The backlash to this occurring was swift and severe. It came from both local politicians and from the public around the country. The purity of just how bad and wrong this was hit a nerve. And, now, the county has caved to that pressure and have immediately reinstated Roots back onto public school bookshelves.

Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk said the district will return the 1976 novel to school library shelves, walking back a decision that had added Roots to a growing list of banned books and ignited debate about race, history and the reach of state law into public school libraries.

In a memo to the Knox County Board of Education dated May 26, 2026, Rysewyk said the decision to return Roots to shelves was effective immediately and that the initial removal “was in no way a commentary on the historical, cultural, or literary value of the novel.

And that’s bullshit, of course. Many of the other quotes from Rysewyk are very carefully lawyered, but this one stands out as obvious nonsense. Removing a book, any book, from school shelves is absolutely a commentary on the historical, cultural, and literary value of that book. You’re making a decision to hide away a literary work from children. If the work had value to those children, you wouldn’t be banning it.

Rysewyk goes on to note that he consulted with many lawyers on the passage that led to the book being banned and that there was no consensus whether that passage actually violated Tennessee’s law or not and that that’s why he reinstated it. Then he dropped this gem.

“Removing any book from circulation is, and should be, an immense decision. Our intent will always be to err on the side of access, which is the decision I have made with regard to “Roots,”” Rysewyk said.

No. No it won’t. Because last week was part of “always” and the initial decision was to err on the side of not pissing off racist goobers and removing access. Nice try, though. It was only when the revolt started coming from within the school board itself that Rysewyk was forced to walk this all back.

Knox County School board member Katherine Bike sent a memo to her colleagues demanding the book’s return. 

“Removing Roots is not a neutral act,” Bike wrote. “It sends a message to our students, particularly our Black students, about whose history is worth protecting. I don’t believe that is the message any of us intends to send. Intent and impact are two different things.” 

On Tuesday after the reversal was announced, State Rep. Sam McKenzie, whose district includes the Haley statue, called the ban a grave injustice and said he was disappointed but not surprised. 

“’Roots’ won a Pulitzer Prize and became a cultural touchstone that inspired and united millions of Americans,” McKenzie said. “I knew that taking it out of the hands of thousands of schoolchildren in Knox County would be a grave injustice.”

Now, what this should immediately result in is a recognition that public backlash can reverse bad policy. There are over 120 other books that are currently on the Knox County banned book list, not to mention similar anti-literature lists from the state’s other counties. Every one of them should get similar backlash. Banning Roots failed to work because of the name recognition of the book, the local interest in its author, and its obvious value to children. I have no reason to believe that there aren’t plenty of other works of literature in the other 120-plus books on the list worthy of defending.

That’s where the work actually needs to be done, now. Because the only thing we should be banning is the banning of books.

In Baltimore County, Maryland on Oct. 20, 2025, a 17-year-old student named Taki Allen was sitting outside his high school after football practice when an artificial intelligence-enhanced surveillance camera falsely identified the Doritos bag in his pocket as a gun. Within moments police cars arrived, officers drew their weapons and Allen was forced to his knees and handcuffed while they searched him. All they found was a crumpled bag of chips. The AI’s misidentification and the human decisions that followed turned a normal evening into a traumatic confrontation.

On Dec. 24, 2025, Angela Lipps, a Tennessee grandmother, was released after spending five months in jail because facial recognition software had incorrectly connected her to fraud crimes in North Dakota, a state she had never visited. Police had arrested her at gunpoint while she was babysitting her four grandchildren.

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

We are researchers who study the intersection of technology, law and public administration. In researching how police departments use AI and how digital technologies operate in a democratic society, we have seen how quickly the shift from probabilistic prediction to operational certainty happens in practice.

AI policing tools are used in dozens of U.S. cities, although no public registry tracks the full footprint. The tools ingest historical crime data and score neighborhoods on predicted risk so officers can be routed toward the resulting hot spots. The mechanism is straightforward, but its consequence is not. Once a system signals a possible threat, the question is no longer how certain the prediction is but what to do about it. A statistical output turns into a deployment decision, and the uncertainty that produced it gets lost on the way.

A matter of probabilities

When generative AI models such as ChatGPT or Claude respond to human requests, they are not searching a database and pulling out facts. They are predicting the most likely answer based on patterns in data they have been trained on. When asked, “Who invented the light bulb?” the models do not go to a source or fact-check a finding. They generate a statistically probable answer which is “Thomas Edison.” The reply might be right, but it might not capture the full story – such as Joseph Swan’s parallel invention at the same time as Edison’s. The danger arises when people believe that the model is retrieving truth rather than generating likelihoods.

This distinction matters. The most probable response is not the same as a factually verified answer, complete with context.

This reality can be highly problematic for policing and law. For example, when law enforcement agencies use AI systems trained on geographical data to estimate where criminal activity is likely to occur, the algorithms analyze historical crime data and geographic patterns. These systems generate statistical risk scores or heat maps for locations based on prior incidents. But such predictions may have little bearing on who was involved in a new crime in the area, even if an algorithm generates information that sounds authoritative.

Some researchers have argued that predictive policing systems do not increase the likelihood that racial minorities will be arrested more often relative to traditional policing practices. The broader concern, however, is not limited to measurable disparities in arrest outcomes alone. It is about how probabilistic predictions can become standardized operational decisions absent further verification.

Artificial intelligence researchers caution against using these models in isolation for crime and legal proceedings or decision-making. Research at the University of Virginia’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab with police chiefs shows that some law enforcement groups follow strict policies that dictate when technology is used in tandem with, or in place of, human discretion, while others have no such policy.

What most users do not realize is that AI systems rarely produce binary answers: yes or no, a positive identification or a negative one. They generate probabilities. Some systems assign scores that assess the system’s confidence in a prediction. In those cases, engineers set a confidence threshold, a level of certainty that determines when the system should trigger an alert about a possible threat. You can think of this threshold as settings on a control knob. A 95% confidence level, for example, indicates that the model considers its interpretation to be highly likely.

A low threshold catches more potential threats but increases false alarms. A high threshold reduces mistakes but risks missing real dangers. Either way, these algorithmic thresholds are often invisible to the public and are set quietly by vendors or agencies, even though they shape when police action begins.

Where to draw the line

In medicine, these kinds of trade-offs are explicit. Diagnostic tools are calibrated on the relative harm of different errors. In infectious disease settings, for instance, systems that detect infections are often designed to accept more false positives to avoid missing contagious individuals. Then medical professionals look into the human cases. And the algorithm-based decisions are subject to professional standards, ethics reviews and regulatory oversight.

In policing, an AI system must balance false positives, where the system flags a threat that does not exist, and false negatives, where it fails to detect a real danger. The trade-off carries significant consequences. A lower threshold may generate more alerts and allow officers to intervene earlier, but it also increases the risk of mistaken identifications, which happened to Angela Lipps, or escalated encounters like the one Taki Allen experienced. A higher threshold may reduce wrongful interventions but could allow legitimate threats to go undetected.

Some law enforcement agencies argue that acting on imperfect signals is preferable to missing serious risks. But lowering the bar for algorithmic alerts based on probabilistic estimates effectively expands the number of people subjected to police attention. It is important to realize that these thresholds are not neutral features of the technology; they are choices embedded by the creators in the model’s code. Decisions about where to draw the line determine when an algorithmic suspicion becomes a real-world police action, even though the public rarely sees or debates how those thresholds are set.

Limits of optimization

Developers often use several methods to determine where to set a confidence threshold. Techniques such as “receiver operating characteristic curve analysis” examine how changing the threshold for an alert alters the balance between correctly identifying real events and mistakenly flagging harmless ones. Precision–recall analysis examines a similar trade-off, asking how accurate the system’s alerts are relative to the number of incidents it successfully detects.

These approaches could help calibrate systems more responsibly by testing how often an algorithm wrongly flags people or locations. Fine-tuning can improve system performance. But the techniques cannot resolve the underlying question of how much algorithmic uncertainty society is willing to tolerate.

In law, legal standards of proof determine how convincing evidence must be before a judge or jury can rule in favor of a plaintiff or defendant. Courts use formal standards of proof depending on the stakes, such as probable cause, preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt. These standards reflect a societal judgment about how much uncertainty is acceptable before exercising legal authority. A court does not accept a guess or a prediction; it follows a process to weigh evidence. Unlike humans, an AI model does not usually say, “I’m not sure.” A model typically has confidence in its reply, even when the answer is incorrect.

Stakes are rising as AI enters the courtroom, law enforcement, the classroom, the doctor’s office and the public sector. It is important for people to understand that AI does not know things the way many assume it does. It does not distinguish between “maybe” and “definitely.” That is up to us. We believe that technologists should design systems that admit uncertainty and need to educate users about how to interpret AI outputs responsibly.

Maria Lungu is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Law and Public Administration at University of Virginia and Steven L. Johnson, is Associate Professor of Commerce at University of Virginia

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Boring Internet (Terry Godier)
• Orkney Library & Archive (Bluesky)
• Silicon Valley takes its AI pitch to the pope (Politico)
• Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s remarks on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas” (Anthropic)
• Vance calls Pope Leo’s AI warnings ‘profound’ (NBC News)
• American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake? (Le Grand Continent)
• Spotify chief defends AI-generated music (Financial Times)
• OpenAI readies cyber, misinformation defenses ahead of elections (Axios)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• In a surprise, Meta increases funding to the Oversight Board (Platformer)
• Spotlight: Five Years of the Oversight Board, from Experiment to Essential Institution (Ctrl-Alt-Speech)

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

But in one of those cases, a judge has told the Justice Department to halt all activity related to the fund until there’s been more briefing.

The case was filed by a semi-random collection of people and organizations, including a former AUSA who headed up the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists (and who Trump fired) named Andrew Floyd, but also a California professor who was arrested for protesting ICE nonsense, the city of New Haven in Connecticut, the National Abortion Federation, and Common Cause. Each has credible reasons to try to stop this slush fund from coming into existence.

The complaint details the MAGA obsession with the mostly false claims that Democrats weaponized the government against MAGA:

The creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund follows directly from President Trump and his allies’ longstanding and frequent accusations that Democrats used the government and the legal system as political weapons.

For example, in June 2023, after DOJ charged then-former President Trump with mishandling classified documents, Trump posted a video on social media exclaiming, “This is warfare for the law . . . . Our country is going to hell, and they come after Donald Trump, weaponizing the Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI.”

Republican lawmakers quickly adopted the same language. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “the weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” and then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pledged on Twitter that House Republicans would “hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

Even before his election to a second term, members of President Trump’s campaign spent months developing a scheme to compensate those of Trump’s political allies who were purportedly the victims of “weaponization.”

It further notes that while MAGA keeps whining about weaponization, it appears to be doing far more weaponization of the government than anything Democrats have ever even been accused of doing. And, they point out that the Trump administration (while weaponizing the government) only seems to point to faux claims of weaponization by Democrats, refusing to even suggest their own side has ever done anything wrong and abused the levers of power:

Notably, none of the administration’s efforts to combat “weaponization” include any mention or review of abuses of government authority by Republican officials.

But Trump himself has used “the levers of government power” in unprecedented ways “to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.” See Ex. A ¶ II.C.

During his first term, Trump broke historical norms by being the first president to reject the post-Watergate firewall that separated the White House’s political decisions from independent DOJ criminal investigations.

In his second term, Trump has been arrogating and using power in increasingly unprecedented and abusive ways to carry out his personal political agenda.

For example, DOJ has sought indictments against Trump’s political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic members of Congress. 23 It has also launched investigations into Trump’s critics like California Senator Adam Schiff, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former Special Counsel Jack Smith. 24 Trump revoked the security clearances of 50 people he accused of aiding former President Biden’s presidential campaign, including former top intelligence officials. Exec. Order No. 14152, Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information, 90 Fed. Reg. 8343 (Jan. 20, 2025).

The complaint shows how this is nothing more than a slush fund for often law-breaking Trump allies:

Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy over the January 6 insurrection, said he planned to apply to the Fund. He said that he assumed he could get between $2 and $5 million.

Jenny Cudd, another January 6 defendant, told reporters that “all J6ers will apply for restitution,” noting that news of the Anti-Weaponization Fund was widely circulating among January 6 defendants on social media and “group chats.”

Caroline Engelbrecht, a prominent election denier and founder of True the Vote, a group that amplified conspiracies that the 2020 election was stolen, stated: “I would put myself and True the Vote … squarely in that camp who have been targeted, and we have the receipts to show just how deep that targeting ran. And hopefully, we will see some level of compensation.”

Several attorneys aligned with Trump’s allies have confirmed that they, too, have already received many requests about submitting claims to the Fund.

For example, Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, which defends and advocates on behalf of abortion opponents prosecuted under the FACE Act, said his group is “actively exploring available avenues to seek compensation for clients who were unfairly targeted by politically motivated government overreach.”

The judge declined to formally grant a temporary restraining order, but functionally accomplished the same thing by ordering that the DOJ cannot do anything regarding the fund until after there’s been more briefing on the details here.

Because full briefing of the issue will enhance the ability of the Court to make a sound decision. plaintiffs’ Expedited Motion, [Dkt. No. 30], is DENIED and defendants’ request for additional time is GRANTED; however, to ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the AntiWeaponization Fund (hereinafter, “Fund”) while plaintiffs’ Motion is pending, it is hereby ORDERED that defendants be and are ENJOINED from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund;

The judge set an aggressive briefing schedule: the government must file its opposition by next Friday, plaintiffs reply by the following Wednesday, with a hearing shortly after.

This is a temporary hold, not a permanent win. The government gets to file its opposition, there will be briefing, there will be a hearing. The fund could still come into existence. But for now, at least one federal judge decided that maybe — maybe — the DOJ shouldn’t be disbursing $1.776 billion to Proud Boys leaders and election deniers before anyone’s had a chance to argue why that’s an extraordinarily bad idea.

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Then it went to where the real bias has always existed: US law enforcement agencies. It promised to tie their systems in with those deployed by private citizens. It attempted to talk Ring (another company with too-close ties to cops) into bed, before shitting the shared bed in front of hundreds of millions of TV viewers during the most recent Super Bowl.

Flock’s reputation had already been in steep decline prior to the Super Bowl debacle, but that aborted arranged marriage saw its shady doings exposed to millions who previously weren’t aware there was a surveillance camera company even less concerned about rights and privacy than Ring.

Flock was doing things even Ring wouldn’t do. It was telling citizens one thing and giving cops something else entirely: a nationwide surveillance network with built-in ALPR (automatic license plate reader) capability with zero oversight. Flock said it would prevent federal abuse of local law enforcement camera networks and then did absolutely nothing to prevent this. Meanwhile, cop shops were using Flock’s cameras to track people across the country — you know, dangerous criminals like the woman (at the request of her abusive ex) who left Texas to seek an abortion in another state.

All of these concerns have resulted in Flock losing plenty of public market share. Sure, it may still be doing brisk business in the private market, but government contracts are where the real money is. Flock can’t seem to stop the bleeding. Multiple local governments have terminated contracts with Flock and plenty more are considering doing the same, especially now that it’s shady dealings have been called out by federal lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden.

Still, the company has its supporters. And they’re exactly the sort of people you’d expect them to be. A public meltdown by a public servant is the subject of this excellent reporting by Joseph Cox of 404 Media. Here’s a bit of background, which also contains some super-useful background on Flock’s PR team.

Like in many other communities around the country, the use of Flock’s AI cameras has become a major topic of discussion in Bandera (Texas). In February, Bandera held a town hall meeting exclusively about Flock that Flowers moderated. Kerry McCormack, a former Cleveland city council member who is now on the public affairs team for Flock, came to that meeting to discuss the technology, demonstrating that the company is sending representatives even to tiny towns in order to promote its use. 

Dial in on a couple of things. First, there’s the fact that former public servants are now running flack for Flock. Second, there’s the mention of Bandera, Texas city council member Jeff Flowers, who’s apparently so smitten of Flock that he’s willing to go full batshit when confronted by public criticism. Bandera’s city council voted 3-2 to end its contract with Flock in response to public resistance, which included repeated vandalizing of the town’s eight cameras.

Flowers apparently couldn’t handle this vote or the resistance that generated it. He went right off the rails, almost immediately:

After the vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, a staunch Flock supporter, said that if people in the town wanted privacy then the city council should basically ban all technology, essentially calling people who did not want government surveillance hypocrites.

Nice. This deep disconnection from reality wasn’t limited to comments made during the vote. He also posted an op-ed (subtitled “Bandera Declaration of Independence”) in the local newspaper, in which he ignorantly continued to claim that rejection of government surveillance was a hypocritical stance taken by people who voluntarily own smartphones and access the internet.

Flowers said that at the next city council meeting he will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.” He will also propose “a total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.”

Flowers is the kind of idiot that’s almost smart enough to be dangerous. But he’s not quite there yet. It’s one thing to “share” information with service providers, apps, and online services. It’s quite another to be forced to share information with the government. While the government may actually demand less information in exchange for services than most internet service providers, people are far more willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience when the recipient is another private party.

Pretending these two things are equivalent is lazy at best, and totalitarian at worst. They’re not the same thing. And even if the collection of data by third parties might result in warrantless access of this data by the government, very few citizens are going to affirmatively choose to surrender data to the government, even if it’s nothing more than an always-on collection of their movements via automatic license plate readers.

To be sure, there are people working for Flock who think Flowers is worthy of a high five or two, if not a permanent position in the PR department. They’re no smarter than Flowers is. This is not a win for Flock. This is another unforced error by surveillance state enthusiasts who are voluntarily creating more negative press for Flock. Flock loses. Flowers rants. Flock loses again. If either party was truly smart, they’d be distancing themselves from each other.

You are to ignore that the FCC has no actual authority to even be proposing this. The TV Oversight Management Board is an independent, industry-created coalition that manages the TV ratings system without legal influence by the FCC.

The FCC’s justification for these demanded changes are based entirely on the false claims of a bunch of anonymous “parents” who may or may not even exist:

“Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being
included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.”

Of course these issues have only been made “controversial” by Republicans, who have taken brutal and ignorant aim at a very small segment of the population in order to actively hurt marginalized people and divide, misinform, and disorient the electorate. Like gay marriage was during the George W. Bush administration, trans rights are an effective wedge issue that exploits public fear, bigotry, and ignorance to redirect public attention away from things like, say, historic levels of corruption.

The idea that media and tech companies are actively flooding the population with a bunch of dangerous “gender non-binary programming” aimed specifically at children is a popular Republican lie designed to agitate and mislead, but there’s no evidence to support the claim. Still it pops up a lot; like Josh Hawley’s false claim at a recent hearing that Netflix is pushing trans-heavy kids programming.

Understandably the proposal didn’t sit well with organizations like GLAAD, which pointed out that it’s grotesque, ignorant, and dangerous to conflate gender fluidity with obscenities, drug abuse, and violence:

“And the Public Notice does not state how a change in TV ratings will impact gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters and stories on TV. Applying warning labels to programs with transgender and nonbinary characters and stories incorrectly equates them to programming with coarse and crude language, sexual situations, or violence. 

This makes life harder for LGBTQ Americans. It sends a message that the FCC can pressure the TVOMB to add even more ratings that stigmatize other diverse groups.”

A broader coalition of 40+ public interest groups ranging from Free Press to Public Knowledge were equally disgusted by the proposal:

“This is Carr’s latest attempt to shut down speech and shift U.S. public discourse to please President Trump. Television-program ratings are wholly outside of the FCC’s control, and the use of this public-comment procedure to coerce change raises constitutional concerns. The FCC should abandon this contrived and morally repugnant exercise.”

Part of Carr’s actual job at the FCC is supposed to involve protecting the public from corporate power, whether it’s a telecom monopoly that leverages corruption to rip off broadband customers, to a cable company using sleazy fees to jack up the cost of TV service. Carr’s not interested in that. He’s repeatedly given large companies free reign to engage in whatever consumer abuses they see fit.

Carr likely figures that the more time the public spends freaking out about nonexistent trans kids’ programming, the less time they have to realize that he’s been captured by industry to the detriment of everyone.

Instead of doing his job, Carr’s obsessed with being a weird little zealot and authoritarian lapdog, whose post-FCC legacy, if he has one, will be one of ignorance, censorship, distraction, and fear.

But it’s largely been a European effort thus far. That’s why I think it’s worth noting that the movement is now starting to gain traction in America as well. In California, where the Protect Our Games Act is seeking to add some of the same protections for consumers, and was constructed under the advice of Stop Killing Games.

California’s Protect Our Games Act, as currently written, would require digital game publishers who cut off support for an online game to either provide a full refund to players or offer an updated version of the game “that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator.” The act would also require publishers to notify players 60 days before the cessation of “services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game.”

As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.

And here’s the meat of the bill’s language itself:

1. (A) 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game:

(i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will cease.

(ii) Any services that will no longer be provided by the operator.

(iii) Any game features that will no longer be available to the purchaser.

(iv) Any known security risks that may result from the cessation of services.

(v) How the purchaser can continue to use the digital game, or obtain a refund, pursuant to paragraph (2).

(B) A digital game operator shall communicate the information required by subparagraph (A) by doing both of the following:

(i) Notifying purchasers directly through the operator’s digital game.

(ii) Posting the information publicly on the operator’s internet website.

(2) Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following:

(A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator.

(B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator.

(C) A refund in an amount equal to the full purchase price paid for the digital game by the purchaser.

What this is really saying is that game publishers moving forward would either have to find a way to allow those who bought the game to keep playing it as intended when they don’t want to support it with backend requirements any longer, or else offer a refund. And I remain in a place where it’s very hard to argue with any of this. Publishers can talk all they want about how they aren’t selling games, but merely a license to play those games for some indeterminate period of time that is solely at the discretion of the publisher.

As Stop Killing Games mentions commenting on the California Bill, there is no other place in commerce where such an insanely anti-consumer scenario is allowed to exist.

In a formal statement of support for the bill sent to the California legislature, SKG wrote that “there is no other medium in which a product can be marketed and sold to a consumer and then ripped away without notice… As live service games rise in popularity for game developers and gamers alike, end-of-life procedures are essential tools to ensure prolonged access to the games consumers pay to enjoy.”

The ESA, which is lobbying hard against the bill, responded with nothing beyond the exact license-focused reasoning I mentioned above.

The Entertainment Software Association, which helps represent the interests of major game publishers, publicly told the California Assembly last month that the bill misrepresents how modern game distribution actually works. “Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work,” the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.

My response to that is simple: then modern software shouldn’t fucking get copyright protection. If that’s the route the ESA really wants to go in, then let’s do it.

That’s true north on this entire question and the one thing that lobbyists like the ESA never, ever comment upon. Copyrighted works are supposed to end up in the public domain. If a publisher actively keeps that from ever happening by essentially making a product that is unusable without its backend support, but plans to stop that backend support, then that publisher is breaking the copyright bargain.

And while I am a fan of all of these incremental preservation efforts, the copyright fight is the real fight.

The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, including a murder rate at its lowest point in more than a century.

Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.

Yet the Trump administration has yanked hundreds of millions of dollars from the programs that helped make those numbers possible.

As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.

‘Wasteful grants’

In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants. About US$500 million in promised funds evaporated, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.

The cuts stretched across the public safety landscape: community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued that the grant programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping to keep Americans safe.

The DOJ’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal reduces the pool of funds for public safety and justice programs by an additional $850 million – about a 15% decrease from the prior year.

Bipartisan programs

On the ground, the effects of the cancellations were immediate.

Initiatives implementing a federal law to support ex-inmates with temporary housing, job training and healthcare lost $40 million in funding, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York Unversity.

Many of the terminated programs had deep bipartisan roots.

Project Safe Neighborhoods, a crime-reduction initiative launched in 2001 under President George W. Bush, lost its training funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found. Also axed was an anti-terrorism program that had trained more than 430,000 state and local law enforcement officers and other partners since 1996.

More modest programs were targeted as well.

In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after a few years of probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed some leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.

Funding cliffs

The funding cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts, as billions of dollars provided by President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan run out on Dec. 31, 2026.

Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.

And now? A double funding cliff with the sudden cancellation of DOJ grants, paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money.

In Chicago, this cliff has already forced a 43% cut to the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 – even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.

Larger and more targeted

Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory identifies a direct relationship between increased strain – economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support – and higher risks of criminal behavior.

Historical precedent reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal across-the-board spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year. The capacity of the FBI and related agencies was slashed by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents.

Between 2014 and 2016, the violent crime rate climbed 7%.

The 2025 cuts are substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.

Equal Justice USA, a national organization working to end the death penalty and reduce violence through community-based interventions, shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants.

Local programs like Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope lost $1.2 million to provide therapy for gun violence survivors.

“What shocked me the most … was what feels like the utter cruelty of it,” said Adam Rosenberg, who runs the center, referring to the cancellation of the funds.

As of April 2026, the DOJ has not paid out $200 million in approved grants to assist victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

This comes after the department last year allowed more than 100 grants for human trafficking survivors to expire, affecting more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania warn that cuts to violence prevention programs are likely to lead to increases in gun crime.

What happens next

The initiatives now losing funding are the ones that helped drive crime down in many American cities.

Community members trained in conflict mediation help extinguish tensions before they turn lethal. Youth programs provide alternatives to street economies. Forensic labs process the evidence that solves cases. Reentry programs keep people from cycling back through the system. With each serving a distinct function, together they form the infrastructure of public safety.

As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.

Andrea Hagan is Instructor of Criminology & Justice at Loyola University New Orleans

If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality (unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that would break the sound barrier).

I’ve warned about this for the last decade here at Techdirt, and the check is coming due. The Pentagon is steadily coming to realize that enemies are using location data purchased from unregulated data brokers to target and kill U.S. troops overseas:

“In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” 

Poor Ron Wyden. The guy has been warning about this outcome for longer than Techdirt, and his reward is generally an apathetic congressional body too corrupted by greed to function.

This should surprise absolutely nobody.

Two years ago, Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was relatively trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. And for much of the past decade cellular providers had been found to be collecting user movement data, selling it, and either not telling consumers or outright lying about it.

If foreign governments can’t get your sensitive location data from a litany of apps that track your every movement, they can get it from data brokers or the wireless carriers themselves.

When the FCC tried to fine wireless carriers like AT&T for spying on and monetizing consumer movements, the fines were vacated by Trump’s Fifth Circuit appeals court. Wyden had previously revealed how right wing extremists were able to easily purchase the location data of abortion clinic visitors and then target them with dangerous health care disinformation. The congressional response: bupkis.

It’s not subtle: the U.S. is too corrupt to function. Instead of fixing that problem, Republicans, “free market” Libertarians, and many centrist Democrats spend most of their time figuring out new ways to lobotomize our regulators, pre-empt meaningful privacy legislation, and completely defang what’s left of corporate oversight. You know, because we just love free market innovation so much.

In his latest letter to the Pentagon, Wyden once again makes the case that the ad tech industry, as currently formulated, poses a direct national security threat:

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it ​was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

Of course, it’s not just the ad industry that poses a national security threat, it’s corruption. It’s the mindless deregulation of industry by bad faith actors. It’s lax government privacy and security oversight of private companies (and their executives). It’s regulatory capture at the hands of corrupt, weird zealots. And it’s a government obsessed with hyper-scaled domestic surveillance with no meaningful guardrails.