This one is from a couple months ago, but I finally had a chance to catch up on some older stories. In late 2023, we wrote about one of the most egregious SLAPP suits we’d ever seen. In a case that seems to defy both law and basic human decency, King Vanga, a Stanford student, got into a car accident that resulted in the deaths of Pamela and Jose Juarez. But that was just the start of a legal saga that would leave any reasonable person scratching their head in disbelief.

You see, Vanga later sued members of the Juarez family for… speaking out angrily about the accident that left their loved ones dead.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

It’s a move so brazen, so devoid of compassion, that it almost defies belief. But believe it, because it happened, and it’s a stark reminder of the ways in which our legal system can be weaponized against the very people it’s meant to protect.

And, thankfully (if too late in the process), it’s also a stark reminder of the importance of a strong anti-SLAPP law, like California’s, that has now righted this wrong. This case is not just an affront to decency, it’s a textbook example of why we need robust anti-SLAPP protections to prevent the legal system from being abused to silence and intimidate victims.

Here’s how the local news reported on the original accident:

The California Highway Patrol says Pam, 56, and Joe, 57, were driving west on Santa Fe Avenue approaching Spaceport Entry in Atwater.

They were just minutes away from their son’s house.

Officials say that’s when 20-year-old King Vanga collided into the back of their car at a high rate of speed.

The Juarez’s spun out and their vehicle caught fire.

Vanga overturned into a fence.

The Juarez’s died at the scene.

Vanga had minor injuries was booked into the Merced County Jail for driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol and vehicular manslaughter.

The police report on the matter suggested that Vanga was driving under the influence:

Vanga later sued the police, claiming he never drinks. And, a later blood test did not show any traces of alcohol in his blood. While this casts some doubt on the initial police assessment, it doesn’t change the tragic outcome of the accident.

Based on the police report and local news reporting, some of Juarez’s extended family sent letters to Stanford, understandably upset and repeating some of the claims in the news and police reports to alert the school to what one of their students was accused of doing. There is no indication that Stanford did anything at all in response.

Yet, somewhere along the way, Vanga requested his student records, found the letters, and then (shockingly) sued some of the family members, claiming that their letters to Stanford were defamatory.

Yes, let’s repeat that for emphasis: this student got into a car accident that left a husband and wife dead… and then when he found out that some of their grieving family members had sent letters with publicly reported details about the accident, he sued them for defamation. It’s hard to imagine a more callous response in the wake of such a tragedy.

That seems like a quintessential SLAPP. And yet… the California court that heard the case did not grant the anti-SLAPP motion. Fortunately, on appeal, a California state appeals court has reversed that. The court rightly found that the letter sent by Priscilla Juarez (a daughter-in-law of the deceased couple) was clearly not defamatory. The court noted that the comments were clearly her opinion based on disclosed facts from sources like the media and the police report.

This is a crucial distinction. If simply repeating already public information in an angry letter or email opened people up to defamation suits, it would have a massive chilling effect on speech, especially speech by crime victims and their families. The appeals court recognized this and rightly concluded that Vanga’s suit was a SLAPP.

Juarez’s pro bono lawyer in all this was Ken White of Popehat fame, who has written up his own thoughts on this mess of a case. It includes that Vanga’s lawyers had effectively demanded that the Juarez family remove any public conversation about Vanga at all:

Mr. Vanga will not pursue a lawsuit against your for defamation if you agree to the following terms:

1. You agree to identify all written statements that you have made that refer to Mr. Vanga (whether you published those statements under your name or anonymously);

2. You agree to remove any online statements that you have published that refer to Mr. Vanga;

3. You agree not to make or publish any disparaging statements about Mr. Vanga in the future, subject to certain required public policy exceptions;

4. You agree not to encourage, assist, or advise others to make or publish disparaging statements about Mr. Vanga in the future, subject to certain required public policy exceptions;

5. You agree not to encourage the criminal prosecution of Mr. Vanga, including by communicating with government officers or protesting at any conference, hearing, or trial involving Mr. Vanga, except as necessary for you to provide evidence, to provide testimony, to assist with a government investigation, or subject to other required public policy exceptions.

Can you imagine? This guy gets into a car accident that kills a beloved couple in your family, and then you get threatened by the guy (and eventually sued) for… talking about what happened.

It’s nuts.

As White notes, this is why anti-SLAPP laws are so important:

On November 19th, 2024, the California Court of Appeal reversed in one of the most strongly-worded anti-SLAPP appellate rulings I’ve seen, linked above. The Court noted that Priscilla Juarez’ letter expressly based her statements on the criminal complaint, statements from law enforcement officers, and press coverage that she had seen, and that she did not suggest she had some personal knowledge or undisclosed basis for the statements. The Court examined the context, concluding that Stanford was unlikely to interpret the letter as asserting facts rather than the victims’ relative’s angry reaction to events in the news. “Accordingly, considering both the language and the context of Defendant’s email, we find the assertions that Plaintiff murdered the decedents, drove while intoxicated, and violated Stanford’s Code of Conduct to be opinions based on disclosed facts. The opinions are therefore actionable only if those facts are false.” (Attached Order at 15.) Moreover, Plaintiff’s claim that the police and witnesses were wrong is irrelevant — the key is that it’s undisputed that the police and witnesses reported those things and Ms. Juarez based her opinions on those reports. The Court found that Vanga had not offered any evidence that he suffered any pain or suffering from another statement, and therefore didn’t carry his anti-SLAPP burden of showing he could prevail.

It’s easy to see why this is important. Under King Vanga’s theory — which the lower court accepted — it would be impossibly dangerous for crime victims to speak to the press — or to anybody. If a defendant in a criminal case can sue alleged victims for making statements based explicitly on police reports and on the charges against the defendant, then criminal defendants can silence their victims by threat of defamation lawsuits. In fact defendants will be able to use the threat of lawsuits to attack witnesses and disrupt their prosecution. The danger is not abstract or a slippery slope. It was directly presented here. King Vanga’s lawyers demanded that, as a price for not being sued, Priscilla Juarez not only stop talking in public about King Vanga, but not “encourage the criminal prosecution of Mr. Vanga, including by communicating with government officers or protesting at any conference, hearing, or trial involving Mr. Vanga.” I remain shocked that an attorney would do such a grotesque thing. I submit that these facts show that the lawsuit was not motivated by any actual harm suffered by Vanga, but was a naked attempt to bully a grieving family into silence through abuse of the legal system.

Allowing lawsuits like this would have a severe chilling effect on the speech of crime victims and their families. It would enable perpetrators to bully victims into silence through legal intimidation.

This case, while egregious, is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a disturbing trend of the legal system being weaponized to silence and harass, which is exactly why strong anti-SLAPP protections are so essential.

Cases like this underscore the vital importance of robust anti-SLAPP protections. Without such laws, those who cause harm can exploit the legal system to compound the suffering of those they’ve already victimized. It’s a perverse outcome that laws like California’s anti-SLAPP statute aim to prevent.

There but for the grace of whatever god goes any of us. Who among us is worthy to judge the actions of someone who has the power to do right, but uses it to do wrong? Apparently, none of us. Not even the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. (h/t Short Circuit)

We like to believe power is directly proportional to responsibility. And, in return for our delusion, we get to see this belief shattered repeatedly.

In this case, it’s just more cops being cops and deciding they’d rather prosecute the person they can find, rather than make the effort to find the actual criminal. And, in this case, a victim of crime was treated as the perpetrator of another, far more serious crime — something that saw him locked up for 18 months for a crime he didn’t commit.

Jorge Rivera-Guadalupe lived in rooming house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t a great place to live, according to Rivera. It was “noisy” and filled with people that apparently abused drugs and alcohol. In May 2017, Rivera was mugged in the hallways of this house. His friend, Christopher Valkosak, came to stay with him, ostensibly to help him defend himself in case he was attacked again.

It didn’t take long for history to repeat itself, as the Third Circuit decision [PDF] notes:

Around eleven o’clock the next evening, Valkosak was standing in the doorway of Rivera Guadalupe’s unit, facing the exterior hallway, when, in his telling, two strangers suddenly appeared. One of the men—“a dark-skinned male in a black hoodie”—shot Valkosak in the stomach. According to Valkosak, Rivera-Guadalupe then fetched a gun from under his mattress and left the room, presumably to chase the shooter.

The cops were called and then things got extremely fucked up incredibly fast. Detective Jacob Pierce arrived at the house to investigate the shooting of Valkosak. A neighbor told the detective that a “tall Black male” dressed in black had been standing in the hallway arguing with Valkosak. When Valkosak tried to punch the intruder, he was shot. The shooter then fled the scene, exiting through the back door.

For some reason, Detective Pierce felt this justified a search of Rivera’s room. So, he went and got a warrant — something he probably only managed to obtain by creating an entirely brand new narrative that would justify this intrusion.

In his application, Det. Pierce included the neighbor’s description of the shooter as a Black male but omitted various details the neighbor gave about Rivera-Guadalupe himself that were inconsistent with the description of the shooter, including that Rivera-Guadalupe is short, of Puerto Rican descent, and walks with a limp.

Pierce searched the room and found marijuana, a knife, IDs belonging to Rivera and Valkosak. However, he didn’t find a gun, which was the sort of evidence Pierce needed to “prove” Rivera had shot Valkosak. Undeterred, he arrest Rivera on attempted homicide charges. A preliminary hearing was held, in which the prosecution’s only witnesses were Det. Pierce, Valkosak, and Valkosak’s roommate — a person who had been nowhere near the crime scene. Det. Pierce’s testimony also excluded the fact that he had received a tip identifying the shooter as someone other than Rivera and, apparently deliberately, neither he nor the prosecutor asked the only witness to the shooting (other than the shooting victim) to testify.

Thanks to all of these admissions, as well as Pierce’s apparently illegal search of Rivera’s room, the judge ruled there was probable cause to continue to detain Rivera until trial. By the time this series of wrongs was (somewhat) righted, Rivera had spent more than a year in jail.

The DA’s Office charged Rivera-Guadalupe with nine offenses, including attempted homicide and possession of marijuana. But at the outset of trial, it dropped five of those charges and proceeded to trial on just two firearms charges and the charges of robbery and theft by unlawful taking. The jury eventually acquitted Rivera-Guadalupe of all four. By that time, however, Rivera-Guadalupe had been incarcerated for over eighteen months—from May 26, 2017, through December 11, 2018.

The lower court took all of this into account and denied qualified immunity to Detective Pierce. For some goddam reason, the Third Circuit insists the lower court was wrong. It says the doctrine of “any crime” applies here. As long as any crime supports arrest and prosecution, the rest of this injustice doesn’t matter. In this case, marijuana possession is a justifiable reason to arrest someone, charge them with attempted homicide, and jail them for 18 months. Nothing legally “malicious” about this says, the Third.

Because the right that Rivera-Guadalupe seeks to vindicate in his malicious prosecution suit was not clearly established at the relevant time, the District Court erred in denying Det. Pierce qualified immunity.

The final indignity is that there is precedent that says this sort of thing is very definitely unconstitutional. Unfortunately, what should have been obvious to cops for forever can’t be considered “obvious” because the US Supreme Court only recently issued a decision telling cops to knock this sort of shit off. And the Third Circuit — despite being ahead of the game in this case — chose to let this go unsettled for years, resulting in completely unearned immunity for the detective who has the utter gall to claim he’s an investigator.

This past year, the Supreme Court held in Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon that “the presence of probable cause for one charge does not automatically defeat a Fourth Amendment malicious-prosecution claim alleging the absence of probable cause for another charge.” 602 U.S. 556, 561 (2024).

But was that right clearly established when Detective Jacob Pierce, the Appellant in this case, arrested Appellee Jorge Rivera-Guadalupe in 2017? No, we conclude, because although we anticipated the holding of Chiaverini nearly twenty years ago in Johnson v. Knorr, 477 F.3d 75 (3d Cir. 2007), tension between Johnson and Wright v. City of Philadelphia, 409 F.3d 595 (3d Cir. 2005), continued to produce confusion within our circuit that persisted until Chiaverini.

Well… thanks for nothing. You had a 17-year head start and managed to do nothing with it. And now someone who was jailed for 18 months for a crime no one but this errant so-called “detective” believed he committed has nowhere to go with his lawsuit. Maybe he can get framed for something else in the future to take advantage of this extremely belated re-appraisal of malicious prosecution. Heads, the government wins. Tails, the plaintiff loses. Same as it ever was.

This was inevitable, ever since Donald Trump and the MAGA world freaked out when social media’s attempts to fact-check the President were deemed “censorship.” The reaction was both swift and entirely predictable. After all, how dare anyone question Dear Leader’s proclamations, even if they are demonstrably false? It wasn’t long before we started to see opinion pieces from MAGA folks breathlessly declaring that “fact-checking private speech is outrageous.” There were even politicians proposing laws to ban fact-checking.

In their view, the best way to protect free speech is apparently (?!?) to outlaw speech you don’t like.

This trend has only accelerated in recent years. Last year, Congress got in on the game, arguing that fact-checking is a form of censorship that needs to be investigated. Not to be outdone, incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr has made the same argument.

With last week’s announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that Meta was ending its fact-checking program, the anti-fact-checking rhetoric hasn’t slowed down one bit.

The NY Post now has an article with the hilarious headline: “The incredible, blind arrogance of the ‘fact-checking’ censors.”

So let’s be clear here: fact-checking is speech. Fact-checking is not censorship. It is protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, in olden times, when free speech supporters would talk about the “marketplace of ideas” and the “best response to bad speech is more speech,” they meant things like fact-checking. They meant that if someone were blathering on about utter nonsense, then a regime that enabled more speech could come along and fact-check folks.

There is no “censorship” involved in fact-checking. There is only a question of how others respond to the fact checks.

What the MAGA world is upset about is that, in some cases, private entities (who have every right to do this) would look at some fact checks and decide “maybe we shouldn’t promote utter fucking nonsense (or in some cases, potentially dangerous nonsense!) and spread it further”.

This is all still free speech. Some of it is speech about other speech and some of it is consequences from that speech.

But not one lick of it is “censorship.”

Yet this narrative has become so embedded in the MAGA world that the NY Post can write an entire article claiming that “fact-checking censors” exist without ever giving a single actual example of it happening.

There’s a really fun game that the Post Editorial Board is playing here, pretending that they’re just fine with fact-checking, unless it leads to “silencing.”

The real issue, that is, isn’t the checking, it’s the silencing.

But what “silencing” ever actually happened due to fact-checking? And when was it caused by the government (which would be necessary for it to violate the First Amendment)? The answer is none.

The piece whines about a few NY Post articles that had limited reach on Facebook, but that’s Facebook’s own free speech as well, not censorship. Also, it’s not at all clear that any of those issues had anything to do with “fact checking,” rather than a determination that the Post may have violated Facebook’s rules.

It does cite the supposed “censorship” of Trump’s NIH nominee Jay Bhattacharya for the Great Barrington Declaration:

Most notably, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and his colleagues from Harvard and Oxford got silenced for recommending against mass lockdowns and instead for a focus on protecting only the elderly and other highly vulnerable populations.

Except, as we called out just recently, even Bhattacharya’s colleague who helped put together the Great Barrington Declaration (and who hosted the website) has said flat out that the reason the FB page was taken down had nothing to do with Facebook, but rather anti-vaxxers who brigaded the reporting system, claiming the Great Barrington Declaration was actually a pro-vaccination plot.

The Post goes on with this fun set of words:

Yes, the internet is packed with lies, misrepresentations and half-truths: So is all human conversation.

The only practical answer to false speech is and always been true speech; it doesn’t stop the liars or protect all the suckers, but most people figure it out well enough.

Shutting down debate in the name of “countering disinformation” only serves the liars with power or prestige or at least the right connections.

First off, the standard saying is that the response to false speech should be “more speech” not necessarily “true speech” but more to the point, uh, how do you get that “true speech”? Isn’t it… fact checking? And, if, as the NY Post suggests, the problem here is false speech in the fact checks, then shouldn’t the response be more speech in response rather than silencing the fact checkers?

I mean, their own argument isn’t even internally consistent.

They’re literally saying that we need more “truthful speech” and less “silencing of speech” while cheering on the silencing of organizations who try to provide more truthful speech. It’s a blatant contradiction.

The piece concludes with this bit of nonsense:

PolitiFact and all the rest are welcome to keep going, as long as they’re just equal voices in the conversation; we certainly mean to go on calling out what we see as lies.

Check all the facts you want, as long as you don’t get to silence anyone else.

But… that’s always been the case. Fact checkers have never had the power to “silence anyone else.” They just did their fact checking, provided more speech, and let others decide how to deal with that speech. The Post’s argument is a strawman, railing against a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

In the end, the Post’s piece inadvertently makes the case for more fact-checking, not less. In a world awash with misinformation, we need credible voices providing additional context and correcting the record. That’s the very essence of the free marketplace of ideas.

The Post seems to want a “free marketplace of ideas” where only ideas they agree with are allowed to be expressed. That’s not how free speech works.

Trying to silence voices calling out misinformation in the name of free speech is the height of hypocrisy. The Post should take its own advice – if you disagree with a fact check, respond with more speech, not by celebrating the active silencing of fact checkers you disagree with.

On Friday I attended the oral argument in the TikTok ban case in person, seated in the second row behind the table where the government’s lawyers were sitting, and only about 15-20 feet away from the justices themselves. There’s something kind of profound about being a normal human distance from them, instead of just in the reach of their radiated power.

Argument was scheduled for two hours but it ran much longer. While both sets of petitioners had each been assigned 30 minutes of argument, with the government getting an hour, each petitioner ended up with at least an hour, with the government only getting in the neighborhood of its original time. Which seems like a good sign, because the extra time was spent with the justices engaging with the petitioners’ arguments, seemingly to look for ways to agree with them, or at least be careful not to do harm if they ruled against them on some basis. Whereas if they had been inclined to simply accept the government’s defense of the law it all could have been over with much more quickly. But the hearing length seemed to reflect recognition by the Court that there was a lot at stake, affecting even more than just the petitioners. For instance, in the discussion about foreign ownership it came up a few times that Politico had a German owner, and American filmmakers often worked with the BBC.  And the justices seemed to realize that if the rule the government was trying to push were that it could supersede First Amendment-protected speech interests because foreign ownership was involved, it would have enormous effect beyond this case.

It was long hearing also because it was a combined case, with both TikTok and a group of TikTok users appealing the DC Circuit’s decision that blessed a law that, if not found unconstitutional, or even just enjoined in some way (which was discussed as an option), would cause TikTok to divest itself by the 19th of January or be breaking the law. Whether such a law amounted to a ban of TikTok was also discussed, with TikTok arguing that, yes, it would be a ban, as it would be infeasible to divest on any sort of time scale, even one longer than 270 days (however I wish TikTok had also argued more explicitly that being forced to divest under duress should itself be something constitutionally intolerable on any time scale).

Also discussed was what would happen as of Jan. 19 if TikTok had not divested. Could Trump rescue it on January 20? No, came the answer from the petitioners, because a non-divested TikTok would be breaking the law by the time he takes office (and Justice Sotomayor commented how she was not keen on a president refusing to enforce a duly passed law). The platform would be likely to “go dark” by then. And what does it mean to go dark, the justices asked? The answer: basically, no one could use TikTok anymore because no one would be able to help it provide its services. But could users simply use some other platform, asked Justice Alito? No, came the answer again. Other platforms have been trying to develop their own TikTok-like solutions, but so far users have never found a suitable substitute — losing TikTok would be a loss to their ability to communicate.

While it is impossible to read the tea leaves from oral argument, I came away feeling cautiously optimistic. My concern is less that TikTok be saved, although I think it needs to be because this is a bad law with bad effects on expressive interests. The concern is that whatever reasoning is used to address the law, especially if it is reasoning that upholds it, not be reasoning that undermines the First Amendment protections everyone else counts on to be able to avoid other forms of censorial state actions. And I felt I could count at least five justices who recognized the impact this ban had on expressive interests. And probably at least five who recognized that if this law could be allowed to affect them here it would reverberate in other ways later on other expressive interests.

One big question the hearing wrestled with was whether the ban could be allowed just because there was a compelling enough reason for at least part of it. The government’s stated concerns about how the app collected user data and shared it with China had a lot of traction with the justices, and Justice Kavanaugh especially (although Justice Gorsuch excoriated the use of secret evidence to underpin those concerns, in addition to lamenting that the factual record was still being laid even at this stage of the case). But TikTok pointed out that if protecting Americans’ data is the actual concern then Congress should have passed an actual data protection statute, and one that would actually protect Americans’ data. Whereas this law didn’t even seem to do a very good job at it.  After all, if the data collection practices of Chinese-owned platforms were the real concern, then why was only this platform targeted and not any of the other Chinese-owned platforms that collect user data, like Temu?

By singling out only TikTok the law seemed to just be cover for a facially impermissible concern of the government: that content was being moderated in ways the government did not seem to like, which at minimum seems to have meant “covertly.” But what does “covertly” even mean, and how does banning TikTok address it? It doesn’t, argued the petitioners. Not only is it not a thing the government gets to care about, but even if it did, the concern could be addressed much less destructively to the expressive interests the ban affects, like perhaps with mandatory disclosures that the moderation practices were accountable to China.

Of course, such compelled speech might implicate its own constitutional issues, but fewer than an outright ban would. And, even then, such a law should still be evaluated on its own terms, and how that evaluation would happen was a big part of the argument and the most important thing at stake in the case. Whether my optimism will be born out is contingent on the justices recognizing that when a law implicates speech interests, as this one does, evaluating whether it’s constitutional requires heightened scrutiny, and that scrutiny should be strict rather than intermediary scrutiny. Also we need the justices to recognize that this law could not survive such scrutiny, if that scrutiny were to be as meaningful as the Constitution requires (the DC Circuit had done the first part – recognizing that strict scrutiny applied – but failed on the second, by essentially applying a much more rigorous test than strict scrutiny necessitated).

But my optimism may mostly be fueled by other things I heard, including the implicit (and perhaps even explicit) acceptance by at least a number of the justices of a few key points that we’ve been working hard to argue before them and other courts for several years now (and will be continuing to argue), including:

(1) That platforms themselves have First Amendment rights in the editorial discretion they exercise over how they moderate their platforms, which was an issue argued in the NetChoice cases, and

(2) That algorithmic moderation is a way of expressing that editorial discretion, which is an issue that will likely soon be before them, and has been befuddling some lower courts (like the Third Circuit, which got it wrong, but not the Second Circuit, which got it right). The petitioners argued this point further, and it seemed like it generally landed without much pushback.

And that’s good news, because this TikTok case is not the last Internet law case that will be before the Court, even this month! It was not so long ago when at an oral argument Justice Kagan observed that the justices were “not like the nine greatest experts in the Internet.” But developing that expertise is a big part of what motivated us to drop everything and write a brief in this case: because every case that appears before them teaches them something they will need to know in order to successfully adjudicate the next one too.

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Ohio residents pay for the cops. They pay for the cameras. Now, they’re expected to pay for the footage generated by cops and their cameras. Governor Mike DeWine, serving no one but cops and their desire for opacity, recently signed a bill into law that will make it much more expensive for residents to exercise their public records rights.

And it was done in possibly the shadiest way possible — at the last minute and with zero transparency.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a controversial bill into law that could charge the public hundreds of dollars for footage from law enforcement agencies, including body cameras.

[…]

Around 2 a.m. during the 17-hour marathon lame duck session, lawmakers passed H.B. 315, a massive, roughly 450-page omnibus bill.

In it was a provision that could cost people money to get access to video from police and jails. Law enforcement could charge people for the “estimated cost” of processing the video — and you would have to pay before the footage is released. Governments could charge up to $75 an hour for work, with a fee cap of $750 per request.

[…]

The policy was not public, nor had a hearing, prior to being snuck into the legislation.

That’s pretty ugly. It’s also a clear indication those pushing this measure knew the public wouldn’t like it, hence the last-minute subterfuge tied to an apparently must-pass bill shoved through the legislation before its Christmas recess.

Reporter Morgan Trau had questions following the passage of this measure. Gov. DeWine had answers. But they’re completely unsatisfactory.

“These requests certainly should be honored, and we want them to be honored. We want them to be honored in a swift way that’s very, very important,” DeWine responded. “We also, though — if you have, for example, a small police department — very small police department — and they get a request like that, that could take one person a significant period of time.”

Sure, that’s part of the equation. Someone has to take time to review information requested via a public records request. But that’s part of the government’s job. It’s not an excuse to charge a premium just to fulfill the government’s obligations to the public.

DeWine had more of the same in his official statement on this line item — a statement he was presumably compelled to issue due to many people having these exact same questions about charging people a third time for something they’d already paid for twice.

No law enforcement agency should ever have to choose between diverting resources for officers on the street to move them to administrative tasks like lengthy video redaction reviews for which agencies receive no compensation–and this is especially so for when the requestor of the video is a private company seeking to make money off of these videos. The language in House Bill 315 is a workable compromise to balance the modern realities of preparing these public records and the cost it takes to prepare them. 

Well, the biggest problem with this assertion is that no law enforcement agency ever has to choose between reviewing footage for release and keeping an eye on the streets. I realize some smaller agencies may not have a person dedicated to public records responses, but for the most part, I would prefer someone other than Officer Johnny Trafficstop handle public records releases. First, they’re not specifically trained to handle this job. Second, doing this makes it a fox-in-the-hen-house situation, where officers might be handling information involving themselves, which is a clear conflict of interest.

Now, that’s just the opinion of a non-cop governor. But cops are saying exactly the same stupid thing about the new fee for body cam video processing.

Mike Weinman with the Fraternal Order of Police said this new law would help smaller municipalities that already struggle with staffing.

“Whoever is in charge of their public records, that person might be pulled off the road to do these things,” Weinman said. “So that means there’s a person who’s not responding to calls, who’s not out there being proactive in the community.”

To be fair, this stupidity comes from a cop union rep, but these reps are almost always current or former cops. This says the same thing: without charging $75/hour, smaller agencies might have to pull officers off patrol to process video for records requests. Equally as stupid as Gov. DeWine’s assertions and equally (and willfully) ignorant of the reality.

Again, no cop should be handling records requests because of the conflict of interest, much less the lack of specific skills. Beyond that, there’s the fact that the state could easily have increased funding for public records handling, just as easily as it decided everyone should have to pay more to exercise their First Amendment right to access information. But legislators (and the cops who back them) don’t want more accountability or transparency. They want to erect barriers that limit their exposure. So, the end result is a law that allows law enforcement agencies to “recoup” the costs of processing, even if the cost of processing is actually much lower or already covered by their existing budgets.

This argument isn’t much better:

Marion Police Chief Jay McDonald, also the president of the Ohio FOP, showed me that he receives requests from people asking for drunk and disorderly conduct videos. Oftentimes, these people monetize the records on YouTube, he added.

Moving past the conflict of interest that is a police chief also being the head of a police union, the specific problem with this argument is that it suggests it’s ok to financially punish everyone just because a small minority of requesters are abusing the system for personal financial gain. Again, while it sounds like a plausible argument for charging processing fees, the real benefit isn’t in deterring YouTube opportunists, but in placing a tax on transparency most legitimate requesters simply won’t be able to pay. And that’s the obvious goal here. If it wasn’t, this proposal would have gone up for discussion, rather than tacked onto the end of 315-page omnibus bill at the last minute. This is nothing but what it looks like: people in the legislature doing a favor for cops… and screwing over their own constituents.

We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.

But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. Both routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true (I enjoyed talking to one medical professional who basically laughed in my face about the cancer claim).

When 5G did arrive, it didn’t even live up to its basic promise, really. U.S. implementations were decidedly slower, spottier, and more expensive than many overseas networks, thanks to the usual industry consolidation and U.S. regulatory fecklessness. The end result: wireless carriers associated a promising but not world-changing technological improvement with hype and bluster in the mind of consumers.

With the ink barely dry on the disappointment, telecom providers are now trying to suggest that “AI” (read: language learning models and machine learning) is just the ticket to “rescue” 5G from irrelevance in dramatic fashion. Verizon, for example, has struck a new partnership with NVIDIA it claims will supercharge excitement over 5G and stalled telecom edge computing efforts all at once:

“Our ongoing investment in our network infrastructure means we’re uniquely positioned to deliver these powerful AI services at scale, driving the digital transformation and fueling the future growth of businesses worldwide.”

Telecom analysts have noted that deploying some additional AI compute resources in the radio network (AI-RAN) might bring about some efficiency improvements, but just like 5G itself it’s more iterative than transformative. As always, innovation-stifled telecoms want to be seen as innovative, key players in the AI and edge computing markets, but they’re usually not, notes Dean Bubley:

“Telcos have demonstrated only a minimal role in edge computing services, either as localised low-latency cloud computing suppliers, or even in terms of just offering colocation space in exchanges, or mobile towers / aggregation sites.”

AT&T’s tried similar things, like this 2023 announcement of a partnership with NVDIA the companies promised would “supercharge operations,” “enhance experiences for both our employees and customers,” and “build, customize and deploy interactive avatars that see, perceive, intelligently converse and provide recommendations to enhance the customer service experience.”

In the same announcement, AT&T pat itself on the back for the company’s climate change and energy efficiency initiatives, ignoring (or trying to pre-empt criticism of) the massive power costs of AI.

The press coverage of these announcements always winds up rather bubbly and unskepctical. AT&T, it should be noted, continues to have some of the worst customer service ratings of any company or industry in America, which is no small feat when you consider that health insurance, medical care, and airlines exist. U.S. 5G is still among the slowest in all developed nations.

Telecoms operate in a market that doesn’t get much hype or press attention in the “Big Tech,” crypto, and AI era. In part because network management isn’t all that sexy or hugely profitable. But also because they largely operate in minimally competitive fields rife with regulatory capture where they’re not really incentivized to truly innovate.

So to drive some market and press interest they’ll desperately try to offer “me too” -esque services and shallowly jump on board of hype trains to latch on to some of the money in other fields they’re envious of (it’s really how the net neutrality fight started after AT&T declared it would double dip on Google way back in 2002).

South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom, for example, was all about the Metaverse when it was the hyped new hot thing. Now it’s pivoting seamlessly pivoted to trying to pretend it’s a cutting edge AI company. Once the AI hype dies down some they’re inevitably glom on to some other technology they’ll pretend they’re at the cutting edge of. It’s just how this pattern goes.

Which wouldn’t be quite so bad for telecoms here in the States if their core competencies weren’t so shaky, with U.S. broadband and wireless still some of the spottiest, slowest and expensive in the developed world, with shaky customer service to match. You hear endless chatter about technological innovations in telecom, but the actual consumer experience always winds up a yard short.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Mark Zuckerberg’s pathetic deference to Trump:

I’ve said it before, but what’s even the point of having that level of wealth if you’re just going to debase yourself for somebody like Trump?

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his spine?

In second place, it’s Citizen with a comment about Elon Musk’s hypocritical site blocking on ExTwitter:

Doxxing is whatever Musk says it is.

This is a classic right-wing tactic. Claim to support a certain freedom, but then change the rules along the way so that only the in-group has that freedom in practice.

It’s doxxing because Musk says it’s doxxing. If it doesn’t qualify even under Musk’s definition, he’ll change the definition so it does qualify. If someone Musk likes does something that qualifies under the new definition, Musk will change the definition again such that they no longer fall afoul of the rules.

He’ll still claim to be all for free speech, though, and his fans will still agree with his assertion. They’ll tie their brains in knots trying to come up with logically consistent justifications for doxxing ever so conveniently only ever being something done by people Musk dislikes.

As Abigail Thorn recently pointed out, though, it’s not really about facts. It’s about values, and about finding “facts” to justify those values. What values would those be? You’ve seen it quoted in comments here before:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

“There must be in-groups whom the law protectes [sic] but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

–Frank Wilhoit

“Free speech” for people like Musk is really just the “freedom” to publicly agree with him. It is ultimately he who decides what is and isn’t covered by “free speech,” not based on anything logical or consistent, but based on how he feels. With all due respect (by which I mean none) to a certain far-right propagandist, Musk’s feelings don’t care about facts.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about Florida’s “halo law” that makes it easier for cops to arrest people for filming them, both in response to another comment asking what affordances police should have to prevent interference from the public. First, it’s an anonymous answer:

i think the line is “actual interference”. As in, not when a cop notices something that bugs them, then willfully abandons their duties to harass someone else. The onlyones interfering with the cops there are the cops.

You get in the way of arriving vehicles or servants, physically get in the way of their duties or efforts, then you’re interfering. i don’t know why this is hard. Cops have cams too. Hell, they can outright make shit up that contradicts what the cams show and still get their way 90% of the time. We don’t need an extra law where cops can estimate 25 feet as 100 feet based on their feelings.

Next, it’s MrWilson keeping the focus where it belongs:

The burden of the legislators is to show that there’s actually a need for the law and its associated restraint on Constitutional rights, not for citizens to have to justify their rights in order to keep them. And bad actors actually interfering is already illegal and able to be charged as an offense, but also shouldn’t be used as justification for curbing rights of those who aren’t interfering. This law allows a cop to walk towards someone and thus create an illegal act out of a legal act simply by their proximity. It’s like cops telling someone to step off the curb and then arresting them for jaywalking. This will be abused by petty cops on a power trip and it won’t protect scenes from interference.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Flakbait with a comment about Jeff Bezos blocking an editorial cartoon for criticizing billionaires:

Washington Post’s new motto: “Democracy Dies in DC”

In second place, it’s Strawb with another comment about Elon’s hypocrisy:

Double the standards, double the fun!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ll start out with an anonymous reply to that comment, offering another version of the joke (which also racked up a lot of insightful votes):

If it weren’t for double standards, Republicans would have none at all.

Finally, it’s tanj with a comment on our post about Chief Justice Roberts complaining about people criticizing the judiciary:

Yet another “article” that thinks it’s acceptable to criticize the aristocracy.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the libel tourism of Devin Nunes was continuing to highlight the problems of weak anti-SLAPP laws. A patent troll got smacked down by an appeals court, while there was a twist in Oracle’s attacks on Google, and Apple became the latest company to up the ante in abusing DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. The streaming wars got confusing when a bunch of Disney+ titles disappeared without warning, and got stupid when the AT&T TV service was pulled from Roku. Also, civil FOSTA suits began to show up in court.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we saw one of the dumber claims of music collection groups when a Swedish PRO went after rental car companies for public performance fees on their car radios, while the MPAA was asking regulators to force ISPs to block sites “at the border”, and Rightscorp was unsurprisingly jumping on Canada’s new notice-and-notice system to send bogus shakedown letters. Also, since this was before the more recent resumption of works actually entering the public domain each year, we looked at the works that should have done so in 2015.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, CNN published a rather empty take on book piracy, the entertainment industry was trying to sell DRM as a feature, and Sony was declining to support its own movie for an Oscar over misplaced piracy fears. Music publishers forced another lyrics website offline, Game Marketer was getting extra moralistic about piracy, and Viacom was asking for summary judgement against YouTube for secret reasons. We also considered whether France’s new “three strikes” law would matter, and whether the leaking of Wolverine helped it at the box office.

Early last year, streaming company Fubo filed an antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery after the three companies decided to launch their own joint streaming live sports venture. Fubo, in the lawsuit, claims the collective power of the three companies would stifle competition in the sports streaming space, ultimately driving up costs for consumers and lowering product quality.

“Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice,” Fubo CEO David Gandler said last year.

In August Fubo won an injunction, but that was then and this is now.

This week, Disney settled the allegations in the most American of ways: additional corporate consolidation. The company has announced it’s taken a 70% ownership stake in Fubo, which immediately proceeded to drop its antitrust lawsuit. When Ars reached out to Fubo TV, the company’s logic had taken a mysterious 180 thanks to the giant bag of money received from Disney:

“The definitive agreement that Fubo signed with Disney today will actually bring more choice to the market. As part of the deal, Fubo extended carriage agreements with Disney and also Fox, enabling Fubo to create a new Sports and Broadcast service and other genre-based content packages.”

So Fubo execs got a big bag of money, and they’ll be fine over the short term. Until the consolidated power of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros Discovery uses their consolidated leverage to ultimately drive them out of the market in a few years, precisely as Fubo originally predicted. At which point these executives will have moved on to something else anyway.

I warned about all of this just about a year ago. Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, media giants are struggling to deliver Wall Street their sweet, unrealistic, bottomless quarterly growth. Since it’s impossible to add any more huge blocks of subscribers, they’ve taken to annoying existing consumers with weird restrictions (see: the password sharing crackdowns) and price hikes to goose revenues.

But the primary way they’ll please Wall Street is via more pointless and destructive mergers like the disastrous Time Warner, Discovery, AT&T kerfuffle. Major deals that temporarily goose stock valuations and drive massive tax cuts, but ultimately result in endless layoffs, price hikes, less overall competition, and lower quality product. The trajectory isn’t subtle.

Media executives like Warner Bros Discovery’s fail-upward brunchlord CEO David Zaslav are all but drooling at the prospect of unlimited merger mania under Trump 2.0. You’ll recall that Trump’s “antitrust enforcers” during his first term routinely rubber stamped massive, competition-eroding deals without even bothering to read studies on their potential impact.

And when Trump “antitrust enforcers” did act, it was usually out of petty vengeance, like when Trump’s DOJ (sloppily) sued to stop the AT&T Time Warner merger because Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch didn’t want the deal to succeed. When Trump “antitrust enforcers” act during Trump 2.0, it’s going to usually be as retribution against companies that don’t adequately coddle authoritarian power. Mob shit.

Ultimately this pointless consolidation in streaming will serve nobody but higher level executives and some investors. Consumers and workers are usually the ones that pay the price for the higher debt loads and distraction caused by pointless consolidation. They’ll respond by flocking to free options and piracy, and execs will, starting later this year, begin blaming everyone but themselves for the migrations.

There’s no end to this cycle because there’s no financial or regulatory repercussion in the U.S. for the corporate pursuit of mindless, purposeless, and clearly harmful consolidation. We pay empty lip service to “antitrust reform” and healthy markets, but when a progressive regulator actually tries to follow through and protect diverse competition, greedy men the country over cry like toddlers who skipped their mid-day nap, scaring federal regulators right back into fecklessness.