Fair Use Is A Right. Ignoring It Has Consequences.

from the dmca-takedown-abuse dept

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy—it’s a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That’s what we told a federal court in Channel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists.

Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), a public access cable station in Waltham, Massachusetts, records city council meetings on video. Channel 781 News (Channel 781), a group of volunteers who report on the city council, curates clips from those recordings for its YouTube channel, along with original programming, to spark debate on issues like housing and transportation. WCAC sent a series of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), accusing Channel 781 of copyright infringement. That led to YouTube deactivating Channel 781’s channel just days before a critical municipal election. Represented by EFF and the law firm Brown Rudnick LLP, Channel 781 sued WCAC for misrepresentations in its takedown notices under an important but underutilized provision of the DMCA.

The DMCA gives copyright holders a powerful tool to take down other people’s content from platforms like YouTube. The “notice and takedown” process requires only an email, or filling out a web form, in order to accuse another user of copyright infringement and have their content taken down. And multiple notices typically lead to the target’s account being suspended, because doing so helps the platform avoid liability. There’s no court or referee involved, so anyone can bring an accusation and get a nearly instantaneous takedown.

Of course, that power invites abuse. Because filing a DMCA infringement notice is so easy, there’s a temptation to use it at the drop of a hat to take down speech that someone doesn’t like. To prevent that, before sending a takedown notice, a copyright holder has to consider whether the use they’re complaining about is a fair use. Specifically, the copyright holder needs to form a “good faith belief” that the use is not “authorized by the law,” such as through fair use.

WCAC didn’t do that. They didn’t like Channel 781 posting short clips from city council meetings recorded by WCAC as a way of educating Waltham voters about their elected officials. So WCAC fired off DMCA takedown notices at many of Channel 781’s clips that were posted on YouTube.

WCAC claims they considered fair use, because a staff member watched a video about it and discussed it internally. But WCAC ignored three of the four fair use factors. WCAC ignored that their videos had no creativity, being nothing more than records of public meetings. They ignored that the clips were short, generally including one or two officials’ comments on a single issue. They ignored that the clips caused WCAC no monetary or other harm, beyond wounded pride. And they ignored facts they already knew, and that are central to the remaining fair use factor: by excerpting and posting the clips with new titles, Channel 781 was putting its own “spin” on the material – in other words, transforming it. All of these facts support fair use.

Instead, WCAC focused only on the fact that the clips they targeted were not altered further or put into a larger program. Looking at just that one aspect of fair use isn’t enough, and changing the fair use inquiry to reach the result they wanted is hardly the way to reach a “good faith belief.”

That’s why we’re asking the court to rule that WCAC’s conduct violated the law and that they should pay damages. Copyright holders need to use the powerful DMCA takedown process with care, and when they don’t, there needs to be consequences.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: censorship, channel 781, copyfraud, copyright, dmca, fair use, takedowns
Companies: wcac

Daily Deal: The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle gives you unlimited access to expertly crafted online courses, interactive labs and study tools. Whether you’re aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, this bundle will help you get there with courses on CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, and more. It’s on sale for $69.97 for a very limited time.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Judge Tears Into ICE Over Its Inhumane Facilities, Insane Amount Of Lying

from the tiny-evil-pinheaded-fuckwits dept

This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner.

Let’s not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won’t change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone who is incarcerated, even if they’re just stuck there awaiting trial.

But it still needs to be seen to be believed. The baseline disregard for detainees health and well-being is nothing new. Neither are the attempts of law enforcement officials to lie their way out of a lawsuit. But the absolute stupidity of the lies and the complete lack of effort of those attempting to shield themselves from accountability goes past the normal ghoulishness we associate with the people doing the imprisoning.

There’s a new level of contempt on display here — one that indicates these people have nothing to fear from the courts because this administration will never consider these acts and the lies used to cover them up as something in need of punishment.

The background of the case is this: Erron Anthony Clarke arrived in the United States in 2018 on a work visa at the request of a US employer. He remained in the country after his visa expired but married a US citizen which put him on track to obtain permanent residency. He picked the wrong time to pursue his legal options, as the New York Times reports:

On Nov. 6, Mr. Clarke applied to become a permanent resident, noting in his application that he had worked in the United States without authorization. As part of his application process, he arrived on Dec. 5 for a fingerprinting appointment at an ICE office in Hauppauge, N.Y. He was pulled over and arrested by immigration enforcement agents shortly after leaving the facility. ICE immediately began proceedings to deport him.

These are the conditions he dealt with while being detained by ICE: he was placed in a 6′ x 6′ cell with eight other people. The cell’s temperature dipped below 30 degrees and occupants were forced to sleep on the floor next to an open toilet. The lights stayed on 24 hours a day. The only reprieve from these conditions came when ICE moved him to other detention centers in order to prevent him from appearing in court.

For 12 hours that night, Mr. Clarke was detained in the tiny room in the federal courthouse. On Dec. 6, he was moved to an ICE detention facility in East Meadow, N.Y., only to be brought back to the squalid conditions three days later.

After petitioning for his release, Mr. Clarke was again transferred on Dec. 10 to an ICE detention facility, this time in Newark. After the agency initially ignored his order to present him for a hearing, he appeared on Dec. 11 before Judge Brown, who ordered him immediately released. Yet Mr. Clarke was held for another night in Newark.

New York federal court judge Gary Brown isn’t happy to have found this sort of thing going on almost literally under his nose in the Islip (New York) courthouse detention facilities. He’s even less happy to have been repeatedly lied to by federal law enforcement officers, whose contempt for the rule of law meant they couldn’t even be bothered to lie semi-competently.

From the decision [PDF] (that I’ll be quoting extensively):

The ICE agent swears that “[b]ased on that investigation, Acting Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer John T. Keane executed a Form I-200, Warrant for Arrest of Alien.” Yet the documents submitted do not fully support this. The arrest warrant is unsigned and dated December 5, 2025 – the date of Clarke’s biometrics appointment and ensuing arrest – and bears no time notation. That warrant offers check boxes to indicate the basis of probable cause; the only box marked states the warrant emanated from “biometric confirmation of the subject’s identity and a records check of federal databases.” Thus, the warrant was issued after the biometric appointment.

Crucially, in issuing the warrant, the officer did not indicate that removal proceedings had been commenced, even though there are two boxes to so indicate. At the Court’s direction, ICE also supplied a Notice to Appear (NTA) – the charging document that commenced removal proceedings. The NTA is also dated December 5, 2025, again without a timestamp. There remains a serious question as to whether the NTA preceded Clarke’s arrest; if not, then ICE improperly arrested him. ICE’s declaration offers no insight into this question.

Also, the alleged “investigation” apparently occurred on the same day that Clarke’s spouse filed the paperwork to convert him to a full-time resident due to his marriage to her. That means ICE was doing nothing more than running searches on anyone expected to appear at the court in hopes of finding people it could detain and remove. This action had nothing to do with Clarke or his pending legal residence status and everything to do with expelling him from the country before his application for permanent residence was processed.

Then there’s the matter of the holding facilities, which were their own violation of Clarke’s rights. The court demanded answers from ICE. It did get ICE to talk. But all ICE had to offer was another set of lies.

First, it defied the judge’s oral and written order demanding Clarke be released immediately on December 11. The government received both before 3 pm on December 11, but ICE held Clarke for another night before finally releasing him on December 12.

Then it produced a endless string of lies when the court demanded the full records of Clarke’s detention (and movements to and from the Islip holding cell), along with photos of the cell Clarke had been held in.

Not only did the government ignore most of the court order, the stuff it sort of complied was a blend of lies and preposterous assertions:

In response, the Government filed a declaration from Supervisory Detention Officer John C. Diaz, based entirely on ICE records and conversations with other officers.

In addition to being rank hearsay, the information presented in the Diaz Declaration proves evasive and demonstrably false. For example, Diaz swears that Clarke “was booked out of NCCC at 3:45 p.m., and into CIHR on the same day at 3:53 p.m.” Given that the two facilities are more than twenty miles apart, requiring a drive of 35 minutes or more, it is physically impossible that ICE officers moved Clarke from one facility to another in eight minutes. Even more preposterous is Diaz’s sworn statement that Clarke was “booked out [of the Central Islip hold room] on December 10, 2025, at 8:30 p.m.” and then “transported to Delaney Hall Detention Facility (“DHDF”) [in Newark. N.J.] where he was booked in at 9 p.m.” Since that journey of about 60 miles consumes, depending on traffic, more than 90 minutes to as much as three and a half hours, it is again objectively impossible that the transport was completed in 30 minutes.

Time-keeping at ICE detention facilities appears to be deliberately sloppy:

These misstatements of fact serve to undermine the information presented and the reliability of the records maintained by ICE. Moreover, the declaration contains material misstatements. Clarke’s stay at the NCCC provides a powerful example. Diaz presents a series of booking times and concludes under oath that Clarke spent a total of under 65 hours at the NCCC. (stating that Clarke “spent two days, sixteen hours and forty-five minutes at NCCC.”). This is important, Diaz emphasizes, “because NCCC does not house DHS detainees for more than seventy-two-hour periods.” However, examination of the NCCC booking times presented by Diaz in his declaration – from December 6 at 11 a.m. to December 9 at 3:45 p.m. – reveals that Clarke spent about 77 hours at NCCC.

It also lied about the rooms people were being held in — or, at the very least, refused to answer any questions about them truthfully.

While there are other misstatements in the Diaz Declaration, of greater concern isICE’s failure or refusal to provide information ordered by the Court. First, though ICE provided its approximate measurements of the Central Islip hold rooms (four rooms measuring, according to Diaz, about 10’ x 7’ or 8’), nowhere in his declaration does he provide the capacity of those cells, a critical question here. Id.

While even that could be seen as a convenient omission, ICE has flatly refused to provide the requested photographs of the facilities. (“DHS is not prepared at this time to provide photographs of CIHR.”). Though legally immaterial – DHS was ordered to provide such photographs – part of the expressed rationale proves revelatory. Diaz avers that:

CIHR is populated 24/7 by detainees, and taking photographs while detainees were present would create privacy concerns for those detainees. [ ] Moving detainees out of CIHR for the purpose of taking photographs is also challenging, because those detainees would have to all be transported to a different facility.

If ICE is incapable of clearing a cell for the split second it takes to snap a photograph, it raises – or perhaps answers – other questions, such as ICE’s ability to clean, inspect and maintain the Central Islip hold rooms.

ICE is sliding headfirst towards a contempt holding. And even if that will just become another thing ICE (and the administration overseeing it) chooses to blow off, at least all of this will be on the public record:

ICE’s failure and, in at least one instance, flat out refusal, to comply with the Court’s directives along with its provision of demonstrably false evidence, requires some comment. While this matter was necessarily conducted in haste, and the Court believes that the assigned AUSA struggled to handle these matters in a reasonable fashion, ICE’s transgressions which include (1) failure to produce the Petitioner for the hearing, (2) failure to provide the holding capacity of the Central Islip hold rooms, (3) refusing to provide photographs of the Central Islip hold rooms and (4) ignoring this Court’s order providing for Clarke’s immediate release, cannot be overlooked.

Of these failings, perhaps the most indefensible is the agency’s refusal to provide photographs consistent with this Court’s order. A party who believes that a court order is unlawful – or in this case, unduly burdensome – does not have the right to resort to self-help. That party has legal alternatives – like a motion for reconsideration (which certainly would have been entertained here) or an interlocutory appeal – but cannot just simply refuse to comply.

Remember this the next time some government official is complaining about ICE being treated like a pariah or anonymous officers are bending reporters’ ears to tell them they’re just trying to do the right thing by enforcing immigration laws. They’re not. And they are the villains people think they are. This is what came to light as the result of a single detainee filing a complaint about the conditions of his incarceration. Imagine what could be exposed if people with actual power got involved.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration

Scope Of Chinese ‘Salt Typhoon’ Hack Keeps Getting Worse, As Trump Dismantles U.S. Cybersecurity Defenses

from the we're-cooked dept

Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to hack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, initially didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers this happened.

Like most hacks, the scale of the intrusion was significantly worse than originally stated. And it keeps expanding. This week, lawmakers finally revealed that they only recently realized that the same Chinese hackers accessed email systems used by some staffers on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee, and armed services committee:

“The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers’ emails.”

Which means that they almost definitely had access to confidential lawmakers’ emails, something it will take our Keystone-Cops-esque government another six months to admit.

It can’t be overstated what a complete and massive hack this was. The Chinese government had broad, historic access to the sensitive phone and email conversations of a massive number of sensitive U.S. public and government figures, for years. Thanks, in large part, to big telecoms like AT&T leaving key network access points “secured” with default administrative usernames and passwords.

Last June, NextGov reported that lawyers at big telecoms had started advising their engineers to stop looking for signs of Salt Typhoon intrusion because they were worried about bad press and liability. Due to this coverup and a lack of transparency by the dying U.S. government, it’s likely we still don’t know the full scope of the intrusions.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has responded by gutting government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the Salt Typhoon hack), dismantling the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and firing oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Trump’s courts have made it impossible to hold telecoms accountable for privacy violations. His earlobe nibbler at the FCC, Brendan Carr, constantly undermines efforts to improve security in Chinese-made smart home devices, and is dismantling what little telecom oversight we had. Their big “win” on “national security” was transferring TikTok ownership to Trump’s unethical billionaire friends.

The Chinese hacked into most of our sensitive systems and spied on powerful people, across the entirety of U.S. governance, for years. The companies involved covered it up and the Trump administrations’ “fix” was to destroy our cybersecurity protections and corporate oversight.

The press, with scattered exception, yawned and put the story on page four.

This generational damage to U.S. IT infrastructure will likely take decades to recover from, and we can’t even begin the process of a proper, competent audit (assuming we’re even capable of that) until Trump is removed from office. Even then, course correcting may not be possible without fixing Trump’s domination of the Supreme and 5th and 6th Circuit courts, which have proudly declared all corporate oversight to be illegal.

Filed Under: china, cisa, compromised, corruption, donald trump, hacked, intelligence, national security, privacy, salt typhoon, security

‘Anthem’ Shuts Down January 12th And, Poof!, There Goes All That Creative Culture

from the broken-promises dept

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many levels, of course. When it comes to art, no one person or group of people get to determine what is important culture and what isn’t. At the present, video games are also a massive cultural force in art and entertainment, with the quality and artistic nature of games having never been higher. And, finally, the bargain that copyright law is supposed to be, where a limited monopoly is granted in exchange for the art it covers eventually going into the public domain, isn’t subject to anyone’s subjective thoughts as to what artforms are important and what isn’t.

When games disappear, that is culture disappearing. When no effort is made to preserve this art, either directly or by prematurely freeing the art into the public domain, that breaks the copyright bargain. The publisher got the monoploy, but the public doesn’t get their end of the deal. Honestly, none of the above should be terribly controversial.

I’m going to try to innoculate against a derivative of all of that for this post by saying the following: it also doesn’t matter if the art that comprises a video game quality is even any good, or if the public generally thinks it’s good. And that brings me to the news that Bioware’s Anthem game will become unplayable next week.

We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.

While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.

Was Anthem any good? I have no idea; I have never played it. My comrade in arms, Karl Bode, mentioned to me that he really liked it. Having discussed video games with Karl for several years, that’s mostly good enough for me. Still, let’s say it was trash. It certainly wasn’t a success by industry standards in terms of sales. And none of that matters.

Bioware could have done several things to make this not a story about the pure disappearance of culture. It chose not to do so. There was no working with fans to cheaply or freely license some fan-run servers. No release of source code. Nothing in the reasonably short list of demands the folks that run the Stop Killing Games campaign have if we’re going to let these shutdowns continue. It’s just… gone.

If there’s one thing that is true in art and culture, it certainly must be that we learn absolutely as much from failure as success. From bad art as much as good art. From the niche as much as the wildly popular. But in cases like Anthem, class is cut short and the learning largely stops because it all just vanishes into the ether. A whisp of cultural smoke disappearing into the sky.

And I keep coming back to the copyright bargain. The public is being shortchanged on what it is owed. If this were music we were talking about, or literature, that suddenly vanished from the universe simply because a record label or publisher decided to disappear it, there would be outrage. The same should be true for the gaming industry.

It shouldn’t be that Bioware can at once benefit from copyright law to make money and leave it such that this same law prevents the art from ever entering the public domain.

Filed Under: anthem, copyright, stop killing games, video game preservation, video games
Companies: bioware

Trump: The Anti-Lincoln

from the preserving-the-constitution-vs.-destroying-it dept

Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely.

Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed to the men standing behind him—his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and said: “The people standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”

Running a nation of thirty million people. Indefinitely. Without congressional authorization. Without a declaration of war. Without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply.

When asked about the legal basis, Trump cited oil rights he claims were “stolen” from American corporations decades ago. When asked about resistance, he promised a “second wave” of military action. When asked who would govern Venezuela, he gestured at his cabinet and said they would decide.

This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to save the Union. Donald Trump announced imperial conquest to extract oil. One defended the regime. One destroys it. Trump isn’t like Lincoln. He’s the structural opposite—doing exactly what Lincoln would have fought against.

---

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.

But watch what else he did.

He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.

Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.

The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.

And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”

That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability.

---

Trump’s Imperial Declaration

Trump’s announcement Saturday inverts every principle Lincoln defended.

No Congressional authorization under Article I, Section 8. No declaration of war. No emergency requiring immediate action to prevent attack on American territory or citizens. Just the President deciding to wage war, seize another nation’s government, and announce indefinite occupation.

“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms,” Trump said from his club. “The socialist regime stole it from us… Now we’re taking it back.”

This isn’t emergency power to preserve constitutional framework. This is imperial conquest announced as resource extraction. This is the President declaring he will “run” a foreign nation to compensate American corporations for assets nationalized decades ago.

The New York Times got it exactly right: the events “evoked memories of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. employed its military might to secure territory and resources for its own advantage.”

Trump hung a portrait in the White House featuring himself alongside William McKinley—the president who seized the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now he’s acting out McKinley’s imperial playbook, but without even the pretense of Congressional authorization that McKinley obtained.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress—not the President—the power to declare war. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a gray area. The Founders explicitly rejected giving war powers to the executive because they had just fought a revolution against monarchical power.

Lincoln understood this. Even while expanding executive authority to suppress rebellion, he sought Congressional authorization, submitted to Congressional oversight, and accepted that courts and elections could check him.

Trump’s position, articulated by his defenders, is different: Congressional authorization is irrelevant when the cause is just. Maduro is evil. Venezuela’s people are suffering. Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. Constitutional process is pedantry when outcomes are good.

This is not Lincoln’s emergency power. This is Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The strong leader acts decisively. Constitutional constraint is obstacle, not obligation. Emergency is permanent condition justifying permanent exception.

Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him.

---

This isn’t isolated. This is the pattern.

When election results constrain him, he claims fraud, attempts to prevent certification, and incites assault on the Capitol.

When courts rule against him, he calls the judiciary illegitimate and promises to ignore adverse rulings.

When Congress investigates, he refuses subpoenas, claims absolute immunity, and purges inspector generals.

When the Constitution limits war powers, he wages war unilaterally from his private club while his defenders mock proceduralism.

Every emergency claim serves the same purpose: eliminate the constraint. Never preserve the framework. Always escape accountability.

His defenders make it explicit. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, said of Venezuela’s interim leader: “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”

Translation: do what we want, or face second-wave military action. This isn’t partnership. This isn’t liberation. This is imperial diktat backed by armada.

Trump himself was clearer: America will extract Venezuela’s oil, and the partnership with the United States will make“the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe”—if they comply. If they resist, he warned: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”

This is conquest. Announced from Mar-a-Lago. Without Congressional authorization. In explicit pursuit of seizing another nation’s resources for American corporate benefit.

Lincoln would have recognized this instantly as what he fought against. This is executive power divorced from constitutional constraint. This is sovereignty claiming exception to law itself.

---

We’re not in normal politics. Normal politics is policy disagreement within shared constitutional framework. Should taxes be higher? How should we conduct foreign policy? What’s the right balance of regulation?

This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.

When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.

When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.

When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle.

Every act of “let’s debate the Venezuela policy” is collaboration with framework destruction. Not because debate is bad, but because they’re not proposing policy within the framework—they’re eliminating the framework while we debate.

You can’t defeat “constitutional constraints are optional” by following constitutional constraints politely while the other side wages war from private clubs. You can only defend the framework by using every power that framework provides.

This is the regime crisis I wrote about in the manifesto. This is what happens when democratic constraint disappears. This is what Lincoln fought to prevent.

And this is what defense of the republic requires us to stop.

---

We cannot treat this as normal politics.

Lincoln preserved the framework. Trump declares himself outside it.

Your grandparents knew which side they were on when the republic was threatened. They fought. They won. They built the middle class and the democratic alliance that kept the peace for seventy years.

We will do it again.

2026 begins now.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Filed Under: abraham lincoln, donald trump, marco rubio, venezuela

Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. And you can tackle one or all in 10-to-15-minute bite-sized lessons, so there’s no need to clear hours of your weekend to gain real-life conversation skills. Babbel was developed by over 100 expert linguists to help users speak and understand languages quickly. With Babbel, it’s easy to find the right level for you — beginner, intermediate, or advanced — so that you can make progress while avoiding tedious drills. Within as little as a month, you could be holding down conversations with native speakers about transportation, dining, shopping, directions, and more, making any trip you take so much easier. It’s on sale for $159 when you use the code LEARN at checkout.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder

from the there-is-no-dispute dept

Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.

We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.

Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”

Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:

It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.

Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.

Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:

Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.

— Bellingcat (@bellingcat.com) 2026-01-07T22:32:56.273Z

This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:

From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.

He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.

This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.

While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.

ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.

This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?

As Chris Geidner points out, it was just a month and a half ago that Judge Sara Ellis called out ICE’s (and CBP’s) lawless nonsense and how dangerous it was:

Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”

Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:

While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent

And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:

Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”

A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.

I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.

Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.

As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.

This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.

And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.

Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.

It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.

The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:

Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….

In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.

And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”

Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T01:35:33.447Z

The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.

Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.

And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.

Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.

But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”

Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T22:56:25.169Z

He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.

The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.

It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.

This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.

But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.

That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.

I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.

There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.

But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.

The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.

ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.

Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.

Filed Under: dhs, donald trump, ice, kristi noem, minneapolis, murder, renee nicole good, tricia mclaughlin