from the this-is-horrifying dept
After years of screaming “save the children” while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t think you can (or should) call most people inherently “bad,” but if you support what the Trump administration is doing here, you are a bad person.
According to multiple reports, including former NCMEC board member Don McGowan and independent journalist Maria Kabas (who has been breaking story after story lately), the Justice Department informed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that it will pull their entire funding if it doesn’t remove all references to LGBTQ+ issues and starts “deadnaming” trans kids. According to the Verge, NCMEC has already started complying and has removed at least three documents:
To be clear: NCMEC isn’t above criticism. Just months ago, we published a detailed interview with McGowan exposing serious problems with NCMEC’s board, including its history of kowtowing to Trump and its reluctance to protect trans kids due to its Trumpist board members.
But crucially: The frontline workers and systems at NCMEC — particularly the CyberTipline — operate as vital infrastructure for child protection, regardless of the board’s political failings.
The CyberTipline serves as the legally mandated clearinghouse for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reports from online service providers, coordinating between platforms and law enforcement to investigate and combat child exploitation.
The CyberTipline isn’t perfect. Last year’s Stanford Internet Observatory report (published before Jim Jordan effectively killed the organization over bogus “censorship” claims) detailed significant challenges in the system. While Congress addressed some issues, like cloud storage restrictions, fundamental problems remain.
If NCMEC loses funding, we’re looking at the collapse of a legally mandated reporting system that processes millions of reports annually. Every tech platform, from the smallest startup to the largest social media giant, relies on this infrastructure to comply with federal law. Without it, we’d effectively create a massive regulatory black hole in online child protection.
And, in effect, this would create a world in which CSAM creators and sharers would have free rein, as the key bit of infrastructure in stopping them would be wiped out.
The CyberTipline’s current struggles stem largely from resource constraints. Increased funding for NCMEC and CSAM investigators would strengthen our child protection infrastructure.
So, of course, the Trump DOJ wants to kill the funding. Entirely.
And why? Because they’re so obsessed with what genitals anyone has (which is none of their fucking business) that they’re trying to wipe out the very idea of transgenderism existing.
And that’s especially damaging, because trans kids are disproportionately at risk of being exploited and abused. The statistics are stark: LGBTQ+ youth are three times more likely to experience unwanted and risky online interactions than their peers, and trans youth in particular face even higher rates of targeting by online predators. These aren’t just numbers – they’re exactly the kind of cases that NCMEC’s resources should be designed to prevent and address. Having resources for LGBTQ+ kids is just incredibly important to actually protect the children.
This is also why this story is so sickening. For a while now, the Trumpist disinformation peddling cultists have pushed the made up story that Democrats are a child abusing cult. Remember “Pizza Gate” bullshit? That morphed into the QAnon conspiracy theory and slogan of “save the children.” In practice, QAnon’s “save the children” campaign was really a “let’s accuse all Democrats of being pedophiles” campaign.
Yet, here, the Trump administration, which QAnon has long supported, is literally looking to pull funding from the one organization most responsible for actually protecting children… if it won’t throw a bunch of the kids it’s supposed to be protecting under the bus.
The consequences of this directive are stark and binary: either NCMEC loses its funding, effectively crippling our national CSAM reporting infrastructure, or it complies by abandoning vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth to increased exploitation risks. Either way, children will suffer real horrific levels of otherwise preventable harm — not the imagined threats of conspiracy theorists, but actual, documented dangers that NCMEC currently works to prevent.
This creates an impossible choice: either we lose the primary infrastructure for fighting online child exploitation, or we institutionalize discrimination that puts already-vulnerable children at even greater risk. Both outcomes achieve exactly the opposite of what any legitimate child protection effort should do.
Sickening.
This isn’t a policy dispute or a culture war skirmish. This is the deliberate dismantling of child protection infrastructure to score political points.
There are issues where reasonable people can disagree. This isn’t one of them. When you strip away the rhetoric and look at the actual consequences, this policy serves exactly one purpose: to harm children, whether through dismantling CSAM protections or forcing the abandonment of vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.
To those Trump supporters showing up in our comments to gloat about how “I voted for this” — yes, you did. You voted to destroy the systems that actually protect children from exploitation. No amount of “save the children” hashtags can obscure that reality.
Companies: ncmec
from the the-death-of-privacy dept
In a stunning escalation that confirms our worst fears, the UK government has finally shown its true hand on encryption — and it’s even worse than we predicted. According to a bombshell report from Joseph Menn at the Washington Post, British officials have ordered Apple to create a backdoor that would allow them to access encrypted content from any Apple user worldwide.
This comes after years of the UK government’s steadily mounting assault on encryption, from the Investigatory Powers Act to the Online Safety Act. While officials repeatedly insisted they weren’t trying to break encryption entirely, those of us following closely saw this coming. Apple even warned it might have to exit the UK market if pushed too far.
Let’s be super clear here: The UK government is demanding that Apple fundamentally compromise the security architecture of its products for every user worldwide. This isn’t just about giving British authorities access to British users’ data — it’s about creating a master key that would unlock everyone’s encrypted data, everywhere.
This is literally breaking the fundamental tool that protects our privacy and security. Backdoored encryption is not encryption at all.
The technical reality is stark: You can’t create a backdoor that only works for “good guys.” Any vulnerability built into the system becomes a vulnerability for everyone — state actors, cybercriminals, and hostile nations alike. And right now, it’s worth recognizing that any government (including our own) can be seen as a “hostile nation” to many.
Even if Apple withdraws from the UK market entirely, as the Post reports they’re considering, it won’t satisfy the UK’s demands:
This global reach is particularly concerning given the UK’s membership in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Any backdoor created for British authorities would inevitably become a tool for intelligence and law enforcement agencies across the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — effectively creating a global surveillance capability without any democratic debate or oversight in those countries.
If the UK does this, it means that the FBI will be able to use it to read anyone’s data.
The UK government’s approach here is particularly insidious. While Apple can appeal the order, their appeal rights are bizarrely limited: They can only argue about the cost of implementing the backdoor, not the catastrophic privacy and security implications for billions of users worldwide. This reveals the UK government’s complete indifference to the fundamental right to privacy.
Even more alarming is the forced secrecy component.
This gag order component is particularly chilling — the UK isn’t just demanding the power to break encryption globally, they’re demanding the right to force Apple to actively deceive its users about the security of their data. After years of dismissing concerns about the Investigatory Powers Act as “exaggerated,” the UK government is now proving its critics right in the most dramatic way possible.
The implications here cannot be overstated. This would represent the single largest coordinated attack on private communications in the digital age. It’s not just about government surveillance — it’s about deliberately introducing vulnerabilities that would be exploitable by anyone who discovers them, from hostile nation-states to criminal organizations.
The timing of this demand is nothing short of breathtaking in its recklessness. We are quite literally in the midst of dealing with the catastrophic fallout from the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack — where state-sponsored hackers exploited a government-mandated backdoor in our telephone infrastructure to conduct widespread surveillance. This hack alone should have permanently ended any discussion of intentionally weakening encryption. It’s a real-world demonstration of exactly what security experts have been warning about for decades: backdoors will inevitably be discovered and exploited by bad actors.
The irony here is almost painful: The FBI itself has been actively encouraging Americans to use encrypted communications specifically because our telephone infrastructure remains compromised by Chinese hackers. Yet at this precise moment — when we’re witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of compromised security — the UK government is demanding we create an even bigger, more dangerous, more consequential backdoor?
This is beyond dangerous. There is no reasonable rationale for this.
There’s a good chance that the UK is doing this right now knowing that the US is totally distracted by everything that Musk and Trump are doing to dismantle the US government. But given how much Trump seems to hate the FBI right now, it seems like even more of a reason for him to call this out as an attack on Americans and our privacy. Does he want the FBI reading his data as well?
Senator Ron Wyden, who has been a tireless champion of encryption, is reasonably angry about this and is calling on both Apple and Trump to “tell the UK to go to hell.”
Trump and Apple better tell the UK to go to hell with its demand to access Americans’ private, encrypted texts and files. Trump and American tech companies letting foreign governments secretly spy on Americans would be an unmitigated privacy and national security disaster.
— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) 2025-02-07T17:15:45.189Z
As he says:
Wyden calling out Trump here actually makes a lot of sense. Given Trump’s current antagonistic relationship with federal law enforcement, he might be uniquely positioned to recognize this for what it is — a foreign government demanding the power to spy on Americans, including him personally. The FBI, which would inevitably gain access to this backdoor through Five Eyes sharing agreements, would have unprecedented access to everyone’s communications — a scenario that should alarm privacy advocates across the political spectrum.
This is, without hyperbole, a five-alarm fire for digital privacy and security. The UK government is attempting to fundamentally reshape global digital security through a secretive demand, hoping the world is too distracted to notice or resist. They’re not just asking for a key to their own citizens’ data — they’re demanding the power to unlock everyone’s digital life, everywhere, while forcing Apple to lie about it.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. This isn’t just about privacy — it’s about the future of secure communication itself. Don’t let this slip by in the chaos of the moment. The UK government is betting on our distraction and apathy. Let’s prove them wrong.
Filed Under: backdoors, encryption, investigatory powers act, privacy, security, spying, surveillance, uk
Companies: apple
from the good-intentions,-hot-messes dept
A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops.
But as we’ve seen with other states that have passed right to reform laws (most notably New York), passing the law isn’t the end of the story. Corporate lobbyists have had great success not just watering these laws down before passage, but after voters approve them. They’ve also been swarmed by coordinated industry lawsuits and falsehood-spewing attacks.
Maine’s popular right to repair law just took effect after a year of hashing out the fine details, but the bill’s still being changed as the state tries to sort out enforcement. Large automakers have been looming over that process to try and weaken the law. But the Alliance For Automotive Innovation also just filed a new lawsuit saying the law isn’t fully cooked and therefore violates the law:
The group is correct that Maine’s right to repair law isn’t fully cooked yet. What they don’t say is they’re one of the reasons the law isn’t fully cooked. Or that they oppose the popular law either way.
The group’s statement makes some false claims that the law wasn’t necessary because the freedom to repair your own vehicle already exists. That’s simply not true, and it’s important to remind folks that the auto industry has some of the worst privacy and security ratings of any tech-based industry. Automakers also routinely falsely claim that right to repair laws are a threat to consumer privacy and security.
Maine’s original and vague law requires manufacturers to give car owners, independent repair shops, and licensed dealers transparent access to vehicle data for repair and diagnostic purposes. It also demanded the creation of a Maine Automotive Right to Repair Working Group to determine the contours of the law and help build an independent entity to govern vehicle data transmitted to independent repair shops.
That process has been a mess, in part, because the original law was vague. But also because auto lobbyists have been applying constant pressure to weaken the law. And because crafting a useful law, with functional privacy measures, that automakers can’t just tap dance around, simply isn’t easy. So yes, the law is unfinished. It’s also not being actually enforced.
Once Maine’s law is finally fully cooked, assuming it has any actual teeth left by that point, consistent enforcement becomes another issue. In all of the states where new right to repair laws have been passed, most corporations are simply ignoring the laws. I’m not sure I’ve seen a single enforcement action yet in any of the eleven states that have passed various right to repair protections.
Now, with Trumpism’s assault on… everything throwing state courts into absolute chaos on subjects ranging from immigration to public safety, I suspect enforcement of extremely popular right to repair laws won’t be at the top of the priority list for cash-strapped states.
Filed Under: affordable repair, automakers, cars, independent repair shops, privacy, right to repair, security
And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you’d start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don’t want to say I told you so, but I’m coming across articles about how Pat Riley is about to get paid all over the place. If you didn’t read the previous post on all of this, this all has to do with Riley’s trademark for the term “three-peat”, a portmanteau that Riley registered in the middle of a failed run to win 3 NBA championships with the Lakers decades ago. Despite the term being relatively common as a sporting term, challenges to Riley’s trademark have thus far been unsuccessful.
That is despite his own commercial use of the term, outside of licensing it, has been a joke. Like, badly designed bumper stickers and license plate frames level of a joke. But since we have a culture that leans more towards ownership than sanity, when the Bulls had two championship runs that were three-peats, Riley got paid.
And now according to reports, he’ll also be paid by the Kansas City Chiefs if they win the Super Bowl this Sunday.
This, again, is a perversion of the purpose of trademark law. Riley’s association with the term “three-peat,” as much as an association even exists, comes strictly from the licensing deals he’s signed, not because of any product or service he’s actually produced. He didn’t coin the term himself. He doesn’t provide anything of value that concerns the phrase. There’s question among the public as to the source of a good or service here. This is purely a 79 year old being paid for having registered a trademark so he could be paid in exactly this way.
How much money that is is anybody’s guess.
Given the popularity of the NFL and the Chiefs, it’s not hard to imagine the sale of 50k pieces of merch that include the phrase, honestly. In fact, I can imagine a world where many times that much merch gets sold.
But however much that ends up being, some of that money will go, unearned in my view, to Pat Riley.
Companies: kansas city chiefs, nfl
from the no-extra-rights-for-cops dept
Last June, Louisiana became the third state to decide the US Constitution was subservient to cops’ wishes that they not be filmed while performing their public duties.
Arizona had already tried this twice, starting at 25 feet before trimming the “halo” to an 8-foot diameter. It didn’t matter. A federal court permanently blocked the law due to its obvious unconstitutional nature. Florida has tried the same thing — a 25-foot “no go” zone around “first responders” — utilizing the dubious theory that too many people filming cops are somehow “interfering” with their ability to do their jobs. At this point, the law remains in place, but it’s only a matter of time before it’s kicked to the curb due to its inherent illegality.
Louisiana may have been the third to get in on the anti-accountability train, but it’s the second to see its law erased from existence by a federal court decision, as Nola.com reports.
For some reason, the journalists at NOLA (as well as the AP correspondents piggybacking on Nola’s reporting) are unable (or unwilling) to provide readers with a copy of the decision. We respect our readers too much to cut them out of this loop.
Here’s the federal court decision [PDF] issued by the Middle District of Louisiana — one that says this law cannot possibly be allowed to remain on the books unaltered, at least not if the state hopes to enforce it.
Whether or not the state has actually enforced the law doesn’t matter all that much, not when it’s obvious the threat the law poses to free speech. The plaintiffs — a large group of local journalists and new agencies — are more than likely to succeed in this lawsuit. And that means the law must be shut down to protect long-held rights while the merits of the case receive further scrutiny.
The First Amendment issue is split, with the plaintiffs winning (for now) the chilling effect argument, but unable to continue pursuing their overbreadth argument. For now. The court appears to believe this might apply to the law as well but has given the plaintiffs the opportunity to amend this part of the complaint.
As for the other constitutional claim, the court sides completely with the journalists. The law is void under the 14th Amendment because its vagueness makes it impossible for citizens to truly understand how and when they might violate the halo law.
So, the law is not completely dead. But it’s 99% dead, and — until further litigation ensues — cannot be enforced against anyone. It doesn’t matter if the First Amendment issues still remain partially unresolved. It’s unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment and all the court needs to shut the law down. No doubt the government will appeal this ruling, but it’s unlikely even the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court will be willing to revive this law. It’s clearly wrong and that’s why most states haven’t even attempted to craft laws like this one and why the few that have are finding themselves on the wrong side of the Constitution when they do.