The UK government has reportedly backed down from its dangerous demand that Apple build encryption backdoors, following pressure from the Trump administration. But the secretive nature of this “mutually beneficial” agreement should make us deeply suspicious about what was actually traded away.
The UK government has backed down on a controversial demand for Apple to build a “back door” into its technology to access private user data following pressure from the Trump administration.
We had written about this—and how dangerous it was—the day the news leaked that the UK had issued such an order. In response, Apple turned off its iCloud encryption in the UK, making everyone way less safe.
Of course, I say “leaked” because the demands to Apple were never officially discussed by the UK government, who hoped to keep this unconscionable attack on everyone’s privacy a total secret. Since then, Apple has been fighting it out (still in secret) in the UK to try to get this order blocked, though it was believed that they only had limited legal routes to stopping it.
But there was widespread condemnation about this move by the UK government, and this is one of those cases where that includes from the Trump administration, who is taking credit for convincing the UK to back down. Of course, the UK is making no comment whatsoever, and the secret nature of the deal—which includes a source saying that the agreement was “mutually beneficial—to the US and the UK should raise some questions:
Gabbard said that over the “past few months,” she had been “working closely with our partners in the UK,” alongside President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, on the agreement.
A source familiar with the discussions told CNN that Gabbard spoke with her counterpart in the UK, Deputy National Security Advisory Matt Collins, a few times about the issue, including once when the UK delegation visited the White House. Vance was also personally involved in reaching a deal, engaging in direct conversations with British government officials to come to what was considered a “mutually beneficial” agreement for both countries, a White House official told CNN.
“This agreement between our two governments maintains each country’s sovereignty while ensuring close cooperation on data,” a White House official said.
Reading between the lines here, it sounds like the US may have threatened to cut off access to some of the intelligence data it collects if the UK went through with the plan.
Of course, it would be more reassuring if the US government itself wasn’t still trying to push through its own attacks on encryption. Federal law enforcement officials, federal elected officials, and state legislators are still pushing efforts to undermine encryption in the US.
So, yes, I’m glad that Gabbard and Vance were able to pressure the UK to drop this completely brain-dead and dangerous idea, but it would be nice if they got their allies in the US government to step down on this issue as well. And, also if they came clear as to what the deal with the UK is regarding “close cooperation on data.”
The broader lesson here is that we should be happy that the UK is backing down, but we shouldn’t celebrate too quickly when governments make these kinds of secretive deals around fundamental rights. Yes, it’s good that the UK backed down from its most aggressive position. But until we know what was traded in return, and until both countries abandon their broader anti-encryption agendas, it’s still unclear if this is a real victory for digital rights or more like a tactical retreat in a much longer war against privacy.
We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous lawsuits here at Techdirt, but the one that Donald Trump filed on Friday against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over the article about the birthday card he was alleged to have given Epstein is so legally incompetent that it reads like a masterclass in how not to file a defamation claim.
The complaint is such a train wreck of basic legal errors and factual misrepresentations that it can only be understood as a SLAPP suit designed to harass the WSJ and force them to reveal sources. The legal malpractice on display would be almost comical if it weren’t so transparent in its authoritarian intent.
Trump is using a Miami law firm that appears to specialize in franchise law—which might explain the amateurish quality of this defamation complaint. When you can’t get competent media lawyers, apparently you make do with whoever will take your money.
Let’s start with what the WSJ actually reported, because the lawyers filing this suit seem to have struggled with basic reading comprehension. It claims that Trump gave Epstein a card for his 50th Birthday that, well, here’s how they describe it:
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
The Journal also includes the type written faux dialogue between Trump and Epstein that was apparently included, which is so bizarre I’m not even going to bother repeating it here.
Here’s where the legal incompetence begins. Trump’s defenders, led by JD Vance, immediately seized on the fact that the WSJ didn’t publish a photo of the letter as somehow “proof” it doesn’t exist:
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how journalism works. Major publications don’t publish stories like this without solid sourcing—the WSJ’s legal team wouldn’t allow it. More importantly, there are often very good reasons for media organizations not to reveal images of documents that have been leaked to them. Just ask Reality Winner. And, of course, I’m sure the Trump regime would love to know who leaked this document, so seeing an image might help reveal that information.
But that doesn’t make it a good legal argument. Unless you’re just trying to flush out the leaker.
So it’s notable that the lawyers decide to lead with that as their key piece of “evidence” that the story is fabricated—a strategy that’s likely to backfire spectacularly when the WSJ produces the letter in discovery (or before).
On the one hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter. And on the other hand,Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proofthat President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists.Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.
That’s a bold claim. It seems like quite the gambit to open with a claim that the letter doesn’t even exist, when it seems quite likely that this argument will come back to haunt them.
Also, the lawyers can’t even accurately describe what the WSJ reported. The complaint claims the article states that “President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter.” But that’s not what the WSJ said. The article carefully states the letter bore Trump’s name and signature, and that the drawing “appears to be hand-drawn” without attributing the drawing to Trump.
This isn’t just sloppy—it’s the kind of basic factual error that suggests the lawyers either didn’t carefully read the article they’re suing over, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.
The complaint also has a weird argument about how the WSJ published this as an “exclusive” but then… disseminated it widely. As one does. With news. I don’t know why this paragraph is in here, other than to make it clear that the lawyer who wrote this is unfamiliar with how journalism works:
The Article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive.1 However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
They also double down on their claim that it’s impossible that this letter exists, which seems like a kind of lawsuit claim preceding an unfortunate event for them.
Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article. That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump.
But the most egregious nonsense comes in how they identify the allegedly defamatory statements.
In a defamation lawsuit, you have to state which statements made by the defendant were “false statements of fact” and that’s tough to do here, but these lawyers power on through.
They claim, among other things, that the phrase “the letter bearing Trump’s name” is false. They also claim that stating the letter “is bawdy” is false. Calling something “bawdy” would clearly be an opinion based on disclosed facts and literally can’t be defamatory.
But here’s where you know these lawyers didn’t actually read the article they’re suing over. They claim it’s defamatory that the WSJ described some contributors to Epstein’s birthday book as “childhood pals”—and they’re claiming this defames Trump. But look at the sentence:
The album had poems, photos and greetings from businesspeople, academics, Epstein’s former girlfriends andchildhood pals, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with them
The “childhood pals” reference clearly refers to other contributors to the birthday book—not Trump. This is such a basic reading comprehension failure that it raises questions about whether these lawyers actually practiced law before filing this complaint.
They separately claim it’s defamatory to claim that Epstein socialized with Trump, which is ridiculous as the evidence for that is widespread, including multiple images, videos, and Donald Trump’s own words
This is not a serious lawsuit that anyone expects to win.
This is a SLAPP lawsuit.
And it asks for $10 billion dollars.
I mean, it’s kinda like this:
The real question is whether this strategy will work. Given that CBS just paid Trump $16 million to settle a similarly frivolous lawsuit, that ABC paid him $15 million to settle another lawsuit, and that Meta paid him $25 million in what amounts to protection money, Trump has good reason to think that flinging enough legal garbage will eventually pay off. Indeed, he crowed about these payoffs on social media as evidence that Murdoch will pay him too.
But this case presents a fascinating test of media power dynamics. Trump is essentially betting that he can bully Rupert Murdoch the same way he’s successfully bullied other media companies. That’s a bold gamble, in part because of how important Rupert Murdoch has been to Trump’s success. Rupert has been a Trump ally for years, but he can be ruthless when his business interests are threatened.
More importantly, the WSJ has the legal resources to fight this, and, hopefully, the financial incentive to do so.
If the WSJ folds here, it would complete Trump’s transformation of SLAPP suits from a nuisance tactic into a reliable revenue stream. The man who famously complained about “fake news” has figured out that threatening to sue over real news is far more profitable.
But Murdoch isn’t exactly known for backing down when someone tries to shake him down. This could get very messy, very quickly—which might be the most entertaining thing to come out of this embarrassing legal filing.
Much of what we’ve written about regarding the Trump regime’s nonsensical and ridiculous immigration policies have focused on how they’re grabbing people off the streets, or disappearing them to random foreign gulags without due process. But we’ve also talked about the absolute insanity of US immigration policy as it pertains to foreigners traveling to the US on visas. And the most telling thing about recent stories involving tourists being denied entry to the US? Nobody’s surprised by them anymore—even when they involve utterly ridiculous reasons like having a satirical meme on your phone.
We’ve mentioned how the US is now scanning the social media of anyone who wants to visit, and it’s leading to plenty of ridiculous stories that seem likely to cause plenty of foreign tourists to just stay the fuck away.
In the past two weeks, two such stories have made a fair bit of news. First, Aussie writer and former Columbia student Alistair Kitchen told a story of flying from Melbourne to Los Angeles (for a layover before traveling on to New York to visit friends) where he was detained for 12 hours, pressured into revealing his phone contents, and then being shipped back to Australia… because way back when, he had written an article about Palestinian protests at Columbia.
He wrote about the ordeal in the New Yorker, and there are plenty of crazy bits, with the CBP people demanding he unlock a folder on his phone and then scrolling through his dick pics with him being perhaps the craziest part:
He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.
That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented.So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.
Come to America! Land of the free! Where we detain you for no reason at the border to yell at you about your reporting (free press!), force you to reveal your secrets (no general warrants!), and gleefully scroll through your dick pics together (cruel and unusual).
As Kitchen notes, they had planned to block him from entering all along. While he had done a cursory “cleanup” of his social media before flying to the US, they apparently already had everything they needed.
They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.
Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)
Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”
Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.
That story got some attention, but not nearly the global attention that the story of a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who had a somewhat similar experience. In his telling, he was denied entry due to a JD Vance meme on his mobile phone.
Mikkelsen claims that immigration officials stopped him for questioning and quizzed him “about drug trafficking, terrorist plots, and right-wing extremism,” all of which he said was “totally without reason.” He says he was placed in a holding cell.
“They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone, and backpack,” he told Nordlys.
Next, Mikkelsen claims that officials threatened to imprison him or fine him $5,000 if he did not grant them access to his phone, so he did. He said that is when agents found a meme on his device that showed the vice president’s face—digitally altered to make him chubbier, bald, and cartoonish—that became popular after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Oval Office in February. He claimed they also signaled disapproval to a photo of him with a homemade wooden pipe.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security has denied that he was denied entry for the meme, saying it was actually because he had admitted to past drug use (apparently he admitted to having marijuana twice: once in New Mexico and once in Germany, though he pointed out it was legal in both places — though in New Mexico while it’s legal at the state level, it’s still (stupidly) illegal at the federal level):
That said, the meme (which had already gone semi-viral back in February) suddenly started appearing all over the place, with plenty of people (especially across Europe) using the meme and Mikkelsen’s story to mock both JD Vance and American immigration/visa policies.
It even went all the way up to the Irish legislature, where a politician, Ivana Bacik, held up the meme of JD Vance during questions on legislation.
Here’s the thing that should terrify anyone who gives a shit about America’s global reputation: when told that a tourist was denied entry over a JD Vance meme, nobody’s first reaction was “that’s obviously fake.” Instead, people across the globe nodded and thought “yeah, that tracks.” The fact that this story is completely believable is a damning indictment of where US immigration policy has gone. That’s not the kind of shit the US is supposed to do, and there’s no way that this isn’t damaging US tourism as these stories spread far and wide.
The thing is, as absurd as it is that Mikkelsen was turned away for either the meme or smoking a little pot, as with the Australian writer, Kitchen, the truly horrifying bit was in how they treated Mikkelsen. Lots of people are laughing about the JD Vance meme bit, but nothing Mikkelsen did could possibly deserve this kind of treatment.
He alleges that he was then strip-searched, fingerprinted, had blood samples taken, and was held for five hours before being put on a flight back to Norway.
Strip searched? Blood samples? What the fuck?
Whether Mikkelsen was actually bounced for the meme or the pot is beside the point. The real story is that when the world hears “American border agents detained a tourist over a satirical image of the Vice President,” their response isn’t disbelief—it’s dark laughter and relief that they’re not planning any trips to the US anytime soon.
That’s not the brand of a free society. That’s the brand of an authoritarian state where mocking the leadership gets you disappeared. And if that doesn’t embarrass the shit out of anyone with even a passing familiarity with what America used to claim to stand for, then we’re already further gone than these stories suggest.
Anything that doesn’t jibe with Donald Trump’s white male-centric worldview must go. Whatever is deemed “woke” — no matter its basis in factual history — must be excised. If tossing aside DEI means pretending blacks, women, and other non-white, non-male people never contributed anything to this country, so be it. If stroking off the far right and its quasi-theocracy aspirations means turning the US into King George’s Great Britain, I guess that’s just the price we have to pay to live in a “free” society.
The latest assault on history by this administration is a bit more horrific than its previous efforts. Wiping out DEI initiatives caused considerable (and deliberate) collateral damage to documentation of the contributions of immigrants, non-whites, women, and LGBTQ+ to the rich tapestry that is American history. This one is more targeted, but that only means there will be no collateral damage. Everything harmed here will be deliberate.
The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.
The Order directs the Administration to work with Congress to ensure that future Smithsonian appropriations: (1) prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law; and (2) celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.
The Vice President will work with congressional leaders to appoint members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents who are committed to advancing the celebration of America’s extraordinary heritage and progress.
That’s from the fact sheet accompanying the executive order. And, unfortunately, there’s a stooge right there waiting to be activated: JD Vance, who — as Musk’s understudy/nominal Vice President — is granted a position on the Smithsonian’s board of regents. It’s a government entity, but one that has rarely seen direct federal government interference in its day-to-day work.
The second paragraph of the fact sheet is extremely disturbing. It targets things that “degrade shared American values” — a list that would certainly include America’s century of slavery and the several decades of segregation that follows it. It would also include anything detailing the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, which includes genocide, rampant racism, and ongoing attempts to strip away what few rights Native Americans still possess. It might also highlight the routine abuse of immigrants, wartime internment camps, war atrocities, CIA coup attempts, police violence, child labor, and the refusal to treat all citizens as equal for most of Americas history. All of these things are part of American history. And every single one of these could be described as “degrading American values” and “promoting ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”
And yet, those are things most likely to be removed first or, at the very least, denied funding by Trump and Vance. While there’s a bone being thrown to women (although I doubt Trump is here to champion abortions rights or the success of the women’s suffrage movement), it’s only there to ensure that “men” do not get recognized as “women.”
Why is this such a problem? And why does Trump think the Smithsonian should be stripped of funding for exhibits straddling this men/women thing that seems to unduly trouble the world’s last consumer of whatever is the Aqua Net of spray tanning agents? It’s all explained (I guess?) in the actual executive order. And that order opens with a sentence that proves the adage “every accusation is an admission.”
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
“Over the past decade?” From what I’ve seen, it’s only been over the past three months that I’ve witnessed a “concerted” effort to “rewrite our Nation’s history.”
The stuff making Trump so angry someone else wrote up an entire diatribe, called it an “executive order,” and asked him to drag his Sharpie across the signature box, includes all the things people say about Trump, his loyalists, his cabinet, and his voters. And, to a person, they’ll agree with these assertions when hanging out with their own. But, once again, everything listed as problematic is just something Trump doesn’t actually think is wrong.
For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.” The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.
The only way to read this is to take Trump at his word. The only reason he would want this removed or censored is because he truly believes white people should be able to do what they want to whoever they want, especially if those on the receiving end aren’t white and male. He doesn’t have a problem with the US government using race to “establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” He actually wants “white culture” to be the dominant force in America. And he seems to have a particular hard-on for something that happens so infrequently it doesn’t even amount to a statistical rounding error: male athletes participating in women’s sports.
Contrary to what some commenters believe about me, I actually think the United States is a great nation, or at least has the potential to become one. It isn’t one at the present and I don’t have a whole lot of hope for its future, given how things have gone over the last 15 years. But it’s a deeply flawed nation that has, historically, at least tried to eliminate its worst traits. But Trump wants to bring all the bad stuff back, and he wants to erase our history of improvement on the civil liberties front. It’s far more than disappointing. It’s sickening. It’s a retcon in which all the things that make this country better than it was will be buried and all the things that held us back will be treated as peaks of achievement, rather than the valleys of failure they always were and always will be.
When the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did.
While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist “Nobody was texting war plans,” the administration’s frantic response suggests they know they’ve stepped in something worse. Their defense has evolved through four increasingly desperate stages:
Saying that Goldberg is a liar and a sleazy journalist
Claiming that this was just a little mistake, and no big deal
Insisting that no actual classified info was shared and…
Saying that even if it was real (it was), and was a mistake (it was) and classified info was shared (it was) that none of it mattered because the Yemen attack was just great.
It has yet to be explained why, if Goldberg is such a terrible journalist, they then added him to their group chat to plan an attack, but we’ll leave that aside for now.
Part of that response included multiple claims, mainly from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that absolutely no war plans were shared in the chat. Also, many other administration officials swore up and down, including under oath to Congress, that no classified info was shared.
Goldberg and the Atlantic responded by… sharing the remaining messages. First, he notes the vehement denials from the admin:
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
Then he proved them all to be liars.
The messages couldn’t be clearer. Details of precise strike timing, delivered just hours before bombs actually dropped, along with specific weapons information — information that anyone with even passing familiarity with classified material (or basic common sense) would recognize as obviously classified. Even Fox News’ own national security reporter noted that every expert she spoke to said, if anything, what Hegseth texted was actually worse than what is commonly referred to as “war plans.”
The key bit from that:
“Attack orders” or “attack sequence” puts the joint force directly and immediately at risk, according to former senior defense official #1. “It allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces.”
This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than “war plans,” which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials.
But rather than acknowledge the obvious, the administration doubled down on increasingly desperate semantic gymnastics. Their primary defense? That the Atlantic’s headline called them “attack” plans rather than “war” plans — as if this distinction somehow negated the sharing of classified military operations in an unsecured chat group that included a journalist. The semantic games only got more desperate from there:
That’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pretending that because The Atlantic called them “Attack Plans” instead of “War Plans” it was some sort of concession, even though (as noted above) experts point out this is worse and more egregious.
We’ve written a few times now about how the administration has been playing cutesy semantic games in court, in which they act like they think playing obvious word games is some sort of magic loophole away from accountability. This is more of that, but to the press. As with courts, no one but the dumbest MAGA faithful are buying this nonsense. THEY STILL WERE PLANNING AN ATTACK INCLUDING CLASSIFIED INFO VIA SIGNAL. The fact that they accidentally added a journalist was only worth noting in the sense that that’s how we know about it. The existence of the Signal chat is the first problem.
Others in the administration really leaned in on this “no war plans” semantic game:
This is again, utter nonsense. It was texting clear details of a military operation before it occurred. It included details of weapons being used and timing. No one — NO ONE — thinks that this is acceptable or normal. Not even this crew now weakly trying to defend it.
But the administration’s semantic tap dance around “war plans” versus “attack plans” isn’t just missing the point — it’s actively trying to distract from something far more serious: evidence of potential war crimes. The Signal chat reveals senior administration officials deliberately targeting a civilian residential building, with full knowledge of its non-military status.
Let that sink in: they authorized bombing a civilian apartment building because a target’s girlfriend lived there. This isn’t just reckless — it’s a likely violation of international humanitarian law, which explicitly prohibits attacks directed at civilian objects. The fact that these officials casually discussed targeting civilian infrastructure in an unsecured chat group — while including a journalist by mistake — demonstrates a shocking combination of moral bankruptcy and operational incompetence.
This reckless disregard for both operational security and international law isn’t just dangerous — it’s potentially criminal. And while the administration tries to deflect with absurd arguments about the difference between “war” and “attack” plans, the reality is that they’ve provided documentary evidence of planning what appears to be a war crime, sharing classified operational details in an unsecured channel, and then lying about it to Congress.
For an administration that campaigned on bringing back competence and accountability to government, they’ve instead demonstrated they can’t be trusted with either classified information or military power.
If you’re going to plan military operations over Signal, you probably shouldn’t accidentally add a journalist to the chat. And if you’re going to do government business over Signal specifically to avoid federal record-keeping laws, you definitely shouldn’t get caught doing it. Yet here we are: A day after we learned that top Trump administration officials — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, VP JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — were coordinating Yemen bombing plans over an unsecured Signal group chat (with bonus journalist Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally included), the first lawsuit has arrived.
The watchdog group American Oversight’s filing makes the obvious point: Using Signal to dodge the Federal Records Act’s requirements is, well, illegal. The law is quite clear about this:
To comply with the statute, the agency head “shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”
Each agency head is further required to establish a records management program providing “effective controls over the creation and over the maintenance and use of records,” id. § 3102(1), and to “establish safeguards against the removal or loss of records the head of [the] agency determines to be necessary and required by regulations of the Archivist,”
When records are handled in a manner that contravenes the FRA, or a parallel agency record-keeping policy, the FRA obligates the agency head to “notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency . . . .”
While there are multiple layers of problems here — from the careless handling of national security information to the sloppy inclusion of an outside journalist to the fundamental question of bombing people halfway across the world — the lawsuit zeros in on what appears to be a deliberate attempt to dodge accountability. Rather than using secure government systems that properly preserve records as required by law, this administration chose to conduct war planning over Signal — a choice that seems designed specifically to keep these discussions hidden from legally mandated record-keeping requirements.
Signal is not an authorized system for preserving federal records and does not comply with recordkeeping requirements under the FRA or NARA guidance
Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations.
This incident didn’t come as a complete surprise to American Oversight. The watchdog group has been trying to get access to administration Signal messages since January, having filed multiple FOIA requests specifically seeking both email and Signal discussions between various agencies and the White House. Those requests remain pending, but this accidental revelation suggests they were right to be concerned.
On January 28, 2025, American Oversight submitted a FOIA request to DoD (bearing American Oversight internal tracking number DOD-25-0183) seeking all records reflecting communications, expressly including Signal messages, between DoD officials, including Pete Hegseth, and anyone in the White House Office, containing one or more specified key terms, from January 20, 2025, through January 27, 2025. On January 28, 2025, DoD acknowledged the request and assigned it tacking number 25-F-2084. Upon information and belief, American Oversight’s request remains pending
And then there’s this simple fact: this Signal group chat only came to light through sheer incompetence. How many other potentially illegal chat groups exist where officials remembered to double-check their participant lists? As the filing notes:
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, presents a substantial risk that they have used and continue to use Signal in other contexts, thereby creating records that are subject to the FRA and/or the FOIA, but are not being preserved as required by those statutes.
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, strongly suggests that they have used Signal to communicate about matters that may otherwise have been discussed via email, thereby avoiding creating records responsive to American Oversight’s FOIA requests for emails.
Beyond just preserving these specific Signal messages, the lawsuit aims to stop this administration’s apparent pattern of using non-secure messaging apps to dodge their record-keeping obligations. Though given their demonstrated technical expertise so far, perhaps we should be grateful they’re not trying to conduct military operations via ExTwitter DMs.
Though, if they were doing that, perhaps we would have had Elon Musk leaking the messages himself.
Oh, and this morning the case got assigned to Judge Boasberg, who is already dealing with this administration’s nonsense regarding the rendition flights to El Salvador. So that should be fun.
Look, I know you’ve probably already seen yesterday’s absolutely stunning story from Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. The one where Trump administration officials somehow managed to add a journalist to their Signal group chat while planning out their bombing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The one that reads like a plot point rejected from VEEP for being too unrealistic.
But having spent 24 hours watching various hot takes and attempts to minimize just how catastrophically bad this security breach was, we need to talk about why this is even worse than most people realize.
First, just look at the casual way these officials discuss highly classified military operations. This isn’t just a quick “oops wrong number” text – this is an extended conversation about bombing plans happening on an unauthorized platform. And the deeper you read, the worse it gets:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”
Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.
At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”
100% OPSEC indeed. Remember, this is the Secretary of Defense (who we all knew was unqualified for the job) literally promising perfect operational security while inadvertently sharing war plans with a journalist over a non-governmental communications system.
And remember — this is just what Goldberg was comfortable sharing publicly. He notes that some messages were too sensitive to publish, containing operational details that “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.” Think about that for a moment: these top officials were casually texting information so sensitive that even after the fact, a journalist felt publishing it would endanger lives.
This isn’t just incompetence — though it certainly demonstrates how the rank amateurs Trump put into power are catastrophically unqualified for their jobs. This is criminal negligence with national security implications.
Under 18 USC 793, “gross negligence” in handling defense information carries up to ten years in prison. And this case goes way beyond mere negligence — they deliberately chose to conduct classified military planning on an unauthorized platform, then accidentally broadcast it to a journalist. That’s before we even get to the numerous other laws likely violated here.
While some members of Congress, including a few Republicans, are appropriately alarmed by this breach, the GOP leadership is desperately trying to minimize it. Take Rep. Don Bacon, an Armed Services Committee member and former Air Force brigadier general, who actually told Axios: “I’ve accidentally sent the wrong person a text. We all have.”
This kind of false equivalence is both dangerous and stupid. This wasn’t a misdirected happy birthday text, you dipshit. This was classified military planning conducted over a third-party messaging app. Yes, Signal’s encryption is excellent — but that’s completely beside the point. There’s a reason the government has specific secured communications systems, SCIFs, and strict protocols for handling classified information.
Even more concerning than Bacon’s clueless response is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to downplay this massive security breach: “They’re gonna track that down and make sure that doesn’t happen again…. Clearly, I think the administration has acknowledged it was a mistake and they’ll tighten up.”
This wasn’t some minor technical slip-up that just needs a policy reminder. This was top officials deliberately choosing to conduct classified military planning on unauthorized systems. The fact that they accidentally included a journalist just exposed what they were doing — but the underlying violation was using Signal in the first place.
And here’s what should really keep you up at night: we only know about this because they happened to add a journalist who went public about this single chat. How many other sensitive conversations are happening on Signal or other unauthorized platforms? How many other “accidental” additions might have gone unnoticed? How many foreign intelligence services are already exploiting this administration’s casual approach to operational security?
Let’s put this in perspective: this is the same Trump team that turned “but her emails” into a movement over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. We were critical of Clinton’s server too — it was a legitimately bad security practice. But what we’re seeing here makes Clinton’s server look like amateur hour.
Clinton used a private server for mostly unclassified State Department business, with a handful of retroactively classified emails found in the mix. These guys are literally planning military strikes over Signal, complete with operational details so sensitive that journalists won’t even publish them. And they’re doing it specifically to dodge both security protocols and federal records laws.
The private server versus Signal distinction matters too. Clinton’s setup, while improper, was at least a dedicated system. These officials are just using a consumer app, making it virtually impossible to properly archive communications as required by law. They’re not just mishandling classified info — they’re deliberately choosing tools that help them hide their tracks.
And, yes, pretty much all of the officials in the chat are on record screaming about supposed security failures during Democratic administrations. CNN put together an incredible supercut of a bunch of these dipshits screaming about security breaches from Democrats:
CNN put together a collection of clips of various Trump officials who were on the signal chat criticizing Hillary Clinton’s email server
Though, my favorite may be this tweet from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (a member of the group chat) from just ten days ago saying “any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.”
Huh, maybe someone should get on responding to this lawbreaking that you were a part of then.
And then there’s Donald Trump’s telling response to this security nightmare. After first trying to dismiss the story by attacking The Atlantic (“a magazine that is going out of business”), Trump pivots to what he thinks is the only relevant point: “Well, it couldn’t have been very effective, because the attack was very effective.”
Think about that for a moment. The man who led “lock her up” chants over Clinton’s email server — who insisted the mere existence of a private server was disqualifying regardless of any actual harm — is now arguing that leaking classified military plans is fine as long as the operation still succeeded.
This is the same Trump who once claimed Clinton’s email practices were “bigger than Watergate.” The same Trump who said anyone mishandling classified information should be disqualified from public service. Now he’s shrugging off his own officials literally texting war plans to random journalists because hey, the bombing worked out okay in the end.
Some Trump defenders are trying to minimize this by claiming the published excerpts only show policy debate among senior officials. But Goldberg’s reporting makes clear just how dangerous this breach was:
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts.The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that theHegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
Let that sink in. These weren’t just policy discussions — these were detailed military plans so sensitive that publishing them could endanger American lives. And they were being casually shared on Signal, where any “accidental” addition could have accessed them.
Remember Benghazi? Republicans spent years investigating Obama administration officials over that attack. They held endless hearings, demanded countless documents, and threw around accusations of criminal negligence and security failures. Now imagine if they’d discovered Obama officials were planning military operations over WhatsApp and accidentally adding journalists to the chat.
In any functioning administration, this would be a career-ending scandal. Multiple officials would be fired. Security protocols would be completely overhauled. Criminal investigations would be launched. Instead, we’re watching Republicans try to wave this away as a simple mistake — just an errant text, no big deal since the bombing worked out fine.
This isn’t just covering up incompetence anymore. This is actively endangering national security by normalizing absolutely reckless handling of classified military operations. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying or has completely abandoned any pretense of caring about operational security when their team is in charge.
There’s a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential threats until they’re already overwhelmed by them. This isn’t just normal human shortsightedness—it’s a specific kind of cognitive failure bred by generations of relative peace and prosperity.
Consider how many educated, thoughtful people respond when you warn them about the marriage of artificial intelligence with autocratic power. They acknowledge the concern intellectually, maybe even express worry about it, but then return to their daily routines as if nothing fundamental has changed. They treat an unprecedented threat to human freedom as if it were just another policy challenge to be debated at leisure.
We see this comfortable blindness in how our society responds to clear warning signs. When Trump openly declares “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” when Musk gains control of Treasury systems while simultaneously developing AI, when Vance explicitly advocates ignoring court orders—these aren’t subtle hints about their intentions. They’re telling us exactly what they plan to do. Yet much of society continues to treat these as normal political developments rather than existential threats to constitutional governance.
Most Americans living today grew up in what they thought was the natural order of things: American power meant global stability, NATO meant European security, and the dollar meant international trust. But what we’re witnessing now is the systematic dismantling of this entire architecture of peace—not through external defeat, but through internal surrender.
Consider the sheer audacity of Trump’s demands to Ukraine: conditions harsher than those imposed on defeated Nazi Germany, turning a democratic ally into an economic colony while simultaneously signaling to Russia that NATO’s mutual defense guarantees are meaningless. This isn’t just a policy shift—it’s the deliberate destruction of the international system that has prevented great power war for three generations.
For Americans who have never known anything but the stability of the post-war order, this should be terrifying. The world their parents and grandparents built—the alliances, institutions, and agreements that kept nuclear powers from direct conflict—is being dismantled with stunning speed. When Trump threatens Canada, alienates European allies, and treats Ukraine like conquered territory, he’s not just making diplomatic mistakes. He’s systematically destroying the frameworks that have prevented World War III.
Yet most Americans continue their daily routines as if nothing fundamental has changed. They treat the collapse of global security architecture as just another news story, perhaps concerning but not immediately relevant to their lives. This is the comfortable blindness that precedes catastrophe—the inability to recognize existential danger until it’s too late to prevent it.
The most dangerous form of comfortable blindness comes from those who should know better—the institutional actors who continue to treat existential threats as routine challenges that can be managed through normal processes. Consider what’s happening with the U.S. Marshals Service, the crucial enforcement arm of our federal courts. The administration is actively working to politicize this institution, transforming it from a guardian of judicial independence into a tool of political intimidation.
Yet responsible people, including many in the legal community, continue to assure us that “the guardrails are holding” because courts still issue restraining orders. They point to these orders as evidence of institutional resilience while ignoring a fundamental reality: court orders mean nothing without enforcement. When the very agency responsible for enforcing judicial decisions becomes subject to political loyalty tests, when marshals are directed to “visit” judges’ chambers to pressure them about January 6th cases, we’re watching the systematic dismantling of judicial independence itself.
This comfortable blindness extends beyond the courts. Congress sits passively while the administration openly declares its intent to ignore laws it dislikes. Media outlets report on the politicization of law enforcement as if it were just another policy dispute rather than the destruction of basic constitutional constraints. Even those who recognize the danger often treat it as something that can be addressed through normal institutional processes—as if the dismantling of those very processes wasn’t the whole point.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how the appearance of institutional function masks their actual collapse. Courts still issue orders. Congress still holds hearings. The media still reports. But these actions increasingly serve as mere theater—institutional muscle memory continuing after the actual capacity for enforcement has been surgically removed. Like a patient who doesn’t realize they’re bleeding internally, our democracy maintains the appearance of health while its vital systems are failing.
Stop. Look at what is happening. Not through the lens of partisan politics or institutional process, but through the basic reality in front of your eyes:
The administration openly declares it won’t follow laws it dislikes. Two plus two equals four.
The enforcement arm of our federal courts is being transformed into a tool of political intimidation. Two plus two equals four.
Private citizens have gained control of highly sensitive government systems while simultaneously developing AI to replace human judgment. Two plus two equals four.
The President explicitly advocates ignoring court orders. Two plus two equals four.
These aren’t complex policy disputes or normal political developments. They are observable facts that point to a single, undeniable reality: we are watching the systematic dismantling of constitutional democracy and its replacement with something fundamentally different—a form of technological autocracy that could permanently eliminate human freedom.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s basic arithmetic. When you eliminate civil service protections, gain control of government systems, develop AI to replace human judgment, and declare your intent to ignore courts—you’re not reforming democracy. You’re eliminating it.
The time for comfortable denial has passed. Either we confront this reality now, while democratic resistance is still possible, or we surrender human autonomy to systems of control so sophisticated they could eliminate not just freedom but the very idea that freedom was possible.
Look at the facts. Add them up. Two plus two equals four.
Because, my friends, the hour is late.
And if you still cannot see it—if you cling to your illusions of normalcy, if you insist that the courts will save you, that the system will hold, that it cannot happen here—then you are not merely blind.
You are complicit.
The blood is on your hands.
And when the last remnants of freedom are crushed beneath the boot of machine-optimized despotism—history will know your name—it will not forgive you. The digital records these days are… quite detailed.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
There’s usually only one reason government officials use personal email accounts: to dodge FOIA requests. The excuses offered by those caught doing it are never credible. And those who do opt for personal email — especially at the federal level — are putting themselves in peril. There are also practical security reasons for using government email addresses.
A lot of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign focused on his opponent’s use of a personal email server to handle official State Department business. The FBI even looked into this before deciding (twice!) Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was careless and stupid, but probably not criminal.
When Trump first took office, he shamelessly did the same thing. Many members of his staff continued to use personal email addresses to conduct government business, both increasing their chances of being compromised by foreign hackers and decreasing the chances that the public could gain access to these communications via FOIA requests.
The trend continues with Trump’s second term. No lessons have been learned during his four years away from the office of president. Or, perhaps, the only lessons Trump and his team desired to learn — that using private email is a pretty good opacity option — have been taken to heart.
Unfortunately for those having to (also unfortunately) welcome him back to office, he and his team’s insistence on using personal email accounts has created security risks that can’t be mitigated without pretty much forgoing electronic communications altogether, as Alice Ollstein reports for Politico:
Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via email with Donald Trump’s transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.
The private emails have agency employees considering insisting on in-person meetings and document exchanges that they otherwise would have conducted electronically, according to two federal officials granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Their anxiety is particularly high in light of recent hacking attempts from China and Iran that targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and other top officials.
If nothing else, this is going to slow down the transition. But more than that, it shows Trump and his hand-picked team are still unwilling to abide by the normal transfer-of-power flow that had pretty much gone uninterrupted until Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the previous election.
Granted, Trump is not officially president yet and his staffers are not yet official government employees. But for the sake of the nation, it would make sense to operate within the normally accepted confines, if for no other reason than doing so decreases the attack surface that can be exploited by hostile nations and their state-sanctioned hacking attempts.
Proving yet again he only cares about anti-Biden optics and maintaining as much direct control of his sycophants, Trump and his team have decided to handle this transition by utilizing an all-you-can-eat buffet of easily-compromised accounts and devices.
Trump — who attacked his then-opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for official business during his first presidential run — is overseeing a fully privatized transition that communicates from an array of @transition47.com, @trumpvancetransition.com and @djtfp24.com accounts rather than anything ending in .gov, and uses private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.
All hail the returning Commander-in-Chief, a man so self-absorbed he’s willing to threaten the security of the nation during his transition back into public office. Not that any of this will matter to him, his team, or his millions of supporters. If nothing else, they’ll present this as another form of “owning the libs” and nail themselves to the nearest cross the moment malicious hackers access anything they’ve deliberately left unprotected. It’s win-win for Trump. But it’s an undeniable loss for the nation and an insult to the long-held expectation that people assuming the office of Leader of the Free World will act respectfully and responsibly when being handed this exorbitant amount of power.
The die is cast. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House – a remarkable victory. But a lot of people who work in the adult entertainment industry are understandably scared. From the concerns for LGBTQ+ rights under the new Trump presidency to access to reproductive care at a state and national level, the next four years will be a significant challenge.
While all valid concerns that I share, it is the specter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda that frightens me most. Previously, I’ve written across various outlets, like Techdirt, to address the “masculine policy” Trump and his new vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, and his allies envision to “make America great again.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the de facto head of Project 2025, a so-called “presidential transition project,” laid out the administration’s position on key culture war issues, such as access to online porn.
Roberts wrote in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025’s incendiary policy treatise nearly 1,000 pages long, that their camp believes “pornography” and “pornographers” should be imprisoned and stripped of First Amendment protection. Some folks have characterized Roberts’ words as simply rhetoric, but the past twelve months have verified a coordinated effort to significantly claw back the rights of all sex workers and adult industry firms.
This time around, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with outspoken Christian nationalists who want to demonize and then criminalize sexual expression that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.
Russell Vought, one of the central architects of Project 2025, was caught on hidden camera a few months ago confirming that the efforts to ban porn will go through a so-called “back door” framework via a patchwork of state-level age verification laws and efforts in a newly GOP-controlled Senate. In addition to that, Vance has supported a porn ban. It was also under Donald Trump’s last term that the FOSTA-SESTA monstrosity that decimated legal sex work on the internet came to fruition. Imagine what will advance under Trump.
Expect to see a renewed effort to advance the Kids Online Safety Act or a beefier version of the bill. The current form of the bill, though supposedly reformed with the input of key LGBTQ+ groups, would make design code the law of the land in an affront to years of case law. As we’ve seen in California, age appropriate design mandates rarely hold up under strict scrutiny. But, relying on the history of FOSTA-SESTA, the Kids Online Safety Act in any form will be a legal flashpoint.
For example, when the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and other civil society organizations sued to render FOSTA unconstitutional, the appeals court in that case, though upholding it, affirmed that it’s overly broad and needs to be narrowly tailored to best address cases of online trafficking while respecting free speech rights. And it’s up to the courts to essentially hold a Trump presidency accountable for any sort of unilateral action taken against legally operating pornography platforms.
The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court is, truly, the only check and balance on key freedom of speech issues moving forward when it comes to the next four years. And it begins in January. Oral arguments are scheduled in Free Speech Coalition et al v. Paxton for January 15, 2025. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the case due to expansive First Amendment implications associated with age verification laws like Texas House Bill (HB) 1181, which specifically targets online adult website operators with requirements to verify the age of users who navigate from local IP addresses. Existing case law suggests that a law like HB 1181 is unconstitutional and clashes with other rulings.
If the Free Speech Coalition is successful, this renders all other age verification laws that specifically target porn websites and require users to submit ID cards or other types of identity verification unconstitutional.
A win at SCOTUS for online speech could set the tone for a successful series of legal victories during Trump’s imperial presidency. That is all we can hope for, right?
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
