It was plainly obvious when RFK Jr. decided to fully remake ACIP, the CDC committee that advises the nation on immunization schedules and practices, that it was done so to place Kennedy sycophants that would enact his batshit theories on vaccinations. ACIP, now chockablock with anti-vaxxer, anti-science grift-gremlins, has been slowly chipping away at decades of good medical practice around immunization. The administration has already altered the recommended vaccine schedules for COVID and Hep B, while appearing to potentially question polio vaccines as well. It has been, to be pointed, an unmitigated shitshow thus far.
But at least ACIP has managed to color inside the lines of its own mandate to date. That appears to be about to change, as reporting indicates that ACIP’s meeting next month will put COVID vaccine injuries on the agenda.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law San Francisco, said the panel does not typically focus on vaccine injuries.
“Vaccine injuries are not a direct part of the committee’s mandates,” Reiss said in an email. “When they make vaccine recommendations, they should consider vaccines risks, and new risks may lead to changed recommendations; but that’s not directly about vaccine injuries.”
This isn’t to suggest that ACIP completely disregards risks associated with vaccinations, as Reiss mentions. ACIP does make changes to vaccination schedules and recommendations based on macro-data it is provided for specific vaccines. But discussions about the prevalence and validity of claims of vaccine injury are well outside ACIP’s purview. To use but one facile piece of evidence of that, you can review the CDC’s own webpage about what ACIP’s purpose and program does. You will notice that there is not a single reference to vaccine injury within it. Nor does the ACIP page that outlines its own charter. There you will see vague references to ACIP’s duties include the “consideration” of “vaccine safety”, but that is the macro-data I referenced earlier, not a deep dive into the specific topic of vaccine injury.
Vaccine injury is a serious topic, for which the Vaccine Injury Compensation System (VICP) was created in the 1980s. Consulting in lawsuits and writing about vaccine injuries is how Kennedy made millions of dollars. Expanding VICP, a stated goal of his, and using ACIP to add validity to those expansions, is a great way for Kennedy and his allies to make more and more money from these types of lawsuits immediately, or once he’s out of government.
It’s just another grift, powered by hand-picked muppets willing to do his bidding in ACIP.
“Some committee members have made repeated claims about Covid vaccine harms that were either unsupported by verifiable data or reflected clear mischaracterizations of the existing scientific literature,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Last year, Osterholm launched the Vaccine Integrity Project, which serves as an alternative source of vaccine information to the CDC.
“If the committee intends to revisit vaccine safety questions, it has an obligation to do so transparently and rigorously,” he said. “Given past misstatements, members do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.”
No, they most certainly do not. You may not think that questions about COVID vaccines are all that important any longer. We’ve moved on, you may think, from this novel virus being a major issue in our lives. And for some of us, that is true. I am very pro-vaccination, but I’m not getting every booster out there.
But that’s not really what this is about. Kennedy wants ACIP to spotlight supposed COVID vaccine injuries in a way that will certainly come with questionable evidence at best. Not out of concern for public health, mind you. But almost certainly for money.
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”
The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.
“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”
Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.
Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”
The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.
Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.
“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”
Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”
In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.
One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”
Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.
The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.
Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.
Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”
“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.
At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.
Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.
Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.
“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”
McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”
Marci McCarthy, second from left, Heather Honey, fourth from right, and Cleta Mitchell, third from right, were among the conservative activists and officials who attended the summit. McCarthy posted about the event on LinkedIn. Screenshot by ProPublica. Redactions by ProPublica.
Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.
Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.
“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.
Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.
The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”
We’ve been pointing out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mandatory age verification laws for years now. To verify someone’s age online, you have to collect personal data from them. If that someone turns out to be a child, congratulations: you’ve just collected personal data from a child without parental consent. Which is a direct violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)—the very law that’s supposed to be protecting kids.
So what happens when the agency charged with enforcing COPPA finally notices this obvious problem? If you guessed “they admit the conflict and then just promise not to enforce the law,” you’d be exactly right.
The Federal Trade Commission issued a policy statement today announcing that the Commission will not bring an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) against certain website and online service operators that collect, use, and disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user’s age via age verification technologies.
The FTC appears to be explicitly acknowledging that age verification technologies involve collecting personal information from users—including children—in a way that would otherwise trigger COPPA liability. If the technology didn’t create a COPPA problem, there would be no need for a policy statement promising non-enforcement. You don’t issue a formal announcement saying “we won’t sue you for this” unless “this” is something you could, in fact, sue people for.
The statement itself tries to dress this up by noting that age verification tech “may require the collection of personal information from children, prompting questions about whether such activities could violate the COPPA Rule.” But “prompting questions” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. The answer to those questions is pretty obviously “yes, collecting personal information from children without parental consent violates the rule that says you can’t collect personal information from children without parental consent.” The FTC just doesn’t want to say that part out loud, because then the follow-up question becomes: “so why are you encouraging companies to do it?”
Instead, they’ve decided to create an enforcement carve-out. Do the thing that violates the law, but pinky-promise you’ll only use the data to check the kid’s age, delete it afterward, and keep it secure. Then we won’t come after you. This is the FTC solving a legal contradiction not by asking Congress to fix the underlying law or admitting the technology is fundamentally flawed, but by deciding to selectively not enforce the law it’s supposed to be enforcing.
The honest approach would have been to tell Congress that age verification, as currently conceived, cannot be squared with existing privacy law—and that if lawmakers want it anyway, they need to resolve that conflict themselves rather than asking the FTC to pretend it doesn’t exist.
No such luck.
And boy, do they seem proud of themselves. Here’s Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection:
“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades…. Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.”
“The most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades.”
Excuse me, what?
This is the kind of statement that sounds authoritative right up until you spend thirty seconds thinking about it. Anyone with any knowledge of security and privacy knows that age verification is anything but “child protective.” It involves a huge invasion of privacy, for extremely faulty technology, that has all sorts of downstream effects that put kids at risk.
Oh, and the FTC seems proud that the vote for this was unanimous—though it’s worth noting that Donald Trump fired the two Democratic members of the FTC and has made no apparent efforts to replace them, despite Congress designating that the FTC is supposed to have five full members, with two from the opposing party. A unanimous vote among the remaining two Republicans is a strange thing to brag about.
The FTC even posted about this on X, and the response was… well, let me just show you:
If you can’t see that, the main part to pay attention to is not the tweet from the FTC itself, but the Community Note that (under the way Community Notes works, notes need widespread consensus among users to be appended to the public tweet):
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Contrary to their claim, using age verification has numerous issues, including but not limited to:
1. Easily bypassed
2. Risks of security data breach
3. Inaccuracies (Placing adults into underage groups, vice versa)
And many more… (sigh, I need a break).
Yeah, we all need a break.
That Community Note does a better job explaining the state of age verification technology than the FTC’s entire Bureau of Consumer Protection. It methodically lists out the problems: kids easily bypass these systems, the collected data creates massive security breach risks, and the technology produces wildly inaccurate results that lock adults out while letting kids through (and vice versa). When the consensus-driven crowdsourced fact-check on your own announcement is more informative than the announcement itself, maybe it’s time to reconsider the announcement.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the technology worked perfectly. Would mandatory age verification still be a good idea?
That still wouldn’t solve the issues with this technology and the harm it does to kids. Even UNICEF (UNICEF!) has been warning that age restriction approaches can actively harm the children they’re supposed to protect. After Australia’s social media ban for under-16s went into effect, UNICEF put out a statement that could not have been more clear about the risks:
“While UNICEF welcomes the growing commitment to children’s online safety, social media bans come with their own risks, and they may even backfire,” the agency said in a statement.
For many children, particularly those who are isolated or marginalised, social media is a lifeline for learning, connection, play and self-expression, UNICEF explained.
Moreover, many will still access social media – for example, through workarounds, shared devices, or use of less regulated platforms – which will only make it harder to protect them.
So the actual child welfare experts are saying that age verification can backfire, push kids into less safe spaces, and should never be treated as a substitute for real safety measures. Meanwhile, the FTC is calling the same technology “the most child-protective” thing to come along in a generation and is waiving its own enforcement authority to encourage more of it.
What we have here is a federal agency that has identified a direct conflict between the law it enforces and the policy outcome it wants. Rather than grappling with what that conflict means—maybe age verification as currently conceived just doesn’t work within the existing legal framework, and for good reason—the FTC has chosen to simply look the other way. The message to companies is clear: go ahead and collect data from kids to figure out if they’re kids. We know that violates COPPA. We don’t care. We like age verification more than we like enforcing our own rules.
That’s a hell of a policy position for the agency that’s supposed to be the last line of defense for children’s privacy online.
Of course, we’ll see what comes of this, but it’s starting to look like this administration won’t outlast this level of judicial scrutiny. It may have bullied its way past courts during Trump’s first year back in office, but now lines are being drawn. Whether or not those lines matter is an open question. But the important thing is that they’re being drawn. All the government has to do is cross them. And there’s no reason to believe it won’t.
This is not the only court drawing these lines. The administration has already been hit with hundreds of adverse rulings. Multiple courts have threatened contempt sanctions. Some courts have even begun making those threats a reality.
Trump may flood the zone, but now it’s clear the zone is willing to flood right back. Stare into the abyss, etc. Judges are done with dealing with this shady AF administration. They’re putting in the (legal) papers that Trump got mad.
This is from a recent order [PDF] handed down by a New Jersey federal court:
The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.
“Roundly rejected.” Just like prior restraint. This is active and ongoing restraint. And while it doesn’t do much to the First Amendment, it certainly does plenty of damage to other amendments dealing with the deprivation of personal liberty.
The court goes on to point out that the US Attorney for New Jersey has conceded to “violating 72 orders” issued in immigration cases handled in this jurisdiction alone. And yet, nothing changes. The US Attorney claimed the violations were “unintentional.” The court disagrees.
Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.
This is how it goes from here. The judge says any further arrests or detentions in violation of this order will result in mandatory testimony under oath, if not actual sanctions. It’s not the best threat I’ve ever heard, but it’s still more than most courts are willing to do, even as the administration continues to pretend courts are mere nuisances, rather than an integral part of the American republic that constitutionally has as much power as the Executive Branch.
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation games and a personal digital assistant using the Google Assistant API. You will also learn how to build Alexa Skills that will run on any Amazon Echo device to voice control anything in your home, and how to build your own Echo clone. The bundle is on sale for $30.
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.
We’ve said it over and over again on this site: when you stand up to the bully, the bully backs down. When you capitulate, you get nothing but a permanent stain and an invitation for more abuse.
And here we are again.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the executive orders sanctioning law firms that dared to represent clients the president didn’t like. The Justice Department is expected to drop its appeals of four separate trial-court rulings that struck down Trump’s actions against Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey.
The fact that these attacks were legal losers is no surprise. We called this out as unconstitutional nonsense when Trump first started targeting law firms. The courts agreed, with judge after judge striking down the orders as unconstitutional retaliation. But it was at least a little surprising that the Trump admin just gave up on this fight, rather than continuing its losing streak. As the WSJ reports:
An ideological mix of judges ruled against the administration, saying the executive orders undermined bedrock principles of the U.S. legal system. In one decision, Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions was necessary to preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”
In another decision, Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said even more cuttingly, “This action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.'”
So the firms that fought back—the ones that read the Constitution and believed it still meant something—won a total, complete victory. The administration folded. The executive orders are dead.
But, the story of the firms that fought and won is actually the less interesting part of this saga. The far more consequential story is about the firms that didn’t fight. The ones that looked at a blatantly unconstitutional executive order and decided the smart play was to grovel.
Led by Paul Weiss, nine large law firms decided to cut deals with the administration rather than challenge what was an obviously hollow legal threat. They promised nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. They effectively paid a cowardice tax—tribute to a bully who, it turns out, had no actual leverage over them.
And what did they get for it?
While the administration lost its battle in court, the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry. Fear of the orders prompted nine large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. Many of the same firms that took a leading role opposing the Trump administration in court during his first term have shied away from taking on pro bono cases adverse to the government.
That “lasting chill” the WSJ describes is real, but it was from the law firms themselves, not the executive orders. By capitulating, those firms validated the threat and made it seem scarier than it ever actually was. Every firm that cut a deal told the world: “This threat is credible enough that we—supposedly the top lawyers in the country—would rather surrender than fight.” And by doing so, they made it harder for every other firm to stand up. They didn’t protect themselves. They weakened the entire profession.
UCLA law professor Scott Cummings put it well in the WSJ piece:
“This affected the interest of big law firms doing what they normally do, to stand up for people without representation…. In that sense, Trump achieved something important that will linger.”
But I’d frame this differently than Cummings does. Trump didn’t “achieve” this. Paul Weiss and the other capitulators achieved it for him. Trump threw a blatantly unconstitutional punch, and instead of letting the courts block it (which they did, easily, for every firm that fought), these firms dove out of the way and handed him their lunch money. The “achievement” here belongs to institutional cowardice, not executive cunning. And that distinction matters, because it means the chilling effect on legal representation wasn’t an inevitable consequence of Trump’s power, but a choice.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this dynamic play out. Just a couple of months ago, the Trump administration quietly dropped its appeal in its effort to withhold education funding from colleges they deemed too “woke.” The administration had threatened to pull billions in funding from states and schools that refused to sign documents attesting they’d eliminated DEI programs. A federal judge struck it down on multiple grounds, including that it threatened educators’ free speech. The administration appealed… and then abandoned the appeal entirely.
The case was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Sociological Association and a school district in Eugene, Ore. Randi Weingarten, president of the A.F.T., said the case was the most important of the 22 lawsuits that her union had filed, along with partner groups, against Mr. Trump in his second term, because of the precedent it would establish for limiting executive power.
“You cannot, by executive fiat, rewrite 60 years of educational opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview, referring to the civil rights laws that protect students from racial discrimination in schools.
The American Federation of Teachers fought and won. But universities like Columbia and Cornell had already surrendered. They cut their own deals, gutted their own programs, and reorganized their institutions to appease an administration whose legal threats were, once again, built on sand. And just like with Paul Weiss, the capitulation didn’t buy them safety. Columbia folded and then the administration stillthreatened its accreditation.
Because that’s how bullies work. Giving in doesn’t satisfy them. It emboldens them.
The pattern across both stories is pretty clear. The Trump administration launches a legally dubious attack. Some institutions panic and fold. Others stand firm, go to court, and win. Then the administration quietly abandons the fight. And the institutions that folded are left sitting there, having paid a price—in money, in reputation, in institutional integrity—for a threat that was never going to survive judicial review.
The nearly $1 billion in “pro bono” commitments those law firms made is particularly galling now. That’s a billion dollars pledged to administration-favored causes, extracted through what amounted to a protection racket built on an unconstitutional executive order that the government itself just admitted it can’t defend. It doesn’t even matter if those law firms ever actually pony up that pro bono representation. The damage is already done. They told the world — and every future authoritarian who might be taking notes — that major American law firms can be rolled if you just threaten them loudly enough.
Meanwhile, the firms that fought are walking away with their reputations intact, their principles uncompromised, and a stack of lower-court rulings affirming what was obvious from the start: what the administration tried to do was unconstitutional. And critically, the administration quit before those cases could work their way up to a Supreme Court that has proven… let’s say flexible… in its willingness to bless executive overreach. We’ll never know if SCOTUS would have found some creative way to let these executive orders stand. But we do know this: the administration’s own lawyers apparently concluded that the answer wasn’t going to be favorable, or at minimum that the fight wasn’t worth having.
That’s the actual lesson here—but it’s narrower than “the system works.” The administration’s legal theory was so weak it couldn’t survive even the first round of judicial scrutiny. A DOJ that has proven willing to argue almost anything looked at these cases and decided it couldn’t defend them. That’s how hollow this threat was. The firms that fought won not because the whole machine is functioning properly—plenty of evidence suggests it isn’t—but because this particular attack was so constitutionally indefensible that contesting it in court was basically a formality. Which makes the capitulation all the more inexplicable: they surrendered to a threat that collapsed the moment anyone bothered to fight it.
For Paul Weiss and the others, that’s going to be a fun thing to explain to future clients.
We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been abusing the FCC’s “equal opportunity” (or “equal time”) rule to try and threaten daytime and late night talk shows with government retribution if they refuse to enthusiastically coddle Republicans.
Late night shows had historically been exempt from the dated rules, which required that any airing of a political candidate on “publicly owned” airwaves is countered with the appearance from a candidate from the opposing party. But Carr isn’t interested in equilibrium; he’s interested abusing FCC authority to try and silence critics of Donald Trump and his increasingly unpopular policies.
But folks have increasingly noted that Brendan Carr doesn’t appear to have any interest in enforcing the same standard on radio, where (especially on AM), listeners are constantly served up a lopsided dose of race-baiting agitprop pretending to be news. When he’s been asked about this inconsistency, Carr has been painfully and curiously vague:
“In a press conference after the FCC’s February 18 meeting, Deadline reporter Ted Johnson asked Carr why he has not expressed “the same concern about broadcast talk radio as broadcast TV talk shows.”
The Deadline reporter pointed out that “Sean Hannity’s show featured Ken Paxton in December.” Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is running for a US Senate seat in this year’s election. Carr claimed in response that TV broadcasters have been “misreading” FCC precedents while talk radio shows have not been.
“It appeared that programmers were either overreading or misreading some of the case law on the equal-time rule as it applies to broadcast TV,” Carr replied. “We haven’t seen the same issues on the radio side, but the equal-time rule is going to apply to broadcast across the board, and we’ll take a look at anything that arises at the end of the day.”
It’s of course far worse on the radio side, which has been utterly dominated by outright right wing propaganda since the early 90s. And he will, of course, not be “taking a look at anything that arises,” because, again, he’s not remotely interested in abusing this rule consistently because he’s an authoritarian hack.
“Carr’s claim that TV but not radio broadcasters have misread FCC precedents is “a bunch of nonsense,” said Gigi Sohn, a longtime lawyer and consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama era. Carr “was responding to criticism from people like Sean Hannity that the guidance would apply to conservative talk radio just as much as it would to so-called ‘liberal’ TV,” Sohn told Ars. “It doesn’t matter whether a broadcaster is a radio broadcaster or a TV broadcaster, the Equal Opportunities law and however the FCC implements it must apply to both equally.”
It’s a tale as old as time, assuming time began a decade or two ago. A music artist who just wants to make and perform their craft gets on the internet and performs the song he or she created, only to receive some version of a copyright notice or warning, confusing the hell out of them. Sometimes this happens due to fraud. More often it’s due to some mistake with some automated bot that trolls for rights violations on behest of some massive company.
The latter is likely the case when it comes to OPM performer Jireh Lim, who recently performed one of his songs from over a decade ago on Facebook, only to be notified that his reel was being demonetized.
OPM singer Jireh Lim appeared amused and puzzled at the same time after he got a copyright notice for singing his 2013 song “Buko” in one of his social media posts. Lim shared a video of himself singing his song along with a band, through his Facebook page on Saturday, Feb. 21.
Lim shared a screenshot of the notice that reads, “Your reel’s earnings are being claimed by music rights holders. Multiple rights owners requested changes to your video because a large amount of their music was detected.”
Lim included a response in the caption of the screenshot in what I believe is Tagalog. I’m sure the translation isn’t perfect, but he essentially says, “Guys, this is me. It’s my song.”
So, what’s going on here? Well, the details are somewhat lacking, so I’m left to speculate a bit. Here’s what I know for sure. Lim is currently signed with Warner Music Philippines. Warner definitely has the rights to Lin’s album Love and Soul, which he made in 2015 while with Warner. Before Warner, and in 2013 when Buko was recorded, he was an independent artist. His pre-Warner catalog, however, made its way onto streaming platforms also in 2015.
And now for the speculation. I am guessing that Warner also acquired the rights to his older music, at least for streaming distribution and the like. Warner is not only extremely protectionist on copyright matters, but also employs copyright bots that automatically look for infringing content on the internet, particularly on YouTube and social media sites. So, I would guess that Lim’s reel performing “his” song got flagged by whatever automated setup Warner Music has going.
None of which changes the fact that’s it’s crazy-pants that a musical artist can’t perform his own song on the internet unmolested, nor the fact that copyright laws are obviously so stupidly insane that even these artists can’t figure out how to navigate them properly.
The administration has burnt the “presumption of regularity” to a crispness normally reserved for conquered bridges succumbing to heat death. It is now well known that the Trump administration will do whatever it wants to do, whether or not it’s supported by law. And when the courts push back, the administration responds with implicit “fuck you’s” or explicit verbal attacks on the judiciary.
The administration isn’t playing with a full deck, albeit not in the way that phrase is normally understood. Normally, it would mean the administration is batshit crazy. And it is! But its insanity isn’t of the pro-se-complainant-arguing-flag-fringe-merits variety. It’s the other thing: the refusal to respect court rulings it disagrees with. Ever.
The courts are sick of this refusal to respect a co-equal government branch. Hundreds of cases handled by dozens of judges have resulted in adverse rulings against the Trump administration. And yet, the administration refuses to stop doing the things hundreds of rulings have stated it can’t do.
It’s never been a regional thing (Fifth Circuit explicitly excluded). These are not the efforts of judges in “liberal” states who have been appointed by Democratic Party presidents. This is universal.
West Virginia, a state where Trump secured 70% of the votes in the last presidential election, is now poised to hand his masked ICE goons a significant loss. In one of thousands of similar habeas corpus cases filed around the nation following Trump’s racist anti-brown people surge, a federal judge has said he’s seen enough to move forward with contempt hearings and possible fines for government officials. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
The plaintiff is a Honduras native who was arrested by ICE and immediately sent to a detention facility one state over. This is something ICE does regularly, for the obvious reason of making it more difficult for detainees to challenge their detention. Since cases need to be filed wherever the person is detained, keeping arrestees in a state of perpetual motion makes this almost impossible.
But Miguel Izaguirre managed to get his case to court before he was moved again. That kept ICE from sending him to another detention center in another, possibly ICE-friendlier state (I’m glaring at you, Fifth Circuit).
Izaguirre’s allegations resemble those of most ICE detainees: he was denied his due process rights despite being arrested for a mere civil violation. The government has refused (probably because it doesn’t have it) to provide anything supporting it’s claim that Izaguirre must remain incarcerated while his civil case plays out in court.
[T[he Government stated that it had “carefully reviewed the pending petition and determined that the same or substantially similar issues arise in the case at bar.” [ECF No. 16- 1, at 2]. The Government further confirmed that it would not offer evidence beyond the documents attached to its response, nor would it offer any witnesses.
Since the government doesn’t actually have anything to offer in support of violating this detainee’s due process rights, the court gets right to the point:
For the reasons explained and analyzed in previous cases before this court and this district, I will once again FIND: First, the court has jurisdiction. Petitioner does not challenge an immigration proceeding or decision that would bar this court’s jurisdiction. Second, Petitioner is not “seeking admission” into the country, and the discretionary detention of 8 U.S.C. § 1226 applies to him. Third, Petitioner’s due process rights have been violated. Despite facing no criminal charge, Petitioner sits in the local jail with no hearing to determine his custody. There is no evidence in the record that Petitioner is a danger to the community or a flight risk, and there is sufficient evidence that he has community ties. Still, he has been afforded no hearing. This violates his due process rights.
Immediate release is the only appropriate remedy. Where detention has been found unlawful and no constitutionally adequate bond hearing has been provided, continued custody cannot stand.
Simply stated, but with some spite. The court makes it clear this is symptomatic of Trump’s anti-migrant efforts — something familiar enough that the court knows it needs to go further than just simply ordering the release of yet another migrant whose rights have been violated.
It’s something this court has seen multiple times in one week.
This case is one of 17 immigration habeas petitions assigned to the court this week. According to the Government, the detention of these Petitioners is “mandatory” under 8 U.S.C. §1225, and regardless of the constitutional defects, the federal district courts lack jurisdiction over these claims—an argument unanimously rejected in this district.
A flood of cases alleging similar violations of rights would be irritating enough. But the government absolutely refuses to abide by rulings issued in several similar cases. (Emphasis in the original.)
In 15 of the cases, Petitioners challenge their continued unlawful detention resulting from an arrest occurring on or after February 12, 2026.
The court then cites three previous rulings on similar cases, in which federal judges not only ruled they had jurisdiction to handle these cases, but that this mandatory detention violated detainees’ due process rights. All of those occurred prior to February 12. Judge Joseph Goodwin is sick of it.
But on February 12, 14, 17, 18, 21, and 22, 2026, the Government arrested noncitizens already in the interior of the United States. Today, the Government continues to wrongfully detain those petitioners without due process. Even now the Government incredulously asserts that the federal district courts do not have jurisdiction, that petitioners cannot raise due process violations, and that the Government has authority to mandatorily and indefinitely detain noncitizens in the local jail.
The Government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over again. I have said it myself.
And that’s where Judge Goodwin invites the government to fuck around and find out, including the subservient local boys who are far too anxious to help ICE violate people’s rights:
This Memorandum Opinion and Order serves as explicit notice to all officials—state and federal—involved in the detention of individuals whose cases come before this court.
Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences. For state jail officials, those consequences include personal civil liability without qualified immunity protection. For federal officials, those consequences include exercise of this court’s full inherent authority to enforce constitutional compliance including contempt.
Officials who believe this court has erred in its constitutional analysis may seek stay of this court’s orders pending appeal or pursue appellate review. What they may not do is continue systematic constitutional violations while preserving appellate objections and expecting this court to grant relief in case after case without enforcing its rulings.
Judge Goodwin signs off with this statement, which should be self-evident:
This court will enforce the Constitution.
Let’s hope he does it. Let’s hope jail officials cut people loose rather than start coughing up part of their paychecks. Let’s hope some ICE officials get to spend a few days in the cooler for refusing to comply with court orders. And let’s hope that courts across the nation generate the sort of collective and concerted pressure that will force the Supreme Court to set precedent that vastly undermines this administration’s bigoted efforts to scrub this country of people who aren’t white enough to be considered human beings by the racist goons infesting the White House.
The State Department wants US diplomats to fight data localization around the world. The policy position is correct. It’s just that the messenger has spent the last few months systematically destroying every reason anyone might listen.
In the State Department cable, dated February 18 and signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship.”
The cable said the Trump administration was pushing for “a more assertive international data policy” and that diplomats should “counter unnecessarily burdensome regulations, such as data localization mandates.”
Now, if you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we’ve long been critical of data localization mandates. They really are bad for the internet. They fracture the global internet into national fiefdoms. They raise costs. They can actually weaken cybersecurity by forcing data onto local infrastructure that may be less secure. And in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries, data localization is often a thinly veiled mechanism for government surveillance and control of information. Requiring that data stay within a country’s borders makes it a whole lot easier for that country’s government to demand access to it.
So on the merits, the policy position described in the cable is basically correct. Data sovereignty mandates do tend to hurt the open internet, and the US pushing back on them has, historically, been a genuinely good thing for global internet freedom. Indeed, the US State Department has a long history of pushing back on such efforts.
But the US already blew its credibility on this issue before this administration even took office. Remember the TikTok ban? That was a bipartisan effort—both Trump and Biden supported it—to do the exact same “data sovereignty” nonsense we’re now telling other countries not to do.
While the justification kept changing depending on the day and who you talked to, many of its supporters (including those in the Supreme Court who blessed that travesty) insisted that it was perfectly legitimate to force a “data localization” plan on TikTok because “ooh, scary foreigners shouldn’t have American data.” Literally this was the Supreme Court’s conclusion:
But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.
So both parties, both of the last two presidents, and the entirety of the Supreme Court announced to the world “it’s totally fine to force a foreign company to not just be required to hold data locally, but even to be forced to sell off local operations to a favored oligarch.”
That alone would make this diplomatic push awkward. But let’s talk about why it lands as completely absurd right now.
The reason data sovereignty initiatives have been “gathering pace,” as Reuters puts it, is in no small part because of the behavior of this very administration. Countries—and especially our allies in Europe—are rushing to build digital walls because the US government has spent the last few months torching every alliance, cozying up to dictators, kicking off arbitrary trade wars, and generally making it abundantly clear that it has zero respect for the norms, rules, or institutions that underpin international cooperation.
You cannot spend your days insulting and threatening your closest allies, engaging in wildly protectionist trade policies, and signaling to the world that no agreement or partnership is safe from your whims, and then turn around and demand that those same allies keep the data pipeline wide open for American tech companies.
This would be like setting your neighbor’s house on fire and then asking to borrow their garden hose. And everyone sees exactly what’s happening:
Bert Hubert, a Dutch cloud computing expert and former member of the board that regulates the Dutch intelligence services, said Europe’s increasing wariness of America’s tech companies may be spurring Washington to take a more aggressive tack.
“Where the previous administration attempted to woo European customers, the current one is demanding that Europeans disregard their own data privacy regulations that could hinder American business,” he said.
And then there’s what the cable actually reveals about its real motivations. The cable reportedly frames data sovereignty as a threat to “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services,” which is a pretty revealing tell. It strips away any pretense that this is about internet freedom or civil liberties. What it actually says is: “American AI companies need access to your citizens’ data to train their models, and we’d appreciate it if you’d stop putting up barriers to that.”
This is the diplomatic equivalent of saying the quiet part loud. The US isn’t making a principled argument about the open internet here. It’s making a commercial demand dressed up in freedom rhetoric. And that’s not exactly a compelling pitch to countries that are already worried about the dominance of US tech firms and the lack of meaningful privacy protections in the US.
The cable also takes a swipe at the GDPR specifically, calling it an example of “unnecessarily burdensome data processing restrictions.” Look, the GDPR has plenty of problems and we’ve written about many of them. But when the US government is publicly calling Europe’s flagship privacy law a burden it wants to fight, while simultaneously offering no credible privacy framework of its own, it’s hard to see how that’s going to win hearts and minds.
Meanwhile, Rubio has also been ordering diplomats to fight against the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the US reportedly wants to set up a portal to help Europeans “bypass” content moderation rules around hate speech and terrorist content.
So the diplomatic message from the US to Europe is currently: ignore your privacy laws, ignore your content moderation laws, give our companies access to your data for AI training, and also we might slap tariffs on you tomorrow. Good luck getting anyone to take the “open internet” pitch seriously after that.
The deeply frustrating thing about all of this is that there really is a strong case to be made against data localization. The open, global internet has been one of the most powerful engines of innovation, communication, and human rights in history, and fragmenting it into national data silos is genuinely dangerous. But making that case requires credibility. It requires being the kind of partner that other countries can trust with their citizens’ data. It requires demonstrating, through your own behavior, that you believe in the rule of law, in stable institutions, and in respecting the sovereignty of your allies even while you advocate for open data flows.
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore’s 2013 Foreign Affairs piece on “The End of Hypocrisy” keeps proving prescient. A huge part of America’s moral power around the world resulted from the clear hypocrisy between America’s stated values and the ones we repeatedly failed to uphold. But it was a convenient myth that we could pretend to hold the moral high ground, and use that as a form of soft power to demand better of others. That falls apart entirely with administrations like Trump’s, where the idea of soft power, or even the moral high ground, is seen as woke nonsense. The Trump administration refuses to understand the power of that myth.
But now it’s gone. And that has a real cost: the policy position in Rubio’s cable is exactly right. The US should be pushing back on problematic data localization and “data sovereignty” laws. They’re bad for the open internet and good for local surveillance. This is an argument worth making—and we’ve surrendered the ability to make it credibly at precisely the moment it most needs to be made.
Foreign diplomats aren’t stupid. They can see that we demanded TikTok localize or divest while telling them localization is bad. They can see that we’re attacking their privacy laws while offering nothing in return. They can see that we’re framing this as “freedom” while the cable itself reveals it’s about feeding data to American AI companies. The policy is correct. The hypocrisy is total. And the result is that we’ve handed every country in the world a perfectly reasonable justification to ignore us.
