God, I hate Downton Abbey. The beloved ITV post-Edwardian period drama and domestic PBS mainstay is purported to be ending with a third theatrical release, closing as I write. Created by the Right Honourable peer Julian Fellowes—who is also the sole scriptwriter—the series is beloved among masses of good-hearted PBS viewers for its lovely photography, exquisite locations, fine cast, and great performances.
Last month, AI supergiant and Department of Defense contractor Anthropic found itself embroiled with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for military purposes. On Feb. 14, Axios reported that the Pentagon was considering severing ties with Anthropic, which insisted on guardrails for its use of AI by the military. The conflict became public two days after the press revealed the American military used Anthropic’s Claude AI to help capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Tensions soon boiled over. Anthropic pushed back, and on Feb. 24, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum: allow unrestricted use of Anthropic’s platform by the Department of Defense or get canceled. Trump followed suit, threatening to ban all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s technology and label the company a supply chain risk. On March 5, the Pentagon followed through, stating it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.” This marks the first time such a sanction has been applied to a U.S. company. In response, Anthropic is suing the Pentagon over the risk label.
According to the company’s public relations, many media accounts and some tech workers, the episode is proof that the corporation aims to “do good” and put people over profits.
Anthropic remains woven into the fabric of the American Empire.
But is this really true? Is Anthropic really concerned with the lives shattered by U.S. militarism, and the American Empire in general, or is it pushing familiar Big Tech public relations asserting commitments to humanitarian values?
The answer is unquestionably the latter. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, was happily offering its services to the military prior to this episode; and it is not in any meaningful way “resisting” the Pentagon. Anthropic remains woven into the fabric of the American Empire by virtue of its attempt to colonize the global AI economy in conjunction with other U.S. tech giants. This cannot be separated from the military applications of its technology.
Let’s dig in.
In Nov. 7, 2024, Palantir proudly announced “a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS.” The partnership would “[allow] for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP).” The arrangement, Palantir stated, “will equip U.S. defense and intelligence organizations with powerful AI tools that can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of complex data.”
Palantir played a central role assisting the U.S. military for its operations in the Middle East. It provided a “God’s-eye view” of Afghanistan and a data processing backbone for U.S. intelligence in Iraq. After building big data analytics systems on the battlefield, it sold its tools back to U.S. police departments, what’s sometimes called the “imperial boomerang.”
On July 14, 2025, Anthropic proudly announced a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to “advance U.S. national security.” Details, while vague, included “Exchanging technical insights, performance data, and operational feedback to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise.”
In reality, Anthropic openly embraces U.S. militarism and American supremacy.
This forms the backdrop for Anthropic’s recent “resistance” to the Pentagon. But what does that “resistance” entail? The company only stipulated two “restrictions” on the use of its technology by the U.S. military. First, that Anthropic not be used to guide autonomous weapons (meaning, a human must pull the trigger if munitions are fired). And second, that Anthropic not be used for the mass surveillance of Americans. The rest of the world is, apparently, fair game.
In reality, Anthropic openly embraces U.S. militarism and American supremacy. It has no problem with the well-documented history of U.S. war crimes, the devastation to populations throughout the world and the crimes of its military allies, such as Israel, receiving its advanced weaponry.
This helps explain why Anthropic’s AI is now being used for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” in Iran. The company “was a step ahead of its rivals,” such as Google, OpenAI and xAI, “thanks to its partnership with Palantir,” the press reported.
While this controversy unfolded, Anthropic also dropped its promise to keep a high bar on general safety measures. According to this provision, the Responsible Scaling Policy, Anthropic would refrain from training an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that its safety measures were adequate. The AI giant decided to remove this restriction because it would disadvantage them against competitors like OpenAI.
There is another theme on which the left is near-universally silent: the economic dominance of the United States in the global economy. The tech pseudo-left has, at times, been vocal about Big Tech services provided to the U.S. military. This dates back to protests at Google in 2017 against its development of drone analytics for the military via Project Maven. Yet this ignores the fact that American economic supremacy goes hand-in-hand with war. In the aftermath of World War II, elite policy planners wrote that the U.S. owns about half the world’s wealth, but only houses 6.3% of the world’s population, a disparity which “cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.” The goal was to “maintain this position of disparity,” a task that required dispensing with “the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
To ignore Anthropic’s role in “maintaining this disparity,” with its $380 billion market cap and CEO worth $7 billion, is to pretend that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Wars waged by the United States and its allies are largely a violent means to preserve the economic “disparity” between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Under this neo-colonial arrangement, the Global South is to fulfill its role as supplier of raw materials and cheap labor, while the U.S. monopolizes the most lucrative parts of the global economy, with Big Tech at the helm. In other words, the American war machine is unleashed on societies in order to maintain the globally unequal exchange and division of labor.
Anthropic and its allegedly “ethical” CEO Amodei, are full-throated American supremacists
Anthropic offers no objections to a global status quo where the United States, which now has 4% of the world’s population, one third of the wealth, and almost half the financial assets, continues to exploit the poor people of the world. Rather, it holds that democracies “must work together to ensure AI development strengthens democratic values globally by maintaining technological leadership to protect against authoritarian misuse.” This tracks with the New Cold War ideology of its high-profile CEO, Dario Amodei, a China hawk who pits the “democratic” West against the authoritarian Chinese. In January, Amodei said Trump’s decision to allow the sale of some AI chips to China is akin to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Just one year prior, following the release of DeepSeek-R1 in 2025, Amodei penned an article calling for export controls on China so that the U.S. and other “democratic nations” can maintain a “unipolar world” where “only the U.S. and its allies” have the cutting edge AI models and “take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.”
If Amodei were even slightly humanitarian in his worldview, he would publicly oppose the flagrant violations of international law, war crimes, genocidal violence of the U.S. and its allies, and sever ties with the military. Instead, the company boasts it is “very proud” to work with the Department of War. “Our most important priority right now,” Anthropic stated last week, “is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.”
In other words, Anthropic and its allegedly “ethical” CEO Amodei, are full-throated American supremacists bolstering the U.S. Empire, and its violent wars, at the highest level. The most recent “stand” against the Pentagon is pure theater.
The post Claude Is No Peacenik appeared first on Truthdig.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has positioned himself as a national public health leader by staking out science-backed policies in contrast with the Trump administration.
After Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez for refusing what her lawyers called “the dangerous politicization of science,” Newsom hired her to help modernize California’s public health system. He also gave a job to Debra Houry, the agency’s former chief science and medical officer, who had resigned in protest hours after Monarez’s firing.
Newsom also teamed up with fellow Democratic governors Tina Kotek of Oregon, Bob Ferguson of Washington and Josh Green of Hawaii to form the West Coast Health Alliance, a regional public health agency, whose guidance the governors said would “uphold scientific integrity in public health as [President Donald] Trump destroys” the CDC’s credibility. Newsom argued that establishing the independent alliance was vital as Kennedy leads the Trump administration’s rollback of national vaccine recommendations.
More recently, California became the first state to join a global outbreak response network coordinated by the World Health Organization, followed by Illinois and New York. Colorado and Wisconsin signaled they plan to join. They did so after Trump officially withdrew the United States from the agency contending that it had “strayed from its core mission and has acted contrary to the U.S. interests in protecting the U.S. public on multiple occasions.” Newsom said joining the WHO-led consortium would enable California to respond faster to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
California became the first state to join a global outbreak response network.
Although other Democratic governors and public health leaders have openly criticized the federal government, few have been as outspoken as Newsom, who is in his second and final term as governor and considering a run for president in 2028. Members of the scientific community have praised his effort to build a public health bulwark against the Trump administration’s slashing of funding and rollback of vaccine recommendations.
What Newsom is doing “is a great idea,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an outspoken critic of Kennedy who as a vaccine expert formerly served on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee but was removed under Trump in 2025.
“Public health has been turned on its head,” Offit said. “We have an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist as the head of U.S. Health and Human Services. It’s dangerous.”
The White House did not respond to questions about Newsom’s stance and HHS declined requests to interview Kennedy. Instead, federal health officials criticized Democrats broadly, arguing that blue states are participating in fraud and mismanagement of federal funds in public health programs.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the administration is going after “Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the covid era.” She said those moves have “completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies.”
Since Trump returned to office, Newsom has criticized the president and his administration for engineering policies that he sees as an affront to public health and safety, labeling federal leaders as “extremists” trying to “weaponize the CDC and spread misinformation.” He has excoriated federal officials for erroneously linking vaccines to autism, warning that the administration is endangering the lives of infants and young children in scaling back childhood vaccine recommendations. And he argued that the White House is unleashing “chaos” on America’s public health system in backing out of the WHO.
Newsom declined an interview request. A spokesperson, Marissa Saldivar, said it’s a priority of the governor “to protect public health and provide communities with guidance rooted in science and evidence, not politics and conspiracies.”
The Trump administration’s moves have triggered financial uncertainty that local officials said has reduced morale within public health departments and left states unprepared for disease outbreaks and prevention efforts. The White House last year proposed cutting HHS spending by $33 billion, more than a quarter of its budget, including $3.6 billion from the CDC. Congress largely rejected those cuts last month, although funding for programs focused on social drivers of health such as access to food, housing and education were axed.
The White House is unleashing “chaos” on America’s public health system in backing out of the WHO.
The Trump administration announced that it would claw back more than $600 million in public health funds from California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, arguing that the Democratic-led states were funding “woke” initiatives that didn’t reflect White House priorities. Within days, the states sued and a judge temporarily blocked the cuts.
“They keep suddenly canceling grants and then it gets overturned in court,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California. “A lot of the damage is already done because counties already stopped doing the work.”
Federal funding has accounted for more than half of state and local health department budgets nationwide, with money going toward fighting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, preventing chronic diseases and boosting public health preparedness and communicable disease response, according to a 2025 analysis by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Federal funds account for $2.4 billion of California’s $5.3 billion public health budget, making it difficult for Newsom and state lawmakers to backfill potential cuts. That money helps fund state operations and is vital for local health departments.
Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said if the federal government is allowed to cut that $600 million, the county of nearly 10 million residents would lose an estimated $84 million over the next two years, in addition to other grants for prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Ferrer said the county depends on nearly $1 billion in federal funding annually to track and prevent communicable diseases and combat chronic health conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure. Already, the county has announced the closure of seven public health clinics that provided vaccinations and disease testing, largely because of funding losses tied to federal grant cuts.
“It’s an ill-informed strategy,” Ferrer said. “Public health doesn’t care whether your political affiliation is Republican or Democrat. It doesn’t care about your immigration status or sexual orientation. Public health has to be available for everyone.”
A single typical case of measles requires public health workers to track down 200 potential contacts, Ferrer said.
Public health doesn’t care whether your political affiliation is Republican or Democrat.
The U.S. effectively eliminated measles in 2000 but is close to losing that status as a result of vaccine skepticism and misinformation spread by vaccine critics. The U.S. had 2,281 confirmed cases last year, the most since 1991, with 93% in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. This year, the highly contagious disease has been reported at schools, airports, and Disneyland.
Public health officials hope the West Coast Health Alliance can help counteract Trump by building trust through evidence-based public health guidance.
“What we’re seeing from the federal government is partisan politics at its worst and retaliation for policy differences, and it puts at extraordinary risk the health and well-being of the American people,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, a coalition of public health professionals.
Erica Pan, director of California’s Department of Public Health, said the West Coast Health Alliance is defending science by recommending a more robust vaccine schedule than the federal government. California is part of a coalition suing the Trump administration over its decision to rescind recommendations for seven childhood vaccines, including for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, and COVID-19.
Pan expressed deep concern about the state of public health, particularly the uptick in measles. “We’re sliding backwards,” Pan said of immunizations.
Sarah Kemble, Hawaii’s state epidemiologist, said the state joined the alliance after hearing from pro-vaccine residents who wanted assurance that they would have access to vaccines.
California is part of a coalition suing the Trump administration.
“We were getting a lot of questions and anxiety from people who did understand science-based recommendations but were wondering, ‘Am I still going to be able to go get my shot?’” Kemble said.
Other states led mostly by Democrats have also formed alliances, with Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and several other East Coast states banding together to create the Northeast Public Health Collaborative.
HHS’ Hilliard said that even as Democratic governors establish vaccine advisory coalitions, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS will ensure policy is based on rigorous evidence and gold standard science, not the failed politics of the pandemic.”
For his part, Newsom has approved a recurring annual infusion of nearly $300 million to support the state Department of Public Health, as well as the 61 local public health agencies across California, and last year signed a bill authorizing the state to issue its own immunization guidance. It requires health insurers in California to provide patient coverage for vaccinations the state recommends even if the federal government doesn’t.
Jeffrey Singer, a doctor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said decentralization can be beneficial. That’s because local media campaigns that reflect different political ideologies and community priorities may have a better chance of influencing the public.
A KFF analysis found some red states are joining blue states in decoupling their vaccine recommendations from the federal government’s. Singer said some doctors in his home state of Arizona are looking to more liberal California for vaccine recommendations.
“Science is never settled, and there are a lot of areas of this country where there are differences of opinion,” Singer said. “This can help us challenge our assumptions and learn.”
The post Newsom Picks a Dogfight With Trump and RFK Jr. on Public Health appeared first on Truthdig.
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we’re subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people’s worst ideas make the most money:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence
Take commercial surveillance. Google didn’t have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.
That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.
But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.
What’s more, advertisers and Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic “market system” in which the myth of “fiduciary duty” is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics
But the policymakers who ultimately determine whether the fines, judgments and criminal penalties outstrip the profits from spying – they work for us. They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding our interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.
Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they could. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
And yes, the EU did pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to enforce the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
The most important question for Google wasn’t “Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?” It was “Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?” And the answer to that second question was a resounding no.
Why did policymakers fail us? It’s not much of a mystery, I’m afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector’s massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can’t legally collect. What’s more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is much cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:
The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, Radar magazine commissioned a story from me about “the day Google turned evil,” and I turned in “Scroogled,” which was widely shared and reprinted:
Radar is long gone, though it’s back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/142bufo/radar_magazine_lines_up_financing_published_2004/
But the premise of “Scroogled” lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.
It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/ice_data_advertising_tech_firms/
I want to be clear here: I’m not claiming any prescience – quite the reverse in fact. My point is that it just wasn’t very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild. Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable and foreseen.
Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance. Just last year, I testified before Biden’s CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems with location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising
Biden’s CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect. Trump officials didn’t offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the testimony in that hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don’t know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump’s political enemies.
Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
On Adxchanger.com, ad-tech exec David Nyurenberg writes, “The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk”:
Nyurenberg opens with a very important point – not only is ad-tech dangerous, it’s also just not very good at selling stuff. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:
https://truthset.com/the-state-of-data-accuracy-form/
There’s another point that Nyurenberg doesn’t make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech’s fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech’s rise by engaging in “criti-hype” (repeating hype claims as criticism):
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
The “surveillance capitalism” critics who repeated tech’s self-serving mumbo-jumbo about “hacking our dopamine loops” helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins when they pitched their ads to credulous advertisers:
https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism
Nyurenberg points to European privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe’s federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech’s “realtime bidding” system, “the largest data breach ever recorded”:
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/453/html/
Ryan is referring to the fact that you don’t even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs. The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they do not.
And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:
https://www.bipc.com/european-high-court-finds-eu-us-privacy-shield-invalid
Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we’ve seen what Trump does to companies that don’t agree to help him commit crimes:
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-trump-pentagon-hegseth-ai-104c6c39306f1adeea3b637d2c1c601b
Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome. Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of wanting to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.
I’m quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there’s plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet – but a series of governments around the world let them do it. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn’t even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.
Our policymakers are supposed to work for us. They failed us. Don’t let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump’s use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They did know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.
(Image: Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0; Myotus, CC BY-SA 4.0; Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0; modified)
Waging war for the lulz https://www.garbageday.email/p/waging-war-for-the-lulz
Live Nation Settlement Spurs Chaos in Court https://prospect.org/2026/03/09/live-nation-settlement-spurs-chaos-in-court/
Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible https://prospect.org/2026/03/10/centrists-better-things-arent-possible-democrats-south-carolina-third-way/
#20yrsago Toronto transit fans to Commission: withdraw anagram map lawsuit threat https://web.archive.org/web/20060407230329/http://www.ttcrider.ca/anagram.php
#15yrsago BBC newsteam kidnapped, hooded and beaten by Gadaffi’s forces https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12695077
#15yrsago Activists seize Saif Gadaffi’s London mansion https://web.archive.org/web/20110310091023/https://london.indymedia.org/articles/7766
#10yrsago Spacefaring and contractual obligations: who’s with me? https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/09/spacefaring-and-contractual-obligations-whos-with-me/
#10yrsago Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked https://web.archive.org/web/20160310041148/https://www.csoonline.com/article/3041994/security/home-depot-will-pay-up-to-195-million-for-massive-2014-data-breach.html
#10yrsago How to make a tiffin lunch pail from used tuna fish cans https://www.instructables.com/Tiffin-Box-from-Tuna-Cans/
#10yrsago “Water Bar” celebrates the wonder and fragility of tap water https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2016/03/world-s-first-full-fledged-water-bar-about-open-minneapolis/
#10yrsago French Parliament votes to imprison tech execs for refusal to decrypt https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/france-votes-to-penalise-companies-for-refusing-to-decrypt-devices-messages/
#10yrsago Anti-censorship coalition urges Virginia governor to veto “Beloved” bill https://ncac.org/incident/coalition-to-virginia-governor-veto-the-beloved-bill
#10yrsago Washington Post: 16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-bernie-sanders-16-hours
Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU)
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/
Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI
The Lost Cause
https://streets.mn/2026/03/02/book-club-the-lost-cause/
Should Democrats Make A Nuremberg Caucus? (Make It Make Sense)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxKrnNfrlo
“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
“The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
“The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
“Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
“The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
“Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027
“The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today’s top sources:
Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1038 words today, 46380 total)
“The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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ISSN: 3066-764X
The U.S. Justice Department and the Turkish state-owned lender Halkbank have settled charges over the evasion of Iranian sanctions, resolving a long-standing dispute that has strained relations between Washington and Ankara for years.
Under the terms of the settlement, which was disclosed on Turkey’s Public Disclosure Platform (KAP), Halkbank will not admit to any criminal wrongdoing and will not be required to pay judicial or administrative fines. However, the bank must hire an independent expert firm to review its anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance measures, and submit a comprehensive report to the Justice Department.
Federal prosecutors in New York alleged that the bank was instrumental in moving approximately $20 billion through a shadowy network spearheaded by Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader. Zarrab was accused of laundering vast sums on behalf of the Iranian government using front companies and falsified trade documents.
The Halkbank case also cast a spotlight on the broader vulnerabilities of the global financial system. A 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed that several other global financial institutions, operating as so-called “victim banks,” processed billions of dollars in transactions for companies linked to Zarrab between 2007 and 2015. The investigation found that these institutions either failed to intervene despite knowing the entities involved, or routinely ignored glaringly suspicious activity.
Through its non-profit organization, the Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.
The Archive’s popular Wayback Machine has archived decades of web history, and it also aims to preserve content directly: by scanning physical books or recording old gramophones, for example.
One of the more unique preservation projects centers around Myspace, which was the leading social network twenty years ago. The site was particularly popular among musicians, but today it’s a shell of its former self with virtually no new activity. In fact, quite a bit of content was permanently lost.
In March 2019, Myspace publicly announced that all music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015 had been wiped. As the result of a failed server migration, an estimated 50 million songs from 14 million artists were gone.
Days later, Internet Archive employee Jason Scott announced on X that some files may have been preserved. An anonymous academic group had mailed him a hard drive containing roughly 490,000 of those recordings, scraped from Myspace between 2008 and 2010.
“ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on Myspace, gathered before they were all ‘deleted’ by mistake,” Scott posted at the time.
This collection was uploaded to archive.org and made available for free, allowing people to stream and download the music without any limits. In addition, an unnamed entity launched a companion site, lostmyspace.com, with a dedicated search and playback interface for the archived files.
With key historical data safely stored, the Myspace preservation effort was celebrated widely. However, not everyone was pleased.
Two years ago, the Illinois-based musician Anthony Martino found out that several of his songs were part of the Myspace Dragon Hoard. These files were hosted by the Internet Archive without his permission and formed the basis of a legal challenge.
Last December, Martino filed a copyright infringement complaint in federal court. He argues that the recordings from his Myspace should not have been included to begin with, as he made these inaccessible to the public around 2011, long before Myspace lost the data.
An amended complaint, filed in January, accuses Internet Archive of copyright infringement, requesting the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work for willful infringement.
In addition to 11 works in the Myspace database, Martino also claims IA scanned and digitized his physical CD liner notes and printed lyrics, adding 48 additional works to the mix. This puts the (theoretical) maximum damages at $8,850,000.
However, in its answer, Internet Archive pointed out that potential damages should be reduced to the statutory minimum, as low as $200 per work, because any infringement was innocent. That would put the damages floor at roughly $11,800.
The Internet Archive vehemently disputes the copyright infringement claims. The organization explains that it was not directly involved in uploading the ‘Myspace Dragon Hoard’. IA notes that this was done by the anonymous academic researchers that were mentioned earlier.
“A group of academics that had saved some of the lost materials uploaded their archive onto the Internet Archive’s website,” the Archive’s attorney informed the court in a joint case management statement last week, noting that the organization is protected against third-party claims by the DMCA safe harbor.
IA does not see any outstanding issues and says that, to its understanding, all of Martino’s takedown DMCA requests were eventually processed.
In its formal answer to the complaint, Internet Archive also raises a notable counter-argument: it denies that any license Martino granted to Myspace by uploading his recordings was “fully and immediately revocable,” and denies that such a license prohibited distribution to third parties outside Myspace’s platform.
Martino, meanwhile, remains convinced that IA has a more active role. Among other things, he points to public statements by Scott himself describing his role in coordinating the collection’s upload.
Since the case will move forward to trial, both parties will get the chance to conduct discovery to find evidence for their claims. The eventual trial date has not been scheduled yet, but both parties suggest planning it for April of 2027.
This is not the first music copyright dispute the Internet Archive is involved in. The organization was previously sued by several major music labels for digitizing gramophones. This case was settled confidentially last September.
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A copy of Martino’s amended complaint is available here (pdf). The Internet Archive’s answer can be found here (pdf), while the case management statement is here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The Kyrgyz Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned the six-year prison sentence of an independent investigative journalist and ordered a new trial. The move came after months of mounting international pressure.
Investigative reporter Makhabat Tazhibek kyzy, a reporter for the investigative outlet Temirov Live, will have her case sent back to a lower court. Until the ruling, she was the only journalist from the outlet still behind bars following a sweeping crackdown on the press.
Tazhibek kyzy and 10 former colleagues were detained during police raids in January 2024 and accused of inciting and organizing mass riots. Rights groups and colleagues maintain the charges were retaliation for the outlet’s reporting on high-level corruption in the Central Asian nation. Tazhibek kyzy was convicted and sentenced in October 2024.
The Supreme Court’s decision to review the case and resume proceedings follows intense lobbying by international bodies. In November 2025, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention publicly called on Kyrgyz authorities to immediately release Tazhibek kyzy and cease a campaign of intimidation against independent media. Earlier, in April 2025, the U.N. Human Rights Office urged the government to review the convictions and remove conditional sentences imposed on the reporters.
Bolot Temirov, editor-in-chief of Temirov Live—a partner of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project—said the U.N. intervention heavily influenced the court’s review of his wife’s case.
“Based on the decision of the U.N. working group as a whole, the court began its consideration,” Temirov told the OCCRP. “The U.N. working group’s conclusion presents all the arguments and evidence that this was an illegal arrest and unlawful criminal prosecution. Well, that’s better than nothing.”
Of the 11 journalists originally detained, colleague Azamat Ishenbekov was also sentenced to prison but was later pardoned by the president. Two others, Aktilek Kaparov and Aike Beishekeeva, were released on probation, while the remaining journalists were acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
The prosecution of the Temirov Live journalists has prompted international condemnation, with organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders accusing Kyrgyzstan of a concerted effort to muzzle free speech.
Malaysia’s anti-corruption agency has arrested 16 Chinese nationals wanted by Beijing for allegedly operating a cross-border fraud network, state news agency Bernama reported.
The suspects have already been repatriated to China to stand trial following a crackdown on the scam center, Zamri Zainul Abidin, a senior director at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), told Bernama.
During the raid, MACC officials seized approximately 3.5 million ringgit ($890,000) in assets, including gold bars, foreign currency, and two luxury vehicles.
Authorities also confiscated laptops and mobile phones suspected of being used as the primary tools for the syndicate’s fraudulent operations.
