Peter Mandelson—the former UK cabinet minister who was just sacked as Britain’s ambassador to the United States over newly revealed emails with Jeffrey Epstein—has found a novel way to avoid answering questions about why he told a convicted sex offender “your friends stay with you and love you” and urged him to “fight for early release.” He got the UK press regulator to send a memo to all UK media essentially telling them to leave him alone.

The National published what they describe as the “secret notice” that went out:

CONFIDENTIAL – STRICTLY NOT FOR PUBLICATION: Ipso has asked us to circulate the following advisory:

Ipso has today been contacted by a representative acting on behalf of Peter Mandelson.

Mr Mandelson’s representatives state that he does not wish to speak to the media at this time. He requests that the press do not take photos or film, approach, or contact him via phone, email, or in-person. His representatives ask that any requests for his comment are directed to [REDACTED]

We are happy to make editors aware of his request. We note the terms of Clause 2 (Privacy) and 3 (Harassment) of the Editors’ Code, and in particular that Clause 3 states that journalists must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist, unless justified in the public interest.

Clauses 2 and 3 of the UK Editor’s Code—the privacy and harassment provisions—exist primarily to protect genuinely vulnerable people from press intrusion. Grieving families. Crime victims. People suffering genuine harassment.

Mandelson is invoking them to avoid answering questions about his documented friendship with one of history’s most notorious pedophiles—a friendship so extensive and problematic that it just cost him his job as ambassador to the United States, days before a presidential state visit.

According to Politico, the UK Foreign Office withdrew Mandelson “with immediate effect” after emails showed the relationship was far deeper than previously known:

In a statement the U.K. Foreign Office said Mandelson had been withdrawn as ambassador “with immediate effect” after emails showed “the depth and extent” of his relationship with Epstein was “materially different from that known at the time of his appointment.”

“In particular Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information,” the statement added.

So we have a senior political figure who just got fired over revelations that he told a convicted sex offender his prosecution was “wrongful” and should be challenged, who maintained this friendship for years longer than he’d admitted, and his response is to invoke press harassment protections?

The notice does include the important qualifier “unless justified in the public interest.” And it’s hard to imagine a clearer case of public interest: a senior diplomat, just sacked from his post, over previously undisclosed communications with a convicted pedophile, in which he expressed support for challenging that pedophile’s conviction. If that’s not public interest, the term has no meaning.

But the mere act of circulating this notice creates a chilling effect. It puts journalists on notice that pursuing this story could result in complaints to the regulator. It’s using the machinery of press regulation as a shield against legitimate accountability journalism.

Now, to be fair, one could imagine scenarios where even a disgraced public figure might legitimately invoke harassment protections—it wasn’t that long ago there was a whole scandal in the UK with journalists hacking the voicemails of famous people. But that’s not what’s happening here. Mandelson is invoking these provisions to avoid being asked questions at all. “Please don’t inquire about why I told a convicted pedophile his prosecution was wrongful” is not the kind of harm these rules were designed to prevent.

This is who Mandelson has always been: someone who sees regulatory and governmental machinery as tools to be deployed on behalf of whoever he’s serving at the moment. Back in 2009, we covered how he returned from a vacation with entertainment industry mogul David Geffen and almost immediately started pushing for aggressive new copyright enforcement measures, including kicking people off the internet for file sharing. As we wrote at the time, he had what we called a “sudden conversion” to Hollywood’s position on internet enforcement that happened to coincide suspiciously with his socializing with entertainment industry executives.

Back then, the machinery was deployed to serve entertainment executives who wanted harsher copyright enforcement. Now it’s being deployed to serve Mandelson himself.

There’s a broader pattern here that goes beyond one UK politician. The Epstein revelations have been remarkable not just for what they’ve revealed about who associated with him, but for how consistently the response from the powerful has been to deflect, deny, and deploy every available mechanism to avoid genuine accountability. Some have used their media platforms to try to reshape the narrative. Some have simply refused to comment.

Mandelson is trying to use the press regulatory system itself.

It’s worth noting that The National chose to publish the “confidential – strictly not for publication” memo anyway, explicitly citing the public interest. Good for them. Because if there’s one thing that absolutely serves the public interest, it’s shining a light on attempts by the powerful to use the systems meant to protect the vulnerable as shields for their own accountability.

Mandelson’s representatives say he “does not wish to speak to the media at this time.” That’s his right to request—but no media should have to agree to his terms. Weaponizing press regulation to create a cone of silence around questions of obvious public interest is something else entirely. It’s elite impunity dressed up in the language of press ethics.

Over the years, we’ve written approximately one million words explaining why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to how the internet functions. We’ve corrected politicians who lie about it. We’ve debunked myths spread by mainstream media outlets that should know better. We’ve explained, re-explained, and then explained again why gutting this law would be catastrophic for online speech.

And now I find myself in the somewhat surreal position of saying: you know who nailed this explanation better than most policy experts, pundits, and certainly better than any sitting member of Congress? A YouTuber named Cr1TiKaL.

If you’re not familiar with Charles “Cr1TiKaL” White Jr., he runs the penguinz0 YouTube channel with nearly 18 million subscribers and over 12 billion total views. He’s known for deadpan commentary on internet culture and video games. He’s not a policy wonk. He’s not a lawyer. He’s just a guy who apparently bothered to actually understand what Section 230 says and does—something that puts him leagues ahead of the United States Congress.

In this 13-minute video responding to actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s call to “sunset” Section 230, Cr1TiKaL laid out the case for why 230 matters with a clarity that most mainstream coverage hasn’t managed in a decade:

Dismantling section 230 would fundamentally change the internet as you know it. And that’s not an exaggeration to say it. Put it even more simply, section 230 allows goobers like me to post whatever they want, saying whatever they want, and the platform itself is not liable for whatever I’ve made or said. 

That is on me personally. 

The platform isn’t going to be, you know, fucking dragged through the streets with legs spread like a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey for it and getting blasted by lawsuits or whatever. Now, of course, there are limitations in place when it comes to illegal content, things that actually break the law. That is, of course, a very different set of circumstances. That’s a different can of worms, and that’s handled differently. But it should be obvious why section 230 is so important because if these platforms were held liable for every single thing people post on their platforms, they would get into a lot of hot water and they would just not allow people to post things. Full stop. because it would be too dangerous to do so. They would need to micromanage and control every single thing that hits the platform in order to protect themselves. No matter how you spin it, this would ruin the internet. It’s a pile of dogshit. No matter how much perfume gets sprayed on it or how they want to repackage it, it still stinks. 

Yes, the metaphors are colorful. But the underlying point is exactly correct. Section 230 places liability where it belongs: on the person who actually created the content. Not on the platform that hosts it. This is how the entire internet works. Every comment section, every social media post, every forum—all of it depends on this basic principle.

Also, he actually reads the 26 words in the video! This is something that so many other critics of 230 skip over, because then they can pretend it says things it doesn’t say.

And unlike the politicians who keep pretending this is some kind of special gift to “Big Tech,” Cr1TiKaL correctly notes that 230 protects everyone:

This would affect literally every platform that has anything user submitted in any capacity at all. 

Every. Single. One. Your local newspaper’s comment section. The neighborhood Facebook group. The subreddit for your favorite hobby. The Discord server where you talk about video games. The email you forward. All of it.

He’s also refreshingly clear-eyed about why politicians from both parties keep attacking 230:

Since the advent of the internet, section 230 has been a target for people that want to control your speech and infringe on your First Amendment rights.

This observation tracks with what we’ve pointed out repeatedly: the bipartisan hatred of Section 230 is one of the most remarkable examples of political unity in modern American governance—and it’s driven largely by politicians who want platforms to moderate content in ways that favor their particular political preferences.

Democrats have attacked 230 claiming it enables “misinformation” and hate speech. Republicans have attacked it claiming it enables “censorship” of conservative voices. Both cannot simultaneously be true, and yet both parties have introduced legislation to gut the law. Cr1TiKaL captures this perfectly:

When Democrats were in charge, it caught a lot of scrutiny, claiming that it was enabling the spread of racism and harming children. With Republicans in power, they’re claiming that it’s spreading misinformation and anti-semitism. This is a bipartisan punching bag that they desperately want to just beat down.

The critics always trot out the same tired arguments about algorithms and echo chambers and extremism. As if removing 230 would somehow make speech better rather than making it disappear entirely or become heavily controlled by whoever has the most money and lawyers. Cr1TiKaL cuts right through this:

There are people that are paying a lot of money to try and plant this idea in your brain that section 230 is a bad thing. It only leads to things like extremism and conspiracy theories and demonization and that kind of thing. That’s not true. 

Anyone who stops and thinks about this for even just a moment, firing on a few neurons, should be able to recognize how outrageous this proposal is. How would shutting down conversation and shutting down the ability to express thoughts and opinions somehow help combat the rise of extremism and conspiracies? that would only exacerbate the problem. Censorship doesn’t solve these issues. It makes them worse. 

He even anticipates the point we’ve made countless times about what the internet would look like without 230:

Platforms would not allow just completely unfiltered usage of normal people expressing their thoughts because those thoughts might go against the official narrative from the curated source and then the curated source might go after the platform saying this is defamatory. These people have just said something hosted on your platform and we’re coming after you with lawsuits. So they just wouldn’t allow it. 

This is a point we keep repeating and you never hear in the actual policy debates, because supporters of a 230 repeal have no answer for it beyond “nuh-uh.”

The people who most want to control online speech are exactly the people you’d expect: governments and powerful interests who don’t like being criticized. Section 230 is one of the things standing in their way.

And when critics inevitably dust off the “think of the children” argument, Cr1TiKaL delivers the response that shouldn’t be controversial but apparently is:

Be a parent. It is not the internet’s job to cater to your lack of parenting by just letting your kid online. Fucking lazy trash ass parents just sit a kid in front of a computer or an iPad and then are stunned when apparently they find bad shit. Be a parent. Be involved in your kids’ life. Raise your children. Don’t make it the internet’s job to do that for you. 

Is this delivered with the diplomatic nuance of a congressional hearing? No. Is it correct? Absolutely. The “protect the children” argument for dismantling 230 has always been a dodge—a way to make critics of the bill seem heartless while ignoring that Section 230 doesn’t protect illegal content and maybe, just maybe, the primary responsibility for what media children consume should rest with the adults responsible for those children.

We’ve been writing about Section 230 for years, trying to explain to policymakers and the general public why it matters. And most of the time, it feels like shouting into the void. Politicians keep lying about it. Journalists keep getting it wrong. The mythology around 230 persists no matter how many times it gets corrected.

And we’ve heard from plenty of younger people who now believe that 230 is bad. I recently guest taught a college class where students were split into two groups—one to argue in favor of 230 and one against—and I was genuinely dismayed when the group told to argue in favor of 230 argue that 230 “once made sense” but doesn’t any more.

So there’s something genuinely hopeful about seeing a young creator with an audience of nearly 18 million people—an audience that skews young and is probably not spending a lot of time reading policy papers—get it right. Not just right in a general sense, but right in the specifics. He read the law. He understood what it does. He correctly identified why it matters and who benefits from dismantling it.

Maybe the generation that grew up on the internet actually understands what’s at stake when politicians threaten to fundamentally reshape how it works. Maybe they’re not buying the moral panic narratives that have been trotted out to justify every bad piece of tech legislation for the past decade.

Or maybe I’m being optimistic. Either way, Cr1TiKaL’s video is worth watching. It’s profane, it’s casual, and it’s more correct about Section 230 than anything you’ll hear from the halls of Congress.

We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something—and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those who insist that it’s all bad and there is nothing of value in it. And there are those who think it’s all powerful, the greatest thing ever, and will replace basically every job with AI bots who can work better and faster.

I think both are wrong, but it’s important to understand why.

So let me lay out how I actually think about it. When it’s used properly, as a tool to assist a human being in accomplishing a goal, it can be incredibly powerful and valuable. When it’s used in a way where the human’s input and thinking are replaced, it tends to do very badly.

And that difference matters.

I think back to a post from Cory Doctorow a couple months ago where he tried to make the same point using a different kind of analogy: centaurs and reverse-centaurs.

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.

As Doctorow notes in his piece, some of the companies embracing AI tech are doing so with the goal of building reverse-centaurs. Those are the ones that people are, quite understandably, uncomfortable with and should be mocked. But the reality is, also, it seems quite likely those efforts will fail.

And they’ll fail not just because they’re dehumanizing—though they are—but because the output is garbage. Hallucinations, slop, confidently wrong answers: that’s what happens when nobody with actual knowledge is checking whether any of it makes sense. When AI works well, it’s because a human is providing the knowledge and the creativity.

The reverse-centaur doesn’t just burn out the human. It produces worse work, because it assumes that the AI can provide the knowledge or the creativity. It can’t. That requires a human. The power of AI tools is in enabling a human to take their own knowledge, and their own creativity and enhance it, to do more with it, based on what the person actually wants.

To me it’s a simple question of “what’s the tool?” Is it the AI, used thoughtfully by a human to do more than they otherwise could have? If so, that’s a good and potentially positive use of AI. It’s the centaur in Doctorow’s analogy.

Or is the human the tool? Is it a “reverse centaur”? I think nearly all of those are destined to fail.

This is why I tend not to get particularly worked up by those who claim that AI is going to destroy jobs and wipe out the workforce, who will be replaced by bots. It just… doesn’t work that way.

At the same time, I find it ridiculous to see people still claiming that the technology itself is no good and does nothing of value. That’s just empirically false. Plenty of people—including myself—get tremendous use out of the technology. I am using it regularly in all different ways. It’s been two years since I wrote about how I used it to help as a first pass editor.

The tech has gotten dramatically better since then, but the key insight to me is what it takes to make it useful: context is everything. My AI editor doesn’t just get my draft writeup and give me advice based on that and its training—it also has a sampling of the best Techdirt articles, a custom style guide with details about how I write, a deeply customized system prompt (the part of AI tools that are often hidden from public view) and a deeply customized starting prompt. It also often includes the source articles I’m writing about. With all that context, it’s an astoundingly good editor. Sometimes it points out weak arguments I missed entirely. Sometimes it has nothing to say.

(As an aside, in this article, it suggested I went on way too long explaining all the context I give it to give me better suggestions, and thus I shortened it to just the paragraph above this one).

It’s not always right. Its suggestions are not always good. But that’s okay, because I’m not outsourcing my brain to it. It’s a tool. And way more often than not, it pushes me to be a better writer.

This is why I get frustrated every time people point out a single AI fail or hallucination without context.

The problem only comes in when people outsource their brains. When they become reverse centaurs. When they are the tool instead of using AI as the tool. That’s when hallucinations or bad info matter.

But if the human is in control, if they’re using their own brain, if they’re evaluating what the tool is suggesting or recommending and making the final decision, then it can be used wisely and can be incredibly helpful.

And this gets at something most people miss entirely: when they think about AI, they’re still imagining a chatbot. They think every AI tool is ChatGPT. A thing you talk to. A thing that generates text or images for you to copy-paste somewhere else.

That’s increasingly not where the action is. The more powerful shift is toward agentic AI—tools that don’t just generate content, but actually do things. They write code and run it. They browse the web and synthesize what they find. They execute multi-step tasks with minimal hand-holding. This is a fundamentally different model than “ask a chatbot a question and get an answer.”

I’ve been using Claude Code recently, and this distinction matters. It’s an agent that can plan, execute, and iterate on actual software projects, rather than just a tool talking to me about what to do. But, again, that doesn’t mean I just outsource my brain to it.

I often put Claude Code into plan mode, where it tries to work out a plan, but then I spend quite a lot of time exploring why it was making certain decisions, and asking it to explore the pros and cons of those decisions, and even to provide me with alternative sources to understand the trade-offs of some of the decisions it is recommending. That back and forth has been both educational for me, but also makes me have a better understanding and be comfortable with the eventual projects I use Claude Code to build.

I am using it as a tool, and part of that is making sure I understand what it’s doing. I am not outsourcing my brain to it. I am using it, carefully, to do things that I simply could not have done before.

And that’s powerful and valuable.

Yes, there are so many bad uses of AI tools. And yes, there is a concerted, industrial-scale effort, to convince the public they need to use AI in ways that they probably shouldn’t, or in ways that is actively harmful. And yes, there are real questions about what it costs to train and run the foundation models. And we should discuss those and call those out for what they are.

But the people who insist the tools are useless and provide nothing of value, that’s just wrong. Similarly, anyone who thinks the tech is going to go away are entirely wrong. There likely is a funding bubble. And some companies will absolutely suffer as it deflates. But it won’t make the tech go away.

When used properly, it’s just too useful.

As Cory notes in his centaur piece, AI can absolutely help you do your job, but the industry’s entire focus is on convincing people it can replace your job. That’s the con. The tech doesn’t replace people. But it can make them dramatically more capable—if they stay in the driver’s seat.

The key to understanding the good and the bad of the AI hype is understanding that distinction. Cory explains this in reference to AI coding:

Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI, and almost without exception, they are senior, experienced coders, who get to decide how they will use these tools. For example, you might ask the AI to generate a set of CSS files to faithfully render a web-page across multiple versions of multiple browsers. This is a notoriously fiddly thing to do, and it’s pretty easy to verify if the code works – just eyeball it in a bunch of browsers. Or maybe the coder has a single data file they need to import and they don’t want to write a whole utility to convert it.

Tasks like these can genuinely make coders more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it’s clear they’re not looking to make some centaurs.

They want to fire a lot of tech workers – they’ve fired 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AIs’ code.

Criticize the hype. Mock the replace-your-workforce promises. Call out the slop factories and the gray goo doomsaying. But don’t mistake the bad uses for the technology itself. When a human stays in control—thinking, evaluating, deciding—it’s a genuinely powerful tool. The important question is just whether you’re using it, or it’s using you.

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales from Texas went on Face the Nation on Sunday and said a lot of silly things, doing his best as a loyal Trump foot soldier to defend the indefensible, to make sense of the nonsensical, and to lie about all the rest.

However, I wanted to focus on one bit of the clip that I’ve watched over a dozen times, and still can’t figure out what Rep. Gonzales meant. And I’m writing this in hopes that some DC or Texas reporter asks Gonzales to explain. Here’s the clip:

And here’s the transcript from CBS. I’m including a bit more than is in the clip just to get the full context of what he’s saying:

MARGARET BRENNAN: You have this facility, though, in your district, Dilley, and that is for family detentions. That’s where little five-year-old Liam Ramos from Minnesota was held before a judge, that’s the picture of him there, ordered him released. He was ordered released because his family has a pending asylum claim, a legal process. He had entered with U.S. government permission through a process that the Biden administration had deemed legal. The current administration does not. The CBPOne app. Liam’s father gave an interview to Telemundo and you read the transcript, he’s talking about this five-year-old. He’s not okay. He’s waking up at night crying. He’s worried he’s going to be taken again. It’s psychological trauma, according to the father. And the administration is still trying to deport him. Do you understand why they are so focused on this five-year-old and his dad if they did come in through the front door with U.S. government permission? 

REP. GONZALES: Well, the front door was via an app that Biden knew exactly what he was doing, and he created this huge mess, and now President Trump is there to clean up.

MARGARET BRENNAN: –but he came in the front door, he wasn’t–

REP. GONZALES: –through an app–

MARGARET BRENNAN: –across the border–

REP. GONZALES: –through an app that wasn’t vetted. And bottom line is, he’s likely- they’re not going to qualify for asylum. So what do you do with all the people that go through the process and do not qualify for asylum? You deport them. I understand the five-year-old and it, you know, it breaks my heart. I have a five year old at home. I also think, what about that five-year-old U.S. citizen–

MARGARET BRENNAN: –You feel comfortable defending that? 

REP. GONZALES: I feel comfortable- we have to have a nation of laws. If we don’t have a nation of laws–

MARGARET BRENNAN: –They were following the- the law that is- that is that’s the rub, is that a new administration deemed the last administration’s regulation not to be legal.

Again, there’s a lot of nonsense in there, including Gonzales trying to pretend that Liam Ramos and his father had not entered the right way and following the laws of the US for those seeking to come here just because it was “through an app.” That app was the legal process. They followed the law. They did it the right way. To magically make that out to be violating the law because the next administration no longer wants to support that path doesn’t change the underlying fact that they were doing things the legal way.

But, again, let’s leave that aside. I simply want to focus in on the question of what the fuck Gonzales meant when he said:

I understand the five-year-old and it, you know, it breaks my heart. I have a five year old at home. I also think, what about that five-year-old U.S. citizen–

What about them? Under what scenario, process, or idea is that hypothetical five-year-old US citizen harmed? I’ve been unable to think or a single possible scenario in which the US citizen five-year-old could be harmed by allowing Liam Ramos to go through the asylum process.

Perhaps Rep. Gonzales can enlighten us by completing his thought and explaining.

Seriously: what is the scenario here? Is pre-kindergarten a zero-sum game now? Does Liam Ramos’s presence in a classroom somehow harm the US citizen in the next seat?

Brennan cut him off before he could finish the thought, and nobody followed up. So we don’t know. But I’d really like someone in the DC or Texas press corps to ask him to complete that sentence. Because I can think of one very obvious way that five-year-old US citizens are being harmed right now—and it’s not by Liam Ramos.

It’s by watching their government kidnap their classmates.

Nicholas Grossman talked about how his own child is distraught because some of his classmates can no longer come to school for fear their parents may be kidnapped by ICE:

Indeed, the NY Times went and actually spoke with Liam Ramos’ classmates, and they seem legitimately distraught that government agents kidnapped their friend and sent him halfway across the country to a dangerous concentration camp. The video on that page is absolutely heartbreaking. I don’t see how anyone with a soul could possibly support or justify what is being done to Ramos. And to claim it’s in the name of his US citizen classmates is even more obnoxious. Just a couple of the quotes from five year olds:

“You are scaring schools, people, and the world. You should be kind, helpful, and caring like normal police. Not dangerous, scary, and stealing people. I think you should make friends with the world.”

“You, right now, you’re making people really sad because you’re just taking them away without them doing anything.”

So, please, Rep. Gonazales, tell us what you were thinking. What about those five-year-olds? What about kidnapping their classmate makes them better off? What about any of this makes sense? They’re not criminals. They followed the official legal process. They came in through “the front door” following the official process of the government at the time.

At no point have they done anything wrong.

So please, Rep. Gonzales: finish the thought. What about that five-year-old US citizen?

Because those five-year-old US citizens have already given their answer. They’re not being harmed by Liam Ramos. They’re being harmed by a government that just taught them their friends can disappear without warning.

That’s “what about” them.

If you watched NBC’s prime time broadcast of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, you saw Vice President JD Vance in the stands at San Siro Stadium in Milan with his wife, Usha. The commentary team said “JD Vance” and moved on. Pleasant enough.

But if you were watching literally any other country’s broadcast—or were actually in the stadium—you heard something else: the crowd booing. Loudly. Jeering. Whistling. CBC’s commentator captured the moment awkwardly:

There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha – oops, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.

Multiple journalists on the ground reported the same thing. The Guardian’s Sean Ingle noted the boos. USA Today’s Christine Brennan noted the boos. The boos were, by all accounts, quite audible to anyone actually present in the stadium.

Timothy Burke put together clips of many other countries broadcasts, many of which called out the boos or discussed criticism of the Trump admin:

Mexico’s broadcast went on at length, including discussing how the US had to change the name of their Olympic village from “ice house” to “winter house” knowing how it would be perceived.

But if you were watching NBC’s broadcast in the United States? Crickets. As the Guardian reported:

However, on the NBC broadcast the boos were not heard or remarked upon when Vance appeared on screen, with the commentary team simply saying “JD Vance”. That didn’t stop footage of the boos being circulated and shared on social media in the US. The White House posted a clip of Vance applauding on NBC’s broadcast without any boos.

For what it’s worth, NBC denies that it “edited” the crowd booing the Vances. But the analysis on that page by the folks at Awful Announcing show pretty clearly that NBC (which ran a live feed of the opening ceremony as well as a prime time version) turned up the sound of music at the moment the Vances were shown on the screen.

Now, look. As a technical and legal matter, NBC has every right to make that editorial choice. Broadcasters exercise editorial discretion over their coverage all the time. They choose camera angles, they choose what to amplify and what to downplay, they shape narratives. That’s not illegal. It’s not even unusual. It’s called being a media company. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion—including editorial discretion that results in coverage that makes politicians look better than reality would suggest.

Of course, that principle cuts both ways. Or at least it should.

We’ve now spent months watching Donald Trump file lawsuit after lawsuit against news organizations for what he claims is “unfair” editing. The theory in these cases is that editing footage in ways that make Trump or his allies look bad is somehow actionable defamation or election interference. It’s a theory that, if accepted, would basically mean the president gets veto power over how he’s portrayed in any news coverage.

Remember, Trump sued CBS over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that the way the interview was edited amounted to “election and voter interference.” That lawsuit was, to put it charitably, legally incoherent nonsense. We covered it at the time, noting that Trump’s supposed smoking gun was that CBS edited an answer for time—you know, the thing every television program in history does, including cutting out the bits that make Trump look bad.

Then there was the $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over a documentary that didn’t even air in the United States. Trump’s legal team actually cited VPN download statistics as evidence of damages, apparently believing that Americans who went out of their way to circumvent geographic restrictions to watch a documentary they weren’t supposed to see somehow constitutes harm to Trump.

Of course, as you already know, CBS, facing the Trump lawsuit while also trying to get FCC approval for the Paramount merger, decided to just… pay up. We called it what it was at the time: a $16 million bribe. Not because CBS thought Trump had a valid legal claim—the lawsuit was obviously baseless—but because CBS was terrified that an angry Trump administration would tank its merger if it didn’t make the lawsuit go away.

And that’s the point. The lawsuits aren’t really about winning in court. They’re about establishing a new norm: favorable coverage or else.

So now we have NBC, which happens to have a rather large interest in staying on the good side of this administration (what with the LA Olympics coming up in 2028 and all the broadcast rights that entails, and you already have Trump and FCC boss Brendan Carr threatening NBC’s late-night comedy hosts), making an editorial choice to mute crowd boos directed at the vice president. And I will bet you every meager dollar I have that no one in Trump’s orbit will say a single word about NBC’s “unfair” editing. No tweets from Trump about “fake news NBC” cutting audio to misrepresent crowd reactions. No lawsuits alleging that NBC’s editorial choices constitute fraud on the American public.

Because the “unfair editing” complaints were never actually about editing. They were about whether the editing made Trump look good or bad. Editing that cuts out boos? That’s just good production values. Editing that makes Harris’s answer seem more coherent? That’s election interference worthy of billions in damages.

This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn’t “be accurate” or “be fair.” The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.

And NBC appears to have learned the lesson well.

Here’s what’s strange about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that made the open internet possible: Both sides of the traditional political spectrum hate it. But for opposite reasons. That, alone, should highlight that something is wrong in their analysis.

Republicans hate it because they say it lets websites censor conservative speech. Democrats hate it because they say it lets websites host dangerous disinformation.

Read those two sentences again.

One side is furious that platforms can moderate. The other side is furious that platforms don’t have to moderate. Both sides are attacking the same 26-word provision of a 30-year-old law—and if you understand why their complaints are contradictory, you understand what Section 230 actually does.

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which contained the mostly unconstitutional Communications Decency Act, which inexplicably contained Section 230. (If you want the full history, I hosted a podcast series about it last year.) And after three decades, there’s now a concerted, bipartisan effort to kill it—by people who either don’t understand what the law does, or understand perfectly well and see its destruction as a path to controlling the flow of information online.

Years back I wrote a piece debunking many of the myths about 230. The myths have only multiplied since.

Both critiques, stripped of their partisan framing, are about the same thing: who gets to control what speech appears where. And Section 230’s answer to both sides is the same: pound sand.

That’s what the law actually does. It doesn’t mandate or prohibit “censorship.” It doesn’t require neutrality (that’s a myth that won’t die). It simply says: if you have a problem with content online, take it up with the person who created it, not the service hosting it. Platforms can moderate however they see fit—aggressively, lightly, inconsistently, politically—and they won’t face ruinous liability for those choices. They also won’t face liability for what they don’t remove.

This is what makes an open internet possible. Without that protection, no service would risk hosting user content at all. Or if they did, every moderation decision would require a lawyer’s sign-off, optimizing for liability reduction rather than healthy communities. The people who actually understand how to build good online spaces—trust and safety professionals, community managers—would be overruled by legal departments playing defense.

Almost all criticism of Section 230 is not actually about Section 230. It’s about one of two things: (1) not liking something in society that manifests online, and incorrectly believing that changing the law will somehow fix it, or (2) wanting control over what content platforms host.

So what happens if critics get their way? There’s a lobbying campaign right now claiming that reforming or repealing 230 will lead to “greater responsibility from tech companies.”

This is exactly backwards.

Without 230’s protections, smaller platforms—the ones that might actually compete with the giants—get destroyed first. They can’t afford the vexatious lawsuits. They can’t afford buildings full of lawyers. The big players survive, and their market position gets locked in even harder.

And those surviving giants won’t become more responsible. They’ll become less. Any competent legal team will tell them: the less you know, the less liability you have. Don’t proactively look for harmful content. Don’t research how your platform causes harm—those findings would be exhibit A in every lawsuit. Just stick your head in the sand and let the lawyers handle the subpoenas.

This is how liability regimes work, and America’s exceptionally litigious legal culture makes these incentives even stronger. The critics either don’t understand this or don’t care, because their actual goal was never “responsibility.” It was control. That they’ve duped some tech critics into thinking it’s about “responsibility” or “safety” doesn’t change that. Because it won’t improve responsibility or safety. But it will give politicians tremendous power over online speech.

Thirty years ago, a 26-word provision buried in a mostly unconstitutional law kicked off the open internet. It let anyone build a platform, host a community, create something new—without needing permission from lawyers or regulators first. That era is now under direct attack by people who misrepresent what Section 230 does and misrepresent what killing it would mean.

The open web turned 30 this weekend. The bipartisan campaign to kill it was never about responsibility or safety, it was always about control. Whether the open web sees age 31 comes down to 26 words that tell both sides to pound sand.

Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice’s unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted about in what was itself likely a violation of the law governing such complaints, accused Boasberg of violating judicial ethics by… privately expressing concerns to other judges that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.

Concerns that, as we noted at the time, turned out to be entirely justified.

Let’s back up and explain what happened. The DOJ’s complaint centered on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a private Judicial Conference meeting on March 11, 2025, where he supposedly “push[ed] a wholly unsolicited discussion about ‘concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.'” The complaint cited “Attachment A” as evidence of what Boasberg said.

There was just one small problem: the DOJ never actually provided Attachment A with the complaint. Actually, there were many, many problems, but we’ll get to those.

The complaint has now been fully resolved, and it went about as well for the DOJ as you might expect. Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, to whom Chief Justice Roberts transferred the complaint, dismissed it in a brusque seven-page ruling that reads like a judge who is deeply unimpressed with having his time wasted.

As court-watcher Steve Vladeck put it in his detailed breakdown of the ruling:

Chief Judge Sutton’s ruling is not just a tour de force in how a judicial ruling can persuasively give the back of its hand to a claim; it is, or at least ought to be, a humiliating smackdown for the Department of Justice—which bungled every single aspect of its misconduct complaint, from publicly announcing it to making spurious arguments about what the alleged misconduct actually was (the distinction between “public” and “private” really shouldn’t be hard, nor should the fact that March 11 is prior to March 15) to refusing to provide the very evidence on which the complaint purported to rest.

Vladeck also noted, in discussing how the DOJ never actually followed through on the steps it would obviously take if it were a legitimate complaint,that this proved how it was all political in the first place:

It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.

Besmirching a long-time judge… for the memes.

The problems with the DOJ’s complaint were numerous, but let’s start with the most embarrassing one mentioned above: the DOJ never actually provided the evidence it claimed supported its accusations.

The Department identified one source of evidence, Attachment A, for the judge’s statement and for the setting in which it occurred. The complaint, however, did not include the attachment. The D.C. Circuit contacted the Department about the missing attachment and explained that, if it failed to submit the attachment, the circuit would consider the complaint as submitted. The Department did not supply the attachment.

In the absence of the attachment, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said during the Conference, when he said it, whether he said it in response to a question, whether he said it during the Conference or at another meeting, and whether he expressed these concerns as his own or as those of other judges. Later in the complaint, to be sure, the Department refers to a Fox News clip discussing the same allegation. But it does not identify any source, contain any specifics, or answer any of the above questions. A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint

So the DOJ filed an unprecedented misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge, made a huge public spectacle of it, and then when asked to actually produce the evidence supposedly supporting its claims… just didn’t. Vladeck’s assessment is appropriately blunt:

DOJ’s failure to produce Attachment A is, frankly, mind-boggling…

But even putting aside the DOJ’s failure to provide any actual evidence, Sutton methodically demolished every other theory in the complaint.

On the claim that Boasberg’s comments at the Judicial Conference were somehow improper, Sutton pointed out that this is literally what the Judicial Conference is for:

A key point of the Judicial Conference and the related meetings is to facilitate candid conversations about judicial administration among leaders of the federal judiciary about matters of common concern. In these settings, a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct. Confirming the point, the Chief Justice’s 2024 year-end report raised general concerns about threats to judicial independence, security concerns for judges, and respect for court orders throughout American history

(For what it’s worth, as someone who had the privilege a couple years back of being invited to a judicial conference to give a talk, I can confirm firsthand that there were many fascinating informal conversations that occurred over the course of a few days among judges comparing notes and thinking through larger issues that might impact the judiciary).

On the DOJ’s claim that Boasberg’s comments constituted an improper “public comment” on a pending case, Sutton noted two rather obvious problems: the comments were private, not public, and the case the DOJ was concerned about hadn’t even been filed yet:

The alleged comment does not refer to a case, and the J.G.G. action was not filed until four days later: March 15, 2025. Because the judge did not refer to a case, that all but guarantees that his comments did not “violate[] Canon 3A(6), Canon 2A, or the Judicial–Conduct Rules.” In re Charges of Jud. Misconduct, 769 F.3d 762, 788 (D.C. Cir. 2014). The comment at any rate was not a “public” one, as it was made in a closed-door meeting in which the communications are off the record and confidential. The complaint, notably, does not claim that the judge made public what was said in private at the Conference or its related meetings.

As for the DOJ’s argument that Boasberg’s subsequent handling of the J.G.G. case (involving the shipping of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp) somehow proved bias, Sutton wasn’t having that either. The complaint, he noted, “does not explain how a Supreme Court ruling about a prior action by the judge necessarily shows willful indifference when the judge addresses a distinct set of circumstances in a later ruling.”

Furthermore, Sutton points out that if the DOJ doesn’t like Boasberg’s rulings in a particular case, its remedy is… to appeal. Not claim misconduct:

When the executive branch’s deep convictions about the law meet the judicial branch’s deep convictions about the law in a trial court, the answer is to invoke the appellate process, not the misconduct process, to resolve the dispute.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Sutton reminded the DOJ that even if it had prevailed, the judicial misconduct process can’t do what the DOJ apparently wanted it to do:

To the extent the complaint asks that the underlying case be reassigned to another judge, that is not a form of relief available through the complaint process.

In other words:

1. the DOJ filed a complaint
2. that was based on misleading evidence
3. which it never produced
4. alleging misconduct that (even if true) wasn’t actually misconduct
5. propped up with claims of bias based on actions that occurred later
6. which could not be signs of bias, and finally
7. sought relief that wasn’t even available.

If the DOJ were capable of embarrassment, this would be the time for it.

In his initial post on the complaint last year when it was filed, Vladeck had noted that the entire complaint was supposed to be a warning to other judges to shut up about any concerns about the Trump admin. One hopes that this ruling by Judge Sutton will reverse that and embolden more judges to do what’s right.

But wait, there’s more.

Because we now have even more evidence of just how absurd this whole episode was, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the mysterious Attachment A that the DOJ never produced. And thanks to that lawsuit, we’ve learned something remarkable: neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can actually explain how the DOJ came to possess this document in the first place.

In a declaration filed in that case, DOJ Senior Counsel Vanessa Brinkmann reveals some truly remarkable details about this document that was supposedly central to the DOJ’s case against Boasberg. First, the DOJ confirms the document exists and describes what it is:

Upon initial review of the document identified in this action as “Attachment A,” OIP observed that the document is a memorandum that bears the markings of a United States Court, is authored by a Federal Judge, and discusses matters internal to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

So it’s a document created by the judiciary, for the judiciary, about internal judiciary matters. And what does the judiciary think about the DOJ having this document? They’re not happy:

AOUSC Counsel conveyed to OIP, in no uncertain terms, the Federal Judiciary’s strenuous objection to the Department’s release of “Attachment A.” AOUSC Counsel further articulated that “Attachment A” was created to be an internal Judiciary document, for a specific Judiciary audience, concerning confidential Judiciary matters and is not now, nor was it ever an Executive Branch document. In sum, AOUSC Counsel advised OIP that it is the position of the AOUSC that “Attachment A” remains under the control of the Judicial Branch, is confidential, and is not subject to disclosure pursuant to the FOIA.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. How did the DOJ get this internal judiciary document in the first place? Apparently, nobody knows:

AOUSC Counsel further stated that the Judiciary made efforts to identify how “Attachment A” ended up in the possession of the Department and has not been able to identify a source of transmission of “Attachment A” from within the Judiciary to the Department. AOUSC Counsel additionally articulated that the Judiciary did not officially transmit or authorize the transmission of “Attachment A” to the Department or any external recipient. Specifically, AOUSC Counsel explained that, given the privileged nature of the document, the Judicial Conference at large would be the only entity that could approve its official release, and that it is the view of the AOUSC that the document is not an Executive Branch record subject to FOIA disclosure, but rather, a judicial record that remains under the control of the Judicial Branch.

And the DOJ’s own investigation into how it acquired this document?

Searches conducted of DOJ leadership office officials’ Departmental email accounts using e-discovery software revealed no electronic trail indicating transmission of “Attachment A” into the Department, nor has OIP’s point of contact within OAG been able to identify how “Attachment A” was received by the Department.

So let’s recap again:

1. the DOJ filed an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge based on a document that
2. it never actually provided as evidence
3. was created by the judiciary for internal purposes
4. the judiciary never authorized to be shared with the DOJ, and
5. neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can explain how the DOJ obtained in the first place.

This is the same DOJ that Attorney General Bondi claimed was acting to protect “the integrity of the judiciary.”

All of this suggests that perhaps one of Vladeck’s theories for why the DOJ refused to hand over Attachment A may have some weight behind it. He theorized that either Attachment A doesn’t actually say what the DOJ claims or that they got it “through means that it’s unwilling to have to identify—even confidentially as part of the judicial misconduct process.” The declaration in the FOIA case would seem to bolster that last point.

As Vladeck notes, Sutton’s dismissal should be the final word on this matter:

The outcome here should be seen for what it is: how a sober-minded jurist actually views these charges, versus how they’re manipulated and broadcast by the Department of Justice and right-wing mouthpieces to serve partisan political ends.

As for the less sober-minded among the commentariat:

Anyone who continues to claim at this point that Chief Judge Boasberg has done anything worthy of further investigation and/or impeachment is telling on themselves.

But of course, that would require the people pushing this narrative to care about things like facts, evidence, and the rule of law. Based on the DOJ’s conduct in this case, that seems like a lot to ask.

For over half a century, the CIA’s World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”

And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has “sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.

Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn’t mince words about what happened:

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely..

That’s exactly right. If the CIA decided they no longer wanted to maintain the Factbook—fine. You could make an argument for that. But the decision to not just stop updating it, but to actively destroy access to it without any advance notice is something else entirely. You couldn’t even grab a final copy before it vanished.

The CIA’s official statement on the closure is a masterclass in saying nothing:

One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.

Okay and… why did you suddenly shut it down? They don’t say.

That’s followed by a brief history of the publication—it started classified in 1962, went unclassified in 1971, hit the web in 1997—and then this parting thought:

Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it… in person or virtually.

Gee, thanks. Super helpful. “We deleted the thing you relied on. Go touch grass or something.”

The New York Times reported that the shutdown happened while students at Boston University were literally in the middle of an open-Factbook exam:

The sudden closure of the Factbook’s website, with all of its entries no longer available to the public, left Jay Zagorsky’s business students at Boston University in the lurch midway through an exam due at midnight the next day.

His exams are regularly open-Factbook, and two questions relied on its famously tidy tables of economic certainty. In an instant, a trusted companion of lectures and late-night problem sets was gone.

“That was a great joy this afternoon,” Mr. Zagorsky said in an interview on Wednesday evening, recalling the moment faculty colleagues had begun talking to one another in disbelief. “Oh my god. What do we do? The Factbook just went offline? How do we let them finish the answers on the exams?”

Professors scrambling to figure out how to let students finish exams because a government agency couldn’t be bothered to give notice before nuking a 54-year-old publication. That’ll teach you to rely on anything from this government, I guess.

The Factbook wasn’t just a nice-to-have reference for academics. Lawyers have noted that it was regularly used in asylum cases as a trusted, objective source for country conditions (maybe that’s why they killed it?). When you’re trying to establish that a country is dangerous enough to warrant asylum, citing the CIA’s own publicly available data tends to carry some weight. That resource is now just… gone. With no replacement.

To try to salvage what he could of the Factbook, Willison took matters into his own hands. He found that until 2020, the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site to the Internet Archive. He downloaded the 2020 version and threw it up on GitHub with Pages enabled, so at least something remains accessible. It’s now six years out of date, but it’s better than the nothing the CIA has left us with.

And that’s what makes this so frustrating. The Factbook was public domain. It was created with taxpayer money. There was absolutely no legal or technical reason the CIA couldn’t have left the existing site up with a banner saying “no longer maintained” or given users time to archive their own copies. Instead, they chose to 302 redirect every single page to their farewell note, as if the goal was specifically to make sure no one could access anything.

There’s already a FOIA request in the works to try to obtain both the current data and the explanation for why this happened. But the fact that we need a FOIA request to find out why a public domain government reference tool was suddenly erased should tell you everything you need to know about where we are.

The Times did find one former intelligence official who wasn’t sad to see it go:

“C.I.A. is not the Library of Congress,” Ms. Sanner said with a laugh. “The intelligence community shouldn’t be your librarian.”

Sure. But when you’ve been the librarian for 54 years and people have built workflows around your library, you don’t get to just burn it down overnight and tell everyone to “stay curious.”

This has all the hallmarks of the current administration’s broader war on publicly available information. Data.gov scrubbed of climate information. USAID websites vanishing completely (along with the agency). Government research going dark. The World Factbook is just the latest casualty in what appears to be a systematic effort to make the federal government’s own information harder to access.

The CIA hasn’t said why they did this. It hasn’t said who made the decision. It didn’t even release the data in some other format. It just went dark and told everyone just to “stay curious about the world.”

Some of us are curious why our own government keeps removing public access to information.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• House Judiciary Releases EU X Fine Details (House Judiciary X Account)
• New Report Exposes European Commission Decade-Long Campaign to Censor American Speech (House Judiciary Committee)
• X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok (BBC)
• Hey Gavin Newsom! Investigating TikTok’s Moderation Is Just As Unconstitutional As When Texas & Florida Tried It (Techdirt)
• Spain Aims to Ban Social Media for Children Under 16, Prime Minister Says (NY Times)
• TikTok Keyword Analysis (LinkedIn)
• Why newsrooms are taking comments seriously again (New_ Public)
• Whoops, Websites Realize That Killing Their Comment Sections Was A Mistake (Techdirt)

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s 2026 Bingo Card!

For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion (and even suggested that the plaintiffs had fabricated some of the facts, unsupported by reality).

But now we have actual, documented cases of the federal government using its surveillance apparatus to track down and intimidate Americans for nothing more than criticizing government policy. And wouldn’t you know it, the same people who spent years screaming about censorship are suddenly very quiet.

If any of the following stories had happened under the Biden administration, you’d hear screams from the likes of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, about the crushing boot of the government trying to silence speech.

But somehow… nothing. Weiss is otherwise occupied—busy stripping CBS News for parts to please King Trump. And the dude bros who invented the “censorship industrial complex” out of their imaginations? Pretty damn quiet about stories like the following.

Taibbi is spending his time trying to play down the Epstein files and claiming Meta blocking ICE apps on direct request from DHS isn’t censorship because he hasn’t seen any evidence that it’s because of the federal government. Dude. Pam Bondi publicly stated she called Meta to have them removed. Shellenberger, who is now somehow a “free speech professor” at Bari Weiss’ collapsing fake university, seems to just be posting non-stop conspiracy theory nonsense from cranks.

Let’s start with the case that should make your blood boil. The Washington Post reports that a 67-year-old retired Philadelphia man — a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the UK — found himself in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security after he committed the apparently unforgivable sin of… sending a polite email to a government lawyer asking for mercy in a deportation case.

Here’s what he wrote to a prosecutor who was trying to deport an Afghani man who feared the Taliban would take his life if sent there. The Philadelphia resident found the prosecutors email and sent the following:

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

That’s it. That’s the email that triggered a federal response. Within hours — hours — of sending this email, Google notified him that DHS had issued an administrative subpoena demanding his personal information. Days later, federal agents showed up at his door.

Showed. Up. At. His. Door.

A retired guy sends a respectful email asking the government to be careful with someone’s life, and within the same day, the surveillance apparatus is mobilized against him.

The tool being weaponized here is the administrative subpoena (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade, under administrations of both parties) which is a particularly insidious instrument because it doesn’t require a judge’s approval. Unlike a judicial subpoena, where investigators have to show a judge enough evidence to justify the search, administrative subpoenas are essentially self-signed permission slips. As TechCrunch explains:

Unlike judicial subpoenas, which are authorized by a judge after seeing enough evidence of a crime to authorize a search or seizure of someone’s things, administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies, allowing investigators to seek a wealth of information about individuals from tech and phone companies without a judge’s oversight.

While administrative subpoenas cannot be used to obtain the contents of a person’s emails, online searches, or location data, they can demand information specifically about the user, such as what time a user logs in, from where, using which devices, and revealing the email addresses and other identifiable information about who opened an online account. But because administrative subpoenas are not backed by a judge’s authority or a court’s order, it’s largely up to a company whether to give over any data to the requesting government agency.

The Philadelphia retiree’s case would be alarming enough if it were a one-off. It’s not. Bloomberg has reported on at least five cases where DHS used administrative subpoenas to try to unmask anonymous Instagram accounts that were simply documenting ICE raids in their communities. One account, @montcowatch, was targeted simply for sharing resources about immigrant rights in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The justification? A claim that ICE agents were being “stalked” — for which there was no actual evidence.

The ACLU, which is now representing several of these targeted individuals, isn’t mincing words:

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again. That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

This is textbook chilling effects on speech.

Remember, it was just a year and a half ago in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court found no First Amendment violation when the Biden administration sent emails to social media platforms—in part because the platforms felt entirely free to say no. The platforms weren’t coerced; they could ignore the requests and did.

Now consider the Philadelphia retiree. He sends one polite email. Within hours, DHS has mobilized to unmask him. Days later, federal agents are at his door. Does that sound like someone who’s free to speak his mind without consequence?

Even if you felt that what the Biden admin did was inappropriate, it didn’t involve federal agents showing up at people’s homes.

That is what actual government suppression of speech looks like. Not mean tweets from press secretaries that platforms ignored, but federal agents showing up at your door because you sent an (perfectly nice) email the government didn’t like.

So we have DHS mobilizing within hours to identify a 67-year-old retiree who sent a polite email. We have agents showing up at citizens’ homes to interrogate them about their protected speech. We have the government trying to unmask anonymous accounts that are documenting law enforcement activities — something that is unambiguously protected under the First Amendment.

Recording police, sharing that recording, and doing so anonymously is legal. It’s protected speech. And the government is using administrative subpoenas to try to identify and intimidate the people doing it.

For years, we heard that government officials sending emails to social media companies — emails the companies ignored — constituted an existential threat to the First Amendment. But when the government actually uses its coercive power to track down, identify, and intimidate citizens for their speech?

Crickets.

This is what a real threat to free speech looks like. Not “jawboning” that platforms can easily refuse, but the full weight of federal surveillance being deployed against anyone who dares to criticize the administration. The chilling effect here is the entire point.

As the ACLU noted, this appears to be “part of a broader strategy to intimidate people who document immigration activity or criticize government actions.”

If you spent the last few years warning about government censorship, this is your moment. This is the actual thing you claimed to be worried about. But, of course, all those who pretended to care about free speech really only meant they cared about their own team’s speech. Watching the government actually suppress critics? No big deal. They probably deserved it.