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DOJ Now Citing Fake AI-Generated Cases To Keep ICE Detainees Locked Up
from the this-must-not-happen-in-a-free-society dept
You’d think that watching multiple lawyers get caught red-handed using AI to file briefs full of made-up citations would cause everyone in the legal profession — especially prosecutors — to double-check their own. You would, of course, be wrong. And the latest offender is not just some random lawyer. It’s the DOJ itself, which cited a nonexistent Sixth Circuit case to argue that an ICE detainee shouldn’t be able to challenge a stay that prevented him from posting a bond that had already been granted, thereby leaving him in detention.
This story hits on two different threads we’ve been covering over the last few years separately. Having them collide somehow makes both worse.
We’ve covered plenty of cases where lawyers for one party (or both, or sometimes judges) are misusing AI to do their writing for them, generating fictitious cases in support of whatever argument they’re seeking to make. This is troubling on many levels, because one of the things any lawyer is supposed to do before submitting anything to a court is check the citations. Historically that has been to make sure the cases cited haven’t been overruled. In these cases, not only is that not happening, they’re literally putting in cases that don’t exist, citing precedents that are completely fictitious.
Our other line of stories touched on here is how ICE and the DOJ have been stomping all over detainees’ basic constitutional rights.
This is one of many cases in which lawyers for a detainee have filed a habeas petition — and it’s a clean example of those two threads colliding in practice. I’ll let Judge Hala Y. Jarbou summarize the basics of what happened:
Petitioner, a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee, initiated this action by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241. (Pet., ECF No. 1.) An immigration judge had granted Petitioner a bond of $35,000, but the bond order was stayed pending appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals pursuant to 8 C.F.R. § 1003.19(i) (2025). Petitioner argued that the 90-day automatic stay provision in § 1003.19(i) violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and sought an order requiring the Government to allow him to post bond. While this lawsuit was pending, the automatic stay of Petitioner’s bond order expired. The Government now represents that the bond order is back in effect and Petitioner will be released if he posts the $35,000 bond. (Status Report, ECF No. 10.) Accordingly, the Court finds that the habeas petition is moot and dismisses it without prejudice.
Already frustrating enough that the 90-day “automatic stay” that the detainee was challenging ended before the actual case could be decided, making the whole thing moot.
But… there’s something else the judge had on her mind. The DOJ appeared to have a totally fabricated citation in an earlier filing:
There is one additional issue in this case that the Court must address. In the Government’s response to the Court’s initial order to show cause, it stated the following:
More recently, the Sixth Circuit has reiterated that § 1226(e) bars challenges that “ask the court to reweigh the evidence underlying a bond decision or second-guess the Immigration Judge’s discretionary judgment.” See Taylor v. Hott, 724 F. App’x 387, 392 (6th Cir. 2018) (district court lacked jurisdiction to review IJ’s bond denial where petitioner challenged flight-risk determination) . . . .
(Gov’t’s Resp. 9, ECF No. 5.) The cited case, Taylor v. Hott, is not located at the identified page of the Federal Appendix. Indeed, page 387 is contained within a different opinion—Atkins v. CGI Techs. & Sols., Inc., 724 F. App’x 383 (6th Cir. 2018)—which is about commercial arbitration, not immigration bond determinations. In its research, the Court was unable to identify a Sixth Circuit case with the caption Taylor v. Hott, or any federal case containing the quoted language. Thus, it seems this citation was likely produced by generative artificial intelligence (“AI”).
It is already bad enough when you have a fabricated citation in a civil case between two private parties. But here we’re literally talking about a case involving someone’s freedom. And the government is filing AI-generated fake cases?!?
We should be livid. But the judge lets them off with a little slap on the wrist and a “please don’t do this again”:
It should be obvious that any attorney who uses AI must scrupulously review its work product to ensure that the cited cases exist and that the citations accurately and fairly represent the underlying case law. The duty of candor towards this tribunal demands no less.
Although the Court will not presently impose sanctions for this conduct, it goes without saying that the Government must ensure its future filings with this Court do not include nonexistent case law
And, yes, judges tend to be fairly restrained in issuing sanctions, often giving misbehaving lawyers many more chances than they probably deserve before rushing to punishment. But, again, this was someone’s freedom on the line. And the DOJ literally directly — whether intentionally or not — misled the court with a precedent that doesn’t exist. That should never happen.
We all know the DOJ is having trouble staffing lawyers. Over 10,000 lawyers have left the federal government since Donald Trump came back into office. They’re offering large bonuses for jobs that lawyers used to deliberately take massive pay cuts to get on their resume. Pretty much everyone agrees it’s a staffing crisis, to the point that earlier this year an apparently exhausted Assistant US Attorney, Julie Le, asked an angry judge to find her in contempt just so she could get some sleep:
Attorney Julie Le was representing the government at a hearing over ICE’s failure to follow court orders and immediately release people that it had wrongfully detained. When Judge Jerry Blackwell asked why the agency is not complying, Le said that the government was “overwhelmed” by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, and that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders has required nonstop work for an office depleted by resignations.
“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”
Given that kind of work environment, is it really any surprise that the few remaining DOJ lawyers would turn to hallucinating AI tools to “generate” their legal filings?
But if you’re starting to feel any ounce of sympathy for the DOJ here, let’s be clear: fuck that. If the DOJ can’t do their fucking job they shouldn’t be throwing people into jails, detainment centers, concentration camps, or anything of that nature. If they want to go around fighting habeas petitions, maybe don’t lock up so many people without any ounce of due process. And if they want to keep people detained then hire enough lawyers to handle the government’s case load.
And if that’s too difficult because good lawyers have no interest in working for a fascist regime that is stomping all over basic fundamental freedoms in every direction, well, maybe work on that rather than locking innocent people up with no due process. Donald Trump’s administration put this DOJ in this position and there’s simply zero excuse for judges letting the DOJ get away with this sort of absolute bullshit.
Judges should be issuing sanctions left and right. They should be reporting lawyers to ethics committees and the relevant bar associations. They should be demanding that the government actually obey the fucking law, and not deny anyone their rights.
Want to stop the DOJ from locking people up with fictitious cases? Start issuing actual consequences to those lawyers and anyone else at the DOJ who had anything to do with this.
Filed Under: ai, ai hallucinations, doj, hala jarbou, ice detentions, izzeddin daghra, julie le
Daily Deal: The Ultimate Microsoft Office 2021/365 Training Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
Administration Works Fast To Cover For Another ICE Killing
from the laundering-murder dept
Former DHS head Kristi Noem got permanently sidelined for being unable to do two impossible things at once: be the anti-migrant hardliner Trump appointed her to be and massage the message when shit went sideways. Two murders in less than a month in Minneapolis may have made plenty of administration figures secretly happy, but once the narrative spun out of their control, it was clear a head needed to roll.
Say hello to Markwayne Mullin. Mullin was yet another Trump loyalist, albeit one that promised a kinder, gentler approach to the bigoted targeting of anyone who didn’t look white enough to belong in this country.
During his confirmation hearings in March. Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin told senators: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
Well, that’s not going to look good on the next employee review. While immigration officers did manage to keep murders to a minimum after Mullin took office, ICE is back to being the lead story every single day.
Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.
The victim of that shooting was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived and worked in the United States for 35 years. According to his family, Araujo was still actively trying to obtain permanent residence and/or citizenship.
And let’s not pretend — as the DHS would have us do with its statement — that it’s okay to kill people who are the targets of immigration arrests. The DHS may have (kind of) admitted fault here, but only in the context that any killing of someone actually targeted by ICE, etc. is fair game when it comes to instant death penalties. Most of the people ICE targets have no violent criminal record, which means federal officers are routinely boxing in vehicles, smashing windows, and violently accosting people suspected of a civil violation. It’s not like this is happening to people who are overdue on their property taxes. I mean, yet.
This isn’t helpful either, and fewer journalists should be willing to publish whatever happens to fall out of the government’s mouth moments after it has summarily executed someone:
When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.
Homeland security officials said Mr. Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though no video or other evidence for that claim has emerged.
The encounter was escalated the moment ICE officers decided to treat suspected civil violations like a felony stop. The government escalated. The reaction officers received was entirely expected from an innocent person who was suddenly surrounded by masked people with guns.
But video not recorded by ICE officers (who were all supposed to be wearing body cameras at this time) pokes a lot of holes in the government’s self-serving theory:
I don’t know what Araujo thought was happening, but in the videos it looks like a couple of unmarked crossovers aggressively pursuing a vehicle with no lights on or any other indication the vehicles contain law enforcement officers. (See 1:20-1:25 of the video where the ICE vehicle cuts through a parking lot.)
Either way, it ended with officers killing Araujo, then the government going on to smear the person they’d just killed:
The Houston incident, following one of the latest deadly shootings by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, mirrors countless routine police encounters that happen daily across the country as officers find suspected drug paraphernalia and seek court orders to seize and test it for illegal substances.
In this instance, however, the search warrant, shielded from public view when initially filed, was inexplicably unsealed and made public the next day. Justice Department veterans told CNN they can’t remember a time when information that could be critical to a case was made publicly available while a criminal investigation was still underway.
A bit more on the “illegal substances:”
The still-unidentified substances were allegedly found on the dashboard and floor of a van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man ICE tried to pull over last week on suspicion of being in the country unlawfully.
First and fucking foremost, these were immigration officers who had the wrong person. Second, this chase wasn’t initiated because officers saw some possible illicit substances on the dashboard. This was only discovered after Araujo had already been killed. Third, the government has yet to deliver lab results on the substances, which means they could have been anything. Considering they were found on the dashboard (those recovered from the floor probably fell off the dashboard), it’s hard to believe Araujo was just driving around with drugs right out there in plain sight. And, once again, this ain’t the Philippines. You can’t just kill people because they have drugs on them.
This was nothing but a cheap attempt to somehow justify a killing after the fact. But it didn’t end with a shitty smear campaign. The other people in the van were apparently subjected to intimidation tactics by ICE officers following the shooting:
They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.
Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.
Araujo had no criminal record, ran his own business, and was on his way to a job with his passengers when he was chased, shot, and killed. And while the government has admitted it misidentified the person officers killed, it still hasn’t explained why it’s okay to engage in these tactics against people only suspected of violating immigration law. It also hasn’t offered any information about the person officers were seeking, which means the real target was another harmless migrant and not the “worst of worst” we keep hearing about every time the DHS is asked to defend its actions.
As I noted earlier, this is only one of two killings to happen this month. Another killing happened in Maine roughly a week later. Since we’re already more than 1,000 words into this one, I’ll dig deep into that killing in another post. But I will leave you with this, which not only shows the kind of people ICE is willing to hire to keep the deportation mill running, but also the kind of people who are innately attracted to ICE:
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.
David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.
This is the real reason ICE officers want to wear masks. It’s also the real reason ICE wants officers to wear masks. These officers are the real threat to public safety, but the less we know about them, the more ICE can publicly pretend it’s nothing but top-notch, well-trained officers regularly engaging in excessive force.
Filed Under: dhs, doj, houston, ice, maine, mass deportation, murder, texas, tom homan, trump administration
The Corrupt, Xenophobic Hysteria Behind The ‘TikTok Ban’ Will Soon Be Mirrored Across U.S. AI Policy
from the prepare-for-everything-to-get-very-stupid-and-racist dept
You might recall how the press and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers suffered a four-year embolism about the purported privacy and national security threat of TikTok, before “fixing” the problem by ultimately offloading TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends. You know, the exact sort of authoritarian-friendly people keen on doing everything critics had previously accused ByteDance and the Chinese of.
The politics, policy, and press coverage of that entire saga were a profound embarrassment. And it’s hard to think of a bigger tech policy own goal by Democrats anytime in the last half century.
Countless news outlets and politicians endlessly overstated the TikTok threat, and downplayed how the “ban” and subsequent sale had nothing to do with protecting national security or consumer privacy, and everything to do with basically stealing a company that U.S. tech couldn’t out-compete, in the process coddling companies like Facebook that can’t innovate their way out of a paper bag.
It was lazy, corrupt protectionism with no shortage of xenophobia, and a variation of that same effort is about to be repeated across AI. Except much bigger, much louder, and much, much dumber.
Worried that cheaper, open source, and on-device Chinese models could disrupt U.S. efforts to dominate, enshittify, and over-charge for walled-garden AI, the Trump administration is already signaling that they’re gearing up to wage war on overseas and open source AI models after they failed to block China’s access to next-generation chipsets:
“The Trump administration is showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models — a momentous move that could lock in dominance by OpenAI and Anthropic.”
Of course it won’t stop there. It will be a hop, skip, and a jump from banning more powerful Chinese AI models to trying to outlaw open source alternatives, models from smaller overseas non-Chinese competitors, on-device models, and anything that might challenge the walled-garden hegemony of U.S. tech giants.
U.S. AI isn’t profitable. It’s nowhere close. It may never be. U.S. tech companies sunk hundred of billions of dollars into costly and ultra-energy intensive AI models that for many companies, like Microsoft, people don’t actually even want to use. Nobody outside of the Musk fashy cult likes Grok. OpenAI is potentially poised to implode. And even more popular companies like Anthropic are contemplating a price war when they already don’t make money.
U.S. tech companies had been busy jacking up the cost of model access to try and claw their way toward profitability (unsuccessfully), resulting in a lot of companies (like Uber) publicly stating they’re paying too much money for too little actual utility. That’s caused many U.S. companies, like DoorDash, to flock to cheaper Chinese models:
“DoorDash, which, according to a post on X on Wednesday by co-founder and CTO Andy Fang, will be launching DoorDash CLI, an experimental tool in limited beta that will allow users to order DoorDash through an AI agent, or even directly from the terminal. Earlier this month, Fang said using a model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI is “better quality” and comes at a “cheaper cost.”
Enter the protectionists, who talk a good game about “free market competition” and forging innovative products in the hot irons of competition, but turn into gargantuan, blubbering crybabies the second Chinese products come into frame (see: TikTok, EVs, 5G, and now AI). This performative gyration always comes with a fake concern for U.S. privacy and national security by people too lazy and corrupt to genuinely protect either (see the ongoing U.S. failure to pass even a baseline internet-era privacy law).
Not only are many Chinese AI models cheaper and improving in quality, they’re often “open-weight,” meaning their parameters or values are entirely visible to the user, which appeals to enterprises that want deeper insights under the hood. As models like China’s Kimi K3 see surging demand, it’s resulting in a rising freak out in the U.S. about what to do about the Chinese threat (sound of thundering timpani drums):
It shouldn’t be too long before the Trump administration, with enthusiastic Democrat support, steps in to try to not only ban higher-power Chinese AI models but also to force Americans to use more expensive U.S. walled garden efforts from our biggest domestic giants.
That’s of course not going to magically stop the rest of the world from adopting cheaper Chinese AI. Or protect U.S. markets from a potential bubble collapse. And it’s not going to magically and suddenly make U.S. AI profitable or well-liked, since many Americans have inextricably tethered their anger at AI to the endless bad decisions by U.S. techno-fascists and domestic enshittification merchants who demand to be shielded from competition and regulatory accountability in equal measure.
You could open the door to international competition, but ensure your well-staffed regulators create a safe and level playing field across privacy, national security, labor, and consumer rights. We don’t want to do that because that might cause domestic U.S. companies to lose money. So instead we’re going to try and ban cheaper overseas alternatives, leveraging a lot of bad faith rhetoric on privacy and NatSec along the way.
That’s then going to be parroted by a lot of lazy news outlets too feckless to explain that Trump policy architects are neither competent nor operating in good faith when it comes to AI.
Things are moving so quickly that it’s hard to parse out exactly what this new era of AI protectionism will look like, but if the TikTok ban was anything to go by, you can be absolutely sure our next steps in domestic U.S. AI policy will be very stupid, filled with a lot of people talking endlessly out of their ass on NatSec and privacy, and tinged with no shortage of gross xenophobia.
Filed Under: ai, china, competition, local ai, open source, open weight, protectionism
Companies: alibaba, anthropic, moonshot, openai, z.ai
You Don’t Need $200 Million To Make A Blockbuster Film Any More
from the community-funded-films dept
Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who love an artist’s work and are happy to support it directly. This allows those works to be made available for no cost, since they have already been funded by fans. That, in turn, means creations can be shared – no need for punitive copyright infringement laws here – thus spreading the word about the artist, and bringing in new true fans and additional financial support.
This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.
One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as:
the opaque or “creative” set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.
In other words, those huge budgets may not reflect the real costs of making a film, but are often a scheme for depriving people such as actors and others of their promised share of the profits by minimizing or even eliminating the latter. Moreover, a recent development certainly suggests that successful films do not requires such inflated budgets, discussed here on the BBC site :
Which film would you expect to be a summer hit – a family-friendly action-adventure which is based on tried-and-tested IP (intellectual property)? Or a creepy low-budget horror film dreamt up by a first-time director? Until very recently, most of us would have put our money on the first option.
But this summer, it’s looking as if low-budget horror will be triumphant, with two indie films, Backrooms and Obsession, vanquishing two megabudget extravaganzas, Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.
The figures speak for themselves:
The difference between the appeal of tired IP and original movies is illustrated by this weekend’s US box office figures. Masters of the Universe, which derives from a 1980s Mattel toy range and cartoon about a loincloth-sporting, perma-tanned warrior prince, is a new release which made just $29m (£21.7m). The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in May, is faring poorly for a Star Wars film: this weekend it made $10m (£7.5m).
By contrast, Backrooms “took $81m (£61m) in the US on its opening weekend. It’s total in the US is now $135m (£101m).” Obsession did even better:
Not only did it have a healthy opening weekend, but it’s also the first film since ET the Extra Terrestrial in 1982 to have its takings go up rather than down in its second and third weekends in cinemas. Its total take is now $152m (£114m) in the US and $225m (£169m) globally.
Those figures are impressive, but what is really noteworthy is the gulf between the respective production costs of the two classes of film. According to the BBC article:
The budget of The Mandalorian and Grogu is reported to be $165m (£124m), and the budget of Masters of the Universe is reported to be $200m (£150m). Take into account the marketing costs, and those films have to make between $300m and $400m (or £225m and £300m) just to break even.
…
The budget for Backrooms, on the other hand: $10m (£7.5m). And Obsession? $1m (£750,000), tops. Suddenly, spending a fortune to make a fortune no longer seems like a winning formula.
The latter sum in particular is easily something that true fans’ funding could amass.
The dynamics behind the growing success of low-budget films – something the BBC article calls “a Hollywood earthquake” – are precisely the ones discussed in the closing chapter of Walled Culture the book. An article on the Guardian Web site puts it this way:
“Going to the movies has become a way to connect with friends and share the moviegoing experience in person. Somewhere you can turn your phone off for a few hours and just disconnect from the world,” says 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose.
It is about the sense of community, which lies at the heart of the true fans idea, one that extends beyond the cinema experience:
Apps such as Letterboxd – essentially the Goodreads of cinema – allow users to distil their reactions into sharp, ironic one-liners and scroll through the takes of other viewers. “Gen Z are yearning for community, and through apps like Letterboxd, which continues to see an increase in popularity, people can find that community of like-minded individuals and share their thoughts and feelings about films,” says Rose.
The rise of Letterboxd is indicative of the hunger for precisely this kind of community-based experience:
The platform, whose core audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, has grown from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, adding more than nine million since January 2025 alone. “When a movie is released in the cinema, online conversations are sparked, which drives more people to the cinema so they can feel like they can join in and be a part of those conversations,” Rose adds.
This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and new production houses is great news for audiences eager for new experiences and a sense of community. It not only brings fresh talent to the art form, it also opens up the possibility of fan-funded films that manage the difficult trick of being thoughtful and popular.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: community funding, films, funding, hollywood accounting, innovation, internet, movies
Victory! Flock Ends Rollout Of Audio “Distress Detection” Of Human Voices
from the i-am-distressed-by-flock-surveillance dept
Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.”
In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection). This feature purported to use high-powered microphones scattered throughout a city to search for sounds of human distress, with original advertisements from the product indicating it would search for “screaming.” (Since the publication of our original blog post, Flock quietly amended the ad on this webpage to say “distress” instead of “screaming.”)
Now, Flock has published a blog post stating that “[a]fter careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.” Good riddance.
We said it when the product was announced and we’ll say it again: this was a misguided and dangerous feature because of the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws.
We were not quiet about this potential new feature. Flock even mentioned our concern about Distress Detection in an attempt to rebut our opposition to the mass surveillance their products enable.
The suspension of Distress Detection, however, does not mean that these high-powered microphones are now magically safe or beyond our concern. Acoustic gunshot detection is still a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology that has resulted in real world harm, as in Chicago where it resulted in police shooting at children lighting fireworks. As Flock itself states, “No acoustic system is perfect, and we don’t claim otherwise.” But police response to a situation where they believe guns are actively in use seems like a pretty high-stakes situation to be making, selling, and deploying technology known to be imperfect. Flock’s devices also listen for more than just gunshots. Their marketing materials admit to be listening for “community disruption,” which includes “non-violent” threats like car sideshows and fireworks.
Flock’s failed attempt to roll out Distress Detection teaches us a few important lessons about the current state of police surveillance. First, we should not assume that just because these companies are large and well-funded, that does not ensure that they are complying with local privacy laws before floating new products to customers. Second, companies roll out and police adopt invasive technology under the justification that it will be used to address our society’s very worst crimes. However, both the companies and police will leverage deployed surveillance infrastructure to introduce new uses without necessarily seeking the consent or approval of the public. Gunshot detecting microphones eventually being used to listen for screaming is exactly the type of mission creep that we’ve seen happen with other pieces of surveillance technology, including Flock’s license plate readers. Finally, gun violence is too serious and complex of an issue to purport to solve with one flawed piece of technology. It has become too easy for police and cities to listen to the fancy marketing pitches of tech companies claiming they’re going to solve all crime instead of doing the hard work of addressing the root causes of societal issues. And, in the meantime, that technology creates more problems and hazards for the communities they blanket in police surveillance.
As we’ve also seen with people across the country pushing back on Flock license plate reader contracts in their communities, public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products. Flock’s decision to end “Distress Detection” for human voices is a win.
Originally posted to EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: distress detection, microphones, privacy, surveillance
Companies: flock, flock safety
xAI, Which Is Being Sued Over Grok’s CSAM Problem, Sues a User Over Grok’s CSAM Problem
from the put-on-the-hotdog-costume dept
You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk’s LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this “trend” at one point by asking Grok to modify an image someone had already asked Grok for putting a bikini on the famous Ben Affleck smoking meme, asking it to replace Affleck’s head with Musk’s own. Grok complied and while the resulting image has since been removed, Musk responded “perfect.”
While some will argue this is more acceptable, as it was Musk doing it to himself, it still generated a ton of extra attention to the idea that Grok would gladly, publicly, undress just about anyone and put them in a bikini. To Musk, apparently, it all seemed like good fun.
As more and more of the media pointed out that this was being done to children, in some cases potentially creating illegal child sexual abuse material, Musk eventually came out with a statement claiming that anyone using Grok that way will “suffer consequences.”
In the interim, a number of people have been arrested for using Grok to produce CSAM, in some cases based on X’s reports to NCMEC. Of course, the company is also being sued by a bunch of people, claiming that it should be liable for the non-consensual imagery that it created. Some of the details of the lawsuit linked above are particularly horrifying:
Jane Doe 4, a female from Wyoming, said her stepfather uploaded a photo of her when she was 11 and lying on a couch to his phone. Using Grok, the stepfather created more than 7,000 CSAM-related images of her. He also shared and traded the images with others on social media platforms.
The lawsuit alleges that the stepfather opted for Grok “because the platform was less restrictive than other AI models and responded to his prompts to generate sexually explicit material using an image depicting a prepubescent minor.”
It also claims that in February, xAI did generate a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding the images, but the company only submitted the original, authentic image as evidence. According to the suit, xAI did not respond when law enforcement requested the thousands of Grok-generated images based on the photo and IP address information that would have quickly helped identify her stepfather as the perpetrator.
Perhaps recognizing that this story is getting worse, xAI (the parent company of X since it acquired the social network in yet another deal of Elon “selling” one of his companies to another of his companies) has now directly sued one of its own users, Terry Harwood, for creating CSAM with Grok, arguing that the indemnification clause in the terms of service means that the court should order Harwood to pay for xAI facing lawsuits from Harwood’s victims.
The lawsuit, filed in Musk’s favorite federal court — the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas — was immediately assigned to Musk’s favorite judge, Reed O’Connor. It sure seems like the company is trying to get out ahead of this story before it gets even worse — by suing one of its own users for doing, in a horrific and illegal way, exactly the kind of thing Musk himself had promoted.
The filing, of course, tries to play up the claim that X is a good actor in this space, taking its responsibility seriously:
There are bad people in the world and not all users have good intentions, so Plaintiff draws a bright line on permissible usage: the tool may be open and truth-seeking but is not a safe harbor for illegal, harmful, or abusive conduct. Plaintiff takes violations of this rule extremely seriously. It enforces its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (“NCMEC”). Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests.
In addition and when necessary, Plaintiff will pursue civil accountability against bad actors who abuse its tool to harm others.
Plaintiff strictly prohibits any use of Grok in connection with illegal, harmful, or abusive activities. These prohibitions are set forth in plain language in the xAI Terms of Service and the xAI Acceptable Use Policy. Among the expressly forbidden activities are:
- “Using [Grok] in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates a person’s privacy or their right to publicity”;
- “Undressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context”;
- “Depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner”; and
- “Sexualizing or exploiting children.”
Which all sounds well and good if you simply ignore the whole “yeah, but your CEO kinda laughed about and promoted this use of the tool” part.
Also, it’s quite a move to sue a user for using a tool that you offer in a manner that you enabled the tool to work. I’ve long argued that users themselves are the ones who should be liable for any violative actions they make rather than the platform but I don’t recall ever seeing a platform actually sue one of its own users for using their own tools. It really feels like them looking at all the lawsuits coming their direction for Grok’s usage and… pulling the whole “we’re all looking for the guy who did this” hotdog costume meme in the form of a lawsuit.
I have no idea if it’ll work, but suing your own users for the very thing that other people are suing you over is quite a statement. Yes, in this case it involves potentially criminal behavior (the guy was arrested after all), but are Musk and X suggesting that if you violate any part of their terms of service, Musk can take you to court in front of his favorite judge? Because it sure seems to suggest that. Much of the argument is based on laying out X’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy and detailing why this guy violated them. This kind of argument does not at all appear to be limited to law-breaking activity:
Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM.
Among Defendant’s various other breaches described herein:
a) Defendant manipulated Grok to create sexually explicit images of others without their consent, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, using Grok to aid in violating a person’s privacy or their right to publicity.
b) Defendant manipulated Grok to create CSAM, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, the sexualization or exploitation of children.
Plaintiff has been damaged by Defendant’s breaches of the xAI Terms of Service.
The lawsuit leans heavily on the indemnification clause in their terms of service to argue that they want the court to order Harwood to cover any legal expenses that might stem from potential lawsuits from the people Harwood victimized with his CSAM.
The xAI Terms of Service contain a clear and conspicuous indemnification provision that states: “You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless xAI, its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs) arising out of or in any way related to (a) your access to or use of the Services, (b) your User Content or Outputs, (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law or regulation, or (d) any third-party claim resulting therefrom, including but not limited to claims of privacy violation, right-of-publicity infringement, or harm caused by content you generate or distribute using the Services.”
Defendant’s conduct directly triggered this indemnity obligation. As detailed above, Defendant knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM and NCII.
There is no indication as far as I can tell that Harwood’s victim(s) have taken legal action against xAI at this point, so it’s a little unclear what they’re hoping to get out of the indemnification here other than to present themselves as taking a (somewhat late) stance against this kind of illegal usage of a tool that they failed to properly lock down while wink-winking at how they expected people to use the tool.
Harwood, assuming the allegations and criminal charges hold up, did something genuinely monstrous, and his victims deserve real justice. But it does feel very wrong that the same company whose CEO demonstrated this use of Grok on himself for laughs, and whose product made this kind of abuse trivially easy to produce at scale, is now standing in front of Musk’s favorite judge asking to make one user personally responsible for some of the fallout — while the “we built and promoted the machine” part stays out of the complaint entirely.
And, honestly, given how much Musk has promoted X as “the anything app” where you can do and say anything, it does seem notable that he’s now suing a user for… doing exactly that.
Filed Under: csam, elon musk, grok, indemnification, liability, terry harwood
Companies: x, xai
Florida Fires Expose Violations Of Over 100 Court Orders By ICE, DOJ
from the flat-out-refusing-to-follow-the-law dept
The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don’t have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary — losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees.
While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have resoundingly made it clear that detainees are owed a bond hearing, rather than simply be expected to ride out an indefinite detention with zero options until the administration finds some random country to dump them in.
With ICE and a compliant DOJ doing everything they can to prevent detainees from filing habeus corpus motions — using methods ranging from shuffling detainees from state to state to deny them standing to multiple purges of DOJ attorneys who aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump — lots of judges aren’t actually seeing the entirety of the administration’s illegal actions. The administration is “flooding the zone” to create a “fog of war” in a way that’s as inelegant and brutish as my mixed metaphor.
But the administration can’t stop acts of God from exposing what ICE and the DOJ would have preferred remained hidden. Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced the evacuation of an ICE detention facility. And that let a judge handling cases in that jurisdiction see clearly exactly how many times the administration had flouted direct court orders.
[The fires] opened a can of worms in federal court after a federal judge was notified that 47 of those detainees were shipped outside the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of court orders. When Miami-based Judge Michael Moore was alerted to the 47 violations, he ordered a deeper look into how often ICE had violated similar court orders in recent months.
The answer alarmed him, and prompted him to respond with force in a hearing on Thursday morning.
Attorneys at the Department of Justice alerted Moore that an estimated 116 detainees have recently been removed from South Florida in direct violation of court orders, a significant increase from the original 47 number. Some of those violations were never reported to the court until Moore started asking.
While Judge Moore understood the fires might mean moving detained migrants to other locations, the government was supposed to inform the court if it attempted to move people with pending petitions out of the court’s jurisdiction. This never happened. And it was happening even before wildfires created this crisis. According to the judge, the DOJ and ICE had done this previously, including one case where the judge wasn’t informed of a relocation until the date of the hearing, which was weeks after the court had told the government to bring this migrant to a bond hearing.
Moore’s takedown of the administration occurred before a packed house of observers, including dozens of interns and federal court clerks. And Moore lit them up:
“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ attorneys. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”
He noted that some detainees not only had been moved to other states, but some have been “removed from the United States” in direct violation of court orders.
The law is settled (at least for the moment) in this circuit. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court ruled two months ago that the government had to provide bond hearings to all detained migrants — something that has always been the case prior to this administration’s refusal to respect the Constitution.
This is how the administration wants to play it, which meant the judge had minimal patience for the DOJ lawyer caught up in the middle of this mess.
Matthew Feely, the DOJ attorney on the case, apologized for the court order violations and said the Southern District of Florida’s office has been overwhelmed with habeus corpus petitions, stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s stance that it does not have to offer bond hearing to immigrant detainees.
[…]
In 2022, there were only 23 habeus corpus petitions filed in the district, he said. In 2023 there were 31. But between June of 2025 and July 10, 2026, there were about 1,800 petitions filed.
At the same time, Feely said the amount of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida has plummeted by 40% since last year.
“We’re struggling here, your honor,” said Feely, while adding that the DOJ is trying to hire to fill the vacant positions.
“I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” responded Moore, who was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”
There it is. This administration does not follow court precedent. It does not respect the Constitution. It makes up its own rules that are completely unsupported by case law. Then it fires everyone who won’t assist the administration with its dirty work. 1,800 petitions in a single federal district, being handled by a DOJ office that has seen 40% of its workforce resign or get fired for refusing to play by Trump’s rules. And as court orders continue to pile up, the administration still refuses to comply with them.
It’s an unmitigated good that this played out in the open. The problem that hasn’t been addressed is how you rein in a rogue regime that deliberately ignores a co-equal branch of the government. Courts need to start considering their options, including this one:
In cases where federal marshals fail to act to enforce court orders (or contempt of court findings), courts can turn to state and local law enforcement agencies.
Federal judges have the authority to deputize state law enforcement officers to carry out federal court orders, particularly in cases of contempt or defiance by federal officials. State attorneys general, governors, and local sheriffs can be called upon to enforce judicial rulings.
The usual stuff isn’t working. Extreme measures are needed. The question is whether anyone in the court system — or in state law enforcement — has the will to get this done.
Filed Under: 14th amendment, doj, due process, florida, ice, mass deportation, matthew feely, trump administration
Daily Deal: AdGuard Personal or Family Plan
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
Tom Homan Again Promises That ICE Will Keep Murdering People Until Democrats Stop Calling Them Murderers
from the dysfunctional-government dept
Earlier this year “Border Czar” Tom Homan, with an apparently straight face, told the media that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed, then they would have no choice but to murder more people. A few weeks later, when ICE did murder another person, he doubled down and blamed people for calling ICE murderers for the additional murder. So it’s little surprise that he’s at it again. He’s taking the fact that ICE has been on something of a killing spree over the last few weeks as… vindication for the batshit crazy statement he made earlier about how calling ICE murderers makes them only more likely to murder.
This is classic psychopathic abuser language. “Baby look what you made me do.”
It should never be coming out of the mouth of a government official. It’s horrifying and disqualifying. No, calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed should have zero impact on future murders, and if (accurately) calling ICE murderers leads them to murder more people, then what the fuck are we doing here? Shut down ICE. Fire everyone associated with them, including Tom Homan.
Of course, Homan wasn’t just blaming people for calling murderers murderers. He also wanted to blame the people they murdered for not “complying.”
Once again, saying shit like that should lead to an immediate firing and possibly an investigation. First of all, it’s clear from the videos released after some of the recent ICE shootings that it had nothing to do with people not complying, and appeared to be almost entirely about raging ICE agents who had no interest in de-escalating situations and seemed to be looking to cause harm.
But, more to the point, not complying with a law enforcement demand (especially a ridiculous one) should not result in your execution.
Tom Homan has been credibly accused of accepting $50,000 in a fast food bag to try to curry favor with President Trump. Does Tom Homan think it would have been okay for law enforcement to shoot Tom Homan dead in a Cava restaurant, claiming that he was clearly violating the law in accepting a bribe? Or does he only accept due process when it comes to himself and his friends?
And just as bad, Tom Homan, like so many MAGA leaders, absolutely positively refuses to take any responsibility at all for his own mistakes. First he claims that the mess in Minnesota he inherited didn’t involve any mistakes at all.
Of course it’s funny because in that clip he suggests that he was the one who refused to buy ICE body cams because of the government shutdown (which is a lie; ICE received a ton of money in the earlier budget bill, and Homan knows this. ICE can afford body cameras). But then a couple minutes later, when a reporter asks about the now-revealed anger issues and mental health problems of one of the ICE murderers from last week, suddenly Homan deflects and says to talk to someone at ICE instead.
Dude. Weren’t you just talking about how you were in charge of properly outfitting ICE.
It’s truly astounding how this MAGA administration appears to be fundamentally allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything. This seems like an impossibly short-term strategy. Or simply the product of a government run by people who are in way, way over their heads, but too vain to admit it.
Filed Under: dhs, ice, ice murders, murderers, tom homan
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