 biggest claims, 28 were wrong. The 13 biggest were all wrong. The very first day the “Wall of Receipts” went live, its largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was off by a factor of 1,000 — the contract was actually worth $8 million, as many folks reported at the time. That’s the kind of error that would get you fired from an introductory accounting course, and these were the people supposedly bringing precision and transparency to the federal government.
The accounting trick DOGE relied on most heavily is worth understanding, because it reveals whether this was mere incompetence or something more deliberate. The Times explains that in many cases, DOGE simply lowered the “ceiling value” of contracts — the theoretical maximum the government could spend, not what it was actually spending — and then claimed the full difference as “savings.” A defense contractor CEO explained this perfectly to stock analysts:
This summer, CACI’s chief executive, John Mengucci, told stock analysts that the change was meaningless.
“It doesn’t change a thing for this company,” he said. His company had always expected to be paid about $2 billion over the contract’s life span. And even if the contract ever did reach the ceiling, he said, the Pentagon could just raise it again.
“There’s no reduction of revenue,” Mr. Mengucci said.
Or to put it in even more understandable terms:
“Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money?” said Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies federal spending. “No, it does not.”
The core of DOGE’s operations was to manufacture pretend statistics so that Musk and friends could claim savings that weren’t real. It was how DOGE manufactured the appearance of progress while delivering essentially nothing. After DOGE initially claimed $55 billion in savings, the website’s own documentation only supported $16.5 billion. Media analysis then showed half of that was a single data entry error (that $8 billion instead of $8 million). A Politico analysis found DOGE had cut only $1.4 billion in actual spending — and even that money couldn’t reduce the deficit because it would be returned to agencies that were legally obligated to spend it. More than one-third of DOGE’s contract cancellations yielded no monetary savings at all.
The Garcia report traces a trajectory that any honest observer should find embarrassing:
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk claimed he could reduce the federal deficit by eliminating “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, promising the destruction of the American social safety net. He began walking back these goals after President Trump’s election victory. In early 2025, Mr. Musk appeared on a variety of conservative-leaning podcasts and media outlets baselessly claiming that fake or stolen Social Security numbers led to more than $500 billion in fraud. Media analysis classified Mr. Musk’s claims about waste and fraud in the federal government as lacking evidence or misleading, saying that he misconstrued Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports or lacked basic understanding of the contracts in question.
So: $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $55 billion claimed, then $16.5 billion documented, then $1.4 billion confirmed, then spending went up anyway. That’s quite a trajectory for something that was sold as bringing Silicon Valley precision and efficiency to government.
Okay, fine — DOGE didn’t save much money. But did it at least make the government run better? Did it cut red tape, speed things up, make services less awful?
No. It did the opposite. And this is the part that should really bother anyone who genuinely wanted government reform.
The Garcia report documents in excruciating detail how DOGE’s “efficiency” measures actually added bureaucratic layers:
In one example, a State Department employee described a new requirement for a 250-word essay, extra forms, and days of work and approvals needed to hire a vendor for an embassy event, which previously would have taken a single day. In another, a NASA employee was required to write several detailed paragraphs justifying a purchase of fastening bolts. FDA employees have stated that DOGE requirements have caused significant delays in routine food monitoring tests for items like exposure to heavy metals because spending for every step—from purchasing lab supplies to paying to ship samples between labs—now requires separate department-level approval.
Much efficient. Very savings.
As one federal employee stated:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work, which I fear is the point.”
Meanwhile, the services Americans actually rely on got measurably worse:
At the Social Security Administration (SSA), wait times for a callback ballooned to as high as two and a half hours for assistance between January and March 2025. Americans attempting to access the SSA website for assistance frequently found the webpage down or unresponsive as DOGE recklessly implemented changes while cutting information technology (IT) staff. SSA eventually discarded several of the supposed fraud checks implemented by DOGE because they significantly delayed claim processing without meaningfully combatting fraud. Career employees reportedly knew that DOGE’s anti-fraud measures would make little difference but were intimidated into silence for fear of losing their jobs. DOGE also implemented a new requirement for Social Security applicants to verify their identity in person instead of over the phone if they aren’t able to do so online, while at the same time closing regional and local offices and reducing the workforce at those offices that remained. More than six million seniors have to drive nearly 50 miles round trip to reach their nearest Social Security office, more than twice the average distance an elderly person expects to drive in a day.
This was a heist dressed up as a reform — and the damage to everyday Americans wasn’t a bug.
Layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to delays in clinical trials and getting new drugs to sick patients. Remaining FDA workers reported struggling to meet statutorily mandated schedules for approving both tobacco products and medical products after the Trump Administration announced 3,500 job cuts across the agency. At one point, FDA drug center leadership resorted to asking drug review staff to volunteer to work on contracting and acquisition tasks because the layoffs had eliminated the entire contracting office.
The Times talked to people on the receiving end of the small-dollar cuts that were DOGE’s actual handiwork. An organization providing counseling and rehabilitation services to torture survivors had to close its centers and stop paying 75% of its staff. A program that sent museum staff into low-income Baltimore schools to teach parents about child development was terminated by form letter because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” Research projects were killed at the stage where data had been collected but results hadn’t been published, rendering the government’s entire prior investment wasted. And the impact on American people was real.
Mr. Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.
“We know for sure that survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.
Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.
“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.
This is how DOGE managed to simultaneously save almost nothing and cause enormous disruption: the big-dollar claims were fake, and the real cuts targeted things that were individually small but collectively devastating to the people who depended on them.
And then there’s the corruption angle, which is where this moves from incompetence into something much uglier.
DOGE staff were embedded at nearly every executive branch agency, and many of them were associates or employees of Musk’s own companies. The conflicts of interest were staggering and barely concealed. The Garcia report details how DOGE staff were involved in firing FDA investigators responsible for oversight of Musk’s biotech company Neuralink. DOGE took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which just happened to be the agency that would directly oversee a mobile payments function Musk wanted to add to X. The DOGE staffer who oversaw firings at the CFPB owned approximately $365,000 in shares of companies regulated by the Bureau. Executive branch employees are generally prohibited from working on matters in which they hold a personal stake, but there’s no indication this person took any such precautions.
Elon Musk and DOGE’s active involvement in knee-capping agencies with which he has a direct conflict makes clear that Musk, DOGE, and the broader Trump Administration are focused on weakening accountability for the American people while advancing their own interests.
DOGE staff at the IRS initiated mass firing of skilled specialists responsible for auditing the complex tax filings of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office has found that reductions in funding for IRS tax enforcement reduce federal revenues. So DOGE’s “efficiency” move at the IRS will likely cost the government more in uncollected taxes than it could ever have saved.
The same pattern held at the CFPB, which since 2011 had received $7.3 billion in funding but returned over $21 billion to consumers through enforcement actions — a three-fold return on investment. DOGE gutted it anyway. The IRS Direct File program — a free electronic tax filing service that 86% of users said increased their trust in the IRS and was projected to save taxpayers $11 billion once fully operational — was killed after lobbying by for-profit tax preparation companies.
And perhaps most alarming were the data security violations that I’ve written about multiple times. A whistleblower from SSA reported that DOGE operatives had accessed a database containing “the entire country’s Social Security information,” copied it to a high-risk external system, and violated a court order barring them from continued access. The DOJ later had to file “corrections” to prior testimony from senior SSA staff, admitting that DOGE employees had in fact accessed SSA’s most sensitive data and covertly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with a political advocacy group that sought to overturn election results. And here’s one I had missed:
DOGE’s forced access to Treasury data was particularly noteworthy as a Treasury threat intelligence analysis recommended that DOGE staff “be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ may have posed the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
At the NLRB, a whistleblower reported that DOGE operatives sent enormous amounts of sensitive case information outside the government to unknown recipients — information that companies like Musk’s SpaceX could use to “get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data.” OPM’s own Inspector General found that DOGE employees flouted cybersecurity and privacy laws, and that Trump appointees at OPM overrode career civil servants’ warnings about security to force implementation of DOGE’s systems, which may have resulted in a massive national security threat:
Experts have shown evidence raising concerns of potential Russian and Chinese access to OPM servers shortly after DOGE created the government-wide email infrastructure. Separately, information received by Committee Democratic staff indicated that DOGE employees lowered all firewall protections at OPM to enable the exfiltration of data for use outside of a government environment.
Yikes.
And while they were gutting agencies that protect Americans, they also gutted the agencies actually responsible for catching waste, fraud, and abuse. Offices of Inspectors General — the very watchdogs whose mission aligns with what DOGE claimed to be doing — were starved of resources. One OIG lost 20% of its staff and was operating with “the fewest number of auditors in decades.” The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of politicians accused of corruption, was purged of all but a fraction of its former employees.
The Garcia report’s conclusion is perhaps the most honest assessment of the whole debacle:
Many analyses have referred to the DOGE disaster as a failure, and DOGE did indeed fail at its stated mission of meaningfully reducing spending and increasing government efficiency. But in the Trump Administration’s vindictive, ideologically motivated, and pointless quest to break the federal government, drive out talented and committed public servants, and make flashy promises of cutting fraud while enriching themselves and their wealthy donors, DOGE was a resounding success.
Now, the Garcia report is a Democratic minority report, and the most committed DOGE defenders will dismiss it on those grounds alone. But the most devastating evidence comes from DOGE’s own website — which kept quietly deleting incorrect entries — from the Times’ independent analysis, from a defense contractor’s CEO telling his shareholders the “savings” were meaningless, from the GAO finding multiple violations of the Impoundment Control Act, from OPM’s own Inspector General, and from the DOJ having to file corrections to its own court filings.
You don’t need to trust a single Democratic politician to see what happened here. You just need to look at the numbers.
Oh, and yes: Musk himself admitted in a podcast interview with MAGA influencer and former DOGE employee Katie Miller (wife of Stephen) in December that DOGE had fallen short and said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t do it again, preferring instead to have “worked on my companies.” The man who was going to supposedly save the republic from government bloat decided his actual companies were more worth his time. Musk’s public admission probably shouldn’t carry too much weight either way — he knows DOGE was publicly perceived as a failure and he’s distancing himself — but it is a fitting coda.
This whole thing was billed not just by MAGA faithful, but also by many in the media, as an expected triumph of private sector brilliance over government incompetence. What it actually demonstrated is that when you hand the keys to people who don’t understand how government works, don’t respect the people who do, and have massive personal financial conflicts of interest, you get chaos, corruption, and a bigger bill for taxpayers. The people who were making government work better — the original U.S. Digital Service employees who were building more efficient systems and better websites — got fired and replaced with Musk acolytes who couldn’t tell the difference between a contract ceiling and actual spending.
The MAGA world continues to pretend DOGE was a ruthless cost-cutting machine. The receipts say otherwise: it failed in every direction except enriching corporations connected to the administration. It was a looting operation dressed up as reform.
Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff.
Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are “running hoaxes and news distortions” (read: telling the truth) about the war will face potential headaches when their licenses come up for renewal:
If you can’t read that, it says:
Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.
The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.
And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.
The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.
It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.
When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.
Time for change!
That’s certainly a lot of tough-talking bullshit.
Carr’s only authority comes over broadcast affiliates (not national media companies or cable TV outlets), most of which are already owned by Republicans and already kiss Trump’s ass (because they want to merge). The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any attempt to do so would result in a massive, protracted First Amendment legal mess that the FCC would be extremely likely to lose.
Carr’s actual goal for this kind of stuff is three fold.
One, he’s putting on a show for our mad, idiot king that Carr is being a good boy. Two, he’s trolling the press so they’ll hyperventilate about his behaviors; those stories then advertise to the MAGA base the false impression that Carr is doing useful and bold culture war stuff (so he can potentially run for higher office). They’ll assume it all must be useful and important because he’s upsetting people of intellect, importance, and conscience, which they enjoy.
But most importantly it sends a message to media companies that they should get in line with the Trump administration or face costly and expensive (no matter how pointless) legal annoyances. Of course those threats haven’t really been needed, because most U.S. media companies (and big corporations) have been happy to bribe the president or kiss his ass anyway.
That sort of feckless journalistic failure in the face of power is why so much of the public has lost faith in U.S. news, not because they’ve historically been too critical of war or too tough on wealth and power.
While these sorts of threats certainly are dangerous, Carr is a monumental clown who is putting on a big show to try and pretend he’s a person of substance and power doing important things.
Meanwhile Trump is upset that some news outlets have been making it clear he was too stupid to understand the evolving nature of low cost, modern drone warfare (despite all the evidence in Ukraine). In his own post at his own right wing propaganda website, Trump went off on a local rambling tirade about Iran somehow misleading the entirety of U.S. media:
That one says:
Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
These are not the behaviors of competent, confidence people who believe things are going well. They’re the sad gyrations of pathetic men who know Trump is on historic trajectory to be the worst and least popular President in U.S. history (with ample room to fall). No amount of posturing can hide it.
