Lindsey

by Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.

All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek civil servants’ emails and texts as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” an acronym for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request the messages of individual employees by name.

Trump has made clear his intentions to overhaul the Department of the Interior, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. Under President Joe Biden, the department has made tackling climate change a priority.

Hundreds of the requests asked for government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Native American Rights Fund; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought communications that mention “Trump” and “Reduction in Force,” a term that refers to layoffs.

Several requests, including some sent to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some ask for “all employees who entered into a position at the agency as a Political Appointee since January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agencies’ “hierarchy charts.”

“It does ring some alarm bells as to whether this is part of an effort to either intimidate government employees or, ultimately, to fire them and replace them with people who are going to be loyal to a leader that they may prefer,” Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said of the FOIAs.

Asked whether the project gathered the records to facilitate the firing of government workers, Howell said, “Our work is meant to just figure out who the decision-makers are.” He added that his group isn’t focused on simply identifying particular career employees. “It’s more about what the bureaucrats are doing, not who the bureaucrats are,” he said.

Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot requested questions in writing, but did not respond further. Jankowski did not reply to a request for comment.

Bookbinder also pointed out that inundating agencies with requests can interfere with the government’s ability to function. “It’s OK to make FOIA requests,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has also submitted its share of requests. “But if you purposely overwhelm the system, you can both cause slower response to FOIAs … and you can gum up other government functions.”

Indeed, a government worker who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job. “Sometimes they come in at a rate of one a second,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their work time processing requests from Heritage, including some that seek communications that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental” or “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” or “defecate” or “poop.”

“They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests,” said the worker. “We have to search people’s accounts for poop. This isn’t a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter putting in a request like that.”

Asked about the comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so they should do their damn job and turn over the documents. Their job is not to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.” He added that “we’re better journalists by any standard than The New York Times.”

Project 2025, which is led by Heritage, became politically toxic — with Trump disavowing the endeavor and Kamala Harris seeking to tie her opponent to the plan — in part for proposing to identify and fire as many as 50,000 career government employees who are deemed “nonperforming” by a future Trump administration. Trump attempted to do this at the end of his first term, issuing an executive order known as “Schedule F” that would have allowed his administration to reclassify thousands of civil servants, making them easier to fire and replace. Biden then repealed it.

Project 2025’s 887-page policy blueprint proposes that the next conservative president reissue that “Schedule F” executive order. That would mean a future Trump administration would have the ability to replace tens of thousands of career government employees with new staffers of their choosing.

To fill those vacancies, as ProPublica has reported, Project 2025 has also recruited, vetted and trained future government employees for a Republican administration. In one training video obtained by ProPublica, a former Trump White House official named Dan Huff says that future government staffers should prepare to enact drastic policy changes if they join the administration.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

Howell, the head of the Oversight Project and one of the FOIA filers, is a featured speaker in one of Project 2025’s training videos, in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss different forms of government oversight, such as FOIA requests, inspector general investigations and congressional probes. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation, offers advice to prospective government employees in a conservative administration about how to avoid having sensitive or embarrassing emails obtained under the FOIA law — the very strategy that the Oversight Project is now using with the Biden administration.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” Jones says.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

The records requests are far reaching, seeking “full calendar exports” for hundreds of government employees. One FOIA submitted by Aamot sought the complete browser history for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, “whether exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer, Mozilla.” The most frequent of the three requesters, Aamot, whose online bio describes him as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command, submitted some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others for the Daily Signal. The publication spun off from the Heritage Foundation in June, according to an announcement on the think tank’s website, but another page on the site still seeks donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.

ProPublica obtained the Department of Interior requests as well as tallies of FOIAs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration through its own public records requests.

Several of the Heritage Foundation’s requests focus on gender, asking for materials federal agencies presented to employees or contractors “mentioning ‘DEI’, ‘Transgender’, ‘Equity’, or ‘Pronouns.’” Aamot sent similar requests to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, Americorps and the Chemical Safety Board, among other agencies. Howell said he believes that the group has uncovered evidence that “unpopular and just frankly sexually creepy and sexually disordered ideas are now being translated into government jargon, speak, policies, procedures and guidance documents.”

Heritage’s FOIA blitz has even sought information about what government employees are saying about Heritage and its employees, including the three men filing the thousands of FOIAs. One request sent to the Interior Department asks for any documents to and from the agency’s chief FOIA officer that mention Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, as well as the names of Aamot, Howell and Jankowski.

Irena Hwang contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” (Emphasis added.)

If that seems like a negligible difference, the facts of this case will probably only underscore that sentiment.

The case involves James Snyder, a former mayor who accepted a $13,000 gratuity from a truck company after the city purchased five trash trucks from that company for $1.1 million. Snyder claims that the money was a consulting fee, but federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with violating an anti-corruption statute.

That statute prohibits state officials from “corruptly” accepting “anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded” for an official act.

As Jackson writes in her dissent, the most natural reading of this statute is that it targets both bribes (payments that “influenced” a future decision) and gratuities (payments that “rewarded” a past decision). As Jackson writes,

Everyone knows what a reward is. It is a $20 bill pulled from a lost wallet at the time of its return to its grateful owner. A surprise ice cream outing after a report card with straight As. The bar tab picked up by a supervisor celebrating a job well done by her team. A reward often says “thank you” or “good job,” rather than “please.”

Jackson argues that the statute should be read to prohibit “rewards corruptly accepted by government officials in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe,” much like the payment at issue in this case appears to be.

Kavanaugh’s majority opinion, meanwhile, relies heavily on policy arguments and other claims that go beyond the statute’s text. He does attempt to make a textual argument — Kavanaugh notes that the statute at issue in Snyder, like a different statute that only concerns bribes, uses the word “corruptly” — but his best arguments are atextual. 

Kavanaugh’s strongest argument is that the law makes it a very serious crime, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for a federal official to accept a bribe, but federal officials who accept gratuities only risk two years in prison. Meanwhile, the statute at issue in Snyder, which only applies to state officials, applies a 10-year sentence across the board. So Kavanaugh argues that it would be odd to read the law to draw a sharp distinction between bribes and gratuities given to federal officials but to make no distinction when state officials accept a gift.

In any event, the decision in Snyder is narrow. It does not rule that Congress could not ban gratuities. It simply rules that this particular statute only reaches bribes. That said, the Court’s Republican majority also has a long history of imposing constitutional limits on the government’s ability to fight corruption and restrict money in politics.

It’s also notable that neither Justice Clarence Thomas nor Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have accepted expensive gifts from politically active Republican billionaires, recused themselves from the case. Thomas and Alito both joined Kavanaugh’s opinion reading the anti-corruption statute narrowly.

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Have you been missing patent trolls destroying innovation and making products you like more expensive? Have you felt that, maybe, some lawyers who did nothing but send extortionate shakedown letters weren’t getting rich enough? Well then, good news for you, Congress is looking to bring all that back!

In the early years of Techdirt, we spent a lot of time talking about patent trolling, and how terrible, ridiculous patents that never should have been granted were being used as a shakedown mechanism against actual innovators. Greedy, shameless lawyers would get or buy extremely broad and vague patents, where there was no intention to actually bring a product to market, and then they’d threaten, extort, or otherwise shakedown, companies who actually built successful products, often totally unrelated to the patents in question.

Thankfully, a decade or so ago, the worst aspects of patent trolling were limited (though certainly not eliminated). Changes to the law made it easier to challenge bad patents, and the Supreme Court ran through a series of cases that made it clear that terrible concepts like business models and pure software were not patent-eligible subject matter. Both have been hugely important.

And the Senate is looking to roll back both of them.

In 2012, the America Invents Act had some issues, but among its good ideas was the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB), which enabled “Inter Partes Review” (IPR) of patents. This allowed anyone to challenge the validity of a patent by showing prior art to the PTAB, allowing the PTAB to say that the original patent examiner made a mistake and shouldn’t have granted a patent.

This process has been hugely important in stopping dangerous and bad patents. In the early 2000s, scholars detailed part of the reason the patent system was so broken was the lack of an antagonistic process in the granting of patents. You have the party applying for the patent, and then you have the examiner. The examiner may challenge the applicant on certain points, but there is no such thing as a “final” no (even if there is something called a final rejection), such that the applicant can keep trying. And there’s no one pushing back on the other side and pointing out why something doesn’t deserve a 20-year monopoly.

That resulted in plenty of patents that shouldn’t have been granted becoming weapons of mass litigation. The IPR process allowed people to challenge these patents, to show that the sole patent examiner who handled the case got it wrong, and to get rid of the dangerous and unnecessary monopoly.

Patent trolls have long hated the IPR system. They’ve challenged it multiple times, but so far, the concept has held up in court, including the Supreme Court.

The other major change that helped stop terrible patents was the Supreme Court repeatedly taking cases about people patenting things that should never have been patentable, and calling out the patent office and the lower courts for allowing this nonsense. One of these cases, Alice v. CLS Bank, from a decade ago, effectively said that software and business models weren’t patentable (though not as clearly as it should have). This followed on similar rulings saying that medical diagnostics and genes shouldn’t be patentable either.

But, of course, some people in Congress love patents and patent trolling. Senators Chris Coons (who, for years, worked for W.L. Gore, a company known for its patent enforcement, though which was also on the receiving end of many patent lawsuits) and Thom Tillis have long been supporters of ever more troll-friendly IP laws.

They have two bills that may get voted on today that seek to wipe out all of the good things discussed above. EFF has a summary of each:

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA, S. 2140) would overturn Alice, enabling patent trolls to extort small business owners and even hobbyists, just for using common software systems to express themselves or run their businesses. PERA would also overturn another 2013 Supreme Court case that prevents most kinds of patenting of human genes.

Meanwhile, the PREVAIL Act (S. 2220) seeks to severely limit how the public can challenge bad patents at the patent office. Challenges like these are one of the most effective ways to throw out patents that never should have been granted in the first place. 

Both of these would be horrific for the future of innovation and would bring back into the foreground more patent trolling shakedowns over completely bogus patents that never should have been granted. It would literally set innovation back a decade. And for what? To help a few lawyers shakedown more innovators? Who wants that other than the patent trolls?

Over the last decade, patent trolling hasn’t gone completely away, but it has become less of an existential threat for innovators than it was for the first ten to fifteen years of the 2000s. These two bills would destroy that and bring us back to an era of less innovation and more shakedowns.

The EFF link has ways to contact your senators to vote against these bills, and I hope that many of you will do so.

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Exclusive: Former federal building near National Mall becomes apartments https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2024/09/13/new-apartments-annex-on-12th-national-mall

Exclusive: Former federal building near National Mall becomes apartments

Fast casual chain BurgerFi filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week after months of declining sales and other financial issues. The Ft. Lauderdale-based company also owns Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza & Wings, which closed its Bethesda location earlier this month. All BurgerFi restaurants, including the one at Pike & Rose, are expected to remain open while the company attempts to reorganize.

The post BurgerFi is bankrupt appeared first on Store Reporter.

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We’ve noted for years how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware that becomes useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will be the same product tomorrow.

Now a coalition of consumer groups, activists, and lawmakers are pushing the FTC to crack down on “smart” device manufacturers that suddenly pull support for products or make them less useful — either by simply removing features or hiding them behind annoying new subscription paywalls.

In a letter sent last week to key FTC officials, a coalition of seventeen different groups (including Consumer Reports, iFixit, and US PIRG) requested that the agency take aim at several commonplace anti-consumer practices, including “software tethering” (making hardware useless or less useful later via firmware update), or the act of suddenly locking key functionality behind subscriptions:

Both practices are examples of how companies are using software tethers in their devices to infringe on a consumer’s right to own the products they buy. While the FTC has taken some limited actions with regard to this issue, a lack of clarity and enforcement has led to an
ecosystem where consumers cannot reliably count on the connected products they buy to last.

The letter cites numerous instances of consumer harms Techdirt has covered at length, ranging from Peloton’s recent decision to charge used bike owners a $95 fee for no coherent reason, to the “smart” baby bassinet maker that recently decided to paywall most of the device’s most popular features.

The letter correctly points out that this environment, where consumers are constantly shelling out significant money for devices that can be killed or rendered less useful (often without clear communications to end users), is resulting in a “death by a thousand cuts” for consumer rights. And, the groups note, it’s likely to only get worse without clear guidance and enforcement by the FTC.

The FTC has occasionally made inquiries in this space, but often only superficially. For example the FTC launched an investigation into Google’s decision to turn Revolv smart home hardware into useless crap but then took no substantive action and implemented no meaningful consumer reforms.

But the (intentionally) underfunded, understaffed, and endlessly embattled agency only has so many resources, and struggles to tackle even far more pressing issues like widespread monopolization or privacy violations. Still, some federal guidance and a few warnings would probably go a long way in a “smart” hardware sector that’s become a hot mess in the cloud computing age.

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This week, we learned that when DC residents see a literal robot meandering down the sidewalk on a random Tuesday, the immediate assumption is that it’s handing out parking tickets. Soo, are robots giving parking tickets now in washington DC? I saw a @DDOTDC robot today . I have enough @WashProbs ! Perhaps we need […]

The post Meet DDOT’s Robot, Which They Promise Won’t Give You a Parking Ticket first appeared on Washingtonian.

Can the fear of students using generative AI and the rise of questionable AI “checker” tools create a culture devoid of creativity? It’s a topic that is curiously one worth delving into a bit more deeply, in part because of something that happened this weekend.

Earlier this year, we had a post by Alan Kyle about California bill SB 942. That bill would require AI companies to offer a free AI detection tool, despite the fact that such tools are notoriously unreliable and prone to nonsense. As Kyle wrote, the bill takes a “nerd harder” approach to regulating technology its backers don’t understand.

SB 942 has continued to move forward just passed in the California Assembly. It’s now on Governor Newsom’s desk to potentially sign.

I was thinking about that this weekend after a situation at home. One of my kids* has an English homework assignment. They had to read Kurt Vonnegut’s famous short story, Harrison Bergeron, and write a short essay about it. Since I do a fair bit of writing, my kid asked me to review the essay and see if I had any pointers. I gave a few general suggestions on how to think about improving the flow of the piece, as it read very much like a standard first draft: a bit stilted. My kid went off to work on a rewrite.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Harrison Bergeron, it’s about a society that seeks to enforce “equality” by placing “handicaps” on anyone who excels at anything to bring them down to the least common denominator (e.g., ugly masks for pretty people, having to carry around extra weights for strong people). One of the morals to that story is on the perils of seeking to force equality in a manner that limits excellence and creativity.

Later in the day, the kid came by with their school-issued Chromebook, which has Grammarly Pro pre-installed. The students are encouraged to use it to improve their writing. One thing that the tool has is an “AI Checker” in which it tries to determine if the submitted text was written by AI.

This is similar to “plagiarism checkers” that have been around for a few decades. In fact, Grammarly’s “check” covers both AI and plagiarism (or so it says). Those systems have always had problems, especially around false positives. And it seems that the AI checkers are (unsurprisingly) worse**.

It turns out that Grammarly only just introduced this feature a few weeks ago. Thankfully, Grammarly’s announcement states pretty clearly that AI detection is pretty iffy:

AI detectors are an emerging—and inexact—technology. When an AI detector definitively states whether the analyzed content contains AI, it’s not acting responsibly. No AI detector can conclusively determine whether AI was used to produce text. The accuracy of these tools can vary based on the algorithms used and the text analyzed.

Anyway, the kid wanted to show me that when the word “devoid” was used, the AI-checker suggested that the essay was “18% AI written.” It’s a bit unclear even what that 18% means. Is it a “probability this essay was written by AI” or “percentage of the essay we think may have been written by AI”? But, magically, when the word “devoid” was changed to “without” the AI score dropped to 0%.

In Grammarly’s announcement, it claims that because these tools are so flaky, it “does things differently” than other AI checker tools. Namely, it says that its own tool is more transparent:

Grammarly’s AI detection shows users what part of their text, if any, appears to have been AI-generated, and we provide guidance on interpreting the results. This percentage may not answer “why” text has been flagged. However, it allows the writer to appropriately attribute sources, rewrite content, and mitigate the risk of being incorrectly accused of AI plagiarism. This approach is similar to our plagiarism detection capabilities, which help writers identify and revise potential plagiarism, ensuring the originality and authenticity of their work.

I can tell you that this is not true. After the kid continued to work on the essay and reached a point where they thought it was in good shape, the AI checker said it was 17% AI, but gave no indication of what might be AI-generated or why.

Now, to be clear, the essay can still be turned in. There is no indication that the teacher is relying on, or even using, the AI checker. When I mentioned all this on Bluesky, other teachers told me they know to basically ignore any score under 60% as a likely false positive. But my kid is reasonably flustered that if the AI checker is suggesting the essay sounds like AI wrote it, that it might mean there’s a problem with the essay.

At that point, the hunt began to figure out what could possibly be causing the 17% score. The immediate target was more advanced vocabulary (the issue that had already been identified with “devoid.”)

The essay did use the word “delve,” which has now become something of a punchline as showing up in every AI-generated work. There’s even a study showing the massive spike in the use of the word in PubMed publications:

Even crazier is the use of both “delve” and “underscore.” However, my kid’s essay did not use “underscore.”

The main theory I’ve seen is that the reason “delve” is so popular in AI works is that some of the training and data commonly used in AI systems was done in Nigeria and Kenya, where the word “delve” is more common. This has resulted in some arguments online, such as when online pontificator Paul Graham tweeted out how receiving an email with “delve” in it indicated it was written by ChatGPT, leading a bunch of Nigerians to call him out by mocking him, and highlighting that other cultures use language differently than he might.

Either way, the “delve” in my kid’s essay was not written by AI. But, just to be safe, the word was replaced. As were some other words. It made no difference. The AI checker still said 17%.

At one point, we looked at a slightly oddly worded sentence and tested removing it. The score went up to 20%. At that point, the kid just started removing each sentence, one at a time, to see what changed the score. Nothing actually seemed to do it, and despite Grammarly’s promise of transparency and clarity, no further information was provided.

All of this struck me as quite a series of lessons. First, it points out the absolute stupidity of bills like SB 942 which will only increase, rather than decrease, this kind of AI dousing rod woo woo divination.

But, the bigger lesson has to do with AI and schools. I know that many educators are terrified of generative AI tools these days. Plenty of educators talk about how they know kids today are turning in essays generated by ChatGPT. Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes less so. And many are not sure what to do about it.

I’ve seen a few creative ideas (and forgive me for not remembering where I saw these) such as having the students create a prompt to get ChatGPT to write an essay related to a class topic. Then, the real homework is having the student edit and correct the ChatGPT output. The students are then told to hand in the prompt, the original ChatGPT essay, and also their corrections.

A similar idea was to have the students write their own essay and then also have ChatGPT write an essay on the same prompt. Then, the students had to hand in both essays, along with a short explanation of why they thought their own essay was better.

In other words, there are some ways of approaching this, and as time goes on, I expect we’ll hear of more.

But, simply inserting a sketchy “AI checker” in the process seems likely to do more harm than good. Even if the teacher isn’t guaranteed to be using the tool, just the fact that it’s there creates a challenge for my kid who doesn’t want to risk it. And it’s teaching them to diminish their own writing skills in order to convince the AI-checker that the writing was done by a human.

And that seems, ironically, quite like the lesson of what “Harrison Bergeron” was supposed to teach us to avoid. Vonnegut was showing us why trying to stifle creativity is bad. Now my kid feels the need to stifle their own creativity just to avoid being accused of being a machine.

I’m not against AI as a tool. I’ve talked about how I use it here as a tool to help edit my (human) writing, to challenge me, and to push me to be a better (human) writer, even as those tools tend to be awful writers themselves. But I fear that with there being such a fear about “AI writing,” the end result might actually make people write less with the creativity of humans, and more to simply avoid being called out as a machine.

* In case you’re wondering, I checked first to make sure they were okay with me writing about this before telling this story and have kept details to a minimum to protect their privacy.

** After reading through a draft of this piece, kid suggested we should run this through an AI checker as well, and it tells me (falsely) that 3.7% of this article appears to be written by AI (it specifically calls out my description of Harrison Bergeron as well as my description of plagiarism checkers as likely written by AI).

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Despite the best efforts of automakers and companies like Apple, states continue to push forward with popular “right to repair” reforms that make it easier and more affordable for consumers to repair tech they own.

While they vary in potency, New York, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota have all now passed some flavor of right to repair laws. Colorado just got done passing its third such bill. The first two ensured that consumers had access to the parts, tools, and documentation they needed to repair agricultural equipment and powered wheelchairs.

The push has even started to expand into the military, and some appliance and tractor manufacturers aren’t happy about it. The fine folks at 404 Media obtained documents showcasing how both industries are lobbying hard against new legislation that could make it easier for the U.S. military to fix the equipment they buy.

As usual, baseless fearmongering is the name of the game, with both industries claiming that more affordable and easier repair would somehow hurt small companies, and might even pose security risks:

The letter argues that the legislation “would undermine the principle underpinning existing technical data rights statutes, which are designed to balance the government’s technical data needs against contractors’ need to protect sensitive proprietary and trade secret information.”

The claim that easier and more affordable repair poses some kind of unacceptable privacy and security risk is always the first one made by companies looking to lock down their lucrative repair monopolies. Apple for years falsely claimed such reforms would create a dangerous surge in nefarious hackers. Automakers claim such reforms will be a boon to sexual predators.

A 2021 bipartisan FTC report showcased how these claims are routinely false. In reality, right to repair reforms not only help make repair more affordable (a boon to military-funding taxpayers) but drive greater availability of manuals, parts, and tools, making tech safer.

In this case the lobbying and policy organizations trying to scuttle military right to repair reforms range from the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” and Aerospace Industries Association to the Irrigation Association, all of which are clearly getting nervous about the potential for even broader federal reforms.

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Was Mark Zuckerberg’s cringey spinelessness just an attempt to grovel before Donald Trump to avoid a vindictive criminal lawsuit? Given the timing of the letter coming out just before Trump’s new book that threatens to imprison Zuckerberg in a bout of authoritarian vindictiveness, it sounds like the reason Zuck is feeding the MAGA conspiracy theories is to try to appease Trump.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s preposterously spineless letter to Jim Jordan, in which he repeats a bunch of things that were already public knowledge about the White House suggesting that Facebook could help save lives by not promoting dangerous anti-vax information. However, he did so in a manner that would allow people like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump to pretend that he moderated content because the Biden White House ordered him to, and that this was a big scandal that Meta would not let happen again.

In that post, I noted a key part of Zuckerberg’s letter: the claim that now he would stand up to government coercion. But that’s laughable, given that the letter itself is him caving in to threats of coercion by Jim Jordan.

Multiple people saw the news of the letter and claimed that it was an admission by Zuckerberg that he wanted Donald Trump to win. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seemed pretty clear that the entire intent of the letter was to position himself as a suck-up to Trump in case Trump wins.

Now there’s a bit more evidence for that. Politico reported that Donald Trump has a new book coming out next week in which he not only blames Mark Zuckerberg for apparently trying to rig the election against him, but also talks about wanting to put Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life if he dares do anything to influence this election.

This is ridiculous (and dangerous) on multiple levels. The claim that he helped rig the election is nonsense, based on Zuck’s charity spending a bunch of money on better election infrastructure. As Zuckerberg said in his spineless letter, that was on a non-partisan basis.

The only way spending on secure election infrastructure is biased towards one party is if the other party was planning to abuse insecure voting infrastructure to steal an election. So one way to read this is a Trump admission that Zuckerberg’s effort to make the election more secure foiled his plans to steal it.

Either way, part of Zuckerberg’s attempt to get back in the good graces of Trump was to claim he wouldn’t do that again merely because some people thought it looked biased in one direction.

One of those “some people” appears to be Trump:

Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.

So, first off, funding election infrastructure is not plotting against the President. I mean, that’s simply unhinged. But then he claims that if it happened again, he’d put Zuckerberg in jail:

“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

The problem with basically all of this is that it’s made-up nonsense, pushed by the MAGA faithful to try to make sure that no one ever calls them on their bullshit.

Facebook did not “steer against” Trump. Multiple studies showed the exact opposite. Reports showed that Facebook actually had a different, more lenient, set of rules for top Republicans because they so frequently violated the policies on the site. Other studies showed that Trumpist content spread better on Facebook, and that the top interactions on Facebook were almost entirely from Trump and friends. Indeed, it was leaked that there were different rules put in place to limit the reach of left-leaning sites.

And the “thanks” that Zuckerberg gets for all that is to be accused of interfering against Trump in the election and being threatened with a vindictive criminal trial.

Zuckerberg was likely aware of this book when he sent the letter earlier this week, which makes that letter so much more pathetic. It’s not even that Zuckerberg can’t stand up to the lies and bullshit framing of Jim Jordan — which is only there to pressure Zuckerberg to again favor Trump & Friends over Democrats — but that Zuckerberg feels the need to do this fake show of groveling to appease Trump, because Trump is so stupid he believes the made up theory that Zuckerberg was against him all this time.

Of course, lots of billionaires support one candidate or another. Elon, obviously, has gone all in for Trump, leading ExTwitter to becoming a non-stop campaign ad for Trump while pushing nonsense conspiracy theories (often pushed by Elon himself) against Harris and Walz.

The hypocrisy is staggering. If Zuckerberg deserves life in prison for supposedly favoring Biden (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), then by that logic, doesn’t Musk deserve the same for openly turning ExTwitter into a 24/7 Trump propaganda machine? Of course not. In Trump’s world, it’s only a crime when the other side does it. But last I checked, billionaires on both sides of the aisle have the right to free speech and political preferences – even if Zuck is too spineless to stand up for his.

But, really, the timing of Zuck’s letter suggests it was done on purpose to try to get back in Trump’s good graces at the same time this book was coming out. It just reinforces that Zuckerberg is willing to cave to political pressure. And that pressure is from Trump.

At the same time, Trump’s claims in the book suggest this latest pathetic political ploy won’t even work. Imagine being as rich and as powerful as Zuckerberg, and feeling the need to feed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which you know is a nonsense conspiracy theory, just in the hopes that maybe Trump and his crew will stop falsely claiming you rigged the election (another nonsense conspiracy theory).

It’s a masterclass in spinelessness: groveling to appease a conspiracy theory that you yourself know is baseless, all in the vain hope of avoiding the wrath of a vindictive ex-president.

Okaeri Japanese Cafe, the second of five new Asian businesses heading to The Shops at Congressional Village, opened its doors this week off Rockville Pike. The made-for-Instagram menu features a colorful array of flavored teas and lattes, lemonades, matcha drinks, Japanese pancakes, mochi donuts, rice balls, sandwiches and savory dishes. Last month this shopping center also welcomed Kajiken, a “soupless ramen” restaurant where you mix your noodles with customized sauces and toppings. What else is on the way to The Shops at Congressional Village? Kanpai, an Asian BBQ and shabu shabu hotpot restaurant; Uzu, a revolving sushi bar; and Teso Life, a Japanese variety store.

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