For nearly twenty years, I’ve used Google Docs for most of my writing: class notes, personal notes, a novel in progress, research, activism, and my day job. It’s become an essential piece of infrastructure for me, an archive of my life and evolving interests.
In order to sign up for Google Drive, I presumably had to read a Terms of Service agreement provided to me by Google. Every once in a while I’ll get an email telling me that the Terms of Service have changed, which I almost always immediately delete without reading. Even if I tried to read what’s been changed, I’d be faced with a 4,500 word document that contains approximately 43 outbound URLs to Terms of Service for other Google entities, which links me out to others indefinitely, an infinity of terms. Even if I could read the terms and didn’t like them, I’d still be stuck with Google Docs; eventually someone at work would ask me to review a document.
We sign these contracts constantly, a kind of digital decision fatigue that’s overlooked in most conversations about tech law and policy. Whether or not you believe that participation in digital life requires a contract at all, clickthrough and wraparound contracts that contain thousands of words, links, and subsections are disempowering to the public and potentially disastrous when enforced.
The contracts attached to most digital services are called “contracts of adhesion,” “take it or leave it” contracts where the terms are set by a stronger party and the only way to walk away is if you can choose another service, which you generally cannot in a world where a handful of companies control the majority of commerce and cloud services on the internet.
Clickthrough contracts of adhesion live in a gray regulatory area, but even though they function as a “mutant form of contract law,” they are generally considered enforceable. Last year, Cathy Gellis wrote on this blog about a particularly egregious case concerning the arbitration clause in a Disney+ agreement. After a woman died of a severe food allergy at one of the parks, Disney argued that they could not sue the company because her husband had signed up for a free trial of Disney+ several years prior.
Lots of scholars point out that laws and constitutions act like contracts of adhesion in certain ways – I live in North Carolina and I vehemently oppose recent transphobic House bills. However, I can, at least in theory, vote those motherfuckers out. I cannot vote out Amazon Web Services or Zoom, which I need for my work. Unlike bad legislation, I can’t organize my neighbors to throw them out either.
Binding contractual agreements for every single digital service has become a tool companies exploit at the expense of consumer rights that makes us even less safe on the internet, and it’s pure enshittification. Even if negotiability is impractical, contracts should be short, human readable, and consumer friendly. Using the internet shouldn’t force me to waive my right to a class action lawsuit, my ability to own a book, or to my own palm print.
How are we supposed to build democracy as an informed electorate when we have, in the words of Brendan Ballou, “lost access to our own justice system” through the nearly universal forced arbitration provisions in terms of service? How am I supposed to participate fully in a market economy when basically every contract I sign online creates an “accountability sink” where no one is responsible for a company’s failings except the system itself? How can I learn to exercise informed consent when I’m constantly clicking through terms of service that I both can’t read or actually consent to? How can I participate in society if everyone is using a tool but I object to its terms of use?
Combatting terms of service and licensing abuses takes a proactive and practical approach. Under the Biden administration, the FTC began to regulate these contracts, but now the regulatory locus has shifted back to the consumer. Even though the government is not coming to save us, we don’t have to live out the rest of our lives as digital peons in a rentier economy.
My organization Library Futures has launched a program to provide counsel in contract negotiation and terms setting for libraries – a DIY contract center in the public interest. No other institution is buying digital content at the same rate as libraries, where one private equity owned digital vendor (Overdrive) provides almost 97% of all ebooks to public library systems. Every single one of those contracts, terms of service agreements, and licensing deals have to run through a process at either the local or or the institutional level. This often happens without a full review of terms and no access to a lawyer. Publishers and library vendors can’t afford to lose this business; through a flex in monopsony power that builds coalitions on both the institutional and collective level, we believe that libraries can force major publishers to the table, rewrite the digital terms of service, take back their collections from the control of large corporations, and reject language that’s unfavorable to the public.
Libraries have always been opposed to onerous terms of service, but like most of us, they’ve felt powerless in the face of corporate overreach. We’re not the first to fight the power in libraryland – the seminal privacy case Doe v Gonzales concerned whether librarians had to violate their own privacy policy and turn over computer records to the government. In 2020, librarians staged a boycott of Macmillan over their shifting and consumer unfriendly digital terms – and won.
In identifying a locus of power with significant buying power and a mandate to serve the public, we’re fighting contractual overreach one library at a time, publishing our results and providing organized, compassionate guidance so institutions and individuals can take back their right to transparency, a fair trial, privacy, and their right to own the content they buy. We’ve been signing away our rights one click at a time at the expense of democracy, civil rights, informed consent, and the well being of a digital generation. If we want to take them back, libraries are the most powerful place we can start.
Jennie Rose Halperin is the Executive Director of Library Futures
Last fall, an Alabama police officer decided he wasn’t going to allow a 62-year-old woman to exercise her First Amendment rights — not if she was going to do so from inside an inflatable penis costume.
Yes, these are sentences we actually have to write here at Techdirt — things that seem so implausible you’d expect them to be generated from the sloppiest of AI prompts. It’s a real thing, though. It happened to Fairhope, Alabama resident Renea Gamble. It was inflicted by Fairhope PD officer Andrew Babb, who took apparently personal offense at Gamble’s inflatable penis costume and her “No Dick-Tator” sign she carried during a “No Kings” protest.
You can watch the arrest in all of its ingloriousness below. It’s alternately comical and horrifying. Horrifying, because it involves officers assaulting a 62-year-old grandmother. Comical, because multiple attempts are made to fit the person and costume into a police cruiser before deciding it might be easier if the person and costume were separated… which then leads to an officer discovering it’s kind of difficult to shove a non-resisting inflatable penis costume into the truck of a police car.
This arrest and resulting prosecution gained national attention. Rather than encourage the city to drop the prosecution, it seemingly emboldened it. Prosecutors waited until people had moved onto the next outage before dropping additional charges on Renea Gamble, including “disturbing the peace” and “giving a false name to law enforcement.” (The latter charge stemmed from Gamble telling the arresting officers her name was “Auntie Fa.”)
Officer Babb — as captured by his own recording — presented a very subjective take on the First Amendment when arresting Gamble. He not only demanded Gamble explain what he was supposed to tell his own kids if they happened to see her costume (wtaf?), but said her particular form of expression was inherently unlawful because Fairhope was “a family town.”
The officer was as wrong about free speech as the town officials who supported this arrest and prosecution. Fair hope mayor Sherry Sullivan called the costume an “obscene display.” City council president Jack Burrell said the costume “violated community standards,” without bothering to assess what the community’s standards actually were.
In December, a Mobile-based talk radio station held a listener poll to choose its annual Alabamian of the Year, with “Inflatable Fairhope Protest Penis” receiving the most votes.
Much more legitimately fortunate is the disposition of Renea Gamble’s criminal case. As AL.com reports, it has been tossed by municipal judge Haymes Snedeker. However, Snedeker’s acquittal comes with some caveats that will make it a bit more difficult for Gamble to pursue a civil rights lawsuit in this particular venue:
Judge Haymes Snedeker, after a trial lasting more than two hours, said he did not believe Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was attempting to suppress 62-year-old Renea Gamble’s free speech rights during their encounter at the anti-Trump protest. He also said there may have been enough probable cause for Babb to arrest her.
However, Snedeker said he was not 99.9% certain that Gamble should be convicted of crimes stemming from the actions that led to her arrest. She was found not guilty of misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, as well as a municipal violation for disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement.
Snedeker gives the officer too much credit, especially when his own statements during the arrest made it clear he was singling Gamble out because he didn’t agree with her particular form of free expression. The recording shows Gamble wanted to manhandle this penis because he was employed by a “family town” and didn’t want to have to explain to his kids what this costume might represent. He didn’t present anything approaching legal justification prior to pinning Gamble to the ground and handcuffing her.
The judge said all of this despite the officer’s testimony being completely undercut by the recording of the arrest.
Babb testified that he was using de-escalation techniques he was trained to employ as a police officer. He said he was concerned about safety and viewed Gamble’s costume as an “obstruction.” He said he did not arrest her because he was personally offended by the costume or her anti-Trump message.
[…]
[Gamble’s lawyer David] Gespass disagreed, arguing that body camera footage revealed the true nature of the arrest. In the footage, Babb tells Gamble that her costume would not be tolerated in a town that “has values.”
“That’s all he talked about when he was confronting her was, ‘I am not going to put up with this in my town,’” Gespass said. “He said nothing about her causing any problems with traffic. Certainly, if you watch the video, he is not de-escalating anything. He approached her aggressively.”
That wasn’t the only stupid thing said by the government. Here’s the prosecutor attempting to salvage an obviously bogus prosecution:
“There is no constitutional right to wear a total erect penis on the side of the road,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Hmm. Seems wrong. Pretty sure in this context it’s protected speech. And all of these qualifiers suggest no prosecution would be happening if Gamble had simply let a little bit of the air out of the costume to appear a bit more flaccid.
Both the cop and the prosecutor (Marcus McDowell) are welcome to say dumb things in their own defense during testimony. For the judge to suggest this arrest might have been supported by probable cause demands a better explanation than what was given here. If the standard is only that one cop felt something violated the law, the First Amendment is meaningless. It’s the sort of thing that tells citizens their rights only matter once they’re violated… and even then, they still may not mean much. The judge blew the call here and the local cops know it. Gamble still has a target on her back and the cops have the judicial leeway to keep arresting protesters they personally don’t like.
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A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are misunderstanding — as vindication of his thesis.
Part of the evidence he marshaled was Pew polling showing that parents are worried about their kids’ social media use. Which, fine. Parents worrying about what their kids are up to is as old as the human species, and usually about as productive as yelling at the wind. It’s kind of what parents do. It’s why every generation has its own series of “the kids these days!” moral panics.
For years now, I’ve been pointing out that the social-media-is-destroying-kids narrative — which Haidt has done more than anyone else to popularize — has never had the empirical backing its proponents claim. Multiplemajorstudieshavefailedto replicatethe harmclaims. When researchers have looked carefully, they’ve often found the causal arrow pointing the other direction: kids who are already struggling with mental health issues and not getting adequate support tend to spend more time on social media, rather than social media causing the mental health issues.
Indeed, the research repeatedly suggests that for the very small number of kids who are facing mental health problems and overrelying on social media in response, the answer is a targeted intervention to help those individuals — not a broad “ban kids from social media” program.
The new Pew data does more than nudge that picture along; it gives it a massive shove.
Let’s start with the finding that should end this debate on its own. Pew asked teens how what they see on each platform makes them feel about themselves. Here’s what the kids reported:
About six-in-ten teen TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat users say what they see on each makes no difference in how they feel about themselves. And about a quarter say it makes them feel about equally better and worse.
When teens say these platforms do make them feel better or worse, it leans more positive. For example, 15% of TikTok users say what they see there makes them feel better, while 3% say it makes them feel worse.
The bar chart showing just how few kids claim that TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram make them feel worse about themselves is quite telling:
Just look at those numbers. That tiny green bar? That’s the percentage that says these services make them feel worse about themselves. On TikTok — the platform most frequently cast as an unusually dangerous self-esteem killer for teen girls — 15% of teen users say it makes them feel better about themselves, and just 3% say it makes them feel worse. That’s a 5-to-1 ratio in the wrong direction for the moral panic narrative.
The numbers on the other platforms follow the same script. On Snapchat, 13% say it makes them feel better, just 2% worse. On Instagram — the platform Haidt has singled out for particular damnation, building much of his case on leaked Meta internal research he insists proves it’s poisonous — 10% say it makes them feel better, just 3% say it makes them feel worse.
Three percent. That’s not a signal of a generation-defining mental health catastrophe. That’s barely distinguishable from a rounding error.
And even these small numbers overstate the harm, because the vast majority of kids—around 60% on each platform—say these apps make no difference at all to how they feel about themselves. Add the quarter who report “about equally better and worse,” and you’re left with a tiny minority on either side of the ledger, tilted toward the positive.
Overall experience tracks the same way:
All told, teens tend to have a mostly positive experience on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. About seven-in-ten teens on each platform say this. Very few – just 3% on each – say it’s mostly negative.
Seven-in-ten teens report a mostly positive experience. Three percent report a mostly negative one. These numbers are not ambiguous. If social media was so inherently harmful to kids, the numbers would not — could not — look that way.
Separately, Pew also asked parents how much time their teens spend on these platforms — and the disconnect between what parents believe and what their kids report is massive:
28% of teen TikTok users report spending too much time on the site, and that jumps to 44% when parents were asked about their teen’s use of the platform.
Parents think their teens are spending too much time on TikTok at a rate nearly 60% higher than the teens themselves report. That gap is the entire moral panic, distilled to a single data point: worried adults constructing a portrait of a crisis that the people supposedly living it mostly don’t appear to recognize.
And there’s a class dimension to this worry that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Dig into the survey on what parents say about their teens’ uses of social media and you find that wealthier, more educated parents are significantly more convinced that social media is harming their kids than less affluent parents are.
This is exactly what you’d expect if the panic is being driven top-down by elite media and political discourse rather than bottom-up by actual observed harm. The audience buying Haidt’s books, reading his Atlantic pieces, listening to NPR segments about the teen mental health crisis — that audience skews wealthy and educated. And it’s precisely that demographic whose anxiety is most out of step with what kids themselves report.
I’ve written before about how the addiction narrative itself may be doing more damage than the thing it claims to describe — teaching kids to interpret normal experiences as pathological, making them feel broken for doing what basically everyone around them is doing. The socioeconomic breakdown in the Pew data fits that framing.
The panic is a panic of privilege, boosted by institutions that shape how the professional class thinks about everything from parenting to policy.
Now, to be fair, the Pew data isn’t uniformly rosy. Around 40% of TikTok users say it hurts the amount of sleep they get, and a meaningful percentage report productivity impacts. These findings deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away.
But context matters here. Teenagers doing things late at night that hurt their sleep is not exactly a new phenomenon. Parents were convinced television was destroying their kids’ sleep and rotting their brains in the 1960s. Video games were going to create a generation of zombies in the 1980s and 90s. Before that, novels were going to warp young women’s minds. Pinball machines were banned in New York City until 1976 in part because they were thought to corrupt youth. The “this new thing is ruining our kids” script is older than any of the things it has ever been used to describe.
And even if you want to focus specifically on “sleep” we can go back to articles from the 19th century about how reading in bed was harming sleep.
None of which means sleep impacts don’t matter. They do. But “some kids report this activity affects their sleep” is a very different claim than “this activity is causing a generational mental health crisis requiring sweeping bans.” And notably, the self-esteem and overall-experience numbers I quoted above are measuring exactly the kind of mental health harm the panic is supposedly about. Those numbers don’t show what Haidt needs them to show.
Which brings us back to Haidt’s seven lines of evidence. I’m not going to rehash every point here, because several are variations on the same methodological moves I and others have addressed at length elsewhere — cherry-picked correlational data that Haidt and his collaborators desperately want to treat as proof of causality. Some people will argue that his lines 5 and 6 rebut the directionality critique; I don’t think they do, but unpacking why would take us pretty far afield. The larger pattern is what matters: when researchers ask the kids themselves, across study after study, the apocalyptic picture doesn’t materialize.
None of this means social media is harmless for every kid. It clearly isn’t. For a very small minority of teens, it appears that they are unable to handle these services in a healthy manner. Some kids experience harassment. Some kids lose sleep. Some kids who are already struggling find that social media makes the struggling worse. These are real issues that deserve real attention.
But the policy response that actually fits the data isn’t banning social media, criminalizing its use by minors, or building elaborate age verification regimes that compromise privacy for everyone. The response that fits the data is identifying the small percentage of kids who are actually having trouble and getting them real help: mental health resources, school counselors, and easier access to therapy. It also means giving parents and teachers better tools for understanding how to recognize when a kid is actually struggling. The boring, unglamorous, underfunded work of actually caring for kids who are struggling — not sweeping policy gestures that make worried parents feel like something is being done while the kids who actually need help go without.
The moral panic response is the lazy response. It treats every teenager as presumptively damaged by the same thing, ignores what teenagers actually report about their own experiences, and papers over the reality that the kids who need help will still need help after social media is regulated into oblivion — because for those kids, social media overuse usually signals existing distress rather than causing it.
Haidt is doing a victory lap. The kids Pew just surveyed didn’t get the memo that they’re supposed to be miserable because of TikTok. Fifteen percent of them say TikTok makes them feel better about themselves. Three percent say it makes them feel worse. Seven-in-ten report their overall experience on these platforms is mostly positive.
At some point, the people telling us there’s a generational catastrophe are going to have to reckon with the fact that the generation they claim is in catastrophe keeps telling researchers something very different. That reckoning doesn’t seem to be coming from Haidt anytime soon. But the data keeps piling up anyway.
CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”
CBS management doesn’t care about any of that, of course, because it’s owned by billionaire right wing Trump ally, Larry Ellison. And Larry and David Ellison are desperate to have the government sign off on their job-destroying merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers board is voting to approve the deal on the same day as the dinner.
Despite some pretense that the Trump DOJ is doing its due diligence to review the deal, there’s little real doubt that the feds will rubber stamp the transaction. The real question mark rests with a likely antitrust lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general to block the transaction.
“David Ellison…made a unexpected appearance at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners. He took the stage to reassure exhibitors they have nothing to fear, whether it be the new regime at Paramount, or his pending acquisition of Warner Bros.”
They of course have everything to fear. The massive $108 billion in debt from the Warner Brothers deal will inevitably result in mass layoffs, price hikes, and sagging product quality due to the need to cut corners to service the debt. This is before we even talk about the layoffs already happening at CBS.
It’s simply not up for debate: this happens absolutely every single time folks like the Ellisons delude themselves into thinking mass consolidation does anything useful outside of generate tax breaks, drive short-lived stock boosts, and let guys like David Ellison pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”
Pre-merger promises about release windows (or anything else) are absolutely meaningless. But with just a handful of people at the top financially disincentivized from learning anything from history (including the three previous disastrous Warner Brothers mergers), the dysfunction just repeats itself indefinitely. We’ve seen merger dysfunction and chaos before, but this one has the potential to outdo them all.
It’s barely been a few days back since we discussed just how open to mistakes and abuse YouTube’s copyright takedown system is, when NVIDIA’s demo video for its controversial DLSS 5 tech got briefly pulled down because an Italian news channel did a piece featuring the footage which it copyrighted. The copyright bots took it from there and the actual source material for the news footage got booted.
While that is a great example of an obvious simple error resulting in copyright collateral damage, there have been plenty of examples of abuse resulting in this sort of thing, too. And if you want a great example of how this could all get much, much worse thanks to AI, you need look only at let’s play YouTuber Nubzombie getting two copyright copyright claims on his video of Silent Hill 2 gameplay for most absurd reasons. It seems multiple people have taken music from the game, originally by Akira Yamaoka, and layered some lazy AI-created voiceovers on top of it and then setup automatic copyright enforcement for those sounds.
Earlier last night, content creator Nubzombie uploaded a video titled A.I. IS RUINING YOUTUBE (and my life). In the video, Nubzombie states that their latest playthrough of the original version of Silent Hill 2 was hit with a copyright strike by someone called “Agro memos.” As you can see (or rather hear), in Nubzombie’s video, the track that the Agro memos strike is protecting is a clear copy of Akira Yamaoka’s track “Promise,” but with an AI-generated voice over top.
Then, in the space of a few hours, Nubzombie uploaded a second video. As they explain in that follow-up, as soon as their first video had finished uploading to YouTube, their Silent Hill 2 playthrough was hit with a second copyright strike. This time, it was from a different artist, named “詹姆斯.K,” but the copyright claimer this time isn’t even trying to hide the fact that their track is a ripoff of Akira Yamaoka’s “Promise”…because 詹姆斯.K’s track is literally called “Promise.”
This has always been the problem with YouTube’s automatic and bot-driven copyright enforcement mechanisms. There is very little that gets in the way of bad actors claiming copyright on all kinds of content actually produced by others, sometimes with this sort of languorous and brief additions to said content, and then slap copyright enforcement on it to issue automatic takedowns or demonetization claims. That YouTube has allowed this problem to fester for years and the timeline is now colliding with the prevalence of AI tools that make all of this even easier for the bad actors is inexcusable.
Though it gets a little bit stranger with that first copyright notice, since it appears Sony Music might be involved.
While I couldn’t find any information on the second “Promise” rip-off, I did find something odd regarding the former. Agro memos’ most recent tracks on YouTube, like this one, state in the descriptions that they were “Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises.”
Orchard Enterprises is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. Turns out Orchard’s got a bit of history of pulling this kind of stunt, dating all the way back to 2022. In this video, content creator EckhartsLadder details how he was repeatedly hit with copyright claims by Orchard Enterprises in 2024 because Orchard falsely claimed that the track “Resonance” by HOME, which EckhartsLadder used as their intro and outro song for all their videos, belonged to the Sony Music subsidiary.
Sony hasn’t responded to questions about all of this as of the time of this writing, but it damned well should. Best as I can tell, Sony doesn’t have any of the video game rights to the Silent Hill franchise, and this specific game was produced by Konami in 2001, and then a remake was released in 2024. It doesn’t seem to me that Sony should have anything to do with any of this.
But even if some division of Sony is a bad actor in all of this, the onus is on YouTube to fix its platform and protect its creators. This is long overdue.
The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school.
A squad of federal agents moved in flinging flash-bang grenades — explosives designed to disorient — into a small home before storming inside. They’d come for Alejandro Orellana, a Marine Corps veteran and UPS employee accused of being a central figure in a secret confederacy of insurrectionists. A news video had shown the 30-year-old distributing water, food and face shields to people protesting the Trump administration’s immigration roundups in Los Angeles.
Bill Essayli, a former state legislator who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles, joined the raid along with a Fox News crew.
With cameras rolling, Orellana, his parents and brothers were led out in handcuffs as agents searched their home.
On Fox News, Essayli, sporting a blue FBI windbreaker, hyped the arrest of Orellana, a quiet, wiry man with a long mane of coal-black hair. “It appears they’re well-orchestrated and coordinated, and well-funded,” he said. “And today was one of the first arrests — first key arrests — that we did.”
Essayli would charge Orellana with conspiracy — under a federal statute typically used to build cases against drug traffickers and organized crime — and with aiding and abetting civil disorder.
Within weeks, the prosecutor’s marquee case would quietly fall apart. Agents who searched Orellana’s house found little that could be considered incriminating, and prosecutors never charged anyone else as part of the supposed conspiracy. By late July, they moved to have the charges dismissed.
It wouldn’t be the only such case.
Over the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has made much of its success in sweeping through U.S. cities, capturing unauthorized immigrants and arresting people who publicly oppose the operations, routinely accusing dissenters of being domestic terrorists or extremists. Federal agents have arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens like Orellana — including protesters, activists observing the immigration enforcement operations, bystanders and, in some cases, the family members of people targeted for deportation.
Less clear to the public is what has happened to those charged.
To find out, ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.
But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.
“What’s happening now is not comparable to anything that’s happened in the past,” said
Cuauhtémoc Ortega, the chief federal defender for the Central District of California, who personally represented Orellana and other protesters. “We’ve never had a situation where it seems like you arrest first and then try to justify the reasons for the arrests later.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the arrests and declined to answer detailed questions from ProPublica and FRONTLINE.
But in a statement in response to an earlier story, DHS said, “The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting. DHS is taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers.”
Watch FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s Documentary: “Caught in the Crackdown”
Given the unprecedented nature of the urban sweeps, it is difficult to compare the rate of failed cases to another time period or context. But current and former federal prosecutors and other legal experts said having that number of arrests come to nothing is particularly striking in the federal system, where U.S. attorneys usually secure convictions or guilty pleas in more than 90% of the cases they bring; only 8.2% of federal criminal cases were dismissed in 2022, according to data compiled by that court system.
The failures highlight the challenges of sending large numbers of federal agents into major cities to conduct roving immigration sweeps: They aren’t accustomed to dealing with crowds of angry protesters
Border Patrol agents are typically stationed at the border where their day-to-day work entails scooping up people who have crossed illegally. ICE agents, who often work in urban settings, had little prior experience handling hostile crowds. And FBI agents, who have aided in the immigration sweeps, would normally spend months or years painstakingly amassing evidence before making arrests.
That lack of experience in street policing and crowd control, coupled with the Trump administration’s demand for huge numbers of deportations, led agents to make a wave of unjustified arrests, legal experts say.
To be sure, protesters have often engaged in hostile behavior, hurling expletives, getting in agents’ faces and occasionally becoming violent. A woman in Minnesota is accused of biting off part of an agent’s finger during a scuffle after the killing of Alex Pretti in late January; in Los Angeles, an officer outside an immigration detention facility suffered a dislocated finger after a protester allegedly grabbed his bulletproof vest and shook him.
“The agents, they don’t know how to operate in these situations,” said Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement. Their behavior, she said, “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.
In its earlier statement, DHS said that “rioters and terrorists” have repeatedly attacked immigration agents, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection personnel “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”
The arrests are not without consequence. Even unsuccessful prosecutions can be costly and emotionally taxing for defendants, said Jared Fishman, a former career prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. The aggressive tactics of the agents and the gleeful social media posts by DHS accusing protesters of serious crimes, Fishman said, affect people’s willingness to publicly challenge the mass deportation policies.
“If the goal of the Trump administration is to keep people out of the streets, then it doesn’t matter if the people are getting convicted,” said Fishman, now the executive director of the Justice Innovation Lab, a nonprofit focused on creating a more equitable and effective justice system. “I’m sure it’s having a chilling effect.”
After reviewing data and some court records for ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Fishman said, “The numbers seem to indicate a pattern and practice of illegal arrests.”
“We Must Identify Him”
The crackdown on protesters began in June of 2025, when the Department of Homeland Security launched its wave of major immigration sweeps in Southern California. The campaign was led by Gregory Bovino, a veteran Border Patrol chief who normally presided over a remote stretch of sand and scrub deep in the state’s Imperial Valley.
Bovino from the start encouraged his agents to shut down or arrest protesters.
“Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino told his officers, footage from an agent’s body-worn camera shows. “Everybody fucking gets it if they touch you.”
He went on to remind them that their actions should be “legal, ethical, moral” while encouraging them to use so-called less lethal weapons on protesters.
“We’re gonna look at shipping tractor trailers full of that shit in here,” he said.
Bovino’s aggressive tactics sparked intense opposition from Angelenos, including those gathered in the streets in front of the sprawling federal office complex in downtown Los Angeles on June 9.
That day Orellana drove his Ford F-150 pickup truck loaded with bottled water, snacks and cardboard boxes containing Uvex brand face shields — clear plastic masks designed to protect industrial workers from flying debris and chemical splashes — to the protest.
When he arrived in front of the federal building, another person hopped into the bed and began handing out the supplies to protesters gathered outside the entrance.
Orellana told FRONTLINE and ProPublica that he decided to help distribute the supplies after watching federal agents fire tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds at an earlier demonstration.
“A bunch of us took it upon ourselves to, you know, go downtown and give out these resources — the food, water and of course the PPE,” he said, referring to personal protective equipment.
Video and photos quickly made their way onto social media. An X user with more than 30,000 followers posted a photo of Orellana. “A photograph of the man delivering boxes of gas masks to the rioters has emerged,” wrote the poster. “We must identify him, so we can track down who is funding this coordinated attack.”
From there the thread was picked up by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has a vast audience on the platform. Jones, who repeatedly claimed that financier and philanthropist George Soros was funding the protests, eventually named Orellana as the driver of the pickup. More than two million people saw the post.
Within 48 hours, the soldiers and federal agents arrived to arrest Orellana.
Over the next five months, they arrested more than one hundred U.S. citizens in Los Angeles and other cities in Southern California — most of them demonstrators — charging them with assaulting federal law enforcement personnel or interfering with agents’ activities. Others were accused of damaging government property. At least 16, like Orellana, were charged with conspiracy, which can carry a sentence of up to six years in prison.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that more than a third of those cases crumbled. In eight instances, juries acquitted defendants at trial. But more frequently, prosecutors dropped charges when the claims made by immigration officers and agents didn’t match video evidence or other inconsistencies emerged. In several cases, prosecutors declined to file charges at all.
There have been some successful prosecutions: 32 of the 116 people whose arrests in California we reviewed have been convicted, many pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges. And in late February, jurors convicted two activists on stalking charges after they livestreamed themselves following an immigration agent to his home; the pair were acquitted of conspiracy.
Today 38 cases are still pending.
Essayli has stated on social media that his office brought more than 100 cases and secured convictions in more than half of them. When asked about the discrepancy between his claims and the data compiled by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, he declined to comment.
“The U.S. attorney’s office does not lose cases because they’re bad lawyers,” said Carley Palmer, who spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the office Essayli now runs. “They are excellent trial attorneys. So if they’re losing a case, it may mean that the evidence isn’t there, or it may mean that the community doesn’t believe it should be a federal crime.”
Palmer, who is now in private practice, said the glut of protest and low-level criminal immigration cases have shifted resources away from the complex prosecutions the DOJ is uniquely equipped to handle: environmental crimes, public corruption, financial fraud, cyberscams, civil rights violations.
Essayli declined to be interviewed for this story or an accompanying FRONTLINE documentary set to air Tuesday. He was appointed by the Trump administration in early 2025, but he has never been confirmed by the Senate, raising ongoing questions about the legality of his role as top prosecutor for the region. His office did not respond to detailed questions sent by email.
Like Orellana, Julian Pecora Cardenas, 31, was charged with conspiracy last summer after following a convoy of federal agents in his car.
On the morning of July 5, Pecora Cardenas followed vans full of Border Patrol agents after they left a Coast Guard station in San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, livestreaming their movements on Instagram. “It’s every citizen’s duty to conduct oversight of their government,” he said. “I was within my First Amendment rights.”
After roughly 30 minutes, the agents stopped, pulled Pecora Cardenas from his Hyundai and slammed him to the pavement. “I honestly thought it was going to be like a George Floyd moment,” Pecora Cardenas recalled in an interview, alleging that multiple agents pinned him to the asphalt with their knees. He suffered a concussion, needed stitches over his left eye and wore an orthopedic collar to stabilize his injured neck.
Federal prosecutors charged Pecora Cardenas and another activist with conspiracy to impede the federal agents, saying that they “were illegally maneuvering their vehicles through traffic, stop lights, and stop signs to stay behind the agent’s vehicles,” that they tried to block the Border Patrol vehicles, and that they created “hazardous conditions on the road.”
Pecora Cardenas’ own video of the day’s events told a different story. The footage, which ProPublica and FRONTLINE have reviewed, contradicts the claims that the men had interfered with the agents. Within days of seeing the images, Essayli’s office jettisoned the charges “in the interest of justice.”
Pecora Cardenas hasn’t tried to observe federal agents or participate in a protest since his arrest. “I don’t want to be assaulted again. I don’t want to wind up back in federal prison for something that I didn’t do.”
“They Were Just Randomly Grabbing People”
When Bovino, the Border Patrol chief, left California and took his forces to Illinois last fall, their focus on protesters intensified.
In roughly one month, federal agents arrested more than a hundred American citizens, many of them activists participating in demonstrations or documenting the movements of immigration agents as their convoys of rented SUVs rolled through the streets of Chicago and surrounding communities.
On the morning of Oct. 3, 2025, about two hundred demonstrators gathered near the ICE facility in Broadview, a small town in the western suburbs of Chicago. Tucked away in a quiet industrial park, the nondescript building had become the locus of ongoing protests since Bovino and his forces had arrived in Illinois.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, accompanied by a DHS video team, was on site that day wearing a baseball cap and a black ballistic vest.
Also present was Benny Johnson, a prominent podcaster and online influencer who is close to the Trump administration. Johnson, who had brought his own camera crew to shoot video for his YouTube channel and other social media accounts, was effectively embedded with Noem, Bovino and the immigration agents.
At about 9 a.m., Bovino and a phalanx of heavily armed agents in combat gear began striding down Harvard Street toward the protesters. “Walk slowly,” Bovino told his men.
Without a bullhorn or any sort of amplification, Bovino informed the crowd that they were being dispersed. Then he and his colleagues began shoving people to the ground and arresting them.
In a matter of minutes, a dozen protesters had been handcuffed. Three arrestees interviewed by ProPublica and FRONTLINE told us they were confused because they’d been standing in a “free speech zone” set up by state officials.
“I felt somebody grab my shoulder and pull me to the ground,” said Juan Muñoz, a business owner and elected leader in nearby Oak Park Township. “And once I fell onto my back, that’s when I saw it was Greg Bovino.”
Kyle Frankovich, a Harvard data scientist and Chicago resident, was also arrested. “They were just randomly grabbing people,” he recalled. “There was nowhere to go, people were falling all over the place, and several of the people they arrested simply had the misfortune of tripping over all of the other protesters” as federal agents surged into the crowd.
Frankovich said FBI agents who questioned him asked who had paid for him to participate in the demonstration and who “covered the transportation cost for you to be here today.”
Johnson’s video team and a DHS camera crew filmed the arrested protesters as they were lined up outside the ICE building, while Noem looked on. DHS posted photos of Frankovich in handcuffs on X and Facebook with the message, “We will NOT allow violent activist to lay hands on our law enforcement.”
Johnson, who has more than more than 4 million followers on X and more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube, posted a video on X panning across the arrested protesters and wrote: “I saw dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement. Every activist here attacked ICE agents in broad daylight just for enforcing American law.” He made the same claim in a nearly 13-minute-long YouTube video.
Such social media content had become a central feature of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. DHS, Border Patrol and a raft of allied social media influencers regularly produced slick videos showing agents in action: riding in helicopters, striding through city streets clutching rifles, breaking down doors, and apprehending immigrants and activists.
But on that day in Chicago, DHS had strayed far from the facts. And so had Johnson, a 38-year-old former journalist who turned to social media after being embroiled in plagiarism scandals at BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review.
After about eight hours in custody, Frankovich, Muñoz and nearly all the others were released without charges. In the end, only one person would be prosecuted.
Neither DHS nor Johnson have taken the posts down. Johnson did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
The lone person charged with a crime that day was Cole Sheridan, who was accused of attacking Bovino and sending him to the hospital with an injured groin muscle.
Sheridan spent three and a half days in jail — “probably the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever had to experience,” he said in an interview with FRONTLINE and ProPublica — before being released.
In court, a prosecutor said that Sheridan had thrown a punch at Bovino and pushed him, transcripts show.
The evidence presented by the Justice Department, though, was slim. Bovino didn’t wear a body camera, so prosecutors relied on video from the body camera of Border Patrol agent Jason Epperson. But it didn’t show Sheridan assaulting anyone — though he did call Bovino “a fucking idiot.” In statements to investigators, Bovino and Epperson had offered conflicting accounts of the encounter.
About a month after Sheridan was arrested, prosecutors moved to dismiss the case after a bystander video surfaced showing clearly that Sheridan hadn’t assaulted Bovino.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced something truly that bizarre and absurd as, like, seeing a law enforcement agent concoct a narrative to arrest me, to press charges against me,” said Sheridan, who describes himself as intensely private and was initially reluctant to talk publicly about his arrest. “That was extremely unnerving.”
He remains worried that he’ll be harassed or even physically attacked because of the inflammatory social media posts about him. “What a farce. Every element of it felt staged,” he said.
In a statement to ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros said, “Our willingness to be open-minded and dismiss cases — or not file charges in the first place — reflects our commitment to do the right thing even in those cases where a crime was committed and the conduct in question clearly falls outside any protected First Amendment activity.” He declined to comment directly on Sheridan’s case.
FRONTLINE and ProPublica showed video of Sheridan’s arrest to Lopez, the former Justice Department attorney. “It’s just a gross abuse of power,” she said. “And we’ve almost normalized that this is how federal law enforcement behaves now. They just arrest people.”
Of the 109 arrests that ProPublica and FRONTLINE documented in the Chicago area, federal prosecutors dropped charges in at least 75 cases.
Felony Charges Downgraded
When Bovino and his forces arrived in North Carolina last November, they were greeted by protesters opposed to the deportation sweeps, as they had been in previous cities.
Heather Morrow was one of them. She had joined a small group of demonstrators, chanting and banging on metal dishes outside an immigration facility in Charlotte when ICE officers confronted the group.
They handcuffed Morrow, 45, and another activist, stuffed them in the back of a federal vehicle and, according to Morrow, kept them there for hours before finally taking her to jail.
“I was so traumatized,” Morrow, a school bus driver and dog boarder, said in an interview. “I didn’t expect them to be so overly aggressive. I really showed up there expecting conversation, making them come to their senses.”
After a full day and night in custody, she was released to face federal felony assault charges. A Department of Justice press release accused her of attacking an ICE officer just as he showed up for his work shift, grabbing his shoulders and trying to jump on his back.
But a shaky phone video circulating on social media showed what appeared to be a very different scene. In it, an officer comes from behind and abruptly tackles Morrow to the pavement. The video doesn’t show her assaulting anyone.
When prosecutors saw the video, they dumped the felony charges. But they promptly filed a new misdemeanor case against Morrow and the other activist, alleging the pair impeded ICE officers and failed to follow their orders. It took a month for Morrow to get her phone back from federal custody, while her other confiscated possessions, including her keys, have been lost, Morrow’s attorney said. Because she’s on pretrial probation, the federal government has seized her passport. Morrow has pleaded not guilty, and her case is ongoing.
In Handcuffs and Intimidated
In early January, Bovino arrived in Minneapolis with his social media team. Within weeks, two activists — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot and killed by immigration agents. The Trump administration immediately portrayed Good as an extremist; Bovino claimed that Pretti was planning to kill federal personnel when he was shot to death.
The killings, which sparked national outcry, would prompt the administration to recalibrate. By Jan. 26, Bovino had been demoted and sent back to his home station in the California desert.
But immigration agents continued to roam the Twin Cities, and activists continued to get arrested.
Civil rights attorneys from around the country gathered in a Minneapolis conference room on Jan. 30 to discuss those arrests.
During a break for lunch, Jon Feinberg, president of the National Police Accountability Project, stepped out of the room and spoke to reporters. “To be charged with a federal crime is something that is life-altering,” said Feinberg, who is based in Philadelphia. “The consequences of being accused and possibly convicted of a federal offense are devastating, especially when people have not engaged in criminal conduct from any reasonable person’s perspective.”
ProPublica and FRONTLINE have identified nearly 80 arrests stemming from the Minnesota immigration sweeps. Most of the cases are still ongoing, though a handful have been dismissed.
Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, did not respond to requests for comment.
One of those arrested was Rebecca Ringstrom, who lives in Blaine, a quiet suburb north of Minneapolis.
Ringstrom, 42, is a member of an activist group that tracks immigration agents as they move around Blaine. “There was a vehicle with four agents inside that I could see. All four were in tactical gear,” she said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “I was able to look at the plate and see that it was a confirmed ICE vehicle.”
Behind the wheel of her Kia, she began following them; Ringstrom insists her driving was safe and lawful. But in a matter of minutes, she’d been arrested and accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.
Ringstrom said an agent at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where she was briefly held after her arrest, said he wished he’d arrested her — because he would’ve made the experience more unpleasant and violent. “There was no reason to say that. I’m already here. I’m in handcuffs. It’s just a way to intimidate,” she recalled.
She was charged with interfering with a federal agent and issued a notice of violation — essentially a ticket — for the misdemeanor offense. Since then, Ringstrom has lined up a pro bono lawyer, but she has also lost her job, “likely due to the ongoing coverage” of her arrest.
She is scheduled to make her first court appearance later this month.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit.
The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past couple weeks, though it’s still down on the year.
Welcome to patronage capitalism with a stock ticker attached.
Last year, we wrote about the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a “tech-friendly” strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails. We argued this was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal, since real innovation requires exactly the kind of stable, open, competitive institutions that authoritarianism systematically destroys.
Palantir has apparently decided to volunteer as the case study. Palantir — the very company whose entire sales pitch is built around using technology to make better strategic decisions and predict how things will play out.
But now the company seems to be betting that Trumpist-flavored authoritarianism is a permanent feature of the American political landscape — and that going all-in on it will never, ever have any long-term consequences.
Over the weekend, the company’s official account posted what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s bookThe Technological Republic, framed as an introduction to the “philosophy” behind Palantir’s work. Most of it is a reheated version of the familiar Thiel-adjacent playbook — Silicon Valley owes a debt to the country, we must build AI weapons before our adversaries do, the iPhone has made us soft — the kind of thing that gets nodded along to at certain conferences and immediately forgotten.
But a few points deserve to be called out. First, there is the quite telling series of bullet points effectively saying that famous people shouldn’t be subject to public criticism because it means they might not want to help save you piddling simpletons.
We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
[….]
The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
This is the same Harpers Letter-style nonsense where people who deem themselves to be great thinkers or great men of history find it horrifying that the public might call them on their bullshit. I mean, sure, we should show more grace in general to lots of people, but these fragile-minded billionaires keep acting like because some wacko on social media calls them on their bullshit pronouncements it’s the end of the world.
But it gets way worse from there. Buried near the end are points 21 and 22, which are insane, and should make anyone who continues to work with or for Palantir radioactive:
Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Strip away the corporate-academic language and you’re left with a very old, very problematic argument: certain cultures — and we all know which ones they are claiming are supposedly the “middling” and “regressive” ones — are inferior, and the pursuit of inclusivity has been a civilizational error. That framing — some cultures produce wonders, others are regressive and harmful, pluralism is a civilizational threat — has been used to justify exclusion, hierarchy, and far worse for over a century. And while internet fascists like to think of it as edge lord contrarianism today, to most people it just comes across as a shiny coat of paint on historical bigotries and ignorance.
It's also worth being clear about who's doing the arguing. Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.
This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet.
Palantir has always been a bit creepy and cultlike in their worship of government power. Years back I debated one of its founders regarding Google employees convincing the company to drop out of a government AI surveillance effort, Project Maven. He insisted that those employees were naive and Google was weak for backing down. Of course, Google’s decision to leave Project Maven turned out to be a huge win for Palantir, who effectively took it over in Google’s place.
But back then, Palantir at least played the game of pretending to care about cultural diversity and pluralism. As Chris Person pointed out, until fairly recently, Palantir had employee resource groups called Palamigos, PalaNoir, PalanQueer, PalanGender Queer, the Palantir Interfaith Network, PalAPI, and PalNoir. The company celebrated exactly the kind of pluralism and multicultural identity that Karp’s manifesto now denounces as “shallow” and “vacant.”
Watching Palantir do Sephiroth posting about multiculturalism and I would like to remind everyone that they were doing corporate fake woke shit just like every other company.
At least now we see what happens when they feel they can go full mask off.
With Trump in power, Karp apparently feels free to discard the diversity framing the company used for years to recruit employees and just say the quiet part out loud.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Palantir has made itself ideologically and technically indispensable to one specific administration’s political project — which happens to include mass deportation, data consolidation on citizens, and the kinds of enforcement actions that require exactly the ideological framework Karp just publicly endorsed.
Supporters of Palantir will likely argue that it sounds like this “embrace fascism” strategy is working great. The company is signing these rich contracts and getting its technology deep within the infrastructure of the federal government. And, yes, you could say that these are short term wins (even if the stock price is kinda lagging).
But these things cut both ways. When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.
One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.
But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.
That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.
Karp has made sure that he and his company have become ideologically toxic to a non-fascist government. A future non-Trumpist administration will have tremendous reputational incentive to very visibly rip out Palantir, as a signal that the prior regime’s infrastructure is being dismantled.
This is exactly the trap we warned about last year when we wrote about Silicon Valley’s embrace of fascism for short-term gain. Contractual dependency you can unwind. But you’ve told everyone in public what you are, and you can’t walk that back when the winds shift.
And the winds do shift. Companies that tied themselves to nationalist or authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century tend not to have great long-term track records as independent entities. Some survive — though often in name only, most heavily restructured, with decades of reputational rehabilitation to follow. When you make yourself a load-bearing pillar of a specific regime’s specific project, your fate becomes tied to that regime’s fate.
Then there’s the talent question. The piece we wrote last year noted that authoritarianism drives brain drain — that foreign students, researchers, and the global talent pool that has always fed American innovation are already heading elsewhere. Palantir just published a document telling the world, in effect, that a diverse workforce is “shallow” and “vacant” and that some cultures are “regressive.” The engineers who have options — and the best ones always do — just got a very clear signal about whether they should take Palantir’s recruiter call.
There’s a version of Palantir’s business that doesn’t require publishing a white-nationalism-adjacent manifesto. You can sell analytical software to the federal government without announcing that pluralism is a mistake and that some cultures are regressive. Plenty of defense contractors manage it. The business didn’t force the decision to publish those 22 points. It was a choice to double down on ideological signaling, presumably because Karp and company have calculated that visible loyalty gets rewarded in the current environment.
And perhaps it earned some cheers from the remaining trolls on X, for whatever that’s worth.
But it’s a recipe for disaster over the long haul, which seems odd for a company whose entire sales pitch is based around the ability to use its tech to get great insights into how strategic decisions will play out.
This is exactly the warning we gave tech founders last year. The pitch that democracy is messy and slow, that innovation really needs someone who “gets it” cutting red tape, leads directly and predictably here: first you justify the pragmatism of cutting red tape, then you’re chasing the contracts, then drafting the manifestos, until your stock price depends on friendly presidential posts and your long-term viability depends on a political coalition never losing power.
Palantir has decided this is its business model. The rest of the industry should watch very carefully what happens next. Because the thing about tying yourself to a regime isn’t that it never works. It’s that when it stops working, it stops working all at once — and you’ve burned every other option on the way there.
Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the “deep state.”
The FISA court recently blessed an extension of this NSA collection, provided the government fixed the most problematic parts of it — that being other IC agencies’ warrantless access to US persons’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the foreign-facing surveillance dragnet.
Trump was having none of this, pressing the GOP to simply give the administration an un-reformed, un-repaired Section 702 that would presumably allow it to engage in the same abuses it was crying about less than a half-decade ago.
Fortunately for every American only allowed to vote by proxy every two-to-four years for surveillance reform, there is still no clean re-authorization on the books. The senator whose name is synonymous with surveillance reform — Ron Wyden — recently had this to say in his Bluesky post:
Update on where things stand on FISA: this deal is a win. We got the House to back down from an 18 month extension, buying us time to negotiate on real reforms. I'll be fighting like hell for reforms that put your privacy first, and will have more to share soon.
Update on where things stand on FISA: this deal is a win. We got the House to back down from an 18 month extension, buying us time to negotiate on real reforms. I’ll be fighting like hell for reforms that put your privacy first, and will have more to share soon.
Not that congressional majority leader Mike Johnson wasn’t trying his damnedest to round up GOP support for a clean renewal that would give Trump what he wanted, and very little of what the GOP actually wanted, given its years of complaining about the FBI’s warrantless access to their communications.
Johnson’s dazzling play to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by five years ended in an excruciating defeat, as the bill failed after 20 Republicans joined Democrats in striking it down. One major reason it lost was that the warrant language baked into that measure not only would have codified existing law, but also would have made it easier for Section 702–acquired data to be used against Americans in criminal proceedings.
The 200-220 vote was called at 1:22 early Friday morning.
Baratta’s report refers to this as an “eleventh hour” burst of activity, but it’s actually well past that hour. We’re looking at 13th to 14th hour desperation here, especially since Johnson went back to the well again shortly after this first defeat.
The other shoe dropped during the vote on a rule to consider a clean 18-month extension of Section 702. That rule also failed at 2:07 a.m. in a 197-228 vote.
Given that the average congressional rep is pushing 58, both votes occurred well after bedtime. It’s a testimony to the resistance to clean re-authorization of Section 702 powers that these many reps were still on the floor to shut down Mike Johnson twice.
It also shows that Mike Johnson isn’t actually leading the Republican party. He’s restricted to doing whatever Trump wants, even if that clashes with what many party members want. To get skunked twice in two hours is embarrassing, which means Johnson may not remain majority leader for long, even if Democrats can’t flip the House following the mid-terms.
The good news is this: Congress only has until the end of this month to get a re-authorization passed. If it hopes to prevent this surveillance power from lapsing, Johnson and his fellow surveillance hawks are going to have to make some concessions, which may (finally!) include warrant requirements for searches of US persons’ communications by IC agencies with access to NSA collections.
On the other hand, when push comes to shove, far too many Republicans are willing to be Trump’s doormat and argue against their own interests, along with the interests of the constituents. But this is the most concerted challenge to Section 702 mounted yet. Even the Snowden leaks didn’t manage to get this done. But even if reforms are finally put in place, the public should remember GOP lawmakers did this because they want to shield themselves from domestic surveillance. That it might better protect their constituents is just an unavoidable side effect of their self-interest.
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