In short, Brendan Carr’s continual threats and unconstitutional distortion of the FCC’s “equal opportunity” rule (also known as the “equal time” rule) resulted in a candidate getting exponentially more attention than they ever would have if Brendan Carr wasn’t such a weird, censorial zealot.
If only there was a name for this sort of phenomenon?
Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, there’s no evidence the GOP specifically targeted Talarico in any coherent, strategic sense. This entire thing appears to have occurred because CBS lawyers — focused on numerous regulatory issues before the Trump administration, didn’t want to offend the extremist authoritarian censors at Trump’s FCC. It’s always about the money.
CBS tried to do damage control and claim they never directly threatened Colbert, but you can tell by the way they’re being a little dodgy about ownership of those claims (demanding no direct attribution to a specific person “on background”) they likely aren’t true:
Phil Gonzalez from CBS, welcome to the Verge’s background policy www.theverge.com/policy/88000…
Colbert’s response to the claim he wasn’t threatened was… diplomatic:
Amusingly some of the news outlets covering this story (like Variety here) couldn’t be bothered to even mention that CBS has numerous regulatory issues before the Trump FCC, which is why they folded like a pile of rain-soaked street corner cardboard at the slightest pressure from the Trump FCC.
As we’ve noted repeatedly, Brendan Carr has absolutely no legal legs to stand on here. His abuse of the equal opportunity rule is equal parts unconstitutional and incoherent. CBS (and any other network with bottomless legal budgets) could easily win in court (I wager they could even get many lawyers to defend them pro bono), but Ellison (and his nepo baby son) have a much bigger ideological mission in mind.
Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That’s the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. “We can always get more china,” says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can’t, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won’t be buying from the US any time soon, much less selling replacement china at the expected price point.
This is worse than the inmates running the asylum. This is more akin to a bunch of Nurse Ratchets running the asylum. The asylum becomes more cruel and less competent with each passing day. Cruelty isn’t generally associated with intelligence. And that truism remains unbothered during Trump’s second ascendance to the Oval Office.
Trump and his fans spent years stoking conspiracy theories about Democratic party members and the wholesale sexual abuse of children. These conspiracy theories led to actual violence that those participating in these conspiracy theories refuse to take responsibility for.
New York financier/pimp Jeffrey Epstein was apparently a friend to everyone rich or powerful. And he gave them what they couldn’t get elsewhere: sexual access to minors. Some of this remains alleged. But some of it was the supporting evidence for Epstein’s conviction. Epstein is dead and I can imagine lots of his friends and acquaintances breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported he had (allegedly) died by suicide in jail.
A resurgence of interest in Epstein’s files posed a unique problem for Donald Trump. On one hand, Trump had spent years stoking interest in these files, claiming they would expose a vast Democratic party cabal solely interested in sexually exploiting minors. But he also knew these files would reveal things about his own relationship with Epstein and, very likely, contain implications about Trump’s interest in much younger women.
After a period of proclaiming the Epstein files to be something no one was interested in (blatantly false, no matter which side of the MAGA you fall on), Trump and his DOJ decided to move forward with a staggered release of these documents. Congress actually managed to get in on the governance game (something lately completely subsumed by Trump’s desire to rule solely from the confines of the Oval Office via executive orders) and passed a bill that required a full release by December 19.
This didn’t happen. GOP leaders made sure it wouldn’t happen by declaring a Congressional holiday recess well in advance of the holidays to ensure GOP reps would be safely back in their home states before the release of additional Epstein files.
We got whatever the DOJ chose to release. And that release was a combination of stuff we’ve mostly already seen, some (heavily-redacted) stuff we hadn’t seen yet, and more than 200 pages of fully-redacted documents. We already knew we were in for a whole lot of opacity. What we possibly didn’t expect was the DOJ attempting to hide stuff after the fact.
At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump’s DOJ is either too dumb to know or too stupid to care about the Streisand Effect. The quickest way to draw attention to something you don’t want people paying attention to is to perform a hasty deletion.
Anyone who was paying attention to this release had already saved the documents to a bunch of cloud services and static storage devices. Those who were paying attention past the initial release would know if the government decided to bury something after the fact.
Of course, the government did try to do that. The people with the most power and money seem to think they’re the smartest people walking the earth because they’ve fully bought into the meritocracy illusion. And they’re always wrong. Being rich or powerful doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes it easier to shrug off your losses.
The DOJ tried to do that after people outside of the imaginary “meritocracy” pointed out this post facto deletion.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche early Sunday said the image was removed from the website after learning there were concerns about women in the photo, “so we pulled that photo down.”
“It has nothing to do with President Trump,” said Blanche on NBC’s “Meet the Press.
That’s impossible to believe because everything this particular federal government does has everything to do with Donald Trump. It’s a system of supposed checks and balances manned entirely by people who demand that the moment Poochie isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking “Where’s Poochie?”
Here’s the most high profile image the DOJ deleted (albeit temporarily) just in case it tries to do it again. Take a look in the drawer to find a photo of the current president next to someone the DOJ now implies was “a victim.”
After everyone noticed this premature burial, the DOJ restored the files, pretending this was all about protecting victims of crimes committed by Epstein and his associates (Donald Trump among them), rather than a misguided attempt to rewrite history while this particular history was still being published.
The Department of Justice on Sunday restored online a photo from the Jeffrey Epstein files that contained images showing President Donald Trump after backlash over its removal.
[…]
“The Southern District of New York flagged an image of President Trump for potential further action to protect victims,” the DOJ said in a post on the social media site X.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice temporarily removed the image for further review. After the review, it was determined there is no evidence that any Epstein victims are depicted in the photograph, and it has been reposted without any alteration or redaction.”
I’d love to be able to take the DOJ at its word. But it has steadily destroyed that option ever since [gestures at the long history of the DOJ, but emphasizing its recent actions with much more demonstrative hand gestures] it has been the (alleged) Department of Justice. But it gets even less of a benefit of a doubt here because we are absolutely right to assume this DOJ considers Donald Trump to be the victim of any criminal acts he may have actually perpetrated while getting cozy with Mr. Epstein.
At some point, the Trump DOJ is going to insist that if Trump ever participated in the rape of underage women, he was forced to do by Antifa protesters backed by billions in George Soros funding. He will have been the victim of a “woke” cabal that recognized him for the sexual predator he is and then used his predilections against him.
This move by the DOJ to temporarily bury a photo of Trump makes it clear it will always do whatever it thinks might please Trump even when it’s immediately obvious it cares more about fluffing Trump than serving the nation.
Since we know that FCC Chair Brendan Carr sometimes reads what we write here at Techdirt, I figured I’d post this one just for him and hopes that he watches it, seeing as we know that, thanks to his own mafioso-like tactics, his good friends at Sinclair Broadcasting (along with Nexstar) refused to show Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night in Washington DC where Carr lives and works. You sure missed a good opening monologue. So I figured I’d help him out by making sure it got as widely seen as possible.
Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can’t control or doesn’t own. Here’s Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop:
An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open broadcasters, obtained by Bounces, requested that broadcasters censor any possible protests or other reactions to President Donald Trump’s presence at Sunday’s U.S. Open men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.
Here’s the key text from the USTA email obtained by Bounces:
“With respect to Broadcast Coverage, the President will be shown on the World Feed and the Ashe Court Feed during the opening anthem ceremony. We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity, including ENG [Electronic News Gathering] coverage.”
Yeah, that’s just sad. The USTA already scheduled Trump’s visit to coincide with the National Anthem part of the programming to better hide the boos behind the expected cheers for the American flag and the singing of the national anthem. But sooner or later, the camera is going to pan to Trump and even a stadium loaded with millionaires and influencers is going to send at least a few boos Trump’s way.
The nice thing about this cowardly ask is that it’s just an ask. It’s not a demand. It’s not part of the broadcasting agreement. And while it could certainly play a factor in future contracts if ABC and/or ESPN go rogue and revel in the boos cascading down on Trump’s whiny shoulders, there’s nothing in this email that threatens anything more than future unhappiness if broadcasters do not comply with the email.
What’s tacitly admitted here by this set of instructions is that the USTA fully expects Trump to be booed, possibly quite frequently. After all, the last time he showed up at the US Open — shortly after his announcement of his campaign for president — he spent most of his time being loudly booed by the New York crowd.
He hasn’t gotten any more popular during the ten years between US Open appearances. Sure, he’s president again, but he’s actually far more polarizing this time around. Those covering Trump’s return to the US Open (as the guest of Rolex, no less) should not only broadcast audible booing, but comment on this reaction and who it’s directed at. After all, broadcasters don’t shy away from naming the target of audible booing when it’s an athlete on the field/court. Why should they pretend the thing that’s happening right at that moment simply doesn’t exist just because the USTA has opted for preemptive capitulation to a bully who does nothing but punch down?
Anyway, this is the real reason you’ve read this entire post: footage of Trump being booed at the 2025 US Open. It happened and even if ESPN won’t show it to you, journalist (and US Open attendee) Marisa Kabas of the always-essential The Handbasket has got you covered. Enjoy!
BREAKING: Trump makes his first appearance at the US Open. There were audible boos and a few light claps. Important to stress the stadium is at most 10% full and the start time has been pushed to 2:30pm ET.
NEW — Trump, along with Jared Kushner, Pam Bondi and others stand for the National Anthem. Crowd boos as the American flag is unfurled on the court. Stadium is still only about 50% full.
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire to counter the US government’s moves, people are also coming up with new systems to warn people about what is happening in their community.
For example, the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network sends and receives warnings about nearby ICE activity using text messages. On its home page, it claims to have over 470,000 subscribers currently. That approach, while effective, might be a little basic for some people, and a number of smartphone apps have been created to meet the need for something more sophisticated. One of them is ICEBlock, which came to the notice of a wider public thanks to a CNN report on 30 June. Its developer, Joshua Aaron, told CNN that his free app was designed to be an early warning system for users when ICE is operating nearby. Its slogan is “See Something, Tap Something”:
Users can add a pin on a map showing where they spotted agents — along with optional notes, like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. Other users within a five-mile radius will then receive a push alert notifying them of the sighting.
Aaron says he does not want users to interfere with ICE’s operations directly, and when a user logs a sighting, the app warns: “Please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only. It is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Aaron has also tried to minimize the risk that the platform is flooded with false reports:
Although ICEBlock has no surefire way of guaranteeing the accuracy of user reports, Aaron says he’s built safeguards to prevent users from spamming the platform with fake sightings. Users can only report a sighting within five miles of their location, and they can only report once every five minutes. Reports are automatically deleted after four hours.
Privacy for users is naturally a key concern:
ICEBlock doesn’t collect personal data, and users are completely anonymous, according to Aaron. It’s only available on iOS because Aaron says the app would have to collect information that could ultimately put users at risk to provide the same experience on Android.
Reassuring users of those privacy protections will likely be key to growing ICEBlock’s user base, given how the government is building a database to aid in its deportation efforts.
I’ll have to watch the clip myself but surely it sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ICE officers. As you stated, there’s been a 500% increase in violence against ICE agents, law enforcement officers across the country who are just simply trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from our communities.
Despite her use of a misleading statistic about assaults on ICE officers, Leavitt’s criticism of ICEBlock naturally led many people to investigate it. In fact, soon after her comment, ICEBlock became the top social networking app in the App Store— ahead of Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook — a position it still holds at the time of writing. In the CNN interview, Aaron said his app had more than 20,000 users, but thanks to Leavitt the number is more than ten times that. According to a story on Wired, ICEBlock now has over 240,000 users, and Trump administration officials have threatened to prosecute Aaron for creating the app, and CNN for reporting on it.
Another app that aims to report and share sightings of ICE activities is Hack Latino. On its GoFundMe page, which is no longer accepting donations, the organizer claims “30,000 app users and 50,000 website visitors”. As someone from Guatemala who uses the Hack Latino app explains in an article on the Rest of the World site, the app works like Waze, which provides live traffic updates: “It sends you a message saying there’s a Border Patrol ahead and that you need to turn back. Most migrants are protecting themselves with it.” However, the same article warns that the US government has taken note of the rise of these apps, and is already working to counter them. It quotes Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that supports migrants and refugees:
The U.S. government, said Rios, is hiring companies that can identify users who post information about raids on these platforms.
“Many of us no longer post all the information,” said Rios. Instead, details on immigration sweeps are “being shared on paper from person to person, or through photos and WhatsApp.”
And so the contest between the hunters and the hunted continues.
When you’re a huge country, and a communist one to boot, the Streisand Effect is a thing that’s just going to inevitably happen to you at times. China has definitely lived this experience. The government is the unfortunate combination of incredibly authoritarian and completely devoid of a sense of humor. The result is the serious belief that it can control everything through sheer force of will, when it very much cannot. China tried to silence Taiwan during the heights of the COVID pandemic, but it only propelled the messaging. China tried to hide its Muslim concentration camps within online maps by blanking them out, that only pointed researchers to exactly where something terrible must be hiding. China attempted a global blackout of a protest song in support of Hong Kong’s independence, but the result was the same song hitting the top of the charts for a stretch.
Authoritarians rarely learn from their own failures until they’re out of power. And, so, they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. The government in Hong Kong, certainly at the request of Beijing, has banned a mobile game called Reversed Front: Bonfire because of its anti-government content.
Anyone who has the game downloaded on their phone risks an offense, and players who have made in-app purchases could face punishment for providing funding to developer ESC Taiwan, according to a notice from Hong Kong police. The game has since been removed from Apple and Android’s app stores in Hong Kong. It remains available in the U.S. via Apple’s App Store, and also currently has a Steam page. As of Thursday morning, Aftermath was not able to access the game on the US Google Play Store; according to Bloomberg, it was removed from the Google Play Store in May for issues unrelated to the current ban. We’ve reached out to Google for comment. (Update, 6/12/25, 7:20pm–A spokesperson for Google pointed us to an AP article noting the game was removed from the Play store “because it did not prohibit users from adopting hateful language in naming.”)
Google’s excuse for its capitulation aside (I’m not entirely sure what that “hateful language” thing even means, even after reading the AP article), far too many non-Chinese platforms are complying with attempting to disappear this game in Hong Kong. The objectionable content here is purely political, with the CCP showing once again just how thin its skin really is. And the ban essentially makes the game’s entire point perfectly.
Reversed Front: Bonfire, which released in April, has the player “pledge allegiance to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Tibet, Kazakhs, Uyghur, Manchuria or the Rebel Alliance of Cathaysian and Southeast Asia to overthrow the Communist regime,” according the game’s website. Or, players can choose to lead the Chinese Communist Party. This plays out in visual novel-esque storylines dispersed between simple, turn-based battle segments. Characters with different abilities and skills are unlocked with gacha mechanics.
An ESC Taiwan representative told Aftermath via email, “The content of Reversed Front: Bonfire includes various political propositions existing in East Asia today, not only self-determination and separatism but also the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. We allow supporters of the Chinese Communist Party to defend their political views in the game, resulting in two different storylines.”
They continued, “The fact remains that while we dare to let the Chinese Communist Party express itself in the game, the Party doesn’t allow dissidents to speak out.”
But ultimately the ban hasn’t been terribly successful, as the developer of the game has claimed that interest in the game has surged since the ban in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s removal of the game from app stores has been a boon for Reversed Front: Bonfire, the representative said. “The Hong Kong government’s ban on Reversed Front: Bonfire indeed made millions of people, who previously didn’t know about the game, aware of its existence.”
That is certainly the case for this writer. While I’m probably not really the target audience for the game, I now know about it purely because of the Hong Kong government’s attempt to silence the game. And I don’t for one second believe that the threat of police action has somehow stamped out all instances of the game in Hong Kong either. In fact, it would not shock me at all to learn that the ban has created more interest in the game on the island than there had been before the ban.
The Streisand Effect in action, in other words. May China never really learn from its mistakes.
Much of what we’ve written about regarding the Trump regime’s nonsensical and ridiculous immigration policies have focused on how they’re grabbing people off the streets, or disappearing them to random foreign gulags without due process. But we’ve also talked about the absolute insanity of US immigration policy as it pertains to foreigners traveling to the US on visas. And the most telling thing about recent stories involving tourists being denied entry to the US? Nobody’s surprised by them anymore—even when they involve utterly ridiculous reasons like having a satirical meme on your phone.
We’ve mentioned how the US is now scanning the social media of anyone who wants to visit, and it’s leading to plenty of ridiculous stories that seem likely to cause plenty of foreign tourists to just stay the fuck away.
In the past two weeks, two such stories have made a fair bit of news. First, Aussie writer and former Columbia student Alistair Kitchen told a story of flying from Melbourne to Los Angeles (for a layover before traveling on to New York to visit friends) where he was detained for 12 hours, pressured into revealing his phone contents, and then being shipped back to Australia… because way back when, he had written an article about Palestinian protests at Columbia.
He wrote about the ordeal in the New Yorker, and there are plenty of crazy bits, with the CBP people demanding he unlock a folder on his phone and then scrolling through his dick pics with him being perhaps the craziest part:
He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.
That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented.So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.
Come to America! Land of the free! Where we detain you for no reason at the border to yell at you about your reporting (free press!), force you to reveal your secrets (no general warrants!), and gleefully scroll through your dick pics together (cruel and unusual).
As Kitchen notes, they had planned to block him from entering all along. While he had done a cursory “cleanup” of his social media before flying to the US, they apparently already had everything they needed.
They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.
Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)
Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”
Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.
That story got some attention, but not nearly the global attention that the story of a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who had a somewhat similar experience. In his telling, he was denied entry due to a JD Vance meme on his mobile phone.
Mikkelsen claims that immigration officials stopped him for questioning and quizzed him “about drug trafficking, terrorist plots, and right-wing extremism,” all of which he said was “totally without reason.” He says he was placed in a holding cell.
“They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone, and backpack,” he told Nordlys.
Next, Mikkelsen claims that officials threatened to imprison him or fine him $5,000 if he did not grant them access to his phone, so he did. He said that is when agents found a meme on his device that showed the vice president’s face—digitally altered to make him chubbier, bald, and cartoonish—that became popular after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Oval Office in February. He claimed they also signaled disapproval to a photo of him with a homemade wooden pipe.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security has denied that he was denied entry for the meme, saying it was actually because he had admitted to past drug use (apparently he admitted to having marijuana twice: once in New Mexico and once in Germany, though he pointed out it was legal in both places — though in New Mexico while it’s legal at the state level, it’s still (stupidly) illegal at the federal level):
That said, the meme (which had already gone semi-viral back in February) suddenly started appearing all over the place, with plenty of people (especially across Europe) using the meme and Mikkelsen’s story to mock both JD Vance and American immigration/visa policies.
It even went all the way up to the Irish legislature, where a politician, Ivana Bacik, held up the meme of JD Vance during questions on legislation.
Here’s the thing that should terrify anyone who gives a shit about America’s global reputation: when told that a tourist was denied entry over a JD Vance meme, nobody’s first reaction was “that’s obviously fake.” Instead, people across the globe nodded and thought “yeah, that tracks.” The fact that this story is completely believable is a damning indictment of where US immigration policy has gone. That’s not the kind of shit the US is supposed to do, and there’s no way that this isn’t damaging US tourism as these stories spread far and wide.
The thing is, as absurd as it is that Mikkelsen was turned away for either the meme or smoking a little pot, as with the Australian writer, Kitchen, the truly horrifying bit was in how they treated Mikkelsen. Lots of people are laughing about the JD Vance meme bit, but nothing Mikkelsen did could possibly deserve this kind of treatment.
He alleges that he was then strip-searched, fingerprinted, had blood samples taken, and was held for five hours before being put on a flight back to Norway.
Strip searched? Blood samples? What the fuck?
Whether Mikkelsen was actually bounced for the meme or the pot is beside the point. The real story is that when the world hears “American border agents detained a tourist over a satirical image of the Vice President,” their response isn’t disbelief—it’s dark laughter and relief that they’re not planning any trips to the US anytime soon.
That’s not the brand of a free society. That’s the brand of an authoritarian state where mocking the leadership gets you disappeared. And if that doesn’t embarrass the shit out of anyone with even a passing familiarity with what America used to claim to stand for, then we’re already further gone than these stories suggest.
Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea’s National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to Streisanding the very information you were hoping would go away.
Back in February, DDoSecrets published around a million emails from Papua New Guinea’s Mineral Resources Authority. The response was… crickets. Turns out not many people have burning curiosity about the daily correspondence of Papua New Guinea’s mining bureaucrats, nor the willingness to dig through a million such emails.
But Vagi couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Three months later, he sent them a pretty threatening letter about the existence of this collection of emails.
He claims that this data is massively damaging:
The data was unlawfully obtained and poses significant risks to individuals and organizations within Papua New Guinea. It is protected under local laws, including the Digital Government Act 2022 and the National Cyber Security Policy 2021, as well as international cybersecurity regulations such as the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, to which Papua New Guinea is a signatory. Exposure to this sensitive information could lead to identity theft, financial fraud, and reputational damage.
And, as that paragraph suggests by mentioning the “Budapest Convention on Cybercrime,” Mr. Vagi turned the threat dial up to 11 regarding how he was very much going to call the manager INTERPOL on DDoSecrets.
Given the legal protections governing this data, I urge you to remove it from your platform under both local and international laws. If the data is not removed, we may be forced to escalate this matter through the relevant legal and international channels, including cooperation with INTERPOL
Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that DDoSecrets doesn’t take kindly to vexatious, censorial threats. Oh, and they have a lawyer, Stanley Cohen, willing to call out the nonsense. You know that we at Techdirt love a good lawyer smackdown response letter to vexatious threats, and this sure is a good one. It starts out with a quick primer in how journalism works.
Although my clients respect your request, in keeping with age-old tradition and practice as journalists and publishers of information even, at times, sensitive embarrassing information, for use and republication by other journalist’s, DDoSecrets understands well its place and obligation to assist in the growth and protection of a robust and widespread marketplace of ideas…. even one in which controversial, if not painful, political concepts and practices arc exposed, examined and debated among the body politic as a whole.
In that light, I can assure you that my clients are not “hackers” and play no role, direct or otherwise, in identifying, seeking or obtaining information from repositories be they state or private entities concerning information and/or internal communications regarding their activities. ‘That isto say at no time does DDoSecrets identify targets or systems to be breached or the ‘manner and means by which to do so in order to access material from any state or private entity. 0, 100, as journalists living up to the highest of that profession’s age-old standards, DDoSccrets takes all necessary steps to protectredact any and all collateral personal data it might receive that if published could pose a direct threat to individuals and or their families be it personal or economic in nature. Quite frankly, that a person, entity or a state may prove to be embarrassed by virtue of a21% century political expose of their intent and activity is of no dispositive or controlling moment to DDoSecrets or, for that matter, any other journalist or publication … it comes, after all not just with the turf, but the profession.
Then, it challenges the threat to go all legal on the site:
My client is a bit shocked, but not intimidated, by your undisguised threats to retaliate against DDoSecrets for what proved to be the publication by it and others of embarrassing political data retrieved from the Mineral Resources Authority (MRA) of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I can assure you DDoSecrets played no role whatsoever in the manner and means by which the MRA material was obtained and neither requested nor directed others to do so when it was apparently “hacked” more than two years ago. Moreover, that the MRA publication contains political information that falls very clearly within the reach, responsibility and safeguard of DDoSecrets as journalists is beyond dispute.
Then Cohen drops the hammer, pointing out exactly why Vagi might be so eager to make these emails disappear. Buried in those million boring bureaucratic messages are details about the Mineral Resources Authority’s cozy relationship with government-owned mining companies on something called an “involuntary resettlement policy”—a euphemism that would make Orwell proud.
So Cohen calls attention to this in his reply letter, noting that perhaps that’s what’s driving their sudden interest in this?
As uncomfortable to state actors in PNG as it may be, one would be hard-pressed to argue that that the mere publication of data that raise questions concerning the good faith and motivation of entities involved with it constitute a violation of the intended reach of any law. For example, among the PNG related data release was an exchange of 2013-05-06 between “Mineral Government PG” and several dozen others affliated with MRA. Entitled “Consultation Meeting- Involuntary Resettlement Policy”
Seems newsworthy!
But here’s where it gets weird. Cohen reveals this wasn’t the first time Papua New Guinea officials reached out about the emails. Earlier, someone claiming to be an “ISMS consultant” for the Mineral Resources Authority took a completely different tack—asking DDoSecrets to help them figure out if it was an “insider attack.”
“That you now seek to bully DDoSecrets into removing. nay, censoring explosive embarrassing information essential to an informed body politic of the People of Papua New Guinea, regarding the pernicious relationship between the mining industry and, at times, PNG is not just an affront to the role of journalism, but a dramatic about face from an earlier outreach by others holding themselves out to be representative of MRA. Thus, in a series of earlier text messages, one self-identifying as an “ISMS consultant” working for the “Mineral Resources Authority of Papua New Guinea’ focused not on content but carrier. One such exchange is telling:
ISMS: “Either take the data being publicised, down and/or letting us know if it was an insider attack.”
DDoSecrets: “1 mean what would happen to him? Or her?”
ISMS: “Nothing. This is all about ensuring that future risks can be mitigated. We are just interested in making the MRA more secure so this doesn’t happen again”
DDoSecrets: “Ok”
ISMS: “Can you atleast confirm whether it was an insider?”
DDoSecrets: “I don’t know what to say”
ISMS: “if you can confirm it was an insider, then we can strengthen our insider security and our awareness training”
DDoSecrets: “What if don’t?”
ISMS: “IF it wasn’t an inside, then we will spend our efforts securing the perimeter.”
As for Vagi’s threats of criminal referrals and INTERPOL involvement? Cohen basically laughs him out of the room. He methodically demolishes each legal theory Vagi throws around:
Finally, I would like in brief to comment on your red herring of potential state and international criminal exposure by my client for nothing more than publication of politically sensitive material. Preliminarily, to the extent you rely upon the Budapest Convention as the basis to demand that DDoSecrets remove its expose on various protocols and activities of the Mineral Resources Authority (MRA) of Papua New Guinea, as constructed and applied your interpretation is little more than a palpable wishful shout .. an argument here lacking any relevant application as to DDoSecrets. Without analyzing in full the intended reach of the Convention, in relevant part its clear intent is not to silence publication of materials received by journalists and publications who played no role whatsoever in the activity that led to its acquisition, but rather to address “cybercrimes” such as hacking or conspiracy to hack by those who engaged in that very activity. Indeed, on this point, unless I am in need of a stronger reading glasses, I found no part of the Convention which specifically sets forth a lawful basis to prosecute not those who hacked otherwise “secure” data bases of information, but rather those who subsequently published it… here some two years later and only after taking reasonable steps to redact the information in such a way as to safeguard sensitive personal information contained therein.
Likewise, while I have reviewed the Papua New Guinea Digital Government Act 2022 and the National Cyber Security Policy 2021 and found them to reflect a powerful commitment by the state to enter the increasingly interconnected world of the 21st century, at days end neither is on point as to your demand of DDoSecrets. Thus, while these Acts clearly express a strong commitment to the establishment of a proactive and far-reaching strategy to ensure state cybersecurity by, inter alia, safeguarding digital infrastructure each fails to address let alone criminalize, as here, third party publication of embarrassing state information.
So, too, I would note that your threat to seek criminal law intervention and enforcement through various international entities including INTERPOL is likewise a bark without bite. Having litigated and prevailed at INTERPOL on the basis of the “political” exception, I am well aware of what is necessary to obtain a Red Notice against a given identified and criminally charged individual by INTERPOL, as well as its political exemption rule. In this case, your ignored demand of DDoSecrets would, in any event, fail to satisfy the requisite charging predicate for triggering a Red Notice, and most certainly presents activity well within the clear reach and intent of INTERPOL’s political immunity clause.
So what did Vagi’s legal threats accomplish? Well, they guaranteed that a lot more people are now aware of the MRA email dump and its revelations about “involuntary resettlement” policies. Before his letter, these were just boring bureaucratic emails gathering digital dust. Now they’re the subject of international attention and legal drama.
It’s a textbook case of the Streisand Effect, but with a bonus lesson: when your job involves covering up potentially sketchy mining policies, maybe don’t pick a fight with people whose entire business model depends on exposing government wrongdoing. They tend to be pretty good at it.
Welcome to the arena, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society! Here’s your Streisand Beachfront Property commemorative dinner plates which, we must inform you, contain massive amounts of lead and should never, for any reason, be used as dinner plates.
PTK (as its abbreviated everywhere, even by the “society” itself) considers itself to be above the frat fray, despite its liberal use of the Greek alphabet. Instead, it’s a “society” that helps colleges students help themselves without having to resort to blackout drinking or ill-advised mascot thievery.
But it’s not quite smart enough. Toni Marek — a former volunteer who worked for PTK — is publishing a book based on her experiences there. Those experiences weren’t pleasant. She attended a dinner for the society, during which PTK Executive Director Rod Risely, allegedly forcibly pushed his hand between her legs. This followed several other sexual transgressions from Risely, ranging from the verbal to the physical during Marek’s brief tenure with PTK.
Marek intended to release her book (for free) on April 3, 2025, a date that deliberately coincided with PTK’s national convention in Kansas City, Missouri. Just as deliberately, PTK sought a restraining order blocking the book’s release prior to that date but extending past the end of its national convention.
PTK got what it wanted: a compliant judge. County Judge Kemper Stephen Williams not only bought everything PTK was selling in its unopposed motion, but granted a temporary restraining order that prevents Marek from distributing her book during the crucial PR period surrounding the society’s national convention. (h/t Popehat)
The opening paragraph of the prior restraint order [PDF] (call it what it is, folks) is pure frontier judicial gibberish:
On this date the Court heard Plaintiff Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s (“PTK”) application for a temporary restraining order against Defendant Toni Marek. The application was presented ex parte without notice to the Defendant. The Court, after considering Plaintiff’s TRO application, the pleadings, the declarations, other evidence submitted, and arguments of counsel, finds that the application is well-taken and should be in all things GRANTED.
I’m sorry, but all of these things cannot be true. An “ex parte” presentation only involves one party. So, there’s no way the judge can claim he truly considered everything that needed to be considered before John Hancocking PTK’s pre-written TRO pretty much unaltered. At this point, the judge only has one set of pleadings, declarations, evidence, and a single set of counsel. There was no emergency here, so there was no reason to keep Toni Marek and her counsel from being heard.
This is just a judge deciding the everything he just read must be true, even though it’s pretty clear the facts PTK presented aren’t actually facts.
However you may personally feel about Marc Randazza, one thing he does really well is embarrass courts that engage in clearly unconstitutional actions. Randazza’s motion [PDF] to revoke the order sets Judge Williams and his assertions on fire.
This aggression will not stand:
The TRO forbids Ms. Marek from publishing a book and states that she will not be permitted to publish her book until she hands it to PTK and allows PTK to determine what further prior restraints it wants from this Court. This is not just an unlawful prior restraint, but a never-before-seen type of prior restraint that acts in anticipation of a further prior restraint. It should never have been issued, and it must be dissolved.
So, clearly nothing justifies this prior restraint. But even the allegations are sketchy as hell. If this looks like a SLAPP suit, it’s because it’s a SLAPP suit. PTK is trying to prevent Marek from publishing a book that is, in part, based on records literally everyone already has access to.
PTK alleges, without proof, that some of the information in Marek’s book “is confidential and protected by non-disclosure agreements” and “is protected by the attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine.” It is not only without proof, but PTK’s very complaint makes it clear that this is false. PTK acknowledges that Ms. Marek obtained the information legally through interviews with third parties and public records requests. Let that sink in. PTK seeks to censor the publication of information received from public records requests.
Finally, there’s this part, which isn’t going to be fun for the judge to read, but needs to be said this pointedly and clearly to ensure he doesn’t double-down on the unconstitutionality.
Here, we have an injunction, based entirely upon anticipated protected speech by Defendant Marek, that contains a double prior restraint. It not only prohibits her from publishing her book as intended on April 3, 2025, but also provides Plaintiff with the sole discretion to determine what she is and is not allowed to say in her book. See TRO, ¶¶ A, B. Meanwhile, even if a tiny portion of the book were legally unpublishable (which is absurd), the Court enjoined the entire book from publication, and the Court has been manipulated by PTK into doing so for no better reason than to help PTK avoid embarrassment during its conference. The Order is wrong and PTK could not have possibly been ignorant to that fact.
That’s why PTK sought the smallest venue it could find to engage in this CYA Hail Mary play. It went to a county court solely because it increased its chances of slipping something past a judge unlikely to have racked up a lot of experience in First Amendment cases. It worked. This judge not only allowed PTK to present its case completely unopposed, he gave it everything it asked for, presumably deciding that whatever real justice might be applied could always wait until later.
If PTK had just sat back and allowed Marek to publish her book, it likely would have walked away from this pretty much unscathed. After the initial interest died down, PTK could go back to business as usual. Instead, it chose to be a bully, punching down in hopes of silencing a single critic for good. Because it chose this path, it will reap what it has sown: the resurgence of public discussion involving allegations that are now at least a decade old. And its extreme defensiveness in the face of this very minor threat makes an implicit statement that backs up Marek’s allegations. After all, if there were no truth to them, PTK would have nothing to worry about, much less sue about.
Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for giving me yet another exhibit in my museum of those who fail to understand the Streisand Effect. Meta is so desperate to silence a former employee’s book that it’s doing everything possible to ensure maximum publicity for the allegations within it. You might think that a company like Meta would understand the Streisand Effect, but apparently Mark Zuckerberg’s newfound commitment to “free speech” only goes so far.
You may have heard about a new book by a former Meta (then Facebook) policy person, Sarah Wynn-Williams, making some pretty explosive allegations about the company. Having spoken to a few former Meta employees, the general response I’ve gotten about the book is that it is a mix of known awful things the company did that have mostly been reported on, mixed with some more questionable claims. I heard from multiple people that some of the claims don’t sound right, though no one wanted to go further than that.
Either way, it appears that Meta is so unhappy with the book that it’s trying to silence the author. It claims she violated a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she was let go from the company years ago.
Let’s talk about Meta’s legal/media strategy here, because it’s a special kind of puzzling. The company’s plan appears to be:
Drag both the author and her publisher into arbitration over a severance agreement
Hope nobody notices that the publisher never signed any agreement with Meta
Get an arbitrator to order them to stop distributing a book that’s already on sale
???
Profit! (Or at least, less embarrassing publicity)
According to the arbitrator’s interim award, Wynn-Williams simply ignored the proceedings (more on that decision in a moment). Meanwhile, Macmillan showed up just long enough to point out the blazingly obvious: they never signed any agreement with Meta and thus can’t be bound by arbitration. The arbitrator, displaying basic common sense, had to admit they had no jurisdiction over Macmillan.
On March 7, 2025, Claimant filed an Emergency Motion seeking interim and emergency measures pursuant to AAA Employment Rule 0-4 concerning the publication of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. On March 10, 2025, the Emergency Arbitrator was appointed and scheduled an emergency telephonic hearing with the parties to occur on March 11, 2025 at 3:15 p.m. (CT) / 4:15 p.m. (ET). On March 11, 2025, the Emergency Arbitrator held the telephonic hearing. Claimant, through its counsel, appeared and presented oral argument. Respondent Wynn-Williams did not appear, despite notice being provided by email. Respondent Macmillian, through its counsel, did specially appear (while preserving its objections to jurisdiction) and was provided the opportunity to be heard, and argued, among other points, that the Emergency Arbitrator did not have jurisdiction over Respondent Macmillian, and that Respondent Macmillian should not be specifically named in this award.
On March 12, 2025 at 11:16 a.m. (ET), the Emergency Arbitrator informed the parties that he would provide Respondent Wynn-Williams additional time until 9:00 a.m. (ET) on March 13, 2025 to file any written objection to Claimant’s Motion. Shortly thereafter at 12:19 p.m. (ET), Claimant provided the Arbitrator and the parties additional evidence regarding Respondent Wynn-Williams knowledge of the proceedings. On the morning of March 12, 2025, Respondent Wynn-Williams apparently appeared on a popular podcast where she discussed her book and Claimant’s attempts to “shut this book down.” The Emergency Arbitrator will consider Claimant’s March 12 submission of the podcast’s partial transcript as a further exhibit in support of its Emergency Motion. Accordingly, the Emergency Arbitrator finds that Respondent Wynn-Williams is on notice of this emergency proceeding.
So Meta filed an emergency motion on March 7th, got a hearing on March 11th, and then frantically submitted evidence that Wynn-Williams knew about the proceedings because she went on a podcast to talk about how Meta was trying to “shut this book down.” Which, of course, is exactly what was happening.
Yeah, so, no one comes out of this looking particularly good. Meta’s aggressive move in trying to silence the book (which is clearly backfiring and driving more attention to the book) seems absurd. Just put out a bland statement (as the company already did) saying that the book is full of “out-of-date” claims and “false accusations.” If there’s anything particularly egregiously wrong, present some receipts, and let the whole thing fade away.
By going to arbitration and trying to block publication, then, suddenly, it all gets that much more attention.
The arbitrator’s ruling reads like a corporate revenge fantasy rather than enforceable legal reality. Yes, Wynn-Williams probably should have engaged with the arbitration process rather than just appearing on podcasts to discuss Meta’s attempts to silence her. But the arbitrator’s order is nonsensical: telling her not to make disparaging remarks about Meta, not to promote a book that’s already on sale, and to stop distribution “to the extent within [her] control” (which is effectively zero since Macmillan controls distribution and isn’t bound by the arbitration).
This fits a pattern for Meta. For all of Zuckerberg’s grand pronouncements about free speech and open dialogue, the company seems pretty quick to freak out when strong criticism comes along.
The timing here is particularly rich. Just months after Zuckerberg made grand proclamations about Meta’s renewed commitment to “free speech,” here we are watching his company flail around trying to legally mandate silence. It turns out Zuckerberg’s version of “free speech” comes with some pretty significant terms and conditions.
The irony, of course, is that Meta’s heavy-handed response has only amplified Wynn-Williams’ message. Perhaps instead of paying lawyers to draft emergency arbitration motions, someone at Meta should have invested in a quick course on the Streisand Effect (I know a good instructor). Though given the company’s track record, they’d probably try to get an arbitrator to block that too.
