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Comcast President Realizes How Their Bullshit Prices/Fees Have Them Losing Customers
from the welcome-to-reality dept
It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have taken the form of everything from so-called “Broadcast TV Fees“, really just the cost of programming as part of the television service, or “Internet Cost Recovery Fees” on the internet side, whatever the hell that means. The end result has been decades of pissed off customers who are only now beginning to have other viable options for content and internet services, with much of the frustration stemming from these inflated prices, sneaky fees, and a complete lack of transparency as to what any of this is for.
I’ve know this for years and years now. So, likely, have you, along with most of the rest of the public. Comcast’s President, Mike Cavanagh, acknowledged what we’ve all known, seemingly for the first time, on a recent Comcast earnings call.
“In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of the network and connectivity products that I just described,” Cavanagh said. “[Cable division CEO] Dave [Watson] and his team have worked hard to understand the reasons for this disconnect and have identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us. The good news is that both are fixable and we are already underway with execution plans to address these challenges.”
The 183,000-subscriber loss lowered Comcast’s residential Internet subscribers to 29.19 million. Comcast also reported a first-quarter drop of 17,000 business broadband subscribers, lowering that category’s total to 2.45 million.
Nothing focuses the mind of a president of a major public company quite like a falling stock price, which is exactly what is happening to Comcast, with its stock dropping nearly 10% over the last five years. It’s a bit jarring to hear this said out loud by Cavanagh as though this is some kind of revelation, particularly given how often Comcast and other cable providers have appeared on lists of the companies that the public dislikes the most. Were they somehow not paying attention to those?
In any case, Cavanagh is saying all the right words about simplifying and locking in prices to avoid this frustration moving forward.
Cavanagh said that Comcast plans to make changes in marketing and operations “with the highest urgency.” This means that “we are simplifying our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments,” he said.
Comcast last week announced a five-year price guarantee for broadband customers who sign up for a new package. Comcast said customers will get a “simple monthly price starting as low as $55 per month,” without having to enter a contract, giving them “freedom and flexibility to cancel at any time without penalty.”
How well they pull this off is a matter of the specifics and the adherence to the promise. If Comcast finally fully goes all in on simplicity, knocks it off with the bullshit fees, and stops with the sneaky tactics to raise or otherwise hide prices, this will be received positively. Whether it’s enough to put the genie back in the bottle on public perception to turn around subscriber numbers is a different question, of course. I tend to think the train has already left the station on that one. Comcast apparently thinks that might be the case for a bit as well.
Comcast investors shouldn’t expect an immediate turnaround, though. “We anticipate that it will take several quarters for our new approach to gain traction and impact the business in a meaningful way,” Cavanagh said.
Look, Comcast has sucked on this stuff for many, many years. It’s going to take a bit of time and good behavior to gain the general public’s trust back, never mind someone like myself that cut the Comcast cord entirely years ago.
But if the company has finally found religion on its crappy behavior, that’s ultimately a good thing.
Filed Under: broadband, cable, fees, hidden fees, mike cavanagh
Companies: comcast
Otherwise Objectionable: Will Section 230 Survive?
from the 230-reasons-to-hope-section-230-survives dept
At a time when Section 230 has become one of the most politically divisive tech policy issues, our final episode of the Otherwise Objectionable podcast brings together an unusual panel for a “roundtable discussion” between myself, Jessica Melugin of CEI, Charles Cooke from the National Review, and Dave Willner (well-known trust & safety expert who has worked at Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI).
<a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/otherwise-objectionable/2007020">Episode 8: Prescriptions to Save the Internet</a>
While these voices span the ideological spectrum and likely disagree on many policy issues, all of them think that Section 230 is an important and useful law. And in this discussion, we explain why we all believe Section 230 was (and remains) the right law for the internet.
Much of the discussion focused on whether or not there were any lessons from Section 230 for new technologies, like AI. There was also surprising optimism about 230’s chances for survival — though I remain more skeptical given the current political climate (and widespread ignorance about the law).
This episode wraps up this eight-part podcast series. It was really fun to work on, and I think is especially useful for folks who want to understand the history of why Section 230 exists and how well it’s worked.
Looking back across the episodes, what’s struck me most is how a law that was crafted in response to a specific bad early-internet court ruling has proven remarkably adaptable to challenges of an evolving internet. While the debates around Section 230 have become increasingly heated, the fundamental principles — that we want to encourage community, user empowerment, and innovation at the internet’s edges — remain as vital as ever.
If you missed it, here are all the episodes:
- Episode 1: The Most Misunderstood Law on the Internet
- Episode 2: The Dawn of the Internet
- Episode 3: Law and Disorder
- Episode 4: The Solution
- Episode 5: Blowback, and the Dust Settles
- Episode 6: The Rest of the World
- Episode 7: The Future of Speech Online
- Episode 8: Prescriptions to Save the Internet
This was a fascinating project to work on, and it was great to see it regularly ranked in the top tech podcasts on Apple’s podcast charts over the last few months. Thanks to everyone who listened! While this series is now done, you can continue to listen to the Techdirt podcast and Ctrl-Alt-Speech in your podcast apps of choice!
Filed Under: ai, charles cooke, content moderation, dave willner, free speech, jessica melugin, otherwise objectionable, section 230
The War On Internet Phone Calls
from the times-have-changed dept
Today Microsoft shut down Skype, a company that helped revolutionize phone calls online. To commemorate the death of Skype, we’re running a recent “Pessimist’s Archive” article on the history of internet calls, and how it almost wasn’t allowed. If you’re not already, you should subscribe to the Pessimist’s Archive.
It used to cost money to call someone, and if that someone was in another country – you would pay a premium: in the mid-90s a prime time call to Paris from New York cost around $113 an hour (in 2025 dollars)
Then came the internet, paving the way for cheap and free calls to and from anywhere in the world… Guess what? Traditional long-distance telephone companies felt threatened.
In 1995, the internet had just 16 million users — but it was enough to make online phone calls useful. That year, startup VocalTec launched the first commercial internet phone software, amusingly named ‘i-phone’ (short for internet phone.) It quickly caught on with early web users, offering cheap long-distance calls – partly thanks to being exempt from FCC tariffs like local access charges. This prompted action from incumbents, who deemed it unfair.
In 1996 America’s Carriers Telecommunications Association (ACTA) – representing over 300 of them – filed a petition with the FCC that sought to ban the sale of long distance internet telephone services until they were regulated as ‘common carriers.’ The internet friendly Clinton Administration would oppose the petition – but it was up to the FCC to make a final ruling.
The Backlash
This is when the nerds stepped in: web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen told The San Francisco Examiner that his browser – Netscape – would build online calling into a future software update seemingly in protest (the feature never materialized.)
“Are we hurting their ability to charge you $10 for a long-distance phone call? Tough bananas” – Harvey Kaufman, vice president of NetSpeak Corp.
Jeff Pulver – an early i-phone user, who’d started a popular mailing list for online phone enthusiasts, would take it upon himself to lead the resistance. Prior to the FCC petition he launched the first online telephone network called ‘Free World Dialup’ (using the VocalTec system.) His mailing list turned into the ‘Voice on the Net coalition’: a group of internet phone enthusiasts and tech startups building out the technology.
This rag tag bunch of innovators would cobble together a lobbying effort to fight incumbents and allow this nascent technology to flourish…
In the following 8 years the VON coalition would fend off various attempts to rein in the technology, while the FCC would hold off ruling on the ACTA petition (VON is still operating today.)
1998 would see the FCC make a number of statements sympathetic to online phone services – meanwhile iphone.com would host an effort to petition lawmakers against online phone services. It isn’t clear if this was a real grassroots effort, or an astroturfed one by traditional phone providers…
In 2000 a bill passed the US house of representatives preventing phone companies charging by the minute for internet access – but it excluded internet telephony services. This prompted Jeff Pulver and his VON coalition to organize the ‘Internet Freedom Rally’ in Washington DC. It would feature the chairman of the FCC and classic rock performances.
In 2004 the FCC would finally rule on the ACTA petition after 8 years – but not before the Justice Department asked for a delay on a decisions until online phones call could be as easily wire tapped as regular calls. The FCC would make its final ruling dubbed the ‘Pulver Order’ allowing for cheap and free online phone calls to anywhere in the world we take for granted today.
This is a good example of how incumbents will try to use old rules to thwart competition enabled by new technologies – had the long distance telecoms companies succeeded, services like Facebook and Google might not be able to offer free voice and video calls globally.
Filed Under: fcc, phone calls, regulations, skype, voice on the net, voip, von
Judge To Trump: No You Can’t Just Kill All The Lawyers You Don’t Like
from the you're-not-a-king,-donnie dept
In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration’s executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an “overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints” through the targeted destruction of a law firm that represented Trump’s political opponents.
The ruling excoriates not just the Trump administration’s unconstitutional overreach, but also delivers a withering critique of the law firms that chose to capitulate to similar threats. Drawing on sources from Shakespeare to the Founding Fathers, Judge Howell frames the order as part of a dangerous historical pattern of would-be autocrats targeting lawyers as a path to power:
No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 2, act 4, sc. 2, l. 75. When Shakespeare’s character, a rebel leader intent on becoming king, see id. l. 74, hears this suggestion, he promptly incorporates this tactic as part of his plan to assume power, leading in the same scene to the rebel leader demanding “[a]way with him,” referring to an educated clerk, who “can make obligations and write court hand,” id. l. 90, 106. Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power. See Walters v. Nat’l Ass’n of Radiation Survivors, 473 U.S. 305, 371 n.24 (1985) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (explaining the import of the same Shakespearean statement to be “that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government”).
The importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice has been recognized in this country since its founding era. In 1770, John Adams made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre and “claimed later to have suffered the loss of more than half his practice.” DAVID MCCULLOUGH, JOHN ADAMS 68 (2001). “I had no hesitation,” he explained, since “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country,” and “the Bar ought . . . to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.” 3 DIARY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ADAMS 293 (L.H. Butterfield et al. eds., 1961). When the Bill of Rights was ratified, these principles were codified into the Constitution: The Sixth Amendment secured the right, in “all criminal prosecutions,” to “have the Assistance of Counsel for . . . defence,” U.S. CONST. amend. VI, and the Fifth Amendment protected “the right to the aid of counsel when desired and provided by the party asserting the right,” Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68 (1932). This value placed on the role of lawyers caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville, who in reflecting on his travels throughout the early United States in 1831 and 1832, insightfully remarked that “the authority . . . intrusted to members of the legal profession . . . is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.” ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 301 (Henry Reeve trans., 2002) (1835).
Quoting Shakespeare, John Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville all in the first two paragraphs? You can tell we’re in for quite a ride. But the key point is this: Trump is acting like a dictator, doing things he cannot be allowed to do:
The instant case presents an unprecedented attack on these foundational principles. On March 6, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14230 (“EO 14230”), 90 Fed. Reg. 11781 (Mar. 11, 2025), entitled “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP.” By its terms, this Order stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees—from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries, and mailroom attendants—due to the Firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current President disagrees, as well as the Firm’s own speech. In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” EO 14230 takes the approach of “Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,” sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.
At the end of this paragraph, there’s a footnote which calls out those law firms that capitulated, noting that this should scare clients away from using those law firms, as you can never believe that they’re not just aligned with the government’s interests over a client’s.
This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees. Yet, some clients may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel, since at least the publicized deal terms appear only to forestall, rather than eliminate, the threat of being targeted in an Executive Order. As amici former and current general counsel caution, a “fundamental premise of the rule of law” is that “when parties challenge the government, their lawyers ‘oppose[] the designated representatives of the State,’ and ‘[t]he system assumes that adversarial testing will ultimately advance the public interest in truth and fairness.’ This safeguard against government overreach fails when attorneys cannot ‘advanc[e] the undivided interests of [their] client[s]’ for fear of reprisal from the government.”…
Only when lawyers make the choice to challenge rather than back down when confronted with government action raising non-trivial constitutional issues can a case be brought to court for judicial review of the legal merits, as was done in this case by plaintiff Perkins Coie LLP, plaintiff’s counsel Williams & Connolly, and the lawyers, firms, organizations, and individuals who submitted amicus briefs in this case. As one amicus aptly put it, “[o]ur judicial system is under serious threat when determining whether to file an Amicus Curiae brief could be a career ending decision. But, when lawyers are apprehensive about retribution simply for filing a brief adverse to the government, there is no other choice but to do so.”…. If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.
This echoes what we wrote back in March. When the history books are written on this, those who capitulated will be remembered as pathetic cowards lacking the backbone to stand up for themselves against injustice.
Judge Howell then calls out just how unconstitutional this is, rightly pointing to two free speech cases that MAGA celebrated in the past two years when they came down: 303 Creative (the case about the fictional homophobic website designer) and Vullo (in which an elected official tried to coerce companies who worked with the NRA to stop doing business with them).
Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, however, is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with “tolerance, not coercion.” 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570, 603 (2023). The Supreme Court has long made clear that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics . . . or other matters of opinion.” W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). Simply put, government officials “cannot . . . use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024).
This is smart, even if the MAGA faithful don’t care about their own hypocrisy. Judge Howell is putting an exclamation point on that hypocrisy by directly calling out how their stance is a complete 180 to what they claimed to celebrate from the Supreme Court in the last two years.
She’s both calling out their total lack of principles and signaling to the same Supreme Court that made those rulings that, to be consistent with them, they should come to the same conclusion: that these executive orders are both unconstitutional and unconscionable.
I won’t go through all the reasoning (it is a 102-page order, after all), I will call out a few key bits, starting with the Court calling out just how incompetent the DOJ’s filings in the case were:
Neither the government’s motion to dismiss itself or its proposed order cites to any procedural rule as the basis for the requested dismissal, see Gov’t’s MTD; id., Proposed Order, ECF No. 43-2), and the government’s memorandum in support likewise contains no clear statement of the procedural rules relied upon as to each claim, leaving the legal bases for the motion to the Court to discern from vague headings used in the government’s memorandum or to tease out of the text of the same document, despite the critical differences in applicable standards depending on which rule is relied upon. Regardless of whether this reflects a strategy to “disguise[] the nature of its motion,” Pl.’s Opp’n at 5, plaintiff requests denial of any intended government cross-motion for summary judgment “for failure to comply with [D.D.C.] Local Rule 7(h)(1), which requires a statement of undisputed material facts supported by record citations,”
This is notable, if only to call out how almost all of the lawyers at the DOJ who know what the fuck they’re doing in court are either gone or sidelined from these cases. The lawyering from those left over is incompetent, and judges recognize that.
Also called out: the idea that the President can just claim something is “in the national interest” and that makes it unreviewable by a court. Not how it works:
When the government does not even claim that a general policy about security clearances was motivated by national security, judicial review of that policy could not threaten unduly entangling the judicial branch in questions of national security. Instead, the EO invokes “the national interest,” id., a concept seemingly far broader and more nebulous than threats to national security. When asked, government counsel was unable to define what exactly falls within the scope of “the national interest,” see, e.g., TRO Hr’g Tr. at 52:21-53:4, and the scope appears to be essentially unlimited, since disagreements about the benefits of diversity programs in hiring apparently qualify, see EO 14230 § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11781 (stating that plaintiff’s alleged discrimination “represents good cause to conclude that they [should not] have access to our Nation’s secrets”); Gov’t’s Reply at 1 (complaining about plaintiff’s “aggressive DEI practices”). Finding any such government actions judicially unreviewable simply because the Executive branch invoked “the national interest” would represent a breathtaking expansion of executive power at the expense of the constitutionally mandated role of the judicial branch and the concomitant safeguards for the individual rights of Americans.
Judge Howell is also paying attention to Trump bragging about how much money he’s getting from capitulating law firms for doing nothing wrong:
President Trump referred to these deals being cut with law firms, in a speech on April 8, 2025, stating: “Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump? $100 million, another $100 million, for damages that they’ve done. But they give you $100 million and then they announce, ‘We have done nothing wrong.’ And I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell, they’ve given me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong. And we’ll use some of those people, some of those great firms, and they are great firms too—they just had a bad moment.”….
The end result of all this is that a permanent injunction has been issued, which Trump is likely to appeal.
The U.S. Constitution affords critical protections against Executive action like that ordered in EO 14230. Government officials, including the President, may not “subject[] individuals to ‘retaliatory actions’ after the fact for having engaged in protected speech.” Hous. Cmty. Coll. Sys., 595 U.S. at 474 (quoting Nieves, 587 U.S. at 398). They may neither “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,” Vullo, 602 U.S. at 188, nor engage in the use of “purely personal and arbitrary power,” Yick Wo, 118 U.S. at 370. In this case, these and other foundational protections were violated by EO 14230. On that basis, this Court has found that EO 14230 violates the Constitution and is thus null and void. For the reasons explained, plaintiff is entitled to summary judgment and declaratory and permanent injunctive relief on Counts II through IX of the Amended Complaint. The government’s motion to dismiss is denied.
What makes this ruling particularly powerful is how Judge Howell deliberately frames it within recent Supreme Court precedents that Trump’s own supporters celebrated. By name-checking both 303 Creative and Vullo, the court makes it clear that those who cheered decisions protecting a website designer’s right to discriminate or defended the NRA against government coercion must now reckon with those same principles protecting law firms from presidential retaliation. While many will fall back on cognitive dissonance to ignore the contradictions, it will hopefully work on some (especially those at the Supreme Court).
The ruling also exposes, yet again, the institutional decay within the Justice Department, where competent career attorneys appear to have been sidelined in favor of those willing to advance legally incoherent arguments. When government lawyers can’t even properly cite procedural rules or define what constitutes “the national interest,” it signals a department that has abandoned legal principle for political compliance.
While this ruling alone won’t stop Trump’s campaign of lawless retribution, it creates a crucial judicial record documenting Trump’s continued weaponization of executive power to destroy those who challenge him. Judge Howell’s opinion doesn’t just reject Trump’s order — it methodically exposes it as part of a deliberate strategy to dismantle the rule of law itself. The question now is whether other courts — and the legal profession as a whole — will demonstrate similar courage in defending constitutional principles against authoritarian assault.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, beryl howell, dictator shit, donald trump, due process, lawyers, retribution
Companies: perkins coie
State Department Gadfly Looks To Use Twitter Files Playbook For Vengeance
from the the-reveal-matters-more-than-the-evidence dept
Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government.
The basics of the playbook are as follows:
- Search through copious amounts of internal messaging and documents for anything that can be positioned (usually misleadingly) to be spun by ignorant idiots as damning.
- Feed that work to a group of the most credulous, simping journalists that can be found.
- Let them run with reports on those “released” documents, which will massively misrepresent the reality within them.
- Sit back and relax as the totally false made-up narrative is considered “accepted truth” by a large segment of the population (even those outside of the MAGA brainwash cult).
As Charlie Warzel aptly explained, this approach works because “what mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents — a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along.”
The evidence itself is secondary to the performance of “revelation.”
And now it appears this playbook is set to play out at the State Department.
Darren Beattie is a top State Department official who had been in the first Trump administration before being fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and who later founded an independent news site mostly known for having effectively no credibility and pushing utter nonsense that somehow always seems to align with the MAGA cult view of the world.
Last week, MIT’s Tech Review revealed that one of the things Beattie has done at the State Department is begin a total witch hunt for documents he can use to mislead the public in Twitter Files-like fantasyland.
The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.
The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.”
For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk.
Specifically, Beattie went looking at the internal documents for the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, which was set up to — as it says on the tin — counter foreign information manipulation.
As we’ve discussed for quite some time now, the MAGA world insists that any discussion of “countering foreign manipulation” is really a cover story for “censoring domestic truths.” That’s never been the case, and it makes MAGA people look very foolish every time they make this claim, but it won’t stop them.
People within the State Department who have called this out as problematic are drastically understating what’s really happening. They’re treating this like a simple records request gone wrong, rather than recognizing it as part of a calculated disinformation campaign (which is ironic, since they’re supposed to be the disinfo experts):
Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation.
While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different.
Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer.
Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie.
While it certainly is improper for Beattie to be doing this, it seems likely that it’s about a lot more than finding out whether or not anyone in this group said anything mean about Beattie and his friends. Assuming this follows from past practice around the Twitter Files or Jim Jordan’s weaponizing of his congressional committee against anyone he believes is insufficiently willing to suck up to Trump, it appears that the intent here is to publish out of context, misleading versions of what they find to try to justify the false claims that operations like R/FIMI are actual part of the “censorship industrial complex.”
Tech Review has published an excerpt of Beattie’s “sensitive but unclassified” request for records, which shows just how unserious this is:
That’s literally “please do a search of previous records for any time anyone mentioned me or my shit-peddling friends.”
It also asks for any documents with a long list of “keywords” or “phrases” related to topics that the MAGA world obsesses over:
If you don’t soak your brain regularly in the vats of the MAGA world’s distortion field, you might not realize there are specific stories behind most of these, but you can tell that this is a mass fishing expedition, to see if the State Department was calling out the absolutely constant flood of bullshit that Beattie and his friends were peddling throughout the majority of the Biden administration, while also checking to see if the State Department folks had been calling out how the nonsense peddlers were coming from inside house.
It’s likely that some of these topics came up at some point or another, though generally under the context of whether foreign adversaries were looking to use domestic culture war controversies to stir up more anger and divisiveness. But if there are any mentions of any of this we’ll be hearing for days upon days from the names listed that it was an example of the government being “weaponized” against them, when the reality will likely be more along the lines of “get a load of this useful idiot pushing nonsense again.”
Meanwhile, rest assured that this fishing expedition is, itself, an example of an illegal weaponization of the government against people for their own speech and expression regarding how best to respond to things like purposeful disinformation. That’s because many of Beattie’s targets appear to be the voices most associated with researching disinformation and the ways to counter it (which, again, don’t mean “censorship” and quite frequently mean “with more speech.”)
Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.
[….]
Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals.
Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny.
The Tech Review article says that it’s unlikely there will be all that much responsive to these requests because that’s not what these organizations actually do:
(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)
But, again, just as with the Twitter Files, that is unlikely to matter that much. Something will be found that can be presented out of context or surrounded with a bunch of misinformation to make it appear like something it is not. We’ve seen this before.
And, as the article notes, that’s definitely in the works:
Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI.
An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”
“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.
This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists.
Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create.
Actual people with knowledge of what’s going on or how this works will have two choices:
- Put in the ridiculous amount of work and effort to debunk the misleading narratives that will come out of this, while at a disadvantage of not having all of the details or documents
- Just shut up and let the narrative overwhelm the wider ecosystem, even breaking out of MAGA confines into the general public
Neither is a great situation — and that’s by design. The Muskian/MAGA world knows that manufacturing bullshit takes minutes, while properly debunking it takes days or weeks of painstaking work. The asymmetry is the point.
Tom Nichols wrote about this at The Atlantic, suggesting that this whole thing is “strange” given that the Twitter files “revealed very little” and assumes that it’s more about creating a kind of blacklist of “bad people” in the government or that he’s trying to “chill any contact between his office and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.”
That might have something to do with it, but I think it misreads the MAGA world’s steadfast belief that the Twitter Files actually “revealed” a vast, horrendous, “censorship industrial complex” in which the “Biden Crime Family” would direct Twitter to delete patriotic posts of people revealing “the truth” about COVID and the 2020 election. That it did literally none of that doesn’t matter. The narrative is all that matters, and Beattie is looking for scraps to feed the narrative.
I think a different piece at The Atlantic, by Charlie Warzel, gets this part more correct:
The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter’s rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who’d paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter’s executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Of course, none of this stopped Musk from portraying the project as a Pentagon Papers–esque exercise in transparency. Teasing out the document dump back in December 2022, Musk argued that the series was proof of large-scale “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” but then later admitted he had not read most of the files. This was fitting: For the Twitter Files’ target audience, the archives and their broader contexts were of secondary importance. What mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents—a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along. As I wrote in 2022, Twitter had been quite public about its de-amplification policies for accounts that violated its rules, but the screenshots of internal company documents included in the Twitter Files were interpreted by already aggrieved influencers and posters as evidence of malfeasance. This gave them ammunition to portray themselves as victims of a sophisticated, coordinated censorship effort.
For many, the Twitter Files were just another ephemeral culture-war skirmish. But for the MAGA sympathetic and right-leaning free-speech-warrior crowds, the files remain a canonical, even radicalizing event. RFK Jr. has argued on prime-time television that “I don’t think we’d have free speech in this country if it wasn’t for Elon Musk” opening up Twitter’s archives. Similarly, individuals mentioned in the files, such as the researcher and Atlantic contributor Renée DiResta, have become objects of obsession to MAGA conspiracy theorists. (“One post on X credited the imaginary me with ‘brainwashing all of the local elections officials’ to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump,” DiResta wrote last year.) Simply put, the Twitter Files may have largely been full of sensationalistic claims and old news, but the gambit worked: Their release fleshed out a conspiratorial cinematic universe for devotees to glom on to.
So, as Warzel points out, Beattie’s efforts are “an attempt to add new characters and updated lore to this universe.”
The MAGA cinematic universe is about as connected to reality as the Marvel or Star Wars cinematic universes, yet they’re taken as true by a huge segment of the population. And, worse, even as it’s a matter of religious faith among the true MAGA cultists, the ideas behind them get laundered through so many people that they often breach that barrier.
To this day, I still hear from otherwise normal non-MAGA people, who think that the Twitter Files actually revealed “something bad” happening between Twitter and the government, they just think it probably wasn’t “as bad” as MAGA made it out to be. The reality that it revealed… basically nothing of interest, just doesn’t seem possible.
Beattie is trying to extend that to other parts of the government as well, and using that plan to protect his friends, and to attack and diminish the work of those who called out their bullshit.
Again, Warzel is directly on point:
Perhaps the records request could dredge up something concerning. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there could be examples of bias or worse in a large tranche of private conversations between a government agency and outside organizations on a host of polarizing topics. But Beattie’s effort, as far as MIT described it, bears none of the hallmarks of an earnest push for transparency. Instead, it reeks of cynical politicking and using one’s privileged government position to access private information for political gain.
The point is not necessarily to find anything real, though that would be a nice bonus. The point is the act of “revealing” something which can then be weaponized to support prior claims, even if the actual evidence doesn’t support the claim. It’s not the evidence, but the structures that suggest evidence. Because these are “internal” communications that have been “revealed,” they must contain important valuable secrets, otherwise why would they be leaked.
It’s all part of the show, the kayfabe — a carefully choreographed performance where the trappings of revelation matter more than the substance. Beattie is following the Twitter Files playbook to the letter: gather documents, prep friendly media, and get ready for the spectacle. It’s a vibes-based narrative designed to work whether anything noteworthy is found or not. And if history is any guide, it will work again.
Filed Under: chilling effects, darren beattie, disinformation, fishing expedition, marco rubio, misinformation, narrative, state department, twitter files, witch hunt
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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
Federal Court Says Cell Tower Dumps Violate The Fourth Amendment
from the let's-see-how-long-this-lasts dept
Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and voluntarily. The Carpenter decision pointed out this simply wasn’t true: cell tower location data is demanded from all cell phones in the tower coverage area and location data (along with identifying info about the device itself) was taken, rather than volunteered.
This has led to a number of interesting decisions, including a couple of state-level court decisions regarding mass collections of cell tower location data. Cell tower dumps generate records of all cell phones in certain areas during certain times, the same way geofence warrants work, but using more accurate cell site location info (CSLI).
Now, even with a warrant, courts are finding cell tower dumps to be unconstitutional. In 2022, the top court in Massachusetts said these warrants may still be constitutional, but only if law enforcement followed a stringent set of requirements. Earlier this year, a magistrate judge in Mississippi came down on cell tower dumps even more forcefully, declaring that if geofence warrants (those seeking Google location data) were unconstitutional, then it just made sense warrants seeking more accurate data with a similarly-sized dragnet also violated the Fourth Amendment.
Those rulings are limited to those states (and, in the case of the magistrate judge, likely just limited to his jurisdiction). But now there’s something at a much higher level, which is definitely headed to a showdown at the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court as soon as the DOJ gets around to appealing this ruling. Here’s Matthew Gault, reporting on this decision for 404Media.
A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.
U.S. District Judge Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11.“
The government tried to argue that if the warrant was unconstitutional, it didn’t matter because this really wasn’t a search under the Fourth Amendment. It hinted the Third Party Doctrine applied instead. The court disagrees, citing the expert for the defense, who pointed out not only was the data not voluntarily handed over to cell service providers, but even the de-duplicated list of responding devices turned this into an extremely broad search.
Spurlock’s expert Ms. Guay examined the same records Investigator Pelichowski got in response to warrant 20-SW-56 in preparation for the Hearing and clarified a few important evidentiary points for the Court. First, she demonstrated that, while Investigator Pelichowski does not appear to have done this in his investigation, from the tower dump records, she was able to determine roughly where the various phones listed in the data were and could plot them on a map if she wanted to. Second, she determined that after accounting for de-duplication the tower dump records contained records—again, including rough location information—for 1686 unique phones. Third, she clarified that the wireless company users whose phones showed up in the tower dump data did not opt in to sharing their location with their wireless provider, and indeed, could not opt out from appearing in the type of records received in response to warrant 20-SW-56.
Even if further efforts were made to eliminate false positives, it’s too little too late. A warrant can’t be salvaged because things were done after the warrant had been served and information obtained. It’s a general warrant, says the court, precisely the thing the Fourth Amendment was erected to protect against.
Taken together, the Court agrees with Spurlock that these characteristics of warrant application 20-SW-56 render it equivalent to a request for “access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”
Now, the bad news, at least for Spurlock. Pretty much every judge involved, along with the investigators who crafted the warrant, had almost zero experience in handling cell tower dump warrants. (I suspect that this is because, prior to Carpenter, most law enforcement agencies handled this with subpoenas that weren’t subject to judicial review. On the other hand, this happened in a sparsely populated area where double murders aren’t exactly common, so there may have never been a reason to use one before.) Since everyone appears to be breaking new ground here, the good faith exception applies. No evidence is suppressed.
But this holding stands going forward, which means Nevada law enforcement will need to be a lot more careful when crafting cell tower dump warrants or, better off, avoid them altogether and get back on the right side of the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements. Since this requires federal and local law enforcement to be better at their jobs, it’s safe to assume the DOJ will ask for this ruling to be overturned. Until that happens, the law of the land is clear: Cell tower dumps (and geofence warrants) are unconstitutional.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, cell tower dumps, cory spurlock, good faith exception, nevada
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