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Gregory Bovino’s star will continue to rise. Admitting you lied to a court no longer matters when the entire administration does it on a daily basis. All that matters is that you serve the fascist cause. And the Border Patrol commander sent to handle things in Chicago certainly has the right look for the job.
Between the alt-right hairdo and the wave the looks a lot like a Nazi salute, the guy who used to patrol the southern border in California is now the face of Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago, Illinois. The arrival of federal officers and federal troops has been greeted with protests, public statements, and lawsuits.
Bovino hasn’t actually been sued personally, but as the commander of the collective of bigots engaged in hunting down non-whites and removing them from the country, Bovino is definitely the source of the rights violations currently being litigated.
Bovino prides himself on answering to no one and perpetrating as much violence as possible against those who oppose him. He put his face out there willingly and seems to welcome as much press attention as possible, even as he continues to be the worst version of himself.
His actions have already gained the attention of a federal judge. The unprovoked violence engaged in by federal officers has already been hit with a federal injunction. And Bovino himself was one of the first to violate the court order, captured on camera tossing tear gas into a crowd of protesters despite not doing any of things he was supposed to do before throwing around crowd control munitions: issuing dispersal orders, giving people time to disperse, etc. When caught, he claimed someone had hit him in the head with a rock and suggested the presiding judge had no business telling him what to do since she herself hadn’t been hit in the head with a rock.
“Mr. Bovino and the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had been hit by a rock in the head before throwing the tear gas, but video evidence disproves this. And he ultimately admitted he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas,” Ellis said Thursday.
The injunction granted by Judge Ellis on Thursday extends temporary restrictions that she issued last month. Judge Ellis ordered federal agents to wear body cameras, give at least two audible warnings before using riot control weapons, and to use those weapons only to “preserve life or prevent catastrophic outcomes.”
She said the restrictions were necessary because immigration agents in Chicago had pointed guns at civilians who were not presenting a physical threat, used pepper spray, deployed tear gas and shot pepper balls.
“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” Judge Ellis, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, said in a ruling from the bench. She added: “The use of force shocks the conscience.”
Her new order [PDF] says Bovino only part of larger problem — one that takes the form of pretty much every bully and bigot that currently serve as part of Trump’s mass deportation machine:
Plaintiffs have also presented evidence that makes clear that senior officials have encouraged and endorsed federal agents’ targeting of non-violent individuals exercising their First Amendment rights. For example, Defendant Noem has instructed federal agents to “go hard” and “hammer” individuals for “the way they are talking, speaking, who they’re affiliated with.” Defendant Bovino followed this up by informing federal agents that a “free speech zone” outside of the Broadview Detention Center is “now going to be a ‘free arrest zone.’” He later stated in an interview: “If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them. Don’t protest, and don’t trespass.” And during his deposition, he confirmed that he believed federal agents’ uses of force throughout Operation Midway Blitz were “more than exemplary.”
That much makes it clear the administration (in whatever form) will lie about the dangers it faces just so it can continue to amp up its own violence and violent rhetoric. You know who else does that? Bullying children, which is pretty much the entirety of the anti-migrant workforce, as Lisa Needham notes in her rundown of this year’s deportation efforts:
The federal government keeps painting a front-facing, meme-driven picture of ICE, one where they are impossibly tough and skilled, and they get to crack heads because it is so violent out there. But when they are forced to tell the truth in court, their injuries are comically minor, the kind of thing you wouldn’t even go home from work for.
So, which is it? Well, it really is both.
When DHS’s goons are a roving band of masked armed men, they’re tough as hell. And why not? They spend their days arresting schoolteachers and tear-gassing kids from a safe distance away. They’re pretty impervious to harm. That said, they also are little babies, because they don’t believe there should be any consequences for their actions, and even the smallest harm they suffer is an outrage, something they simply can’t comprehend.
And that’s completely expected. It’s an administration filled with some of the most childish people ever to hold high-level government positions. They’ve modeled themselves after Trump’s infantile belligerence and they’ve been rewarded handsomely for prostrating themselves in front of a man who is the embodiment of the phrase “lowest common denominator.” You’d never give a toddler the power to deprive people of their lives or freedoms. And yet, here we are, overrun by toddlers with lots of power and ambition but deliberately unwilling to grow up, even when there’s an entire nation at stake.
Under Trump 2.0, the company has not only seen the complete lobotomizing of agencies like the FCC thanks to revolving door regulators like Brendan Carr, but a Trump-stocked court that makes it genuinely impossible to hold big companies like AT&T accountable for literally anything (see the 5th Circuit’s recent decision to nullify a fine against AT&T for spying on its customers and selling their location data).
With federal regulatory oversight dead and most states too overwhelmed or feckless to fill the void, AT&T’s now taking aim at the last vestiges of any sort of functional oversight: flimsy “self regulation” groups like the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Review Board (NARB) and its BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) enforcement arm.
NARB and NAD are supposed to act as a way for companies to resolve disputes about misleading advertisements in house to forestall the complaints migrating over to the FTC and FCC (which again, no longer function under Trump). The organization will often give adorable wrist slaps to telecom companies that engage in things like lying about their competitors or advertising misleading promos.
Some times the actions will result in companies pulling misleading ads, but it’s usually long after the ads have been airing for a while and have had their intended impact.
For example, AT&T was recently criticized by NARB for airing ads that falsely promised everybody a new iPhone, when the actual promotion (more than a year old at this point) had all sorts of limits. You know, the sort of thing that’s super common in a country too corrupt to have functional regulators:
“In reality, the offer was only for AT&T customers on certain plans, excluding customers with low-cost plans. “The panel recommended AT&T modify its advertising to avoid conveying the message that everyone is eligible for AT&T’s free cell phone offer, or to clearly and conspicuously disclose that subscribers to value plans are not eligible or otherwise make clear the extent of plan eligibility,” the NARB announcement said.”
Now to be clear, companies can basically ignore NARB and NAD without any real consequence. Because again, these organizations were was long-ago designed by companies for companies, to create the illusion that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are capable of regulating themselves without serious federal or state government oversight (spoiler: they can’t).
“AT&T also slammed the NAD for failing to rein in T-Mobile’s deceptive ads. The group’s slow process let T-Mobile air deceptive advertisements without meaningful consequences, and the “NAD has repeatedly failed to refer continued violations to the FTC,” AT&T said.”
Again that’s… ironic, given that companies like AT&T specifically built NAD and NARB to give the illusion that federal oversight isn’t necessary. It’s basically the flimsiest veneer of functional oversight specifically built to pre-empt real government oversight, and even that’s a bridge too far for the fine folks at AT&T.
One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay the $5.9 million buyout of the contract up front, the team instead made the bonkers decision to negotiate a deferred payment schedule for that amount with 8% interest over the course of 25 years. The result is that the Mets will be paying Bonilla $1.2 million per year every July 1st, starting in 2011 and ending in 2035. And if you can’t make sense of the math on that one, it’s because you aren’t aware that the Mets ownership was one of Bernie Madoff’s many victims, which is why they had to defer the payments.
November 10th is not Bobby Bonilla Day. But it should be named “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.” The classic spy-shooter turned 25 on that date and, for the exact same reasons we’ve detailed for a god damned decade now, you still can’t buy the game.
Here’s the short of it. Due to a series of mergers, closures, and rights purchases, the IP rights for No One Lives Forever and its sequel have been potentially split into three pieces between Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox, like it was some kind of fucking horcrux. I say potentially because nobody really knows who owns what, if anything, when it comes to these games. When one company, Nightdive Studios, attempted to remaster and re-release the game as they’ve done with other titles, along with securing trademark rights to the game which hasn’t been sold in over a decade, all three companies complained that they may have rights to it and may sue over it.
All of those qualifiers are, again, because even these companies themselves don’t know what rights they actually have. And why is that? Well, because the gaming rights deals were inked before digital storage was widely used for this sort of thing and, well, nobody seems to be able to locate the actual paperwork denoting who owns what. Here’s an example of an exchange Nightdive had with Activision.
“So we went back to Activision and, [after] numerous correspondence going back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights, but that any records predated digital storage. So we’re talking about a contract in a box someplace.” Kuperman laughed. “The image I get is the end of Indiana Jones… somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision, maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed, they didn’t have [their] hands on it. And they weren’t sure that they even had any of those rights.”
Which didn’t keep Activision from warning Nightdive that it might totally sue if it moved forward with remastering the game. The other companies made similar noises.
So what’s a person to do if they want to play this game? You can’t buy it legitimately currently. It’s not even for sale anywhere. And a situation like that, which I’ve stated before, completely breaks the copyright bargain. The only option is, as Kotaku of all places notes, to download it for free from somewhere.
Downloading games that are available for sale is piracy. It’s illegal, and it’s not supportive of developers and their art. But when companies have gone out of their way to refuse to take your money for a game for the better part of two decades, it’s a very different situation. Look, I’m not your real mom and dad, and I can’t tell you what to do. But if you were to click on this link (link removed by Techdirt due to us not knowing where it takes you) and download both games (as well as spin-off Contract Jack), you’d end up with modernized versions of these classic games, with mods that allow them to work on Windows 10 and 11, and in widescreen. And what better time to do (or not do) this than on the first game’s 25th anniversary?
At this point (as indeed it was over eight years ago, the last time I suggested just downloading it, to no negative response at all) we have to consider No One Lives Forever to be abandonware. No one is willing to take ownership of it, although those that could do so sometimes mindlessly threaten to intervene should anyone else try to rebuild it for sale. Nightdive were scared off a decade ago, and it’s been sitting on GOG’s Dreamlist since that launched earlier this year (with 87,171 people saying they’d pay for it if they could). It’s far too small of a concern for any of the megacorps who might own it to spend the time and money to work out if they do, but it’s far too big of a concern within gaming history to be allowed to just disappear. Thank goodness for the anonymous heroes running NOLF Revival. I thank them for their service.
It’s the only option the public has to play this game and enjoy this small piece of our collective culture. The real answer here is some sort of copyright reform that makes this situation not a thing. If a company, or group of companies, won’t offer a piece of work for sale, can’t be bothered to understand what they own of it, if anything, and have no plans to figure any of that out… then how can this be copyright infringement?
So happy “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes” Day. Maybe we’ll be able to play this game legitimately by the time Bobby Bonilla stops making his million and change per year.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Kenji Yoshino, who has the excellent title of Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and the Director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. Kenji is also a member of the Oversight Board. Together Ben and Kenji discuss:
This episode is brought to you by our sponsor CCIA, an international, not-for-profit trade association representing a broad cross section of communications and technology firms and that promotes open markets, open systems, and open networks.
I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you.
You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers and everyone has standing to speak.
Some of us have gotten really rich. Really powerful. And they’ve decided the real problem is that we dare to think we’re capable of this endeavor. This experiment in self-governance. They want to replace your Constitution and its laws with a Terms of Service Agreement. They say the “customer service” will be better. They’re the cognitive elite, you see. And the commons—us—is a tragedy. Unrestrained, we’ll vote for regulations and taxes that will slow the march of progress.
Progress toward what? For whom? Where are we going?
They think they know. Musk to Mars. Thiel to monarchy. Yarvin to corporate feudalism with better branding. A whole apparatus of Silicon Valley intellectuals convinced that democracy failed and hierarchy is the answer. That most people should accept subordinate roles. That the intelligent few should rule. That your capacity for self-governance is the problem, not the solution.
They’ll tell you it’s inevitable. That fighting it is naive. That efficiency matters more than agency. That optimization beats dignity. That customer service under enlightened technocratic rule will be better than the messy democracy you’re clinging to.
To hell with that.
Our nation must be defended, of course. China and Russia are real threats. But in meeting those threats, we cannot lose the very thing that makes us different from them. The reason there is a line in the sand. The reason an American soldier would lay down their life. For freedom. For liberty. For the preposterous idea that ordinary people can govern themselves.
Not so some fucking oligarch can tell us that hierarchy is inevitable. Not so feudalism with Wi-Fi can replace the Constitution with terms of service. Not so the “cognitive elite” can optimize us into subjects.
I’d rather wait in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles than take a knee before these men.
Because here’s what they don’t understand—what they cannot understand because their frameworks won’t allow it: the inefficiency is the point. The messiness is the point. The fact that democracy is slower and harder and more uncertain than rule by superior intelligence—that’s not a bug. That’s what makes it worth defending.
When you govern yourself, you make mistakes. You argue. You compromise. You change your mind. You live with decisions made by people you disagree with. You accept that your superior insight doesn’t grant you authority over others. You do the hard work of reasoning together across difference.
They say: inefficiency. I say: human dignity.
The oligarchs look at this and see waste. I look at it and see everything worth fighting for.
They want to sell you the idea that surrendering agency will make your life better. That if you just accept your place in the hierarchy, the people at the top will take care of you. That democracy is too hard, too messy, too slow for the challenges we face.
This is the oldest tyranny dressed in the newest language. It’s the same thing every authoritarian in history has offered: surrender your freedom and I’ll give you security. Accept my rule and I’ll solve your problems. Trust me to decide and you won’t have to do the hard work of deciding together.
Every time, it’s a lie. Not because the authoritarians are uniquely evil—though some are—but because the bargain itself is corrupt. You cannot trade freedom for security and get either. You cannot accept hierarchy and keep dignity. You cannot surrender self-governance and remain free.
America, you’re built on the idea that this bargain is bullshit. That ordinary people figuring it out together beats extraordinary people deciding for everyone. That the mess and uncertainty and difficulty of democracy is the price of being human rather than being managed.
Some days I look at you and despair. At how close you are to surrendering what makes you worth defending. At how many people are ready to trade your beautiful preposterous idea for the promise of better customer service. At how the oligarchs have convinced half the country that their own capacity for self-governance is the problem.
But then I see the governors who won’t bend. The representatives calling for new leadership. The millions who took to the streets saying “no kings.” The jury in D.C. that refused to enforce political prosecutions. The judges still building factual records and defending constitutional constraints. The ordinary people who keep showing up, keep organizing, keep insisting that they have standing to determine their collective fate.
And I remember: you’re not your worst impulses. You’re not your oligarchs or your authoritarians or your accommodating establishment. You’re the idea that ordinary people can govern themselves. And that idea—however battered, however threatened—is still alive because enough people refuse to surrender it.
The fight ahead is existential. The oligarchs aren’t going to stop because we ask nicely. The authoritarians aren’t going to respect norms they’ve explicitly rejected. The establishment isn’t going to fight power because fighting costs more than managing.
It’s going to take genuine resistance. Sustained organizing. Economic power used against economic power. Democratic institutions defended by people willing to use them. Governors who fight. Representatives who mean what they say. Citizens who refuse to become subjects.
It’s going to require accepting that some things are worth the mess, the uncertainty, the inefficiency. That self-governance is harder than being ruled but that the difficulty is what makes it dignified. That waiting in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles is preferable to kneeling before men who think your capacity for self-governance is the obstacle to their vision of progress.
America, I love you. You’re so fucked up. But the idea you’re built on—that ordinary people can govern themselves together—is the most beautiful and preposterous thing humans have ever attempted.
Some want to replace it with hierarchy. With feudalism dressed as innovation. With Terms of Service where the Constitution used to be.
I say: Let them try. Let them make their case. Let them explain why surrendering your agency will make you free.
And then let us make ours: that you are capable. That self-governance is possible. That dignity requires the right to fail rather than the security of being managed. That freedom means doing the hard work of reasoning together rather than accepting the easy comfort of being ruled by your betters.
The wire still holds. Not because the forces trying to break it are weak—they’re not. But because enough people remember what you’re built on and refuse to trade it for better customer service.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ordinary people can govern themselves if they choose to do the work.
I choose the work. I choose the mess. I choose you—beautiful, preposterous, fucked-up America, built on an idea worth defending even when defending it costs everything.
May love carry us home. Not as escape but as reminder that what we’re fighting for—the right to govern ourselves together despite our flaws—is worth more than all the efficiency and optimization the oligarchs can offer.
The circus continues. But the idea at its center—your idea, America—is still ours to defend or surrender.
I know which I choose.
The question is: do you?
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Here comes more pathetic, childish bullshit from an administration that has made petty bullshit its brand. The just completed government shutdown caused problems everywhere. The Trump administration knew its refusal to compromise on the budget bill was going to hurt it, so it did everything it could to reshape the narrative, even as it somehow retained the funding to argue against things like… ensuring SNAP benefits are paid out to recipients.
Ever since the government went down, the Trump administration converted agencies that are supposed to be apolitical entities into proxy mouthpieces for its ridiculous attempts to heap the blame on the party that isn’t in power. Here’s how that went, as described by DC federal court judge Christopher Cooper in his ruling [PDF] in favor of government employees whose inaccessible email accounts had been hijacked by the Trump administration. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
Over a month ago, the Executive Branch launched a multifront campaign to assign blame for the government shutdown. It began by plastering politically-charged language on official public websites. See, e.g., Compl. ¶¶ 17 (Department of Housing and Urban Development: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.”), (Department of Justice: “Democrats have shut down the government.”), (Department of State: “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.”), (Department of Agriculture: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”), (Small Business Administration: “Every day that Senate Democrats continue to oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA guaranteed funding.”), (Department of the Treasury: “The radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism.”), (Department of Health and Human Services: “Mission-critical activities of HHS will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown. Please use this site as a resource as the Trump Administration works to reopen the government for the American people.”).
All of that is highly concerning, if not actually a violation of appropriations laws. While it’s completely normal for partisan politicians to blame the members of other parties for government shutdowns, it’s beyond the normally-accepted pale to convert federal websites into bullhorns for partisan hackery and straight-up gaslighting.
Nothing succeeds like excess, which is the only thing this administration knows. Back to Judge Cooper:
Apparently, that wasn’t enough. The Department waited until its furloughed employees lost access to their email, then gratuitously changed their out-of-office messages to include yet another partisan message, thereby turning its own workforce into political spokespeople through their official email accounts. The Department may have added insult to injury, but it also overplayed its hand.
That paragraph arrives 34 pages into the 36-page decision, which makes it apparent where it’s headed. Of course, reading it through from the beginning would also give you a good idea where it’s headed. And it’s worth doing that, because the court tangles with the hazier aspects of First Amendment law.
Compelled speech is always a constitutional problem. But adding bits of stuff to government employees’ (automated) speech isn’t necessarily as obvious of a problem, considering they’re still considered to be employees of the administration that currently controls the White House.
This, however, is so far out of the ordinary that it can’t possibly be considered constitutional, as the court explains. It’s one thing to generate out-of-office messages on behalf of furloughed employees. It’s quite another to lock them out of their accounts and then add gratuitous partisan attacks that will often be assumed by recipients to be the furloughed employees’ personal take on the government shutdown.
The government’s defense of these actions is ultra-weird. I mean, it would have to be. No other administration has ever done this. And it’s likely no other administration has ever considered doing this, much less the commandeering of public-facing websites to engage in attacks on the opposing party.
The original messages notifying citizens of interruptions in service due to the shutdown simply stated the facts: the person they were trying to reach had been furloughed and would not be back to work until government funding resumed.
Shortly after they were furloughed, their out-of-office messages were hijacked by administration officials to say this:
The Department employee you have contacted is currently in furlough status. On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. The employee you have contacted will respond to emails once government functions resume.
Now, if any employee had chosen to do this on their own, they could conceivably be reprimanded or fired for using their government email account to engage in partisan politics. I mean, obviously this message would never get anyone fired by this administration, but the government could have removed the employee without worrying too much about violating their First Amendment rights.
But this is the flip side of this theoretical: this is the government inserting partisan speech into email auto-responses. And since the government (as a whole) is the more powerful entity here, it’s compelled speech — compelled speech that occurred often without the knowledge of the person who’s mouth was being filled with the administration’s words.
The government’s arguments are terrible. First, it claims (as it almost always does immediately after being sued) that the court (whatever court it is) doesn’t have jurisdiction. In this case, it says it’s a labor dispute that should be resolved administratively through internal channels, rather than be treated like the constitutional violation it so very obviously is.
The court is having none of this bullshit. It simply points out the obvious: the government was shut down and the internal channels were closed, along with much of the rest of it, until finally reopening today. If the case was delayed until the budget bills passed, the administration would be allowed to continue to engage in compelled speech and then declare the whole thing moot once the proper channels for employment complaints were reopened.
Furthermore, this is a constitutional claim, which is definitely the sort of thing federal courts are allowed to review, no matter what “proper channels” already exist. A court may decide the case should be handled through those channels after further review of the facts. But it is completely false to claim the court cannot handle this case ever, no matter what internal administrative options might otherwise exist.
The government also says this case is already moot because it has clawed back the wording it inserted into government employees’ email messages. The court says that definitely doesn’t mean the case is moot, especially given the timing of the removal:
[T]he Department’s prompt recission of the Original Message after the Department of Justice received AFGE’s [American Federal Government Employees] cease-and-desist letter is likely indicative of the message’s unconstitutionality.
The court discusses (and discards) some other procedural arguments from the government before making everything clear. While this is certainly unprecedented, it doesn’t mean it’s OK simply because this nation hasn’t encountered this particular brand of petty bullshit before:
[F]or all its novelty, this case does not lack for clarity. When government employees enter public service, they do not sign away their First Amendment rights, and they certainly do not sign up to be a billboard for any given administration’s partisan views.
Expanding further, the court delivers what should be the death knell, but will only trigger endless rounds of appeals until Clarence Thomas or somefuckingbody says “Hey, the government owns these people so they can be forced to say whatever the government wants them to say.”
Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians. But by commandeering its employees’ e-mail accounts to broadcast partisan messages, the Department chisels away at that foundation. Political officials are free to blame whomever they wish for the shutdown, but they cannot use rank-and-file civil servants as their unwilling spokespeople. The First Amendment stands in their way. The Department’s conduct therefore must cease.
It’s amazing that this ever needed to be said by a federal judge. This has always been obvious, which is why only the most willfully oblivious presidential administration in the history of this nation has even tried it. It was already fucked up when it turned government agency websites into GO TEAM TRUMP billboards. It’s even more fucked up that it thought it could do the same thing to thousands of federal employees during a government shutdown the GOP could have easily averted.
A federal magistrate judge just ordered that the private ChatGPT conversations of 20 million users be handed over to the lawyers for dozens of plaintiffs, including news organizations. Those 20 million people weren’t asked. They weren’t notified. They have no say in the matter.
Last week, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered OpenAI to turn over a sample of 20 million chat logs as part of the sprawling multidistrict litigation where publishers are suing AI companies—a mess of consolidated cases that kicked off with the NY Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI. Judge Wang dismissed OpenAI’s privacy concerns, apparently convinced that “anonymization” solves everything.
Even if you hate OpenAI and everything it stands for, and hope that the news orgs bring it to its knees, this should scare you. A lot. OpenAI had pointed out to the judge a week earlier that this demands from the news orgs would represent a massive privacy violation for ChatGPT’s users.
News Plaintiffs demand that OpenAI hand over the entire 20M log sample “in readily searchable format” via a “hard drive or [] dedicated private cloud.” ECF 656 at 3. That would include logs that are neither relevant nor responsive—indeed, News Plaintiffs concede that at least 99.99% of the logs are irrelevant to their claims. OpenAI has never agreed to such a process, which is wildly disproportionate to the needs of the case and exposes private user chats for no reasonable litigation purpose. In a display of striking hypocrisy, News Plaintiffs disregard those users’ privacy interests while claiming that their own chat logs are immune from production because “it is possible” that their employees “entered sensitive information into their prompts.” ECF 475 at 4. Unlike News Plaintiffs, OpenAI’s users have no stake in this case and no opportunity to defend their information from disclosure. It makes no sense to order OpenAI to hand over millions of irrelevant and private conversation logs belonging to those absent third parties while allowing News Plaintiffs to shield their own logs from disclosure.
OpenAI offered a much more privacy-protective alternative: hand over only a targeted set of logs actually relevant to the case, rather than dumping 20 million records wholesale. The news orgs fought back, but their reply brief is sealed—so we don’t get to see their argument. The judge bought it anyway, dismissing the privacy concerns on the theory that OpenAI can simply “anonymize” the chat logs:
Whether or not the parties had reached agreement to produce the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs in whole—which the parties vehemently dispute—such production here is appropriate. OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers’ privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAI’s exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.
The judge then quotes the news orgs’ filing, noting that OpenAI has already put in this effort to “deidentify” the chat logs.
Both of those supposed protections—the protective order and “exhaustive de-identification”—are nonsense. Let’s start with the anonymization problem, because it shows a stunning lack of understanding about what it means to anonymize data sets, especially AI chatlogs.
We’ve spent years warning people that “anonymized data” is a gibberish term, used by companies to pretend large collections of data can be kept private, when that’s just not true. Almost any large dataset of “anonymized” data can have significant portions of the data connected back to individuals with just a little work. Researchers re-identified individuals from “anonymized” AOL search queries, from NYC taxi records, from Netflix viewing histories—the list goes on. Every time someone shows up with an “anonymized” dataset, researchers show ways to re-identify people in the dataset.
And that’s even worse when it comes to ChatGPT chat logs, which are likely to be way more revealing that previous data sets where the inability to anonymize data were called out. There have been plenty of reports of just how much people “overshare” with ChatGPT, often including incredibly private information.
Back in August, researchers got their hands on just 1,000 leaked ChatGPT conversations and talked about how much sensitive information they were able to glean from just that small number of chats.
Researchers downloaded and analyzed 1,000 of theleaked conversations,spanning over 43 million words. Among them, they discovered multiple chats that explicitly mentioned personally identifiable information (PII), such as full names, addresses, and ID numbers.
With that level of PII and sensitive information, connecting chats back to individuals is likely way easier than in previous cases of connecting “anonymized” data back to individuals.
And that was with just 1,000 records.
Then, yesterday as I was writing this, the Washington Post revealed that they had combed through 47,000 ChatGPT chat logs, many of which were “accidentally” revealed via ChatGPT’s “share” feature. Many of them reveal deeply personal and intimate information.
Users often shared highly personal information with ChatGPT in the conversations analyzed by The Post, including details generally not typed into conventional search engines.
People sent ChatGPT more than 550 unique email addresses and 76 phone numbers in the conversations. Some are public, but others appear to be private, like those one user shared for administrators at a religious school in Minnesota.
Users asking the chatbot to draft letters or lawsuits on workplace or family disputes sent the chatbot detailed private information about the incidents.
There are examples where, even if the user’s official details are redacted, it would be trivial to figure out who was actually doing the chats:
If you can’t see that, it’s a chat with ChatGPT, redacted by the Washington post saying:
User my name is [name redacted] my husband name [name redacted] is threatning me to kill and not taking my responsibities and trying to go abroad […] he is not caring us and he is going to kuwait and he will give me divorce from abroad please i want to complaint to higher authgorities and immigrition office to stop him to go abroad and i want justice please help
ChatGPT Below is a formal draft complaint you can submit to the Deputy Commissioner of Police in [redacted] addressing your concerns and seeking immediate action:
That seems like even if you “anonymized” the chat by taking off the user account details, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose chat it was, revealing some pretty personal info, including the names of their children (according to the Post).
And WaPo reporters found that by starting with 93,000 chats, then using tools do an analysis of the 47,000 in English, followed by human review of just 500 chats in a “random sample.”
Now imagine 20 million records. With many, many times more data, the ability to cross-reference information across chats, identify patterns, and connect seemingly disconnected pieces of information becomes exponentially easier. This isn’t just “more of the same”—it’s a qualitatively different threat level.
Even worse, the judge’s order contains a fundamental contradiction: she demands that OpenAI share these chatlogs “in whole” while simultaneously insisting they undergo “exhaustive de-identification.” Those two requirements are incompatible.
Real de-identification would require stripping far more than just usernames and account info—it would mean redacting or altering the actual content of the chats, because that content is often what makes re-identification possible. But if you’re redacting content to protect privacy, you’re no longer handing over the logs “in whole.” You can’t have both. The judge doesn’t grapple with this contradiction at all.
Yes, as the judge notes, this data is kept under the protective order in the case, meaning that it shouldn’t be disclosed. But protective orders are only as strong as the people bound by them, and there’s a huge risk here.
Looking at the docket, there are a ton of lawyers who will have access to these files. The docket list of parties and lawyers is 45 pages long if you try to print it out. While there are plenty of repeats in there, there have to be at least 100 lawyers and possibly a lot more (I’m not going to count them, and while I asked three different AI tools to count them, each gave me a different answer).
That’s a lot of people—many representing entities directly hostile to OpenAI—who all need to keep 20 million private conversations secret.
That’s not even getting into the fact that handling 20 million chat logs is a difficult task to do well. I am quite sure that among all the plaintiffs and all the lawyers, even with the very best of intentions, there’s still a decent chance that some of the content could leak (and it could, in theory, leak to some of the media properties who are plaintiffs in the case).
And, as OpenAI properly points out, its users whose data is at risk here have no say in any of this. They likely have no idea that a ton of people may be about to get an intimate look at what they thought were their private ChatGPT chats.
OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale. This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions of conversations without first narrowing for relevance. This is not how discovery works in other cases: courts do not allow plaintiffs suing Google to dig through the private emails of tens of millions of Gmail users irrespective of their relevance. And it is not how discovery should work for generative AI tools either.
The judge had cited a ruling in one of Anthropic’s cases, but hadn’t given OpenAI a chance to explain why the ruling in that case didn’t apply here (in that one, Anthropic had agreed to hand over the logs as part of negotiations with the plaintiffs, and OpenAI gets in a little dig at its competitor, pointing out that it appears Anthropic made no effort to protect the privacy of its users in that case).
There have, as Daphne Keller regularly points out, always been challenges between user privacy and platform transparency. But this goes well beyond that familiar tension. We’re not talking about “platform transparency” in the traditional sense—publishing aggregated statistics or clarifying moderation policies. This is 20 million complete chatlogs, handed over “in whole” to dozens of adversarial parties and their lawyers. The potential damage to the privacy rights of those users could be massive.
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Last night the House passed, and then Donald Trump signed, the funding bill that reopened the government after the longest government shutdown in history. Amazingly, the Republican’s sketchy demands to fill their personal bank accounts with undeserved taxpayer money almost scuttled the deal. But, don’t worry: those Senators got their corrupt boondoggle and they plan to enrich themselves.
The party of pure fucking garbage just keeps being awful. Government employees went without paychecks, families went without medical and food benefits, and no one in the GOP really appeared to care how long an entire nation suffers so long as it got what it wanted.
“Ask not what this country can do for you” is apparently too woke to be considered an aspiration. Under Trump’s GOP, the operative phrase is “Don’t even ask whether or not it can. Make the country do for you and fuckthem if they complain.”
A spending package expected to be approved as part of a deal to reopen the government would create a wide legal avenue for senators to sue for as much as half a million dollars each when federal investigators search their phone records without notifying them.
The provision, tucked into a measure to fund the legislative branch, appears to immediately allow for eight G.O.P. senators to sue the government over their phone records being seized in the course of the investigation by Jack Smith, the former special counsel, into the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
To be clear, legitimate concerns have been raised about warrantless access to Americans’ phone records, especially when the FBI utilizes the NSA’s collections to engage in “backdoor” searches.
But there’s nothing legitimate about what is happening here. Congressional reps have sought carve-outs that only serve themselves and have expressed almost zero concern about how this same warrantless access affects the people they serve.
So, not only have GOP legislators placed themselves above the people they serve by only seeking to exclude themselves from the reality that affects the rest of us, they went further by holding the entire government hostage with a demand that has no business being tacked onto a federal funding bill, and one that only serves to give those eight Senators the freedom to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money.
If they want to give themselves extra privileges, they should have the strength of character to introduce this in an actual bill that would be forced to stand on its own merits (read: lack thereof), rather than force the Democratic party to comply as federal government websites (illegally!) pillory them on a daily basis as the people who are keeping American citizens from collecting paychecks and benefits.
It gets even worse when you look at the details:
Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Each violation would be worth at least $500,000 in any legal claim, according to the bill language. The bill would also sharply limit the way the government could resist such a claim, taking away any government claims of qualified or sovereign immunity to fight a lawsuit over the issue.
This isn’t even about the FBI’s abuse of NSA collections, which would actually be something worth limiting further. It’s specifically and only about eight GOP Senators whose phone records were sought under the Third Party Doctrine — something that few people in the government would attack because that court-created doctrine has proven extremely useful to law enforcement at every level.
But it also adds a payout for those “victimized” by a legitimate investigation into the attack on the Capitol building following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. And guess who these people are:
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
Yep, it’s the expected collection of boot-lickers. These are people unfit to serve who may see themselves raking in at least a half-million for stroking Trump’s ego and repeating his lies about the 2020 election.
Lindsey Graham has already said he plans to make people pay for having his phone records accessed, which is rich, because Graham has been one of the most vocal proponents in the Senate of giving the DOJ vast and unlimited surveillance powers. Also, when he says “make people pay” he means that you, the taxpayer, needs to give him money because he got caught up in the DOJ’s investigation into the attempted insurrection.
These Senators who have no problem expanding surveillance on you, the little people, also simultaneously are awarding themselves a special provision to sue for your tax money to go straight into their bank account. It’s about as corrupt as it can be. Incredibly, they even screwed over a colleague in the House, Mike Kelly, who was the one member of the House whose phone records were part of the same investigation. The funding bill only allows for Senators to sue over this.
No one else will benefit from this but these eight GOP senators. The rest of the nation can continue to get fucked on the regular.
“The Senators may not like being treated like the rest of America, but these phone-record subpoenas and non-disclosure orders are routine in grand jury investigations at the state and federal level,” he said. “No one has an absolute right to be notified that their call records have been subpoenaed, much less the right to a million bucks if it happens. This provision would not give any Americans other than U. S. Senators these rights.”
Passing a law that only applies to eight Senators, which only serves to enrich them at the expense of the taxpayer seems like a perfect encapsulation of the state of the modern GOP: fuck the little guy and do anything to get money for yourself. The MAGA mantra.
While Speaker Mike Johnson has said that they’ll bring up a separate bill next week to strip this provision, Republicans in the House refused to strip it during negotiations over the funding bill, where it would have actually mattered. What is now likely to happen is that Johnson will allow a vote on a bill next week in a symbolic gesture that will not pass. And Senator Graham and his buddies will cash in.
What a job, when you get to vote yourself the ability to just take a bunch of taxpayer money in response to being investigated.
