And so it is here: someone you’d never think would oppose fascism and bigotry deciding to speak up, despite knowing he could have just kept his head down and maintained his position as Sheriff For Life in Polk County, Florida.
I’m of course talking about Grady Judd. The sheriff of Polk County is a resolutely terrible person — someone who has routinely used the misery he inflicts on people not just in his own county, but across the nation, to elevate himself. He’s a guy who loves to hear himself talk. He loves being the center of attention, even if the attention is negative. And he’ll never turn down an opportunity to get in front of news cameras and get his id on.
Judd likes to send sex workers to jail (while pretending he’s saving them from sex traffickers), has used natural disasters to bump up arrest numbers, waged a misguided, illegal war on alleged pedophiles located well outside of his jurisdiction, and threatened to arrest Apple CEO Tim Cook for refusing to decrypt iPhones on demand.
So, it comes as a genuine surprise that Sheriff Grady Judd would say the things he’s saying about Trump’s anti-migrant actions. After all, he’s overseen directly and indirectly by a political party that’s more than willing to indulge and protect him, no matter what godawful thing he might choose to do. It’s certainly worked for him so far, given his abhorrent track record.
Florida’s Republican sheriffs want President Donald Trump to end mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes, a striking shift from law enforcement in the nation’s most aggressive anti-undocumented immigration state.
“While Congress sits on their hands and does nothing about this, we are on the ground floor with this day in and day out — looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately. But some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Monday during a State Immigration Enforcement Council meeting.
Judd is simply saying what non-bigots have been pointing out for years: immigrants pay more taxes, work more hours, commit fewer crimes, and are a net benefit not just for governments’ bottom lines, but for America itself.
This is coming from one of the Florida GOP’s handpicked members of its recently formed “immigration enforcement council.” Judd was no doubt chosen because the GOP expected wholehearted support of whatever it chose to do. But here’s the thing: the GOP-picked panel is seeing plenty of dissent, with Judd simply being the most-recognizable critic of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts.
At least six of the eight council members echoed Judd during Monday’s Microsoft Teams meeting — a seventh, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, was not present for the call. One said the state has cast “too wide of a net;” another urged Judd to write to Congress, and a third offered harsh criticisms of ICE tactics.
“I wholeheartedly agree that Congress, they need to get off their butts and they need to fix it,” Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell agreed. “We’re not out … just raiding business and homes, but, unfortunately, when ICE gets involved, you have the collaterals.”
While some of the other board members might just be in the “stopped clock is right twice a day” category, Judd isn’t. He’s on another level completely when it comes to being a sheriff. He’s a clock that adamantly refuses to tell time at all, and is now perhaps as surprised as anyone else that he might have (however momentarily) told time correctly.
And while that’s disappointing, it must be noted that the walkback does not include every bit of his criticism. Judd still wants immigration enforcement limited to criminals, while expressing his support to paths to citizenship for migrants who may have come here illegally, but have done nothing but contribute to their communities since their arrival.
Judd’s in a safe space. He can level this criticism and know he can’t simply be fired for going against the GOP grain, ranging from the state governor to the Commander in Chief. He’s in an elected position, which means he’d need to be voted out. And that hasn’t happened yet, despite Judd’s casual disregard for constitutional rights and jurisdictional limits. I don’t think this is the sort of thing that’s going to end his law enforcement career — not just because most voters tend to vote for incumbents, but because even some people on the far right are recognizing Trump’s anti-migrant efforts are not only bad for polls/public perception of the party, but bad for America itself.
EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah’s Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society — the organizational arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask the anonymous operator of a website called JWS Library. If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu here, that’s because we’ve written about Watch Tower doing this exact thing more than once before, and they keep coming back to the same playbook.
EFF’s client, identified as J. Doe, is a current member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who got curious about the history of the organization’s public statements and how they’ve changed over time. So Doe did something pretty straightforwardly useful. As EFF explains:
They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. Doe and others discovered prophecies that failed to come true, erasure of a leader’s disgrace, increased calls for obedience and donations, and other insights about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices. Doe also used machine translation on a foreign-language document to help the community understand what the church was saying to different audiences and also to help understand potential changes in the organization’s attitudes towards dissent.
That’s about as clearly transformative and non-commercial as fair use gets — it’s for research and commentary, after all. But Watch Tower doesn’t care about whether the copyright claim is actually viable. It cares about finding out who Doe is. And everyone involved knows exactly why. Again EFF’s Kit Walsh explains:
Within the church, dissent or even asking questions has often been punished by labeling members as apostates and ostracizing—or “disfellowshipping”— them. As a result, Doe and others choose to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation that could cost them family, friend, and professional relationships.
Watch Tower knows all of this, of course. That’s precisely the point. They’re not sending DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare because they have a genuine interest in protecting their copyrights — they’re using the subpoena process as a surveillance tool with a built-in punishment mechanism waiting at the other end.
We know this because we’ve watched the pattern play out in extraordinary detail multiple times. When Paul Levy of Public Citizen’s Litigation Group dug into Watch Tower’s history back in 2022, he found that the organization had filed an astounding 72 copyright subpoenas since 2017. And how many of those subpoenas resulted in an actual copyright infringement lawsuit? Essentially zero. As Levy documented:
As can be seen from this list of Watch Tower copyright infringement lawsuits, Watch Tower has never used the information obtained from these subpoenas to file an infringement action. The only infringement lawsuit that Watch Tower has filed against the target of one of its DMCA subpoenas is a current case (discussed below) in which enforcement of the subpoena was denied!
So they file subpoena after subpoena claiming they need to identify alleged infringers to bring a lawsuit, and then they never bring the lawsuit. What they do with the information, as Levy uncovered, is identify critics and then initiate disfellowship proceedings against them. The copyright claim is just the crowbar they use to pry open the door.
The one time Watch Tower actually did file a lawsuit — against a critic using the pseudonym Kevin McFree — things went badly for them. Once a judge started paying close attention to what was actually going on, Watch Tower fled the case, dismissing with prejudice. Among the more remarkable moments in that case: Watch Tower’s counsel tried to claim the organization lacked “significant funds” to pursue litigation — despite Watch Tower’s publicly available tax filings showing it has more than a billion dollars in assets. The organization also tried to use the infringement lawsuit as a vehicle to investigate how McFree had obtained leaked unpublished videos — something that had nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with plugging leaks and identifying internal dissidents.
Which makes the history here so galling. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have one of the most impressive First Amendment track records of any organization in American legal history. Starting with Lovell v. City of Griffin in 1938, they brought a string of landmark cases establishing core free speech protections that benefit all of us today. They fought for the right to go door-to-door without identifying themselves, and against compelled speech. Watch Tower’s own in-house counsel, Paul Polidoro — the same lawyer who has been issuing many of these DMCA subpoenas — successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to speak anonymously.
And now that same organization is systematically using copyright law’s cheapest, lowest-bar procedural tool to strip anonymity from its own members who dare to ask questions. As EFF puts it:
The First Amendment does not permit the unmasking of anonymous speakers based on such weak claims. Indeed, the First Amendment protects anonymous speakers precisely because some would be deterred from speaking if they faced retribution for doing so.
Watch Tower got caught doing this in 2019. They got caught again in 2022 and ran away from court once a judge saw through the scheme. And here they are in 2026, right back at it. There’s no honest way to treat these as isolated incidents — this is a deliberate, ongoing policy of abusing copyright as a weapon against internal dissent. The DMCA subpoena process — designed to be quick and cheap — is working exactly as Watch Tower wants: a low-cost intelligence-gathering operation that most targets can’t afford to fight.
EFF is pushing back, at least. But it shouldn’t require EFF — or, as in the last case, Paul Levy and Public Citizen Litigation Group — to show up every single time before a court will acknowledge that an organization with a billion dollars in assets and a decade-long pattern of filing subpoenas it never converts into actual lawsuits is abusing the process. At some point, courts should be able to connect these dots on their own.
The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering users to successfully launch digital products independently of developer assistance. It’s on sale for $20.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.
And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.
Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.
Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”
That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.
The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.
Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.
[…]
Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”
Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.
Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.
This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.
The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.
It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:
The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.
A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.
Of course, you’re supposed to try and have some subtlety in this so the public isn’t fully aware of the con. But the Trump administration doesn’t do subtlety.
Last week Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently got upset by the fact Trump’s war in Iran isn’t going very well. Poor Donald clearly didn’t understand the evolving nature of modern and inexpensive drone warfare (despite all the brutal evidence in Ukraine), and has gotten the country bogged down in precisely the sort of clusterfuck the fake populist pretended he opposed last election season.
Even our soggy corporate press has occasionally been making this clear to the public, something that upsets Pete Hegseth very much. Hegseth apparently got particularly upset with CNN recently insisting that the Iran War had “intensified.” It made him so upset that he openly pined for the moment when Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son) control CNN, so they can cheerlead for war:
Hegseth: "Some in the press can't stop. Allow me to make suggestions. People look at the TV and they see banners, 'Mideast War Intensifies.' What should it read instead? How about, 'Iran increasingly desperate.' More fake news from CNN. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better"
It’s very clear that the U.S. right wing won’t be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media is owned by a handful of rich right wingers like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, allowing them to create a North Korea bullhorn of daily, uniform propaganda that does nothing but lavish praise upon them. To build something like that here in the States requires a level of subtlety they’re simply not capable of:
Donald Trump is now just openly bragging about interfering in the media. He's the president. He's running a truck over the first amendment here.
Democrats historically suck on media policy and reform (even the progressive wing of the party is fairly incompetent on the subject), so you can’t expect much help there.
But there are several things working in our favor, including America’s sheer size (it’s very difficult to maintain the kind of control they’re looking for), our diversity, the decentralized nature of the modern internet, and the fact that most of the nepobabies (David Ellison) and brunchlords (Bari Weiss) integral to their plans appear to have absolutely no Earthly idea what they’re actually doing.
For example, all the debt Ellison has adopted from the purchase of CBS and Warner Brothers is going to force them to engage in massive, unprecedented cost cuttings and layoffs, making it hard to maintain informational control and build an effective, ratings-grabbing propaganda operation (even if Bari Weiss knew what she was doing, which she assuredly does not).
And the public still has agency. Larry Ellison can buy TikTok and Elon Musk can buy Twitter, but they can’t control the flow of the public as they flee to other, less white supremacist, right wing friendly alternatives. It’s sheer hubris to think they can maintain information control in a country this massive and diverse, and there will be some useful entertainment value in watching them set money on fire trying.
It’s been a long and winding road to mostly get us right back to where we started in the battle between pop star Katy Perry and Aussie clothing designer Katie Perry. If you’re not familiar with this saga, here is a brief summary. Note that I will be mostly using only Katy and Katie when naming the players here to avoid confusion.
Katie Taylor is the real name of the Aussie designer, but she began selling clothing under the name “Katie Perry” in 2008 and secured a trademark for the name in Australia for clothing. While Katy’s team initially sent a C&D to Katie’s business around that same time, it appears nothing came of that C&D, even as the singer went on a worldwide tour that included Australia in 2014. That’s when Katie sued Katy, arguing that clothing merch sold on her local tour constituted trademark infringement, as the public might be confused between the two entities and who was producing what and for whom. She won her initial lawsuit, but Katy appealed and won, with the court not only clearing her of trademark infringement but also canceling Katie’s trademark entirely. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Katie appealed that ruling to Australia’s High Court.
And that brings us to an unlikely present, in which the High Court partially agreed with Katie’s appeal, reinstating her trademark, but not ruling that Katy Perry infringed upon it. I’m going to stay away from the first part of CNN’s post on the matter, because it does a horrible job of framing all of this, mostly in that in paints Katie Perry as some kind of underdog victim in all of this when she very much is not. But as for the ruling itself:
But on Wednesday, Australia’s High Court overturned the ruling, arguing the cancellation of the trademark was not warranted, and the use of the “Katie Perry” trademark was not likely to deceive or cause confusion.
Taylor said the court battle was a long and difficult process, but she did it to show that trademarks are there to protect small businesses, not just large brands.
“So many people said to me, like, why don’t you just give up? It’s not worth it. I really believe in standing up for your values. Truth and justice are part of my core and my values.”
And this is where I’m once again frustrated with CNN’s posture in its reporting. Katie sued Katy. That’s how this whole episode really started. Katie talking about how she is glad this all isn’t hanging over her head when she started the lawsuit that led to all of this is insane. This was a self-inflicted wound of epic proportions on a timeline equally crazy.
But the key part to me is that the logic behind ruling that Katie can have her trademark back is that Katie’s and Katy’s trademarks can coexist without any real concern for deception or confusion. That same logic is what I stated at the start of this whole ordeal as the reason this trademark lawsuit battle never should have been started in the first place.
Started by Katie Perry, I’ll remind you. And so we’ve come full circle, with both groups having their trademarks but without any actual infringement having occurred. It’s been a wild, stupid trip, but I guess we got where we were going: right back to where we started.
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.
