Here’s yet more anecdotal evidence demonstrating why we’re be better off routing mental health calls to mental health professionals, rather than to people who tend to respond to things they can’t immediately control with violence. The good news is more cities are experimenting with multiple options for 911 response. The better news is that those experiments have been successful.

The bad news is everything else. Most cities aren’t willing to do this. And because they’re unwilling to explore their options, more people suffering mental health crises are going to end up dead. That’s what happened to Roy Scott, a Las Vegas resident who was “helped” to death by Las Vegas police officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman.

Here’s another story that’s all too familiar here in the United States, as recounted at the opening of the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Early in the morning on March 3, 2019, Roy Scott called the police for help. But he did not get it. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman came to the scene. Scott was unarmed and in mental distress. Though he complied with the officers’ orders and was not suspected of a crime, Smith and Huntsman initiated physical contact, forced Scott to the ground, and used bodyweight force to restrain him. Shortly after, Scott lost consciousness and he was later pronounced dead.

The one-two punch of “called for help”/”but he did not get it” makes it clear the officers’ response to the situation was objectively terrible, at least in the Appeal Court’s eyes. The phrase “initiated physical contact” gives a hint of what’s to follow in the narrative: an unwarranted deployment of force against an unarmed person who was already experiencing distress long before these officers decided to end his life.

The district court nailed it on the first pass, denying qualified immunity to both officers. The officers appealed, but are greeted with more of the same at the next judiciary level.

The first two paragraphs recounting the violent incident in greater detail contain some pretty chilling facts. First, the evidence shows both officers clearly understood they were dealing with someone in mental distress, rather than some sort of dangerous criminal.

Scott was distressed and hallucinating when Officers Smith and Huntsman arrived at his apartment. After Smith and Huntsman knocked and identified themselves, Scott yelled to the officers to “break the door down” claiming that there were people inside his house. The officers did not break the door in because they did not hear anyone inside the apartment. Instead, they continued to knock and order Scott to come to the door. About two minutes after first knocking on the door, Smith told Huntsman, “this is a 421A for sure,” using the department code to indicate he believed Scott was mentally ill. Huntsman then called through the door: “Sir, have you been diagnosed with any mental diseases?” After Scott did not come to the door, Smith asked dispatch to call Scott back to ask him to come to the door, noting again that Scott appeared to be mentally ill. Smith then said to Huntsman: “I ain’t going in there. That’s too sketchy.” Huntsman agreed, “That dude’s wacky.” Peering into Scott’s window, Huntsman asked Smith if he could see the “crazed look in [Scott’s] eye.” They could not see anyone else in Scott’s apartment.

While it’s obviously possible for someone to both be in mental distress and pose a safety threat to others, the first fact that matters is that both officers affirmed (in their own body cam recordings) that they believed they were dealing with a mental health issues, rather than actual criminal activity.

The next paragraph contains a pretty damning fact — one that is a leading indicator that police violence, misconduct, or rights violations will be the most likely outcome of any encounter.

When Scott did not open the door, Smith called their sergeant, turning off his body worn camera. On Huntsman’s camera, Smith can be heard telling their sergeant that Scott sounds mentally ill. After ending the call, Smith told Huntsman that their sergeant said that “at the end of the day we can’t do anything if we don’t hear any reason to have an exigent circumstance.” Smith also explained that their Sergeant suggested they try again to get Scott to come to the door.

Never a good sign. Fortunately for Scott’s survivors, the other officer continued recording and captured the rest of Roy Scott’s killing. Scott finally answered the door carrying a metal pipe — one that he immediately dropped when the officers asked him to. They asked if he had any other weapons. Scott handed them a knife he had in pocket — handle-first — and said “I am sorry.” The officers pushed him up against a wall, shining a flashlight in his face. Scott asked to be put in the cop car, telling officers he had schizophrenia and that the light was bothering him. This request was ignored. The officers told Scott, “We are out here to help you.”

They didn’t.

At first, the officers held Scott’s arms at his sides while he was lying on his back. In this position, Scott screamed, struggled, and pled with the officers to leave him alone for over two minutes. The officers then eventually rolled Scott onto his stomach, repeatedly ordering Scott to “stop.” With Scott on his stomach and with his hands restrained behind his back, Huntsman put his bodyweight on Scott’s back and neck for about one to two minutes. At the same time Smith put his weight on Scott’s legs, restraining his lower body. Scott’s pleas turned increasingly incoherent and breathless as Huntsman applied his bodyweight. After handcuffing him, the officers attempted to roll Scott on his side, as he continued to incoherently cry out that he wanted to be left alone. When they rolled Scott over, his face was bloody from contact with the ground. Scott stopped yelling and thrashing around after a few minutes. Scott did not respond when Smith and Huntsman tried to wake or revive him. Shortly after, when the paramedics arrived, Scott was still unresponsive. Scott was pronounced dead after paramedics removed him from the scene. Plaintiffs’ expert found that Scott had died from restraint asphyxia.

From there, the fact-finding is simple, especially since it was recorded. While the officers presented their one-sided argument for qualified immunity, the appeals court shuts this attempt down. First of all, the facts are on the side of the non-moving party’s assertions at this point. Second, the body cam footage takes care of most of the questions of fact and what’s left to be decided should be done in front of a jury.

The officers’ attempt to portray Scott as a threat falls flattest, in terms of appellate arguments. The officers claimed Scott was a threat because he was carrying two weapons — a metal pipe and a knife. The court reminds the officers that one had been dropped and the other voluntarily handed to officers well before the officers decided to take Scott to the ground and restrain him to death.

The law was clearly established when the officers ended Scott’s life. And the precedent is almost directly on point.

The similarities between this case and Drummond are striking. Scott was not suspected of a crime. Instead, he was taken into custody because of his mental health. Though they were presented with an individual experiencing a mental health crisis and presenting no obvious danger to others, Smith and Huntsman crushed Scott’s back and neck to subdue him while handcuffing him. Scott also cried out with increasing distress and incoherence as the officers’ force escalated. Reasonable officers would have known that their force was not reasonable and that it created a serious risk of asphyxiating Scott.

When the law is clearly established and any facts that might help the officers push their version of the events still in dispute (not including those caught on camera, which are indisputable), qualified immunity is not an option. This will return to the lower court to be argued in front of a jury, assuming the city of Los Angeles doesn’t decide to settle first. No matter how this ends up being resolved, the city and the PD would be wise to look into alternative response options for mental health calls. It’s pretty clear police officers can’t — or won’t — handle these calls responsibly.

There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

Well, here’s something unexpected. Apparently Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book coming out this week called “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.” And, one of the examples in the book is about the ridiculous criminal case against Aaron Swartz and his eventual tragic decision to take his own life while facing the possibility of decades in prison for the “crime” of downloading too many research papers while on a college campus that had an unlimited subscription to those research papers.

At the time, we wrote about the travesty of the case and the tragedy of how it all ended.

But it’s still somewhat surprising to find out that the case has been wedged in Gorsuch’s mind as an example of prosecutorial overreach and over-criminalization.

David French has an interview with Gorsuch about the book in the NY Times, and the Swartz case is the first example Gorsuch brings up:

French: This was an interesting element of the book to me and something that people who are not familiar with your jurisprudence might not know — it’s that you’ve long been a champion of the rights of criminal defendants. It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point. Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain. And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.

His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy. And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them. Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies. And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?

They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system. And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial. And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970. And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).

I disagree with Gorsuch on many, many things. On the two big internet cases from this last term, Gorsuch joined the Lalaland takes of Justices Alito and Thomas (in both the Moody and the Murthy case Gorsuch was a third vote besides Alito and Thomas towards nonsense). So, it seems a bit shocking for Gorsuch to be somewhat on the side of Swartz, who would have eviscerated Gorsuch’s position in both of those cases.

Of course, Gorsuch is also wrong that Swartz “probably shouldn’t have done that.” MIT had a site license that enabled anyone on campus to download as many articles from JSTOR as they wanted. It didn’t say “unless you download too many.”

But, at least he recognizes how ridiculous the criminal lawsuit that Swartz faced a dozen years ago is. For well over a decade, we’ve been highlighting how dangerous the CFAA is as a law. It is so easily abused by prosecutors that it’s been dubbed “the law that sticks.” It sticks because when there is no real criminal prosecution under other laws, prosecutors will often cook up a CFAA violation, as they did with Aaron. And it remains ridiculous that, to this day, nothing has ever been done to prevent another Aaron Swartz-type scenario from happening again.

Perhaps, with Gorsuch bringing it up again in his book and in this interview, it can renew some of the interest that showed up in the months following Aaron’s untimely death to make real changes to the laws that caused it. Having a Justice like Gorsuch calling out the terrible and ridiculous situation the CFAA caused seems like a good reason for Congress to revisit that law, rather than cooking up new nonsense like KOSA.

It is almost impossible to believe, as the nation stands on the precipice of one of the most important elections in our lifetime, if not the nation’s history, that Democrats would want to stick it to young people, whose enthusiasm and activism they desperately need to prevail in November. But in trying to ram through Congress the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act” (the title is a misnomer, especially given that the law would actually put vulnerable youth in jeopardy by cutting them off from resources and support) this sort of political foot-shooting would seem to be exactly what leading Senate Democrats were determined to make their fellow Democrats do, no matter how much this exhibition of self-defeating political ineptitude would make them all resented in November.

Fortunately, House Republicans inexplicably decided to help Democrats dodge their own bullet by scuttling the bill, at least for now. Hopefully that will afford a chance for clearer minds to prevail and recognize the political insanity of it should it come back to the floor, or any other similar bill percolating through legislatures around the country, many of which inexplicably have Democratic support. As courts are already starting to find, all of them stand to be a First Amendment disaster. But they also stand to be a political one too.

No matter how they are framed, just like book bans, each of these bills ultimately seeks to use government power to unduly infantilize young people, ignore their First Amendment rights, and remove their practical ability to become educated, informed, and socially connected citizens. While some of the worst of these bills may have been dulled a bit in the Senate’s version of KOSA, it still remained a blunt and potent weapon able to cause a lot of harm to young people’s ability to access information online.

Just as book bans are intended to do, laws like these are intentionally designed to cut young people off from a universe of ideas and information. Sure, maybe up until they turn 18 they could still passively watch TV (almost entirely corporately owned, by very few companies), or listen to the radio (do young people even still do that?), or read newspapers and magazines (but only the dead tree versions, if they still exist, because everything digital stands to fall under these laws’ age-restricting requirements, which means young people can forget about reading things like Teen Vogue, or plenty of other digital-only publications). But the richness of the Internet will largely be out of reach.

Furthermore, these bills manage to be even worse than book bans in how they are also inherently designed to harm young people’s ability to communicate online as well, cutting them off from a needed sense of community and opportunities for their own self-expression. None of these outcomes would arrive accidentally; they are indeed the very point of laws like these, to disconnect young people from others’ expression, and others from theirs.

Yet despite this deliberate deprivation somehow Democrats nevertheless seem to expect young people to emerge from the mandatory isolation these laws would impose on their youth as eager supporters of the very same politicians who had sought to keep them in the dark up to then. Such an expectation is beyond naïve. Like with the TikTok ban, laws like KOSA would represent yet another Democrat own-goal taking aim at the very means that political excitement is engendered, including that which has tended to benefit Democrats in particular.

Laws like KOSA seem to reflect the unreasonable belief that at the stroke of midnight on their 18th birthdays young people somehow magically suddenly become qualified to avail themselves of the medium. At least that’s the belief for now, because any law championed to unilaterally ignore First Amendment rights at one age it could similarly be championed to unilaterally ignore them at other ages too. So even if laws like KOSA only dismiss the rights of young people under 18, maybe the next bill proposed by its proponents will strike at the rights of young people up to the age of 21. Or 24. Or 30, etc. Or maybe the next bill after that will work the other way and take First Amendment rights away from people lawmakers now think are too old.

As they stand now laws like these already harm the First Amendment rights of everyone, including all adults, which is yet another reason that bills like KOSA are so toxic to Democrats’ political prospects. They explicitly teach everyone that Democrats don’t care any more about the Constitution than their opponents. For proponents of these bills the First Amendment is a mere triviality that can be ignored whenever politically expedient. Bills like these run roughshod over the First Amendment rights of so many, including everyone who runs a website, who will now be burdened with onerous if not impossible compliance obligations, which is why young people will end up getting cut off from nearly all digital information if they go into force. And also every adult Internet user as well, who would now have to divulge sensitive personal information to be allowed to read or say anything online, irrespective of how the First Amendment is supposed to protect their rights to read and speak anonymously.

And of course it offends the rights of young people themselves, just as they are when books get excised from curricula and removed from libraries, which is why the book bans being pushed by Republican officials are so odious: they are always about cutting people off from ideas and information, Constitution be damned. But there is no reason why it would be bad only when Republicans engage in such censorship and not when Democrats do it too (and with Republican help, of course, as KOSA was only get passed with bipartisan effort).

In fact, if anything laws like KOSA are even worse than book bans, because people are not just getting cut off from the ideas and information that certain government officials don’t like, but potentially ALL ideas and information, including plenty that young minds very much need to grow up into educated adults, well-equipped and ready to vote (including for Democrats!).

The problem, of course, as per usual, is that this rush to “think of the children!” is not thinking about how much what a law is trying to do will instead actually harm them, and what the results of that harm will inevitably be. If the alleged goal of a law like KOSA is to help ensure the minds of the next generation can develop into healthy adults it is indeed an odd policy to pursue, to purposefully starve those minds of informational resources, social connections, and their own expressive outlets. And politically obtuse to think that, once grown, these same young minds won’t remember who left them hungry.

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If you’re a swing state voter who thought AmericaPAC was helping you register to vote, think again. The Elon Musk-backed SuperPAC seems more interested in your personal info than your civic participation. It appears to be misleading visitors in order to collect all sorts of data, specifically on swing state voters, according to an incredible CNBC report.

I tend to think that the discourse around all three of the following things is overblown: the impact of SuperPACs on elections, concerns about “dark patterns,” and how much the owner of a social media platform can influence an election. But Elon Musk sure seems to be working overtime to change my mind on all three things.

Remember how Musk took over Twitter because he thought its leadership was managing the company in too political a manner? Indeed, while he was in the process of trying to buy the site, one of the things he said is that the site needed to be “politically neutral” to “deserve public trust.”

Since taking over Twitter, renaming it to X, and reinstating the worst people in the world, Elon continues to fall deeper and deeper into MAGA-fueled fantasyland, leading to his official endorsement of Donald Trump and turning ExTwitter into an all-day, every-day promotional campaign for the former President.

Around the same time that he endorsed Trump, it was announced that Musk would be donating to a SuperPAC that was created to support Trump. Some of the details have been disputed, but Musk admits he created a SuperPAC to support Trump.

“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “It is called the America Pac.”

Now, the whole thing with SuperPACs is that they’re supposed to be independent from the campaign. This is a convenient lie for everyone, so it’s rarely enforced. But, earlier this year, the Federal Election Commission said that the independence is really only around advertising. It said they can coordinate on canvassing.

That’s a very big deal, because these days canvassing and “get out the vote” campaigns appear to be the keys to winning elections.

And that brings us to the CNBC article, which notes that AmericaPAC has been running sketchy ads that then push users to a site where it claims it will help register them to vote. But how it handles users depends on where they live:

The website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user clicks “Register to Vote,” the experience he or she will have can be very different, depending on where they live.

If a user lives in a state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election, like California or Wyoming for example, they’ll be prompted to enter their email addresses and ZIP code and then directed quickly to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up section.

But for users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

If they agree to submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter registration page. Instead, it shows them a “thank you” page.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

This is… not normal. Yes, political campaigns do all sorts of things to collect data on potential voters, but that’s not supposed to involve actively misleading them. And targeting the enhanced data collection in swing states suggests that the PAC could seek to focus on activating likely Trump voters, while decreasing turnout of likely Harris voters.

Now, I’ve pointed out before that people freak out too much over claims of everything being “election interference,” but it kinda does seem that collecting a ton of personal data on someone, telling them that you’re helping to register them to vote, and then not actually registering them to vote… is a form of fraud, doesn’t it?

The report notes that people who end up on this page are not given any indication that the site they’re on is designed to support Trump. Instead, it’s made to look like a generic form to help you register to vote.

The PAC’s website offers no indication one way or another what the group’s political leaning is. But in its federal filings, the group discloses that all of its work is designed to either help Trump or hurt his opponent.

When you put all of this together, it’s fairly concerning. The PAC is not upfront with visitors, and then is potentially fraudulently suggesting that it’s helping them register to vote, when it’s actually just collecting a ton of valuable information on people in important swing states (while not actually registering them to vote). Combine that with the fact that the SuperPAC has been engaging in canvassing activities (where it can coordinate with the campaign) and the whole thing seems quite sketchy:

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said.

No wonder Elon is so quick to insist that others are engaged in attempts at election interference.

There’s been significant progress, but many popular consumer electronics brands are still building hardware that’s often impossible to repair despite a flood in new state “right to repair” laws around the country. That’s at least the conclusion of this new report by the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

PIRG examined 21 different mainstream tech devices subject to New York’s recently passed electronics Right to Repair law, then graded them “based on the quality and accessibility of repair manuals, spare parts, and other critical repair materials.”

They found decidedly mixed results, with nine of the devices earning As or Bs (including all of the smart phones), three products receiving Ds, and six popular mainstream devices earning Fs. The devices that fared poorly, like the HP Spectre Fold foldable laptop, the Canon EOS r100 camera, or the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 VR headsets, usually did so because of a lack of spare parts or useful repair manuals.

New York’s Digital Fair Repair Act, passed in 2022, requires that tech manufacturers provide tools, manuals, and parts to ensure affordable, easy repair of consumer electronics. But as we noted at the time, tech industry lobbyists managed to convince NY Governor Kathy Hochul to water the bill down to the point of near-uselessness by including ample loopholes. PIRG says they’d like this addressed:

“The New York Right to Repair Bill has had mixed success. It has gone a long way in pushing companies towards greater repair standards, but it has been surpassed by newer repair bills in other states like the recent passage in Oregon. In order for this bill to remain useful for the people of New York, it should be updated to bring it in line with newer repair standards, as well as provide greater enforcement to move companies towards full compliance in the future.”

PIRG Senior Director Nathan Proctor told me there’s been no enforcement action taken by NY on the law despite numerous companies failing to comply. All told, the report notes that the cellphone sector has made significant strides in terms of repairability and providing easy access to repair manuals and replacement parts. That’s offset greatly by sectors like VR headsets and cameras, where repairability remains mostly a mess.

Oregon recently became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York, Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states are considering such bills in 2024.

But such bills are routinely at risk of being watered down by lobbyists keen to exclude the most problematic sectors (like medical equipment, game consoles, or agricultural gear). And the bills are only useful if they’re actually enforced, which isn’t likely to be a top priority in many well-lobbied states.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment on our post about Democrats moving from fact-checking to vibe-checking:

I think describing it as “vibes” is reductive. The vibe is certainly part of it, but it’s not just about vibes. It’s about substance, too.

When we talk about how weird the Republicans are, we’re not just talking about Trump’s hair or whatever, we’re talking about Alito quoting a fucking 17th-century witch-hunter to justify overturning Roe. We’re talking about the Heritage Foundation wanting to put an end to recreational sex and the Project 2025 guy having ties to Opus Dei.

That shit is weird, man. Not weird like Trump’s spray-tan is weird, weird like a bunch of self-professed Christians running a guy who raped a woman and then responded to the allegations by calling her ugly is weird.

Context matters.

Like, if there’s a group of adults meeting in robes and calling themselves dragons and wizards, that’s a little weird, but if it’s a LARP session that’s a very different class of weird than if it’s a Klan rally.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about Jim Jordan demanding that advertisers explain why they don’t advertise on MAGA media sites:

GOP: We love the free market and free speech!
Free market: Advertising on your sites is a PR nightmare. We’re taking our business elsewhere.
GOP: That’s not what we meant!

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment (also anonymous) about vibe checks over fact checks:

We are post-truth. Facts don’t matter anymore. If they did, president Trump never would have happened. Between Trickle-Down-Economics and the Iraq war, the right wing has blown all its credibility with rational people. To maintain any level of power, they necessarily had to create an environment where there is no objective truth.

Reality and facts are for the rational. Anyone thinking of voting GQP at this stage is the game needs a different tack.

Next, it’s a comment from Pseudonymous Coward about House Republicans killing KOSA:

My personal suspicion is that it has more to do with “we don’t want the Dems to pass anything they can claim has bipartisan support in an election year” than anything to do with what the bill does or does not do.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is tanj with a comment on our post about the Fifth Circuit ruling against the FCC’s rural broadband subsidy program:

I find it unsurprising that TD is in favor of rural subsidies that would make the site more accessible.

In second place, it’s an anonymous clapback to some dumb comment calling us degenerates:

Can you stop fucking the keyboard for just one post?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of comments from Pixelation. First, it’s one about AI mass surveillance at the Paris Olympics:

It’s okay because, France has always been at war with Eastasia.

Finally, it’s one about Google autocomplete following up “President Donald” with “duck” before “Trump”:

Well, to be fair, Donald Duck would make a better president.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the New York Times stood up for Section 230 and called out the politicians who were lying about it, like Rep. Gosar who had previously been sued for blocking constituents on social media, while we tried to put an end to the myth that big tech was censoring conservatives (and that platforms legally had to be neutral) and looked closer at Josh Hawley’s latest bill that would make him product manager for the internet. And, as expected, Nick Sandmann’s lawsuit against the Washington Post was quickly dismissed.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Michael Hayden had a moment of accidental honesty and admitted that Ed Snowden was a whistleblower, while the EFF was asking the court to declare that the NSA’s “internet backbone” collections were unconstitutional, and Keith Alexander was going around asking for $1 million a month for his cybersecurity services. The recording industry was going after Ford and General Motors for cars with built-in CD rippers, City of London police were pulling some ridiculous shenanigans to “fight piracy”, and Prenda received another appeals court smackdown. Also, a podcasting patent troll was trying to run away from a lawsuit after realizing podcasting didn’t make much money.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, an earlier patent troll was stepping up to claim it owned pretty much all podcasting. The Associated Press was trying to get out of having to talk any more about its plans for news DRM, Hollywood was still calling for more movie DRM, and Barnes & Noble was defending its practice of putting DRM on public domain ebooks. A new ruling in Europe said that an 11-word snippet could be copyright infringement, a publisher was nervous about letting an author quote a single sentence, and we saw what might be the first defamation lawsuit over a tweet.

We’ve mentioned a few times that there are more than $42 billion in broadband subsides about to drop in the laps of state leaders thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. Since the bill gives individual states leeway on how this money is spent, a lot of states (like Pennsylvania) are simply throwing the money in the laps of giant telecom monopolies with long histories of subsidy fraud and abuse.

Some states, like California and New York, are, thankfully, doing things a little differently. Hopefully.

California, for example, is spending $3 billion of its funding on a massive open access “middle mile” network that should drive down access costs and boost competition. There’s been some consternation as to how transparently and inclusively California leaders are doing this, but it’s a strong idea.

New York, meanwhile, is directing a lot of its COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding to community owned and operated broadband networks, which saw a massive surge in popularity during the home education broadband headaches during COVID lockdowns. Said lockdowns illustrated that broadband is an essential utility, and that widespread monopolization has clearly led to market failure.

New York just announced that $70 million of a broader $228 million program will be headed to community-owned broadband networks. Like the one being built in Dryden, New York, which is offering locals previously stuck under a Charter cable broadband monopoly symmetrical 400 Mbps, 700 Mbps, and 1 Gbps connections for $45, $75, and $90 a month, respectively.

According to a New York state announcement, many of these areas will be getting affordable fiber broadband for the first time ever:

“These awards through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program will connect tens of thousands of homes and businesses across Upstate New York and deliver reliable high-speed internet service to areas of the state that are unserved and underserved while addressing ConnectALL’s mandate to develop a robust, equitable broadband marketplace across New York State.”

A good chunk of the funding is being spent on “open access” fiber networks, which effectively provide multiple providers — municipally owned or private –the low cost ability to provide service. That boosts competition, and in most places where it’s implemented, results in cheaper, better service (I wrote a report on this phenomenon for the Copia Institute last year in case you missed it).

Contrary to what big telecom and its assorted mouthpieces like to claim, community broadband is an organic, grass roots response to monopoly power and market failure, and sees broad, bipartisan support. Which is why telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast tried to have House Republicans impose a national ban in the middle of a national health emergency that was busy highlighting its importance.

Community broadband isn’t magic. It needs to be implemented and funded intelligently. It can take on many forms, from an extension of your local power utility or a cooperative, to a municipally owned network or a hybrid public-private partnership. These creative, popular, local solutions are again a direct result of decades of apathy by regional telecom monopolies that have lobbied many leaders into apathy.