We didn’t really need more precedent assuring us our rights don’t mean anything at the borders, but we got it anyway.

Within 100 miles of any US border (and that includes international airports), courts have generally ruled that rights are optional. If they seem to be getting in the way of “securing” the border, they have to go. And that’s why intrusive device searches have increased steadily in recent years, despite the Supreme Court’s 2014 Riley decision. That ruling said warrants were required to search cell phones because cell phones, unlike someone’s trunk or pants pockets, contained a wealth of personal and private information previously unseen in the history of the nation.

Given the rationale for the warrant requirement, you’d think courts would extend it to cover the nation’s borders. But no court has. When it comes to border searches, Riley simply doesn’t apply.

Not every court has reached this conclusion. A federal judge in the 2nd Circuit said Riley applied at the border. But that ruling was never ratified at the appellate level, so it hardly changes things in the Second Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court — which covers the largest amount of southern border (which is where pretty much all the intrusion takes place) — did place some restraints on warrantless border device searches, limiting them to searches for “contraband.” How much that changed anything is unknown, but it was a small step further than any other circuit has been willing to go.

The circuit with the second largest amount of border territory (the Fifth Circuit) hasn’t had any qualms about eradicating the Fourth Amendment at border crossings. An unequivocal “no warrants needed” was handed down by that circuit late last summer.

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court recently revisited this issue. Its earlier ruling on the issue was pretty much a punt. The court decided it didn’t need to deliver any ruling on the issue at that point because it could use the “good faith” release valve to sidestep anything approaching precedent.

The primary positions staked out by the parties could not be more starkly contrasted. The defendant argues that nothing less than a warrant authorizes a search of electronic devices at the border. The government asserts that it may conduct these searches without any particularized suspicion at all. In the end, though, we need not adopt either of these positions, and indeed may avoid entirely the thorny issue of the appropriate level of suspicion required. Instead, we affirm the district court’s denial of the motion to suppress because these agents acted in good faith when they searched the devices with reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime was being committed, at a time when no court had ever required more than reasonable suspicion for any search at the border.

That’s how it went in April 2019. Here’s how it’s going now:

The “longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless ‘reasonable’ has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself.” United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 619 (1977). That history leads us to join the uniform view of our sister circuits to hold that searches of electronics at the border—like any other border search—do not require a warrant or probable cause, and that the kind of routine, manual search of the phone initially performed here requires no individualized suspicion. We affirm.

That’s from the opening of the appeals court decision [PDF], one that portrays a CBP agent’s trawl through a traveler’s phone as a “routine, manual search,” which included demanding (and obtaining) a passcode, digging through images stored on the phone, and unlocking (with the provided passcode) another application where more images of child sexual abuse were discovered.

The traveler (and the person seeking to suppress the evidence discovered on his phone) is Marcos Mendez, a US citizen who had previous arrests for solicitation of a child and CSAM possession. So, he was already on the CBP radar. That being said, it’s a bit chilling to realize this is what the CBP thinks is an indicator of child sexual abuse — something the Seventh Circuit tacitly endorses by placing it in the decision without further comment:

Mendez also fit the profile for child-pornography offenders: a single adult male traveling alone.

Well… OK, then. The supposed connective tissue was the fact that Mendez traveled alone to Ecuador, which is apparently just as suspicious because… well… rank speculation, I guess?

[M]endez was returning from Ecuador, which CBP officers classified as a potential child trafficking source country.

Couldn’t literally any country be considered a “potential child trafficking source country?” I mean, we’re just talking potential here. It’s not other countries, which are known destinations for people seeking to engage in sex with minors. All this says is that Ecuador, like every other country in the world, has minors in its population and those minors have the potential to be trafficked for sex.

Anyway, the Seventh Circuit isn’t going to let itself get bogged down by questionable assertions about suspicion asserted by our valiant border officers. Instead, it’s just going to get down to business aligning itself with every other circuit by going on (permanent) record with a free pass on constitutional violations anywhere people might enter or exit the United States.

And, in doing so, the court says things the Supreme Court didn’t say about the Riley decision, even as it uses a very selective direct quote. According to the Seventh Circuit, Riley doesn’t apply at the borders because the incident underlying that historic decision did not occur at the border.

Riley involved the search incident to arrest exception and “carefully tailored its analysis to that context.” Wood, 16 F.4th at 533. What is unreasonable after arrest may be perfectly reasonable at customs, as Riley itself anticipated. See Riley, 573 U.S. at 401–02 (“[O]ther case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone.”)

But the Seventh Circuit’s blanket exception for border searches ignores a crucial part of the very decision it quotes:

“[O]ther case-specific exceptions…”

This ruling has nothing to say about specifics. While it’s certainly true a known sex offender will receive greater scrutiny when entering or exiting the country, the ruling here applies this line of thought to everyone crossing borders, whether or not any reasonable suspicion exists to justify the seizure and search of someone’s phone.

There’s evidence here this search was likely justified under the lower level of constitutional protections at our nation’s borders, but the Seventh Circuit looks at a case-specific exception and makes it a blanket exception by refusing to undo precedent that says federal officers can pretty much do whatever they want, so long as it happens within 100 miles of any border crossing.

So, it’s not a great ruling or even a good one. It just is. And because no appellate circuit has been willing to upset this free-for-all at the border by instituting a warrant requirement, every other appellate circuit thinks it’s OK to ignore the greater message of the Riley decision (that being that almost any search of a person’s phone is intrusive) in favor of just keeping their heads down and allowing the status to remain quo.

Last December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.

To be clear the FCC’s plan doesn’t actually stop such discrimination. Regulators didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and imposed some loophole-filled rules stating that big ISPs shouldn’t discriminate moving forward.

As with the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules, I highly suspect the historically feckless and captured FCC ever actually enforces the guidelines with any zeal. But the effort to acknowledge that such discrimination exists (as it has been documented in both electrical utility deployments and highway location selection) was viewed as progress by civil rights groups. And also enough to send the GOP into a multi-month tizzy.

Last February, 65 US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval claiming, falsely, that the Biden administration was using the pretense of “equity” to “expand the federal government’s control of all Internet services and infrastructure.” And last week, the Federalist Society hosted a function at which GOP officials (including Trump appointed FCC Commission Nathan Simington) gathered to make up claims the rules were already having a “chilling effect across the broadband industry“:

“Out of fear of running afoul of the rules, companies will certainly avoid otherwise planned investments,” said Erin Boone, chief of staff and wireless advisor for Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington.”

As you might recall, this was the same claim Republicans made about some modest net neutrality rules. For a decade the GOP proclaimed that modest and largely unenforced FCC net neutrality rules would have a devastating impact on broadband investment. But if you looked at earnings reports, public data, and even CEO statements, it was patently obvious the claim was absolute bullshit.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also positively flummoxed that a telecom regulator acknowledged that digital broadband discrimination exists, penning a lengthy missive falsely stating that the FCC’s half-assed effort would most assuredly harm poor Americans:

“These rules undermine public and private sector efforts to build modern broadband networks—jeopardizing connectivity for all Americans.”

This is the perpetual doom cycle U.S. telecom policy has inhabited for 30 odd years.

Democrats weakly propose long overdue but meekly enforced rules to address a problem they’ve ignored for the better part of thirty years. Republicans pop up to proclaim these bare-minimum efforts are somehow a “radical socialist takeover of the internet” (or some variant), which “both sides” news outlets parrot without much in the way of skepticism, giving the GOP unearned credibility on telecom policy.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s broadband privacy, net neutrality, racial discrimination, or even very basic efforts to stop your cable company from ripping you off with bullshit fees. It doesn’t matter how basic the proposal is or if it ever even sees enforcement.

The pretense is always the same: that the government doing the absolute bare minimum is, in reality, a “radical government running amok” and “chilling all investment in the broadband industry.”

It makes me wonder how the AT&T earlobe-nibbling politicians of today would respond to a Democratic party and regulators with an actual antitrust enforcement backbone. In lock step with GOP whining, major telecom policy and lobbying groups have also sued to block the modest digital discrimination rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, claiming falsely it’s akin to “rate regulation.”

The goal of most Republicans (and a not insubstantial number of Democrats) is a market in which regional, highly consolidated monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are allowed to freely run amok, taking bottomless advantage of the one-two punch of feckless oversight and limited competition while being slathered with subsidies. All dressed up as some kind of noble defense of free markets and the little guy.

I’ve been seeing some variation of this for the better part of 25 years of covering the broadband industry, and it’s utterly remarkable how utterly impervious the whole corruption-fueled dynamic is to both reason and meaningful change.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Rico R. with a comment about the Surgeon General’s call for a warning label on social media:

Bullying somewhere does not make that place bad for kids

Surgeon General Warning: Enrolling your child in a public school can increase issues with your child’s mental health due to peer pressure and bullying. Homeschooling is advised.

See how ridiculous that sounds? I was bullied WAY more in school than I was on social media growing up, and yet I don’t see the Surgeon General demanding warnings on school enrollment forms.

And if some troll says, “School is mandatory, but social media is not,” let me ask you why is school mandatory? Because of its net benefit to society. A good quality education is important. Yet, whenever someone points out how social media can be beneficial to teens (i.e., helps them express themselves, get help when needed, feel like they belong, etc.) and research backs up that this is the case, such studies are hand-waved away as irrelevant.

Social media isn’t the boogeyman many claim it is. It reflects real life, and real life has good and bad things about it. It can build people up or bring people down. So can social media. So don’t write it off as “all bad” for kids.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about the fictional crime wave:

There’s another factor underlying this

A lot of the people wailing about “a historic crime wave” don’t care about preventing crime – at all. They care about pandering to their base (in the US: old racist white people in suburbs who think cities are hellholes) and ensuring that their supporters (like police unions) are well-funded.

Unsurprisingly, these are the same people who vociferously oppose every proposal to stop crime well before it happens. They campaign/vote against school lunches, education programs for the unemployed, housing for the homeless, lead paint/pipe removal (yes, it’s linked to crime rates), youth recreational programs, substance abuse help, mental health counseling, offender rehabilitation, etc. – every possible thing that could actually help people so that they’re not so desperate that they resort to crime.

So every time you hear someone trumpeting “law and order”, know that what you’re really hearing is a vicious, sadistic thug who is willing to doom tens of millions of people to miserable lives in order to pander to the wealthy and privileged.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment about the Surgeon General’s concerns, this time from an anonymous commenter:

In my experience, it largely seems to be ostensible adults who are brain damaged from social media.

Next, it’s That One Guy with a comment about the attacks on the Internet Archive:

Names to remember and avoid

Hatchette
Harper Collins
John Wiley
Penguin Random House

Any time those publishers try to claim that they have no problem with libraries the only response should be pointing to their actions here, where they’ve made crystal clear that if they could they would absolutely destroy the very concept of libraries and require anyone who wants to read a book to buy their own copy to do so.

Those publishers are friends to neither readers or authors, and should be avoided by both as a result.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about a reference we made to people who cry libel every time they are insulted:

Giving them way too much credit here, Tim. As often as not, they cry “slander” rather than “libel” when encountering written words that upset them.

In second place, it’s tanj with a comment about New York’s “save the children” bill:

Blame Canada

He’s blaming The Internet when he should be blaming Canada.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from tanj, this time about all the dastardly pirates defending the Internet Archive:

You pirates also think the purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authord and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries rather than enriching publishers.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about the lawsuit against Martin Shkreli over the Wu Tang album:

Watch your step, Shkreli,
Protect ya neck, kid.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we reiterated the all-important point that there is no legal distinction between a “platform” and a “publisher”, and explained why the freedom to decide what content to facilitate is essential to Section 230, while the Supreme Court signaled its recognition that social media sites don’t have to allow all speech. Genius picked a dumb fight with Google over song lyrics, which quickly got even dumber. And Congress was stirring up a moral panic about deepfakes, while Kim Kardashian got one such deepfake taken down with a copyright claim. Also, Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier was finally hit with a fine and prison time.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, more details emerged about how the US government had no idea to solve a problem like Ed Snowden, while congressmen were admitting that the NSA spied on Americans without a warrant. Techdirt received our first right to be forgotten request, and we breathed a sigh of relief (while also chuckling) as an appeals court ruled that having “dirt” in your domain name doesn’t remove safe harbor protections. Another copyright troll ran away upon details of its practices coming to light, and a new ruling repeated the forcible case that Sherlock Holmes had entered the public domain.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, Hulu was accused of being “anti-American” for providing free content, while Blu-Ray was allowing users to make copies with a lot of strings attached. A French court ordered a P2P news site to cover recent file sharing convictions, while the NY Times was correcting its false article about the Pirate Bay appeal but still getting it wrong. Also, the much-anticipated penalty in the Jammie Thomas case arrived, clocking in at an absurd $1.92 million that was quickly defended by a bunch of RIAA mouthpieces.

When school students are tested, those overseeing the tests seemingly are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent cheating, even if it means utilizing extremely intrusive spyware to lower the risk of dishonesty. Students are just supposed to take this in stride, but the lessons they’ll often learn of just how little respect school administrators have for them.

But when it comes to cops taking tests, no one even bothers to do the bare minimum. Here’s Jonathan Bailey of Plagarism Today describing the far-from-sterile testing environment afforded to NYPD officers taking a sergeants exam:

The city did just about everything possible wrong when administering this test: It did not enforce cell phone rules, it allowed ineligible people to sit for it, it did not change the questions between sessions/days, and it did not adequately follow up on allegations of cheating.

That’s the upshot of the detailed report [PDF] on this cheating scandal compiled by the city’s Department of Investigation. Somewhat ironically, this came to light thanks to the complaints made by honest cops who apparently didn’t appreciate the massive amount of dishonesty they had witnessed.

In the days and weeks following the Exam, which consisted of 100 multiple choice questions, DOI received approximately 80 complaints from NYPD police officers alleging widespread cheating, involving candidates who took the Exam on Day 1 and passed questions and answers to candidates taking the Exam on Day 2. It was reported that officers used their cell phones in the waiting room and received communications or disseminated information to other test-takers, and that officers who took the Exam on Day 2 received answers to the Exam through social media posts and text messages

Of course, the ratio of honest cops to dishonest cops was still pretty low. Even if we generously assume the 80 complaints came from 80 different officers, the total number of officers who participated in this test was 10,300. Sure, not all of them cheated and obviously not every officer was privy to cheating by others, but that’s still a pretty low number given the total number of test takers.

The large number of test takers was due to the COVID pandemic, which delayed the annual testing for two years. So, there was obviously pressure on the department to get as many officers through the testing as possible, which probably contributed to the nearly nonexistent efforts made to deter cheating.

Not every officer had a chance to cheat. But a whole lot of officers were provided with the opportunity by other officers who were even more ethically compromised than the people they helped cheat.

DOI found that after that first session, 35% of the test questions and answers were disseminated via social media to more than 1,200 Exam candidates.

Given the opportunity for cheating and the lax testing room standards, the real surprise here is how many officers failed to pass the test.

Of the 10,399 candidates taking the exam, only 1,730 of the test takers candidates (17%) achieved a passing score.

While the DOI report notes that some test takers are not eligible for a promotion to sergeant, many officers still take tests like these to polish their test-taking skills, something the department allows. And while that may have contributed to this very low percentage of passing scores, it doesn’t explain why so many officers who desire this promotion are so ill-prepared for a test like this, especially when (at least in this case) some were given questions and answers by other test takers. (Then again, as noted elsewhere in the report, about half of the answers shared on social media by NYPD officers were wrong.)

Then there’s whatever the hell this is:

DOI discussed with IAB the candidate who received a score of 3%. IAB identified that candidate as a retired NYPD captain who was not eligible for the exam because he had retired more than three years prior to taking the exam. The retired captain currently runs a promotional exam school which charges approximately $800 per student for a 20-week course; while still at NYPD he cofounded an NYPD promotional exam training academy. He explained in his interview with IAB that he scored 3% because he intentionally chooses the wrong answers to be able to protest any questions he believes to be unfair. It is unclear how the selection of incorrect answers would support a “protest” of test questions because, according to DCAS, protests are deemed valid only if a candidate can establish that the answer they selected is as accurate — or more accurate — than the answer in the test’s answer key.

In any event, the retired captain registered for 19 exams from 2002 to the present, and was ineligible for all of them. According to the Sergeant’s Exam requirements, applicants must maintain the title of NYPD Police Officer for at least three years preceding the date of the Exam. DOI reviewed the retired captain’s NYPD employment record and DCAS exam history and found that he was promoted to NYPD captain in September 1999 and retired from the NYPD in October 2013. Since 2002, the retired captain has registered for 19 NYPD promotional exams, 11 of which were from 2002 to 2012 while he was employed as an NYPD captain. DOI reviewed the Exam application, which outlines eligibility requirements, and found that the retired captain was not eligible to take any of the 19 exams for which he registered. While DOI did not establish that the captain took any exam for an improper purpose, allowing ineligible candidates to sit for exams plainly poses a risk to exam integrity.

Great stuff, that. Some cop boss who thinks he’s better than the tests was allowed to take tests he wasn’t permitted to take, perform some sort of performative failure during testing, and take all the info he had gathered and use it to run a for-profit test-taking class for other NYPD officers.

And what’s come out of this other than a bit of temporary embarrassment for the NYPD? Not much. According to Bailey’s write-up at Plagiarism Today, only seven officers were lightly wrist-slapped for receiving test answers from others via text messages or social media. 103 officers were declared ineligible to take the test and their tests were thrown out. But no effort was made to perform a do-over in a more sterile testing environment and the two government contractors who combined forces to deliver this test-taking farce are apparently still considered valid options for future testing.

While this may show police officers are, above all else, human beings just as prone to temptation as the rest of us, they’re supposed to hold themselves to higher standards. But only about 80 of them did. The department they work for apparently isn’t willing to hold them to a higher standard either. And if NYPD brass doesn’t give a fuck, why should they?

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

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

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

• Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms (New York Times)
• The Surgeon General Is Wrong. Social Media Doesn’t Need Warning Labels (The Daily Beast)
• Anthropic calls for AI red teaming to be standardized (Fortune)
• How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline (Engadget)
• Pornhub to block five more states over age verification laws (The Verge)
• New York Outlaws ‘Addictive’ Social Media Feeds For Teen Users (PC Mag)
• Meta Oversight Board’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt: ‘Not all AI-generated content is harmful’ (Financial Times)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Definitely loving all of this. And right up front (just in case the defendant thinks she can rob Peter Techdirt to pay Paul Eric Posey), I’ll make it clear this post will be filled with colorful expression, hyperbole, highly opinionated takes on the lawsuit, and… possibly… archaic slang.

A lot of people (especially the most awful ones) think libel laws in this country are too restrictive. They claim it’s almost impossible to rifle through someone’s wallet via court order because someone said something about them they didn’t like. In most cases, those people are like the defendant here — someone who probably thought it was impossible to get successfully sued for libel in the United States.

You know these people. They’re the ones who cry libel every time one of their own is insulted but say dumb shit like “facts don’t care about your feelings” when other people complain about the garbage flowing out their social media accounts.

The saddest thing about this case is that this person continued to do the libel even after she knew what she was saying on social media was definitively not true. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)

A jury has awarded more than $1.1 million in damages to the drag performer who sued a blogger for defamation.

The unanimous verdict was returned Friday. The jury found that blogger Summer Bushnell defamed Post Falls resident Eric Posey when she accused him of exposing himself to the crowd while he performed in drag at the Coeur d’Alene City Park bandshell in June 2022.

That’s hilarious. Not so much for Eric Posey, who was falsely accused of exposing himself. He sued the blogger in 2022 for claiming something had happened that actually hadn’t happened.

And, of course, the posting Posey sued Bushnell over was motivated by her own bigotry. It was also an attempt to rouse a rabble that rarely needs an excuse to be roused.

The day of Posey’s performance, June 11, 2022, Bushnell posted a video of herself discussing the mass arrest of Patriot Front members near City Park, as well as footage from Posey’s performance.

“Why did no one arrest the man in a dress who flashed his genitalia to minors and people in the crowd?” she said in the video. “No one said anything about it and there’s video. I’m going to put up a blurred video to prove it.”

Yes, this is the kind of person who thinks posting an edited video can “prove” anything. However, it did prove this: there are plenty of suckers in Idaho and some of them wear government-issued uniforms. After racking up a few thousand views on social media, the edited video generated national news coverage as well as a local police investigation. Fortunately, the criminal charges were dropped after prosecutors took a look at the unedited video.

City prosecutors ultimately declined to file charges and stated publicly that the unedited video showed no exposure.

Here’s what Bushnell posted, as included in Posey’s lawsuit [PDF] against the blogger:

Here’s the same shot in unedited form:

After being sued by the drag performer, the blogger claimed this was all just an unfortunate misunderstanding. The video had been passed on to her by another person who had blurred the crotch area and Bushnell was just passing along this information.

But that excuse only lasted until she was called to the stand to testify.

Wendy J. Olsen, legal counsel for Posey, questioned Bushnell about Facebook messages she sent to multiple friends, including ones in which she references being able to see Posey’s genitals in an unedited video.

“And you knew at the time it was false,” Olsen said.

“It was not accurate,” Bushnell replied.

“You knew that at the time,” Olsen said.

“Correct,” Bushnell said.

That’s libel, folks. That’s fully admitted defamation by the defamer on the record in court during a jury trial. That can’t be undone. That’s how you lose a libel case in the United States. You say something defamatory, knowing it’s not true.

Bushnell’s lawyer, despite the $1.1 million damages award and despite his client’s own admission she had lied to people about the drag performer, continues to engage in self-delusion of his own.

Attorney Colton Boyles, who represents Bushnell, told jurors that his client’s allegations were “close to the line” but did not cross the line into defamation. He maintained that Bushnell’s “honest belief” is that Posey exposed himself, though she admitted on the witness stand that she never saw the “fully exposed genitals” she described to others.

“That remains her steadfast testimony to this day,” Boyles said.

There’s a very good reason Colton Boyles would represent someone like Bushnell. And it’s not because he’s such a great litigator. No, this is all ideological. Colton’s decision to take this case was likely motivated by his own personal animus against people like drag performer Eric Posey.

Boyles, whose full name is Dennis Colton Boyles, was recently retained by the Community Library Network – the group of Kootenai County libraries outside of Coeur d’Alene – whose board members have ambitions of restricting books and services.

He defended former Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin when she lost a public records lawsuit to the Idaho Press Club.

Boyles pleaded guilty to a driving under the influence misdemeanor late last year and is on unsupervised probation until Dec. 12.

He has appeared as a guest on far-right internet shows, such as “The Pete Santilli Show.” Pete Santilli was a vocal supporter of anti-government activist Ammon Bundy during the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Ammon Bundy’s governor campaign paid Boyles’ firm $5,000 in 2022 for legal advice.

In an Epoch Times documentary, Boyles pushed deep state conspiracy theories about Child Protective Services.

“I would say it is a state- and federal-funded kidnapping system,” Boyles said.

[…]

In 2021, Boyles donated $500 to Post Falls School Board candidate David Reilly, a former radio host who has expressed antisemitic views and attended the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

With competent representation, the blogger may have been able to secure a settlement in the low thousands. She might have been able to walk away with nothing more than a public apology. But she chose to retain a showboating rube. I hope he can explain to Bushnell how he just cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars and makes it clear that no matter how many libs the two have collectively “owned,” being stupid on social media can’t really be considered a stable revenue stream.

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician’s funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck’s giant windshield wiper.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had one of these posts, but it remains important: Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” and repeatedly insists that he bought Twitter and turned it into ExTwitter to “bring back” free speech. However, over and over again we see him delete speech, often on ideological grounds.

Remember, Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist.”

He also claims, bizarrely, that free speech means “that which matches the law” (which seems to contradict his claims above about disobeying orders from governments to block certain speech).

He also repeatedly claims that ExTwitter “will fight for your freedom to speak” and that “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.”

But, of course, the second someone semi-powerful whom Elon agrees with is aggrieved, well, down go the tweets. Witness the situation faced by reporter Pablo Manriquez, who ended up with the briefing notes that some poor schlub of a Ted Cruz staffer accidentally left somewhere to be picked up.

Manriquez went to ExTwitter, home of “free speech,” to report on what he got his hands on in a nice thread of posts with images of all the documents. Or maybe not:

Yeah, that image is the current entirety of Pablo’s nine post thread. Only the first and last tweets are shown, and all seven in the middle — the ones that at one point showed the documents in question — have been removed because, the screenshot shows, “This Post violated the X Rules.”

I went through “The X Rules” and couldn’t find anything this credibly violated. The closest would have to be the rule against publishing “private information.” But that rule describes private information as things like “home phone number and address.”

Going through the more detailed policy on private information, I still don’t see anything that could possibly qualify with this data dump. It also claims that the company takes into account what type of info is being shared, who is sharing it, and why. All of those would suggest this did not violate the policy, as it’s information in the public interest, being shared in a reporting fashion, in a manner that does not really violate anyone’s privacy, nor put anyone at risk (except of embarrassment).

Now, it is true that a few of the documents show the phone number of the Cruz staffer who will be tagging along for the meetings. So, arguably, you could say that would trigger a privacy violation as well. But not all of the removed tweets had that. And I just did a quick search on the staffer’s name and “phone number”, and the top Google result shows the exact same phone number. So it’s not exactly “private” information. Some of the docs also show some other phone numbers, or the names of family members, but nothing that seems particularly sensitive. Indeed, much of it appears to be copied from public bios that mention the family members.

But, fine, if Musk/Cruz defenders want to insist that this is obviously still a violation of the policy on private information then… wouldn’t the same be true of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I can see no world in which the information from Hunter Biden’s laptop is not more private than some briefing notes regarding Ted Cruz being told to ask Ron Lauder to donate the maximum possible, a combined $119,200 to his various campaign and political PACs. It’s a nice way to “legally” donate way more than what the public believes are the official limits on individual campaign donations.

Anyway, Musk’s attempt to block these tweets from being shared didn’t work very well. The ThreadReader app captured them all, and I’ll include them below as well (though I’ll blur out some info to be nice, not because I think it needs to be blurred). Meanwhile, both Newsweek and Business Insider reported on the details of the documents, highlighting how newsworthy they are.

To be clear: there’s nothing nefarious in these docs. I can guarantee that every Senator has similar briefing notes revealing similar requests for money. It is, however, revealing to the public how the fundraising game is played, as the Business Insider piece notes. And that makes it extremely newsworthy.

Publishing these docs may be embarrassing, but they break no laws. So, Musk’s claims of his definition of free speech matching the laws is already shown to be bullshit.

And, of course, as we’ve always said, it’s Musk’s platform. He is absolutely free to have whatever rules in place he wants and to delete whatever content he thinks should be deleted. That’s part of his own free speech rights.

But the same was true of Twitter before Musk took it over. It wasn’t an “attack on free speech” when Twitter removed some content that violated its rules, nor is it one when Musk does it.

It would just be nice if Musk and/or his fans would recognize that he’s no more of a “free speech” warrior than the old Twitter was. Indeed, as we’ve highlighted, the old Twitter was actually willing to stand up to more government demands and push back on real attacks on free speech way more often than Musk’s ExTwitter has.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not to figure out why the 911 dispatcher who answered the first call about the shooting hung up on the caller after getting mad at them for whispering.

No, it was to blame the internet.

Blaming the internet is a very convenient scapegoat for politicians who are in over their heads with societal-level problems.

On Thursday, Hochul became the living embodiment of the “won’t someone please think of the children” meme. She gleefully signed an easily unconstitutional bill that will not protect children, and which will likely do real harm. She signed the SAFE For Kids Act, which bans algorithmic feeds for kids. In signing the bill she literally said:

“Today, we save our children.”

There are just a few problems with this, all of which Hochul’s office (and the sponsors of this bill) have been told about, only to be dismissed as “talking points from big tech.”

Problem 1: There remains no study showing that algorithmic feeds are somehow “addictive” or even a problem. It’s all based on vibes (and adults who seem unable to put down their own phones).

Problem 2: What actual studies show is that if you force chronological feeds on people, a few things happen, none of which “save our children.” First, users get annoyed because they see less of the stuff they go to social media for. This doesn’t make them use less social media, it just makes them switch to other social media. It also exposes those on the chronological feed to more untrustworthy content and disinformation. I’m not sure why Kathy Hochul thinks that exposing kids to more disinformation is “saving our children,” but someone should ask her.

Problem 3: This bill requires age verification, which has already been ruled to be unconstitutional by multiple courts. It is also a privacy nightmare, as has been described multiple times in the past. Creating a world that puts kids’ private data at risk is not “saving our children.”

Problem 4: The requirement about how websites can order content is just a blatantly obvious First Amendment infringement. I mean, just imagine if the NY legislature told a newspaper that it could no longer prioritize some headlines over others and had to lay out the newspaper in the order the stories were written? Everyone would immediately recognize the First Amendment problems with such a law. But this is no different.

Problem 5: Algorithms are a hugely important tool in keeping kids safe online, by minimizing or hiding more harmful or problematic content. And Hochul and the NY legislature are telling social media companies that such tools must be removed from their arsenal.

Hochul told a reporter, “we’ve checked to make sure, we believe it’s constitutional.” And, that’s just laughable. Checked with whom? Every attempt I saw to call out these concerns was brushed off as “just spewing big tech’s talking points.”

The Constitution is not a “big tech talking point.” What the actual research shows is not a “big tech talking point.”

I’m not against chronological feeds as a general concept. They’re great for those that want them. Lots of services already offer them as an option. But mandating them, and especially mandating them for certain ages (necessitating dangerous age verification), doesn’t solve any legitimate problem and makes it harder for trust & safety teams to actually help protect kids.

I recognize that this signing happened the same day that Hochul’s approval ratings and favorability hit all-time lows. So, it’s no surprise that she’s trying populist nonsense and embracing moral panics. But perhaps she should try actually doing things to actually help, rather than things already proven harmful?

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