Emil Bove used to work for the DOJ. Then he went to work for Trump, acting as his personal lawyer starting in 2023. Upon Trump’s return to office, he was brought back to the DOJ to serve as an “associate deputy attorney general” — a position that didn’t actually require Bove to be subjected to the Senate confirmation process.

Bove was fine with this. And being one of Trump’s guys, he decided to use this new position to aid and abet illegal activities engaged in by ICE and the DHS. It was Bove who first instructed DOJ lawyers to tell courts to “fuck themselves” when faced with rulings that demanded the administration respect the law.

It was also Emil Bove who pushed hard for the “murder people in boats” program the Trump administration has been engaged in ever since it first decided people from Central and South America needed to be killed to prevent them from eventually reaching the US border.

This show of absolute loyalty was rewarded. Emil Bove is no longer just a guy who thinks ignoring court orders and murdering people in international waters is a fine way to run a government. He’s now capable of turning an entire circuit against Americans and their rights, thanks to his installation as a Third Circuit Appeals Court judge.

There’s no reason he should be given this position. He’s entirely untrustworthy and has, at best, only a cursory relationship to the rule of law so often claimed as the high ground by Trump and his bootlickers.

There was plenty of evidence already on the record that should have blocked this nomination, but all it took to install him in a position to do serious damage to an entire nation was a unified MAGA front that could override any opposition from the Democratic Party minority in the Senate.

It doesn’t take much to get a judge installed, as Trump has repeatedly proven. It takes far, far more to remove one who is so compromised they can’t possibly be trusted. The wheels are greased and the trolley car has been directed to engage in maximum cruelty. And that’s not going to change even if more dirt on Bove emerges.

Nevertheless, we will engage with this dirt, which comes to us via a whistleblower complaint about Bove’s activities during his relatively brief tenure as a top DOJ prosecutor.

Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made a formal whistleblower complaint to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders over the federal response to anti-ICE protest activity around federal buildings, as well as in a residential area, early last year.

[…]

Fields says Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told the head of the field office to open an investigation into activities outside the federal building even though, she says, the activities were protected free speech. Separately, she says the White House gave a directive to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate a group of protesters using megaphones during immigration enforcement operations after FBI agents had conducted a check into the conduct and declined to open an investigation.

There’s no pretending this doesn’t sound exactly like something Bove would have directed and approved. After all, he was already giving his blessing to boat strikes and courtroom “fuck you’s” at this point. The whistleblower report [PDF] goes into more detail about Bove’s actions, demands, and general disregard for constitutional rights.

First, it details how FBI agents and officers were taken off task to help Trump fight his War on Los Angeles that was a vindictive offshoot of his general War on Migrants. It also details the administration’s desire to do these things while adding as little as possible to the public record.

From the very start of the second Trump administration, Ms. Fields and her colleagues at the Los Angeles Field Office were instructed by Field Office leadership, including the Assistant
Director in Charge (ADIC), the Special Agents in Charge (SACs), the Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs), and the Senior Supervisory Intelligence Analysts (SSIAs), through emails and directives in meetings, to support what they called a nationwide “big immigration push” to take
place across multiple “weeks of action” that would begin in February and continue throughout the year.

The initiative included assigning agents Title 8 authorities, directing intelligence analysts to conduct checks on lists of immigrants, and supporting immigration-related arrests across FBI Field Offices nationwide. During meetings on this initiative, Ms. Fields experienced supervisors encouraging her and others to not put things in writing and noticed many directives and subsequent discussions were conducted in face-to-face meetings rather than over email.

Not only were agents redirected to support the “big immigration push,” they were told not to create any written documentation of their actions in support of Trump’s bigotry.

The FBI no longer served the public or the ideal of public safety. What FBI agents in the Los Angeles area were instructed to do was make their superiors look good in front of the boss.

[A]gents were pulled off active cartel cases to satisfy what her supervisor, , described as “optics” designed to “make a show for the president.”

Meanwhile, ICE and DHS were busy making themselves look worse. Whatever wasn’t an obvious lie about the situation in Los Angeles was a series of “boots on the ground” debacles that failed to produces the thousands of migrant arrests the administration had already told its voting base were all but inevitable.

Either Bove sensed some impending displeasure or was just a hideous human being who should never have been allowed to become a judge. Whatever the case, Bove — while still holding a position as a top DOJ prosecutor — directed the FBI to start investigating peaceful protesters simply because they were protesting the government that now employed him.

In late January or early February 2025, shortly before a standing 4:00 pm Pacific Timemeeting including SACs, ASACs, SSIAs, and the Los Angeles Criminal Program’s Mission Support Analyst regarding the immigration push, [redacted] came to Ms. Fields’s office, shut the door, and informed her that Department of Justice (DOJ) former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove had instructed Akil Davis, the ADIC of the Los Angeles FBI Field Office, to open an investigation into any anti-ICE and CBP protesters demonstrating at federal buildings in Los Angeles.

The FBI knows constitutionally protected activity can never form the basis for an investigation. And it ignores this knowledge with alarming regularity. But this is Trump’s DOJ, which not only spends most of its time satisfying his bigotry and revenge fantasies, but also hasn’t met a right it doesn’t feel comfortable violating (Second Amendment excluded).

That Bove would be the lapdog Trump wants to see in the world is unsurprising. What is surprising is that an agent would actually file a whistleblower report while overseen by an administration that has been rooting out dissent since day one, and would gladly hang any dissenter if it didn’t have to hammer out a contract with Dana White first. Anyone who isn’t a loyalist will soon be unemployed. And those who dare to peep above the parapet will be the first against the wall.

This report is essential. But it’s being handed to people who can’t do anything about it and raises issues the current administration views as features, rather than bugs. And it certainly won’t get Bove booted back to where he should be: just another Trump lawyer wondering when he’s going to get paid for protecting Mr. MAGA from the consequences of his own actions.

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Shellenberger was at it again this week. There’s a conference happening right now in Vilnius, Lithuania, called #Disinfo2026, hosted by the EU Disinfo Lab, which (as the name implies) does a ton of work studying disinformation, including how it’s created, how to respond to it, how it spreads, and its potential impact on democracy. Unlike Shellenberger, I’ve spent plenty of time with actual disinformation researchers and recognize that there is a wide variety of (often conflicting) beliefs about how to deal with disinformation, the most common of which is figuring out how to use counter speech to respond to disinformation campaigns. While there absolutely are exceptions — people who believe that suppression is the right approach — it is far from the most common view within the disinformation ecosystem. If anything, a lot of disinformation research is explicitly about finding alternatives to censorship, because most disinfo experts know that actual censorship tends to backfire (hold that thought).

But, because Shellenberger — who has a job at Bari Weiss’s flailing fake university as the “Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech” — thinks that the only purpose of disinformation research is censorship, he spent the last few days on a campaign to demonize the entire conference as yet another gathering in the “Censorship Industrial Complex” focused on how to censor speech. That, of course, is not what the conference is about at all. But Shellenberger, posing as a “journalist,” sent a bunch of participants emails in the last few days asking fairly silly questions about the conference.

For example, he sent an email with a bunch of questions to someone who runs an independent spam labeling service on Bluesky (because, you know, on Bluesky anyone can build their own moderation tools). A bunch of other researchers reported receiving similar emails. Indeed, in every email Shellenberger seemed especially focused on one particular issue: how the attendees of the conference felt about whether or not the US government is “a source of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in Europe.”

Then, the day of the conference, attendees noticed that signs at the conference appeared to have had the logos of sponsoring countries and orgs — namely Canada, Lithuania (where the event was being held!), and the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm — hastily covered up as they apparently pulled out of having their sponsorship listed either the day before or the morning of the conference.

A few hours later, The Guardian found out that the US State Department was actually responsible, leaning on the governments sponsoring the conference until they pulled their support — and then thanking them for it.

Three persons familiar with the matter, including European officials, confirmed that the US state department had been in touch with multiple governments over their support for the conference.

Internal state department documents seen by the Guardian also show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously”.

The main issue? One panel, out of many at the conference, asked whether the United States itself should be viewed as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” (FIMI) threat… the very same issue that Shellenberger seemed so focused on.

The document says Washington was “grateful” Lithuania supposedly found a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising” and welcomed its decision to limit involvement in the conference.

That panel – called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back”, with the acronym FIMI referring to “foreign information manipulation and interference” – took place Wednesday. It explored how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington, and is the first time the conference appears to have entertained the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe. Sources and the internal document indicate the state department was explicitly focused on this panel…

Indeed, soon after the sponsorships were pulled and before anyone had publicly reported it, Shellenberger emailed at least some attendees yet again, pointing out that the sponsorships had been pulled, and asking them more questions about their participation in light of the dropped sponsors.

Yeah, let me repeat that so we’re abundantly clear: we had a guy who cosplays as a “free speech” supporter trying to drum up propaganda attacking a disinformation conference because one panel of many asks the question of whether or not the US engages in foreign information manipulation. Around the same time, the State Department reaches out to sponsors of the event to literally engage in foreign information manipulation and interference because the US government is upset that anyone wants to discuss how the United States might engage in foreign information manipulation and interference.

It’s a hypocrite turducken.

After this started getting some attention, the State Department tried to defend its censorial “lobbying” efforts:

The U.S. State Department criticized the conference for proposing that the United States is a source of foreign interference and manipulated information.

“The organizers appear to put the United States in the same bucket as foreign adversaries,” the department said in an e-mailed statement. “This false equivalence is antithetical to the goals these individuals claim to promote and obscures the scale and nature of adversarial interference.”

Knowing how these conferences work, it’s not “the organizers” who did this, but whoever proposed this panel. And, more to the point, by threatening sponsors of this event for their participation in a foreign conference about speech, the US is kind of confirming that it absolutely is “a foreign adversary” when it comes to interference and manipulating information.

Not surprisingly, at least some of the communications appear to have come from the office of the State Department’s top censor, Sarah Rogers, who literally a few days ago (I was there) spoke at the “Future of Free Speech Summit” about how important free speech was to her, as an American. Apparently, that support for free speech does not extend to anyone talking about the US’s propaganda efforts.

According to one person familiar with the deliberations, other communications appeared to originate from the office of Sarah B Rogers, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Also, this is absolute bullshit:

In statements, Lithuania, Canada and the EU said the program of the conference did not align with their official views on the US role in disinformation – although that program had been in place for months before they withdrew their support, since June.

“Lithuania has cancelled its participation in ‘Disinfo 2026’ as several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government,” Lithuania’s foreign ministry wrote in a statement.

Global Affairs Canada “carefully assesses participation in, and sponsorship of, external events on a case-by-case basis,” GAC spokesperson Samantha Lafleur said. “Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, GAC decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference.”

….

An EU spokesperson confirmed that the European External Action Service had decided to withdraw its support from the conference because “the organisers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU.”

Canada, at least, tries to defend its position by saying the framing “changed,” but the Guardian points out that the program has been public since June. The other statements are just weird. Do they mean that other conferences sponsored by Canada, the EU, or Lithuania only take place after those three have carefully vetted and approved all speakers and topics? Because that would seem like more of a free speech problem than… having a single panel discussing how the US engages in foreign propaganda campaigns.

The only supporter of this conference who comes out of this with any principles is, surprisingly, France:

A diplomatic source at France’s foreign ministry said “there’s absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments” when it came to supporting the conference.

“We stick to supporting civil society. It’s not just principled, it’s operational,” she said, adding that the conference was a “laboratory” that helped Europe develop key policy around disinformation.

There’s no way to get around this: this is the same US State Department that has exiled critics in the name of free speech, with a censorial guy who pretends to be a supporter of free speech as their warm-up act, making sure that there can be no discussion about how the US itself engages in foreign propaganda campaigns.

Except, of course, as both Rogers and Shellenberger should know by now, the Streisand Effect remains undefeated. And now tons of people who had never heard of a conference panel on America as a foreign propaganda threat know all about it.

Hopefully, next year’s disinfo conference includes a panel on The Streisand Effect.

Major media companies insist they simply have to merge to create all manner of amazing new “consolidative synergies.” The debt from the acquisitions then result in brand and company cannibalization as labor and consumers are forced to carry the load. The net result is mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier products from corner cutting. Typical enshittification.

It used to be that after a major acquisition, executives would spend six months to a year at least pretending there were no labor downsides to consolidation. Now they don’t even bother.

The Ellison family and Paramount/Skydance/Warner Bros executives are already warning staff of major impending layoffs as “redundancies” are eliminated and workers are forced to pay off $82 billion in debt.

But worry not, in a memo to staff by Skydance CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the duo states that coming mass terminations will be conducted “thoughtfully and respectfully:”

“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the execs wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.”

The mass firings are, employees are told, part of “building a culture” where people feel “supported” and “empowered:”

“We must never lose sight of what matters most: our people. We will build a culture where people feel respected, empowered, supported and proud of the work they do.”

It’s important to recall that Skydance was first created years ago by Larry Ellison as an avenue that would allow his son David to pretend he was an actor. Like most extraction-class brunchlords, David has just failed upward ever since, to the point where he’s now in charge of most of Hollywood’s biggest studios.

Paramount execs say they’re aiming to create more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings over three years, most of which will come from layoffs (despite claims to the contrary by deal architect and RedBird Capital Partners boss Gerry Cardinale). Recall that when AT&T bungled its dual, doomed acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, more than 50,000 employees ultimately lost their jobs.

This comes after numerous rounds of layoffs caused by the previous merger between Paramount and Skydance. Further layoffs will come next year as bumbling Paramount execs struggle to adapt to shifting demand across traditional film and television. We know this because this is literally what happens every single time major media companies (especially Warner Brothers) pursue “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation.

The risks here are so bad, even normally pro-consolidation and pseudo-growth obsessed Wall Street is getting cold feet about how this all ends:

“TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note Wednesday that investors should hold their shares of Skydance as the firm remained “quite cautious on the ability of the company and its management to avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

“The risks (leverage, integration) of the combination with WBD are high; we remain skeptical that SKYD management will be able to create value from this deal when so many other major media deals have failed,” the note read.”

And again, this could have been potentially prevented if California Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra hadn’t pressured state AGs to settle their antitrust lawsuit against the company. What’s worse is they couldn’t even be bothered to affix meaningful conditions to the deal; most were simply empty gestures Paramount suggested itself.

That’s why, while the focus recently has been on the outbreak in Pennsylvania that has resulted in 5 deaths, a disease like measles was never going to be bound by state borders. It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, to see that New York has declared a statewide emergency due to measles infections as a result.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide emergency on Monday over a measles outbreak spreading from Pennsylvania. It is the first time an emergency declaration has been issued since measles began surging in the U.S. in 2025.

“No one should get seriously ill or die from a vaccine-preventable disease,” Hochul said in a statement.

Indeed, but this is what Kennedy and the Trump administration hath wrought. Hochul paired the declaration with an executive order that expands what types of medical professionals can administer the MMR vaccine, and to whom. Now, pharmacists can inoculate the public, so long as they are at least 2 years old. The EO also requires that any administration of the vaccine must be reported to the state within three days, regardless of whether patients opt into that reporting or not.

I fully expect the MAHA goons to go kazoo over that last bit, but it’s important for the state to have this data when they’re trying to combat a disease as infectious and problematic as measles.

It’s unlikely that New York will be the last state to have to do this sort of thing. For now, I guess we hold our breath until November to see if the government is reconfigured in a way that can finally put an end to Kennedy’s profane reign at HHS.

Recent changes by Flock, in response to months of sustained negative reporting, have the potential to limit abuse by officers, but they don’t really have the power to make it happen. You can add flags and guidelines by default, but if the defaults can be switched off and current users aren’t forced to comply with new demands, it really doesn’t do a damn thing.

While Flock and Flock’s supporters in law enforcement claim it’s essential to the business of fighting crime, the results speak for themselves. A national network that generates billions of plate/location images every month — coupled with plain text, AI-utilizing searches that allow officers to search for more than just plate images — lends itself to abuse. And how. Stories are surfacing daily about how officers have used Flock’s tech to stalk ex-spouses, ex-paramours, and anyone else they want to keep an (unofficial) eye on.

What’s semi-comforting is that even some law enforcement agencies are recognizing the tech’s potential for abuse and responding positively to public criticism. But before we start handing out gold stars to every cop shop that decides to rein things in because it can’t simply continue to ignore the people they’re supposed to be serving, let’s take a closer look at one attempted response that says far more than the police department probably thought it did.

Louisville Metro Police is limiting which officers are able to search the department’s controversial Flock automated license plate reader camera system, officials announced during a Sept. 16 news conference.

“Independent search capability will be generally limited to personnel who are assigned to investigative and analytical roles,” said Deputy Chief Emily McKinley. “These are detectives and analysts who are responsible for investigating crimes. They will be the ones who will have the search capability within the system.”

This seems like good news. And, to be fair, it is. At least up to a certain point. And that certain point has already been reached in the opening statement by the deputy chief. If you’re serious about limiting access to only people who should have access, you shouldn’t need to start hedging almost immediately. “Generally limited” is — at least from the outside — indistinguishable from a free-for-all. The PD gets to decide who should have access. But then it immediately says access won’t “generally” be limited to just those people.

The LMPD’s equivocation gets worse as the announcement continues. Worse, it makes it clear the LMPD was doing almost nothing to prevent abuse of Flock camera access prior to this point.

In addition to limiting who has access to Flock, LMPD officials said the department would add new training on Flock and tighten required documentation for searches. Outside agencies will also be restricted from accessing LMPD’s system without making a formal request.

Searches will need to include an identifying factor tying it to a case, such as a report or warrant number, and officers will be required to explain why a Flock search would be needed for the investigation.

The new policy also outlines prohibited uses, including “curiosity searches” as well as harassment and intimidation, McKinley said. Officers will not be allowed to share their credentials or conduct searches for unauthorized individuals.

This statement tells everyone everything the PD hasn’t done prior to this point. And “limiting access” doesn’t mean as much as it should when the deputy chief qualifies it with “generally” and later in the police chief Paul Humphrey’s statement, he says officers without access will still “receive appropriate information in a timely fashion,” which strongly suggests those without access will just ask others to perform searches on their behalf. That undercuts the assertion that “unauthorized individuals” will not be allowed to ask others to do what they can’t do themselves.

But the truly damning stuff is in the middle. These are policies going forward. And that means that up until now, the LMPD never required officers to tie searches to cases or to explain why they’re accessing the system. It also means the PD never considered taking a hardline stance on questionable searches before now. This next part of the chief’s statement perhaps explains why this has never been the case prior to this:

As part of the new policy, auditing will become routine and mandatory, McKinley said. LMPD will audit searches at least every 90 days using Flock’s audit assistance tool, which runs continuously to flag suspicious searches.

How in the fuck was none of this “routine and mandatory” before this? I mean, I know the answer. The less the police police themselves, the less often they have to fire, punish, or criminally charge one of their own. See no evil is SOP. Agencies willingly blind themselves to prevent having to engage in any form of accountability. The LMPD can no longer pretend it’s okay to simply pretend abuse isn’t happening because it deliberately hasn’t gone looking for it. Sure, things will be better going forward, but that doesn’t excuse this agency for refusing to engage in any minimal form of Flock accountability up to this point, even though Flock has given it access to audit tools pretty much since day one. This is on the LMPD, not Flock.

To its credit, auditing features have been provided by Flock for months, if not years. It’s the existence of these auditing tools (and the logs they generate) that have allowed activists, journalists, and even law enforcement agencies themselves to sniff out abusive searches. The LMPD could have been on top of this for months, but has only decided to start using these features because the public has forced it to.

While I do appreciate law enforcement doing the right thing, no matter how belatedly, I cannot praise them for deciding to do things they could have been doing for months, if not years. It’s this sort of thing that makes cops indistinguishable from criminals: it’s apparently not a crime unless you get caught.

French lawmakers have officially adopted a new sports law that replaces manual domain checks with support for automated, real-time piracy blocking. The system allows for instant blockades during live sports broadcasts, with oversight checks from regulator ARCOM being applied afterward rather than before.

A new study commissioned by the European Parliament calls for something similar:

The study recommends a swift takedown obligation for streaming intermediaries, requiring these to take action within a certain time limit. As an example, it mentions 30 minutes, following the example of Italy’s Piracy Shield.

This takedown requirement should not only apply to Internet providers. Other intermediaries including third-party DNS resolvers such as Google and OpenDNS, VPN providers, and CDNs such as Cloudflare, should also take action.

The suggestion therefore is to adopt all the bad ideas that EU countries such as Italy, France and Spain have been trying out recently, with no sign that any of them actually help.

The copyright companies also continue to chip away at the surprisingly resilient Anna’s Archive. In January, the site lost its main .org domain; in April, Spotify secured secured a $322 million default judgment against the still unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. More recently, the site was hit with what it calls a “coordinated attack” that took it offline for a while, although it is not clear whether anyone in the copyright world was involved.

Against the background of those recurrent copyright topics, it is interesting to see a less familiar issue crop up recently. It concerns large-scale protests taking place in Albania. They were triggered by revelations that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, planned luxury tourism developments in two important Albanian natural habitats. One of them, the Vjosa–Narta wetland ecosystem, is the home of flamingos. This has led to the mass protests being given the name the Flamingo Revolution.

The protests against the proposed developments have been on a very large scale – some estimate 250,000 participants at times – and have rocked the Albanian government, which was caught completely off-guard by the widespread objections to the plans, and which has struggled to counter them and the widespread support they have received online. That makes the sudden mass suspension of Instagram accounts posting about anti-government protests in Albania because of alleged copyright infringement suspicious, to say the least. Martha Dimitratou, founder of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks digital censorship, spoke to Wired about what has been happening in Albania:

Dimitratou told WIRED they had verified around 100 cases of account restrictions connected to protests. “We continue to receive additional reports and, based on the volume and patterns we are seeing, estimate that the true number could be several hundred,” she says.

“We also identified that multiple posts on an account would receive copyright complaints, often five to 10 in a relatively short period, followed by escalating enforcement and, in some cases, the disabling of the entire account,” Dimitratou says. “Taken together, the alleged paid reporting, the repeated sequence of copyright complaints followed by account enforcement, the concentration of targets around the same movement, and the repeated targeting of replacement accounts strongly indicate coordinated activity,” Dimitratou added.

Arjan Koçi, who had multiple posts taken down, managed to contact the person behind those copyright complaints. Koçi asked why he was making these false claims against him:

To his surprise, Koçi received a response. “He asked for my contact and then texted me.” The person told Koçi that he had been paid $1,800 to report these accounts and would withdraw his complaints if Koçi paid him. “He said he would accept crypto as payment.”

This kind of coordinated copyright abuse is a well-known phenomenon:

“This tactic of mass copyright reporting, commonly called brigading, is an abuse of the systems that Meta has in place for people to report genuinely problematic, abusive, dangerous, or illegal content on their platforms,” said Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for tech policy and digital rights research at Freedom House. “We’ve even seen this sort of brigading happen at scale in the context of a war or a conflict. Certainly, it’s a tactic that we saw carried out by the Myanmar military, for example, to go after people criticizing the government’s conduct,” he told WIRED.

As that indicates, this is not a new problem. Walled Culture the book discusses similar cases of copyright being abused for the purposes of censorship, notably as part of online “reputation management” services. These often use false claims of copyright infringement to remove material that is damaging or embarrassing to their clients. The application of similar censorship techniques on a large scale against politically inconvenient material in Albania shows how copyright continues to be perverted for purposes far from the purported ones of encouraging and rewarding creativity.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

One estimate says that over 300 state bills to regulate social media and kid safety on the internet were introduced in 2025 alone. And, from the beginning, some of us have wondered how states could even try to regulate the internet at all, given that the dormant Commerce Clause (DCC) is (in theory) supposed to limit the states’ ability to regulate commerce that runs across state lines, as the internet obviously does. While the DCC has come up in a few cases, it’s mostly been as an extra throw-in and given significantly less attention than other arguments.

So, it’s good, if somewhat surprising, to see that a federal judge in Utah has blocked a key piece of that state’s latest (in a long line) attempt to age verify parts of the internet. Utah already required adult content sites to age verify Utah users back in 2023. This year’s amendment added a provision saying that anyone “actually located” in Utah counts, VPN or no VPN. Aylo, the internet’s largest adult content company, sued to block that new provision. And, so far it has worked, with the court granting a preliminary injunction against that provision. But what’s most interesting is that the ruling relies on the dormant Commerce Clause, though in a very narrow way.

The new law was crazy in all sorts of ways, effectively demanding that websites see through VPN usage to figure out where a person really is, even if they appear to be somewhere else. Even Utah agreed that this isn’t something anyone can actually do with certainty:

However, all the parties agree that IP-based geolocation is underinclusive because it fails to account for technologies that obscure a user’s location. These technologies, including virtual private networks (“VPNs”) and proxy servers, mask a user’s true location by routing traffic through IP addresses corresponding to different geographic locations. VPNs and location-obfuscation technologies have entirely legitimate purposes—such as securing communications on public networks, preventing websites from harvesting personal data, and circumventing censorship by oppressive governments. But these technologies can also be used to circumvent IP-based geolocation restrictions, such as the one used by Aylo for its free sites. Utah presumably passed the actual-location provision to address this issue.

But both parties also agree that there is no way for a website operator to determine a user’s physical location with perfect certainty. Aylo argues that Utah’s actual location requirement means that Aylo must “impose age verification on every user of their platforms, everywhere in the world” because it is impossible to know for sure whether any given user actually is in Utah.

The court then rejects a bunch of Aylo’s other arguments before zeroing in on the one that lands: because Utah’s law demands perfect geolocation — an impossibility — the only way to comply is to age verify absolutely everyone, everywhere. That clearly impacts commerce far beyond Utah’s borders… and thus triggers the dormant Commerce Clause:

The law requires geolocation perfection, but the parties agree that current technological advancements do not allow an entity to perfectly (1) detect VPN/proxy users, or (2) geolocate where all of those VPN/proxy users are accessing the site from. Aylo could not ensure compliance with the law without age-verifying all users. Unlike a law that merely increases a company’s cost of running its business, the actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating their location from Utah. As a result, the law “cannot effectively be limited” to primarily regulating those in Utah obfuscating their location “over the Internet because no such [technology to detect those users in every instance] exist[s].”

Because the actual-location provision, in most cases, directly regulates an entity’s interactions with those who have no connection to Utah, it likely creates too much direct regulation of wholly out-of-state conduct to be lawful under the dormant Commerce Clause.

The court also finds that the law fails the (recently weakened) Pike balancing test, burdening interstate commerce far out of proportion to its local benefits:

As an example, Aylo has approximately 28 million active visitors to its sites each month from the United States. Because the law requires perfection in the absence of perfect geolocation tools, Aylo would need to verify those 28 million users—whether located in Salt Lake City, Boston, New Orleans, Anchorage, or Honolulu—to ensure compliance and avoid liability. Indeed, every entity that hosts material applicable under the actual-location provision would need to age verify all of the entity’s users nationwide or inevitably violate the law. This reach is expansive and would involve massive numbers of wholly out-of-state interactions.

The ruling is fairly narrow, though, and the court more or less tells Utah how to fix it: by adding a reasonableness clause that gives Aylo (and any others under the law) some leeway in how they determine the location of visitors:

Utah argues that the actual-location provision is indirect because technology “allow[s] Aylo to reasonably and feasibly attempt to age assure VPN-using Utahns, [so] any decision by Aylo to instead age-verify all users would be a voluntary business choice, not an effect forced by Utah law.” The court does not doubt that this is the Attorney General’s good faith intention. But, as discussed above, the actual-location provision does not contain a reasonableness or feasibility standard and would therefore impose liability every time an entity did not perform age verification on a user located in Utah. Unlike Online Merchants Guild, the nationwide reach of the actual-location provision would not be due to an entity’s choice on how to structure its business. Rather, it would be “inevitable” that the entity would need to comply by age verifying every outside-of-Utah user on its site to avoid liability.

The court makes the same point again when it notes that there are “less burdensome means” to get what Utah says it wants:

Second, the significant local interests served by the actual-location provision can be achieved through less burdensome means. To be sure, the law involves a substantial safety interest in preventing minors from accessing harmful sexual material, which falls squarely within Utah’s traditional regulatory power. But Utah has represented that a law requiring “feasible and reasonable [geolocation] methods,” instead of perfection, would promote the same interests served by the actual-location provision. Because of this unique posture, Utah’s weighty interests could clearly be “promoted with . . . a lesser impact on interstate activities.” Thus, Aylo has shown that the actual-location provision likely imposes an excessive burden on interstate commerce in relation to its local benefits.

So, while it’s nice to see one of the many state internet regulations blocked on DCC grounds, it seems incredibly likely that Utah will just have its legislature rewrite the law (again), add a “reasonable” or “feasible” standard, and take another crack at it. While that would have the benefit of not requiring companies to do the literal impossible thing of seeing through VPNs to figure out where people really are, it won’t do much to stop yet another silly age verification law from existing.

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But that’s the bad news up front. Let’s get to the good stuff. And that stuff is a court recognizing that a license plate reader search doesn’t occur in a vacuum. The government will always argue — as it did here — that there’s no expectation of privacy on public roads. Therefore, any plate read (and any subsequent search of an ALPR database) is no different than a cop physically seeing a license plate on a passing car and then proceeding with whatever information they happen to have on hand.

Except it’s definitely not like that at all, not when plate readers are gathering 20 billion plate/location images a month. And that’s just Flock Safety, whose cameras and constantly swelling database are at the center of this decision [PDF].

What we have here is a pretextual stop that (very) eventually resulted in the discovery of 91 lbs. of meth. This stroke of luck belongs to Tulsa County Deputy Freddie Alaniz, who saw a vehicle drive by with California plates and decided to play the odds. From the federal court ruling:

Alaniz then pulled his vehicle onto the highway to follow the Mazda for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate. Alaniz also ran a query on the Flock system for the California license plate number on the Mazda SUV. Both Flock and VehicleManager provide users an option for the reason the query is being run. The reasons Alaniz put in those systems for running the queries were “traffic violation,” and “investigation.” At the time of those queries, all Alaniz knew was that the vehicle had a California license plate.

The eventual traffic stop (for lane change violations and following too closely) quickly became an investigative stop (albeit not officially). The deputy asked the driver several questions about her recent travels, attempting to sniff out any differences between her narrative and the one provided by the Flock ALPR search he had performed while following her down the highway. To do this, Alaniz performed a nationwide search of the database even though he was apparently only troubled by the driver’s semi-carelessness on the road. (Also of note: the deputy was unable to access any Flock data from California because that state appears to have finally succeeded in blocking outside searches.)

Free to go is never free to go, not when an officer has ulterior motives:

Alaniz then completed the stop by returning Kyle’s license to her and giving her a warning. After that was done, Alaniz asked Kyle if she would answer some questions, which Kyle agreed to do.

A few minutes later and it looks like we have an unlawfully extended stop:

Alaniz asked Kyle for consent to search her vehicle, and she denied the request. Immediately after Kyle refused, Alaniz asked for backup and told Kyle that she was detained so he could have his dog sniff her car.

While Alaniz explained the next steps, Kyle disclosed that she had some marijuana in the car. She asked Alaniz if she could give it to him because she knew that Alaniz’s dog would alert to the marijuana. Alaniz stated, “I am not worried at all for a little bit of marijuana, that’s not what I’m looking for,” but he proceeded with detaining Kyle to deploy his dog for a drug sniff. Alaniz also responded to a radio communication by stating “it’s non-pressing, I’ve just got a refusal on k9 deployment.”

Given this development, the court had multiple reasons to toss the evidence. The decision says the stop itself was clean due to traffic violation caught on camera. But the stop was illegally extended. That alone would have been enough, but fortunately the court decided to fully address Kyle’s challenge of the ALPR search. That’s where things get really interesting.

The court says it’s no longer acceptable to maintain the illusion that always-on ALPR systems can be excused with the dated assumption that no expectation of privacy exists when traveling on public roads. And courts certainly don’t need to maintain this pretense on behalf of law enforcement, which has enjoyed an exponential growth in collection/retention abilities with nearly zero added constraints.

The use of the ALPR camera system described by Alaniz in this case credibly invokes concerns raised in both Carpenter and Chatrie. Alaniz had access to an entire month’s worth of location data tied to the license plate on Kyle’s car, including more than fifty sightings across multiple states. This is not the same fine-tuned level of detail that something like a cell phone reveals about the whole of someone’s physical movements. But by virtue of how ALPR technology works, Alaniz and other officers using these systems have access to a continuously updated location history for all vehicles caught on ALPR cameras within the network. This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.

And because the government likes to play dumb when faced with simple statements like this, the court breaks it down further, making it perfectly clear that what cops think is “reasonable” is nothing any actual reasonable person would agree with, much less consider an acceptable use of law enforcement technology.

Think about it this way. We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: “Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week.” But we do not expect people we know—let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement—to randomly approach us to say: “Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.” Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts.

Still not enough? There’s more, just in case the government thinks it can bluff its way through this by setting its deliberate obtuseness to “MAX.”

To be sure, ALPR technology does not provide the same precision in location information as cell phones. But it could still reveal a lot about a person’s whereabouts, and it is easy to imagine the kinds of sensitive information it collects. It could track and log a couple struggling to start a family at the fertility clinic. It could show how often someone visits a liquor store or casino. It could show which doctor someone goes to or what lawyer’s office someone visits. It also collects mundane information about people’s commutes, but it collects a tremendous amount of such information all the time. It is possible that a dedicated team of law enforcement officers could constitutionally collect this information about one car—and its driver—by following that vehicle on public roadways over a month. But this leaves the question of why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so. That is what the Supreme Court has said since its decision in Katz through its decision in Chatrie this year, nearly sixty years later. It is not too much to draw the line at indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Amen. Of course, I’m sure the government is already crafting the argument that it is too much to draw the line at indiscriminate mass surveillance in preparation for its inevitable appeal. But until then, we have this, which makes all the points the beneficiaries of mass surveillance resolutely refuse to recognize.