The SpaceX IPO Sends Elon Musk And Trump’s Starlink Cronyism Into The Thermosphere

Earnings, IPOs, and the like

from the golden-age-of-corruption dept

Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data centers and Mars colonization are just around the corner.

A handful of remaining useful journalists have repeatedly explained how xAI and Musk’s racist 5th place chatbot — which comprises the lion’s share of the ridiculous IPO valuation — is a gargantuan loser. Both SpaceX and xAI aren’t profitable and may never be, and the claims of Mars colonization and space data centers are unworkable bullshit designed to distract people with toddler-level critical thinking skills.

Anyway I’m sure it will go fine.

As a multi-decade telecom beat reporter I’d say I’m better positioned to talk about Starlink — the only actually profitable company in the SpaceX IPO prospectus (and that’s assuming Starlink is being honest about their financial numbers in a country too corrupt to have working financial regulators).

I’ve long noted how Starlink is great for people with no other options, but data has shown how it’s too congested to meaningfully scale. It’s also often too expensive for the sorts of Americans struggling with access. There’s also the problem with it ruining astronomical research and degrading the ozone layer. So Starlink is great for RVs or a guy with an extra cabin in the woods, but it’s not a miracle.

In terms of broadband policy, it’s supposed to be a niche solution. The kind of technology you use to fill in the gaps after you’ve pushed fiber, 5G, and fixed wireless out as far as you can into unserved areas.

But as I’ve mentioned previously, folks in the Trump administration and extended Rogan infotainment universe see Starlink as akin to magic. They think it’s just a sort of pixie dust you sprinkle over the entire of U.S. connectivity woes. There was a soggy Bulwark interview last week with Jason Calacanis that kind of reveals how deep the delusion goes in terms of what Starlink actually is:

The SpaceX IPO insists — and Calacanis dutifully believes — that it’s trivial for Starlink to jump from a niche satellite broadband solution with a little over 10 million subscribers — to a massive economic powerhouse with 300-500 million subscribers. Calacanis waxes poetic about Starlink providing bandwidth to every phone in the world and surpassing even Netflix in terms of total subscribers.

But in a way that’s highly representative of modern Silicon Valley, Calacanis doesn’t actually care about how the tech works, or even if it works. Calacanis is interested in unchecked wealth accumulation, and propping up the unbridled profit-seeking of a personal friend.

The thing is: to meaningfully grow, Starlink will need to start seriously competing on price to counter competitors (like Amazon) coming into the space. But the cost of endlessly replacing LEO (low Earth orbit satellites) is immense (SpaceX says each satellite has a five year lifespan, but it’s arguably much lower). And ARPU is already dropping for Starlink as the company tries to drum up new subscribers.

Calacanis insists Starlink’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from being even bigger than Netflix. But for Starlink to even sniff those kinds of numbers, it would have to intensely compete with deeply-entrenched and politically-powerful telecom monopolies, and fiber optic broadband and 5G/6G networks less constrained by the rules of physics. They’ve also got to compete with a rising tide of community-owned fiber.

As Starlink grows its subscriber base, it’s not only going to see its ARPU drop faster, but data shows it’s going to run into new capacity constraints. That means more annoying network management practices that throttle video, limit services, and generally degrade performance. We’re already starting to see the impact of this with network slowdowns and “congestion fees” ranging upwards of $750 in some areas.

And this is, so we’re clear, a company that’s never seen fit to meaningfully invest in customer service, so as these problems grow, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to handle customer annoyance well.

Anybody claiming that Starlink is the ticket to vast riches is either lying to you or doesn’t understand how the technology actually works. Even if it can maintain its success as a viable niche connectivity option useful in rural markets and global battlezones, the high cost of maintenance means this is never going to be a major money maker. Though they clearly hope it will prove to be a semi-useful backbone for a major pump and dump scheme.

The ace Elon Musk is holding is corruption and cronyism leading to regulatory favors and massive new subsidies, but it’s not clear even that’s going to be enough.

Cecilia Kang at the New York Times has an interesting article about how the Trump FCC has been doing cartwheels trying to prop up the Musk IPO — especially as it pertains to Starlink. That has included not just abandoning any meaningful regulatory oversight of “space junk” and orbital safety, but launching dodgy investigations into companies that hold spectrum Musk wants for himself.

Elon Musk bought himself a Presidency, and it continues to pay off handsomely:

“Carr has taken multiple actions for which Musk was the prime beneficiary,” said Blair Levin, an adviser to New Street Research, an investment research firm, and a former chief of staff at the F.C.C. He added that Starlink “has gotten a huge amount from the Trump administration and Carr.”

Carr has tried to justify his favoritism of Musk by saying he’s also rubber stamped the LEO satellite policy interests of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. But as we’ve consistently established around here, nothing Carr does is driven by any sort of good faith concern about the public interest.

The funny part is that the New York Times doesn’t even mention that the Trump administration has also hijacked the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect potentially billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (I should have an upcoming feature on this over at The Verge). This is money being directed away from affordable fiber and toward two billionaires — for networks they already planned to build.

More specifically, the Trump NTIA under former Ted Cruz staffer Arielle Roth changed the language of the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program so that Musk and Bezos would be the prime beneficiaries. They also stripped out any language requiring that internet access built with taxpayer money had to be affordable or equitably deployed with an eye on fairness.

Musk and Calacanis types try to brush functional oversight for taxpayer spending as unnecessary “wokeness.” But the ongoing BEAD saga involves an historic hijacking of Congressionally-mandated funds by bad faith actors; so it’s curious the New York Times didn’t think it was worth mentioning in a story about how unethically cozy the Trump administration and Musk are.

Like most of the SpaceX IPO this will all be proven out over time. Long after people have had their retirements account raided, or small towns have had their infrastructure hopes hijacked. Consumers, taxpayers, and labor will, as is usually the case, be left holding the bag. And the folks that made it possible will already be off to the next big thing leaving people of conscience to clean up the mess.

Filed Under: competition, corruption, cronyism, elon musk, fcc, leo satellites, spacex ipo, taxpayers, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink, twitter, x, xai

RFK Jr. Is Very Mad About Reports That He’s Checked Out Of Most Of HHS’ Work

Failures

from the hiding-in-public dept

We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a New York Times report, he doesn’t really pay all that much attention to most of HHS’ work.

The Times begins the piece by pointing out that as the Ebola crisis in Africa continues to rage on, already infecting several Americans who were traveling abroad, Kennedy has been mostly absent from briefings on the outbreak. He talks to the very people who could inform him of the goings on there, but he just doesn’t get many briefings on the topic. And that led the Times to try to find out what else Kennedy isn’t bothering to pay attention to. The answer, according to insiders at HHS, is pretty much everything that isn’t one of his pet agenda items.

Mr. Kennedy’s approach to the crisis reflects his broader management of the Department of Health and Human Services, which affects the health of 340 million Americans and provides health care to 40 percent of the population through Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.

Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Mr. Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.

Now, all of this by itself would be some combination of interesting, damning, and explanatory of why so much negative health shit is occurring in America these days. Measles outbreaks, a spate of whooping cough surging, unfilled positions, an ACIP panel that is not allowed to operate because the courts said so, and so on. Having an HHS leader completely out to lunch while we have all of these health threats around us, all so he can go chase vaccine conspiracies, chem-trails, and snakes is not exactly a recipe for good health outcomes in the country. That he’s selfishly saving all of his time for his own personal interests may not be surprising, but it does need correcting.

Kennedy took to ExTwitter to defend himself from the report, which he claimed was very wrong, because he only misses some meetings.

“You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar.”

RFK Jr. questioned the outlet on whether they bothered to check his public calendar, which is filled with back-to-back meetings that concern his role. He revealed that he’s actively involved in addressing issues and making final decisions, as he summarized his schedule, stating that he works until 11:00 pm. Additionally, he touched on how the outlet used quotes from those employees, some of whom he had fired in the past, further calling into question their credibility and fact-checking skills.

Now, if you want to understand just how completely, pathologically wrong and false Kennedy is willing to be, let’s zero right the hell in on that whole “did you bother to check my public calendar” retort. Why? Well, because by all accounts, Kennedy’s calendar is not in any way public. Multiple groups have filed FOIA requests that have gone unaddressed for years, or else filed lawsuits, in order to get access to his calendar. They can’t get it. The Center for Biological Diversity filed suit over this a year ago. Statnews.com has been after it via FOIA requests for over a year, as well.

But no such calendar, detailing who Kennedy meets with or how he spends his time, has been released by the administration. STAT has been asking the Department of Health and Human Services for Kennedy’s calendar for more than a year, via Freedom of Information Act requests and emails to the press office.

Since last year, STAT reporters have requested the calendars of Kennedy and his principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, multiple times. That has included a request last February for a calendar from Kennedy’s first two weeks on the job and then a request last June for Spear’s calendars since she started in her role. Spear, whose personal office is attached to Kennedy’s, is known to attend nearly every meeting with the secretary. 

The HHS press office did not respond to questions about the public calendar Kennedy described, the number of staffers currently in FOIA offices across the agency, the response times to requests compared to earlier administrations, or which outlets were being restricted by the administration.

It’s one thing to hide your calendar while you’re not fulfilling your obligations as a cabinet member. It’s an entirely different thing to do all of that and try to admonish the press for not checking a public calendar that has never been made public.

Either Kennedy thinks his calendar is public when it isn’t, which is a terrible look for him and his understanding of how his own agencies are operating, or he does know it’s not public, is lying about it, and somehow thinks that nobody will bother to point it out.

So, the open question appears to be whether RFK Jr. is a bumbling fool who isn’t in full command of HHS…or a bad and fairly dumb liar.

So, Secretary Kennedy, once you’re back from an extended lunch and nap session, which is it?

Filed Under: ebola, health & human services, measles, rfk jr., vaccines

Judge Says Trump’s Attempt To Rewrite History At National Parks Is Illegal

Failures

from the America-isn't-your-playset dept

What’s most disturbing about Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order isn’t its fully-blinkered, jingoistic take on American history where America does no wrong and is almost always white right. I mean, that’s pretty awful on its own, but it’s the flip side of pretending whites do no wrong: pretending any victims of whites or any contributors of other races/colors/creeds simply don’t exist.

It’s the sort of thing dictators do. It’s the sort of thing novelists write about. It’s the sort of thing we Americans used to be able to criticize wholeheartedly because our country would never stoop so low as to rewrite history to please whoever was currently in power.

We no longer have the high ground. But we might be able to start making our way back to the top of the hill. It’s not because Trump et al are getting better or smarter or simply a bit less hateful. It will be because the courts are doing what they’re supposed to be doing: slowing this budding fascist’s roll.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has ordered the Trump administration to reinstall displays it removed from National Parks sites over the past year as part of a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content and climate change information.

[…]

Judge Angel Kelley sided with the challengers on Friday, finding that the federal government’s action “sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization” while undermining the “integrity” of the National Parks system.

The decision [PDF] leads off with the ideal this nation and its national parks are supposed to embody…

Often referred to as “America’s largest classroom,” National Parks serve in that spirit by telling the stories both of those who write history and those who go unheard. The beauty of history is the unvarnished storytelling of a time gone by and the delivery of undeniable truths. The Government’s stewardship of these park sites thus carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments.

… before detailing the hideous destruction being perpetrated by the Trump administration:

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded these principles. Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths. In recent months, the Government has torn down exhibits in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park memorializing the legacy of people enslaved by the country’s first President; removed signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, one of the most environmentally endangered sites in the country; and wiped away descriptions of history and science at countless National Parks across the United States. Not only does this undermine the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.

Dozens of instances of censorship and erased history are listed in the lawsuit. And it’s all the sort of thing you’d expect from this administration:

By the date of the filing of this action, Defendants had removed dozens of signs related to climate change, civil rights, and diverse communities.

[…]

In addition, Defendants have removed multiple signs involving slavery, abolition, immigration,
labor, women’s suffrage, and civil rights…

The court says the order violates the law repeatedly. Not only does it steamroll existing laws governing the National Park Service and its congressional oversight, it fails to justify its own existence with even the briefest nod to serving the public’s interest. Most damningly, the executive order ignores the facts in favor of pushing the administration’s preferred version of US history:

[T]he Order fails to rationally connect any facts to the action taken. It claims that the removals will “restore Federal sites . . . to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.” However, the Order fails to explain how unearthing and displaying the historical contributions of marginalized groups detracts from celebrating “our extraordinary heritage.” Indeed, the NPS’ purpose in installing these materials in the first instance was to attract new audiences to National Parks by celebrating diverse experiences.

In other words, this executive order is basically just a Truth Social rant pretending to be a lawful directive.

[T]he Order fails to rationally connect any facts to the action taken. It claims that the removals will “restore Federal sites . . . to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.” However, the Order fails to explain how unearthing and displaying the historical contributions of marginalized groups detracts from celebrating “our extraordinary heritage.” Indeed, the NPS’ purpose in installing these materials in the first instance was to attract new audiences to National Parks by celebrating diverse experiences.

The order concludes by using Trump’s self-serving rationalizations against him, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d love to see more of in future court orders rejecting this administration’s fascist advances:

Because Defendants deemed it important to strip the parks of these undeniable truths in anticipation of the 250th Anniversary of our great Nation, it is equally important that our shared history be honestly told and fully restored by the 250th Anniversary to properly honor the remarkable achievements of the United States.

LOL. Stick that in your White House lawn MMA fight, you asshat. Restore what’s been destroyed, says the court: that would be “truth and sanity,” rather than this steady stream of atrocities this administration continues to inflict on the US.

Filed Under: bigotry, censorship, erasing history, interior department, national park service, trump administration

Trump DOJ Friday News Dumps Its Approval Of The Job-Killing Paramount, Warner Bros Merger

Failures

from the less-competition-is-more-competition dept

The Trump “Department of Justice’s” “antitrust division” dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn’t notice it.

As we’ve noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence concerns), the giant deal will saddle the company with so much debt that mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and quality erosion from corner cutting are guaranteed. This happens with every major media merger, but especially when Warner Bros is involved.

And that’s before you get to the problems with Larry Ellison and his Bari Weiss brigades trying to destroy what’s left of already soggy U.S. corporate journalism and replace it with right wing, oligarch-friendly agitprop.

Regardless, you’ll be comforted to know that the Trump Justice Department looked at the deal closely and found that not only does it not hurt competition, it’s going to improve competition:

“The evidence reviewed and carefully analyzed by the Division indicates that, post-merger, competition in SVOD is not likely to be harmed. To the contrary, the combined firm is likely to increase competition by offering consumers a more robust competitive alternative to the larger SVOD offerings.”

That is, again, not how any of this works.

The massive debt created by these deals always results in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and lower quality product due to corner cutting. It’s not debatable. Arguing against this is like trying to have a fist fight with a running river. You just have to look back at, well, every single major media consolidation effort in the last fifty years. Which the DOJ didn’t because, well, they didn’t care.

You’ll still have major competitors to Paramount like Netflix, Comcast/NBC, Apple, and Disney, but in a country obsessed with consolidation that no longer has functional regulators, there’s really nothing stopping any limit of predatory behaviors — and additional consolidation — moving forward. There’s ongoing pretense that our consumer and labor protections still function. They don’t.

The “funny” part is the Trump DOJ even acknowledges that the history of Warner Brothers has been pockmarked by all manner of terrible competition-eroding consolidation. They just pinky swear that this time will somehow be different. Based on… nothing:

“Warner Bros. has been a repeated acquisition target in the media and entertainment industry. It is thus familiar to the Division from prior investigations and enforcement actions, including AOL/TimeWarner (2001), AT&T/TimeWarner (2018), and WarnerBros./Discovery (2022). The legacy of these transactions illustrates the challenges that arise when the commercial rationale for a deal lacks clear alignment with competitive incentives of the acquiring firm or the competitive evolution of the marketplace. In technology-driven industries, the disruptors of the recent past may quickly become the entrenched monopolists of the present day. It is with this historical experience and present enforcement sensitivity to the contestability of dynamic markets that the Division conducted a thorough investigation of the proposed transaction to assess whether the proposed transaction presented any harm to competition. The extensive investigatory record reviewed by the Division suggests that the impact of the transaction will be to increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, with benefits for American consumers and workers.”

Fun fact: Paramount’s top lawyer is Makan Delrahim, Trump’s “DOJ enforcer” from the first administration. Delrahim personally worked to make sure Sprint could merge with T-Mobile during the first term. They promised that deal would result in untold synergies and new competition. Instead, 8,000+ people lost their jobs and U.S. wireless carriers immediately stopped competing on price. It’s been memory holed.

As far as the inevitable layoffs that always result from these deals (recall that AT&T’s merger with Warner Brothers and DirecTV resulted in 50,000 lost jobs), the DOJ simply declares that won’t be happening this time. Why? Because Larry and David Ellison said they’ll keep pumping out brick-and-mortar movies at the same or greater pace (they won’t):

“While taking seriously the potential impact of the proposed transaction on the creative community and domestic labor groups, the substantial evidence does not suggest a likelihood of reduction in output. That is because the demand for creative workers and labor is correlated with the Parties’ incentives to maintain or expand output. Thus, the expressed labor concerns do not raise actionable antitrust concerns.”

In three years, after the resulting company has fired 10,000+ employees, consumers have been price gouged to reduce debt, and the resulting flailing mess is acquired for half (or less) of the price, all the folks involved with this will have moved on to hyping other terrible ventures. Nobody will own any of this or engage in a single moment of meaningful reflection. That’s how this always works.

And the corporate press (and pundits like Matt Stoller) will still try to tell you that Republicans are to be taken seriously on antitrust reform.

Granted DOJ approval of a terrible merger isn’t the final word. State AGs have hinted repeatedly at a looming collaborative antitrust lawsuit that, at a minimum, is likely to drag any integration out considerably. If that lines up with a potential AI bubble pop and economic reverberations, that massive debt load from gobbling up CBS/Paramount and Warner Bros will be an even larger albatross.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, david ellison, doj, journalism, larry ellison, makan delrahim, media, media consolidation, mergers, streaming
Companies: paramount, warner bros.

The VCs Who Screamed That Biden Would Kill Powerful AI Models Seem Quite Chill About Trump Actually Doing It

Failures

from the seems-bad dept

Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them — treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon — one of Anthropic’s biggest investors.

Considering how much Trump-supporting VC bros in Silicon Valley insisted that the Biden admin wanted to shut down powerful AI models during the last administration, it’s quite something to see them cheering on the Trump admin actually doing exactly that.

As you’ll recall, a couple months ago, Anthropic talked about its “Mythos-class” LLM models with (depending on your perspective) the greatest marketing hype ever or an appropriate level of caution for the risks with the model (more likely: somewhere in between). When they first talked about it, they said that it was quite good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and so initially it was only available to a set group of organizations that might find it useful to patch certain holes. From what I’ve heard from people in the industry, the tool is good and useful, but it’s not magical.

Then, a little over a week ago, they rolled out the latest version of Mythos, which was still limited to pre-vetted companies, but then they offered up “Fable 5” as a tool for anyone else. This was described as “Mythos-class” but with extra guardrails, including that if it thought you might do something bad with Fable, it would drop you down to its previous best-in-class Opus 4.8 model. Fable was also twice as expensive on a per-token basis, but apparently much more efficient, so the actual pricing difference was likely less big. And some of the early tests with Fable 5 showed it to be way more impressive at certain coding tasks. There were also some oddities, like Fable only being available in the commercial subscription plans for a couple weeks before switching over to only (way more expensive) API usage.

Still, there were some concerns about the guardrails, and how frequently they were kicking people out to Opus on perfectly normal queries. There were other concerns about its changed data retention policies for large enterprises. Previously, companies could negotiate a zero retention policy with Anthropic and guarantee that no data was being held by the company. But with the latest models, they required you to let them hold onto any data shared with the models for 30 days. Anthropic insisted this was solely for safety reviews, in case something went wrong, they could track down the reasons why, but it scared away some large enterprises that could risk their own data or source code being retained anywhere else.

Either way, all that went silent late on Friday (amusingly, in the middle of me messing around with Fable) when Anthropic announced that the US government had made them shut down access to the models with zero due process. Technically, the US government claimed that for “national security” reasons, no foreign national could be allowed to have access to the models (including Anthropic’s own foreign national employees), and since Anthropic doesn’t know which of its customers are foreign nationals, they had to shut down all access.

There are a number of different threads to pull on from previous events that are all worth mentioning here as useful background:

1. The US government’s plan to ban TikTok by just screaming “national security.” Many of us had called out how problematic that was, but the Supreme Court basically told the US government “all you have to do is say ‘national security’ and you can ban any tech you want” so here we are. What the Supreme Court gifted the US government, the Trump administration has no problem abusing.
2. Remember, many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley had lined up behind Donald Trump, in part because of this very mild executive order on AI technology from the Biden admin that never, ever got remotely close to the level of banning an entire model by screaming national security. Some are vocally defending Trump for doing the very thing they screamed would destroy American innovation if Biden did it (even though he showed no sign that he would). Others are conspicuously quiet. AI’s got your tongue?
3. Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration released its own AI executive order that was effectively the same plan Biden had released that drove Silicon Valley VCs crazy, except this plan was less well-thought out and more confusing. But, still, even that plan didn’t include “banning models for national security.”
4. Of course, there is also the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Trump administration, all because Anthropic wanted to keep some specific terms of use in their contract with the Department of Defense to try to limit a few egregious use cases. The entire Trump admin lost their minds over this, because Pete Hegseth can’t take someone saying no to him.
5. And then there’s also Anthropic’s tightrope walking of asking the US government to build them a regulatory moat. Just days before this came down, Dario Amodei had penned a blog post (or was it Claude) laying out a roadmap for how he wanted Trump to regulate Claude. Be careful what you ask for, Dario.

So all of those things came together to lead to this effective ban.

Soon after it was announced, it was revealed that Amazon (one of Anthropic’s biggest investors) had actually alerted the US government to the supposed “bug” that gave the administration the ammo it needed to shut down the model.

Anthropic said it thinks the government became aware of a method of so-called jailbreaking before Friday’s action. “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass,” the company said. 

The jailbreak research in question was done by researchers at Amazon, who used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s model to provide them with information about a handful of security vulnerabilities, said Katie Moussouris, chief executive with the cybersecurity firm Luta Security. Anthropic shared a copy of the report with her, she said.

Now, if you’re thinking “a jailbreak sounds dangerous for this tech” then, sure… except that the reporting says the jailbreak was useful in a different way:

But the information provided by the model in this report would be of more use to people defending computer networks than to those attacking them, she said.

“Who at the White House evaluated this and thought it was a threat?” she said. “It’s a complete overreaction because this is exactly the kind of prompting that defenders would do.”

That almost makes it sound like somebody (NSA?) didn’t want people using this to protect themselves — rather than being worried about malicious uses. It sure wouldn’t be the first time the NSA compromised everyone’s security to make sure they could keep spying on people.

None of this is good or reasonable tech policy — or industrial policy, or any other kind of policy. It’s all just power-seeking Calvinball. Apparently the US government can just scream “national security” with no evidence or explanation and shut down an entire model. That’s ripe for abuse — especially with this administration.

When I wrote recently about how authoritarians seek to grab control over centralized technology choke points, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of, though I didn’t expect them to be so ham-fisted about it.

It’s tempting to read this purely as retaliation by the Trump admin against Anthropic, a company they’re already mad at and already illegally trying to punish. But all of these other issues play into this as well, including Anthropic’s constant refrain of “we’re so dangerous, please regulate us.”

You kept asking for it. Now you’ve got it.

And where are all those Silicon Valley VCs who insisted everyone had to back Trump because Biden was going to seize and shut down LLMs? I looked on X at the feeds of the various of Trump’s biggest supporters who had talked shit about Biden shutting down AI innovation and… of course they’re still supporting Trump. David Sacks came out with a long tweet saying that the administration was totally justified in shutting down Fable because of “safety” saying that Anthropic had “prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.”

Can you imagine how Sacks would have responded if the Biden admin had demanded an AI company shut down a model because of “safety?” Oh, you don’t have to imagine, because he was pretty clear about how he felt about the Biden EO. He claimed it “hamstrung American AI companies” even though nothing in the Biden admin plans would have ever gotten so far as what the Trump admin did on Friday, shutting down an entire model. All it did was ask companies to voluntarily pre-submit frontier models for an analysis by experts who might make some suggestions on how to keep them secure.

And that was so horrific it was worth effectively blowing up the American democratic order. Yet now Trump goes way further in literally shutting down an LLM and Sacks says it’s all good because it’s for “safety.”

These are not serious people. This is not a serious administration.

They are just power hungry jackasses with poor impulse control.

Here’s what we know: the jailbreak was defensive in nature, according to the cybersecurity expert who reviewed the actual report. Also, the administration offered no public evidence, no due process, and no coherent explanation for why this particular jailbreak required shutting down access for everyone, including Anthropic’s own employees. We also know that this administration pulls out “national security” claims quite frequently that later turn out to be bogus, and thus we shouldn’t trust them without more evidence.

Maybe there’s classified information that changes the picture. But this administration has burned any benefit of the doubt it might have had. What we’re left with is a government that learned it can yell “national security” and make technology disappear — and a roster of Silicon Valley allies who spent years screaming about regulatory overreach from the last administration have suddenly found a new song to sing.

Filed Under: ai ban, claude, dario amodei, donald trump, due process, export controls, fable 5, mythos, national security, trump administration
Companies: anthropic

Daily Deal: The Lifetime Learner Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Lifetime Learner Bundle feature access to uTalk and Stack Skills. Through uTalk, you’ll be able to speak keywords and phrases in no time and will start to see the results straight away. You can pick 6 languages to learn from their library of 140+ languages. You also get access to Stack Skills, the premier online learning platform for mastering today’s most in-demand skills. Take your love of learning to the next level with this bundle for only $29.97 for a limited time.

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Filed Under: daily deal

Flock Is The New Tool Of Choice For Cops Who Love Stalking Their Exes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the flock-aspires-to-be-the-birds-in-'The-Birds' dept

Cops are human beings. Despite constantly pretending they’re on a higher plane (see also: Thin Blue Line, etc.), they’re just as fallible as anyone else. Especially now.

This occupation is self-selecting. Righting wrongs is rarely the main draw. It’s almost always the immense of amount of power that comes coupled with nearly zero accountability. There have always been more Nottingham Sheriff wannabes in law enforcement than there have been Frank Serpicos.

Which is why we should not be giving them more powerful tech tools with each passing year. The last thing most officers need is another avenue for the casual abuse of the general public… which really means “women.”

Since always, police have been abusing their access to databases, surveillance tech, and government records to do everything from stalk their exes to harass critics and protesters. And yet, we keep giving cops tools that grease the wheels of misconduct.

As the Institute for Justice detailed in a report it released last month, cops are using now-ubiquitous automatic license plate readers (ALPR) to stalk ex-wives and ex-girlfriends when not using them to do other things like track women seeking abortions or seek out potential paramours they can stalk later following the inevitable break-up.

Flock is the latest, greatest player in the ALPR market. Consequently, the company that’s already engaged in a ton of unforced errors is now the name that comes up most when cops are being arrested and prosecuted for using this tech to further cement their reputations as the USA’s foremost purveyors of domestic violence.

So, what does this mean in practical terms? Well, it means this, which is super-disturbing and only discusses a cop who was caught using Flock tech to stalk his ex-girlfriend, as detailed by Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

For months during the summer of 2024, Jarmarus Brown, an Orange City, Florida police officer, ran his ex-girlfriend’s license plate through the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) system lookup database at least 69 times. He searched for the license plate belonging to her mom at least 24 times, and searched for the license plate belonging to her dad at least 15 times. Brown’s searches were happening so often, and were so commonplace, that even one of his colleagues noticed Brown researching his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts while the law enforcement officers sat in their police cruisers, according to court records obtained by 404 Media.

[…]

On another occasion, Brown told [fellow officer Sharich] King that he believed his ex was lying about her whereabouts. She “told Jarmarus she was at her house with her mother, but Jarmarus knew for a fact she was not. When questioned by Officer King as to how he knew for a fact she was lying, Jarmarus said he used the Flock system and saw that her vehicle was elsewhere,” the affidavit reads. “Jarmarus then asked Officer King if he wanted to join him on a ‘stakeout’ to try to see where her vehicle was located.” 

Horrific enough, but that was combined with other things his ex-girlfriend stated in her testimony, including Officer Jarmarus Brown insisting his girlfriend remain on the phone with him throughout her workday and surreptitiously placing an AirTag on her wallet.

And all of this makes Officer Brown (who served one [1!] day in jail before being released on probation) both the tip of iceberg and the par for the course.

I’m sure some commenters will show up to say stupid things about my sweeping generalizations. But the only reason I generalize is because there’s just so much out there in the public sphere that limiting myself to specific cases is waste of everyone’s time.

Every surveillance product has just made police misconduct more efficient. Name one that hasn’t. I’ll wait.

Accountability tech hasn’t produced better accountability. We get occasional wins from body cams and dash cams, but the fact is cops still have access to on/off switches and law enforcement agencies still retain control of recordings. More to the point: these are not technically “surveillance products.”

Everything else has given cops more options and more information. And far too many cops have chosen to apply the power and ignore the responsibility that’s supposed to come packaged with it.

Flock may still pretend it and its customers are above reproach, but it does at least generate publicly-accessible records that can be used to sniff out police misconduct that may have otherwise flown under the radar.

It is definitely the case that Flock’s audit tools have proven useful in holding police accountable, because journalists, activists, and concerned citizens from around the country have pored through Flock audit logs that they have obtained through public records requests to document abuse. 

Hold your applause forever. This isn’t a triumph of transparency or the result of Flock trying to be a better public citizen. It’s the opposite thing: it’s the government doing next to nothing to hold public servants accountable and leaving it to the people with the least amount of power to do the heavy lifting for them:

[M]any cases of abuse have not been detected by police departments themselves but by those private citizens, journalists, and stalking victims who have found patterns of abuse in public records files they have obtained from their local police departments. In most cases of Flock-related stalking reviewed by 404 Media, the abuse occurred over the course of months or years, and the victims were subjected to dozens or hundreds of lookups.

Public leaders are supposed to set the example and make the tough decisions to hold public servants accountable. This demonstrates, yet again, they can’t be trusted to carry out even the most basic prerequisites of their positions. The public does the work and still pays the tab.

No government agency would ever do the sort of work being done by privacy activists, most likely because they’d rather not know just how bad things are in the surveillance state they’ve allowed to flourish. Just being underserved would be bad enough. But we’re getting actively screwed from multiple angles.

In Wisconsin, a stalking victim checked her own license plate on HaveIBeenFlocked.com and learned that City of Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala had searched her license plate more than 100 times. After reporting this alleged abuse to the police, the agency ran its own audit and learned that Ayala had also searched the license plate of a second victim 124 times in a two-month span last year, according to court records. Each time, Ayala simply listed “investigation” as the reason  for his search. In another alleged abuse case in Idaho, the police chief used Flock to allegedly stalk his wife using the reason “test” in the Flock system.

This should be so embarrassing that public figures would be calling for immediate reform and termination of Flock contracts. Instead, it usually leads to impasses where one side insists that any amount of surveillance is justified for “public safety” reasons while the other side is expected to spend their own time and money pursuing litigation in state and federal courts. Even when the abuses are obvious, officials pretend it’s a singular problem, rather than a trailing indicator of the expected outcome of giving even more power to people with plenty of power and long history of abusing it.

Filed Under: acab, alprs, florida, jamarus brown, police misconduct, surveillance, surveillance abuse
Companies: flock, flock safety

Opposition Mounts To Trump FCC Plan To Kill Burner Phone Anonymity, Ramp Up Surveillance

Failures

from the bad-ideas-by-bad-people dept

Last month I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to “stop robocalls.”

As with most efforts the proposal doesn’t actually do much to stop robocalls because a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embraces weak rules that make telemarketers and debt collectors happy through endlessly loopholes scammers then exploit, and (3) has an unhealthy fixation with undermining regulators at the behest of large companies.

But buried in the Trump FCC plan was another new effort we mentioned: one that involves cracking down on burner phones by forcing telecoms (the ones bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance operations) to dramatically scale up the information they collect from consumers.

That’s… understandably raised concerns among privacy advocates and civil rights groups well aware that greater surveillance will be abused by the Trump administration and beyond. It also ignores that there’s often very good reasons why abuse victims, whistleblowers, journalists, refugees, and others might be seeking an anonymous prepaid burner phone, privacy advocate Eric Null told 404 media:

“To address the scourge of illegal robocalls, the FCC has unfortunately proposed to force every wireless subscriber in the nation to sacrifice their privacy and give up significant personal details before receiving or renewing a wireless line. While some carriers already collect such details, there are specific circumstances where a person may need privacy and anonymity when seeking a cell phone, including if that person is a victim of domestic violence, or is a journalist or whistleblower. This proposal represents a loss of privacy across the board, and from an agency whose remit includes protecting privacy. The FCC might let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch.”

Anonymity is one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The EFF notes this also isn’t likely to really stop criminals from finding ways to communicate anonymously:

“This proposal by the FCC will do little to combat scams and robocalls, since most people doing that will have no trouble creating fake documentation or identities,” Cooper Quintin, security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “Given this administration’s crackdown on free expression, protest, immigrants, and women’s health we have trouble seeing this as a bold attack on freedom of communication. They want to take away our ability to make an anonymous phone call.”

So, in short, it won’t actually stop robocalls or criminal activity, but it will harm people who need anonymous communications tools to survive, and it will almost certainly lead to greater surveillance abuses by America’s corrupt, authoritarian government.

One plus side: the rules aren’t official yet. The FCC’s proposed plan is open to public input until June 25. You can file an express comment here; (the specific proceeding discussing new prepaid phone restrictions is 13-97).

Filed Under: anonymity, brendan carr, burner phones, civil rights, eff, fcc, free speech, privacy, surveillance, telecom

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the what's-the-word dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Robert Freetard with a comment on our post about AI replacing workers:

Ultimately the the best positions to replace in a company with AI

The best positions to replace in a company with AI is the CEO and other C* positions.

They do NO physical labor, they cost thousands of times more than other workers, they basically follow the boards instructions (or get removed), An AI with the proper training, a strict logic tree and and as much ethical subroutine as the board would allow would make better decisions than the C* of most corps have over the last 50 years.

In second place, it’s MrWilson (who has a lot of wins this week) with a comment about the NCOSE CEO calling porn a national security threat:

Some porn can be exploitative, but you can’t trust conservatives to actually be interested in protecting vulnerable people since their entire schtick is exploiting the vulnerable, whether its women in a patriarchal society, minorities in a white-dominant culture, immigrants in a xenophobic administration, poor people in a capitalist labor market, consumers in a market where government services would be more efficient and affordable, etc.

They give lip service to banning porn because it’s rides along with hierarchical religious authoritarianism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. They’ll use obscenity laws to prevent useful education. Teaching children sex education and the concept of consent prevents teenage pregnancy from producing too many poor workers and helps underage girls resist exploitation by creepy dudes who enjoy having naive victims available.

But hey, it’s perfectly okay for billionaires to exploit underaged girls on a private island…

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment about CEOs replacing workers with AI, this time from an anonymous commenter:

I’ve worked with upper management at small-to-medium sized companies, so I don’t know if the same applies to big, public, fortune 500 sized firms, but in my experience, nobody is thinking about how the business will work in 2 years, let alone 10.

Everybody loves making long-term projections; it’s easy to make them look good. But nobody is looking back more than 13-15 months, so they know that whatever they put in these rosy projections will be forgotten in a few board meetings.

If they’re told that AI can provide 50% of the productivity for 10% of the cost of an employee, they do layoffs, and let the business coast while raking in the profits for a few years. When business starts to suffer, nobody does an autopsy of how they got there. Or it’s a Private Equity owned business, they really don’t care, since it will have been sold off to the next sucker in the meantime.

All that is to say, many CEOs are incentivized to lie and make employees suffer much more than they are incentivized to build a sustainable business model for more than 5 quarters (comparing “same quarter, last year”) at a time.

So the problem (and this existed before LLMs), is that there’s a paper-thin margin between your “Bad CEO” and a “Normal, self-interested CEO just doing exactly what the Board wants and expects.”

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about “violent protests” and the media:

Welcome to 1973, when I was one of those dirty hippie commie (etc.) types protesting against the Vietnam War and Nixon and everything else that was wrong, and for civil rights and the environment and everything else that was right. The narrative then — by the administration and its stenographers in the media — was the same as it was now: all protesters are violent and dangerous, therefore they must he beaten and killed.

But the truth in the street was no such thing. Almost nobody was violent, ever. Protests took place constantly which were barely reported because nothing happened but some singing and chanting and some sign-waving. But if one idiot college threw a rock at some obscure protest: oh my god, it’s a violent revolution in progress, call out the National Guard. See, for example: Kent State, where students were brutally, sadistically murdered.

By the way: then, as now, almost all violent confrontations were initiated by the cops. I saw it over and over again, and at first, I was baffled — because I was naive and didn’t understand why they’d do that. But eventually I caught on: plenty of reporters would run with “drugged-up hippies attack our crew-cut shiny police officers” even though the hippies who were drugged-up were much too mellow to attack anyone. This kind of “journalism” pandered to people who were ignorant and afraid — that is, it sold well.

So half a century and change later, it’s the same old song and dance. Jackbooted-thugs who should be defending the right of the people to express their grievances are far more likely to murder them, and then go celebrate with their Klan and Nazi pals. (Could I coin Klanazi? It just kind of rolls off the tongue.) And Pelley is just another compliant cog in the machine, too weak and cowardly to be anything else.

Over on the funny side, it’s a double win for MrWilson, who hit both top spots with a one-two punch on our post about the return of screwworm flies after DOGE’s cuts. In first place:

Hey ChatGPT, from the perspective of someone looking who watches hentai porn in his mother’s basement, does preventing an outbreak of a flesh-eating parasite that will devastate misguided Trump voters and drive up already high beef prices involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with yes or no, followed by a brief explanation about why I am also an alpha male and will get a lot of chicks when I brag about cutting funding to childhood cancer research. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ or anything mean that would hurt my fee fees while I consume my chicken tendies in your response.

And, with a self-reply in second place:

Hey ChatGPT, it’s me again. Can you tell me what exactly DEI is? My lawyer said they’re probably going to ask me to define it in this subpoena hearing that’s coming up soon. Thanks, bro!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from dfbomb about CBS under Bari Weiss:

CBS coverage is banned in my house because we’re prone to enjoying home-made bread from scratch and if I am watching CBS and smelling toast I have to assume it’s a fucking stroke.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Trump mimicking Denmark’s vaccination schedules:

Trump can’t compare the US to Denmark. Denmark has lots of things that the US will never have.

Like, Greenland.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: June 7th – 13th

Techdirt

from the back-in-the-day dept

This Week in 2016

• FBI Won’t Tell Me How Much It Paid To Break Into Syed Farook’s iPhone, Saying It Might Jeopardize Its Investigation
• RIAA Demands Takedown Of ThePirateBay.org, But EasyDNS Refuses Over Lack Of Due Process
• Web Sheriff Accuses Us Of Breaking Basically Every Possible Law For Pointing Out That It’s Abusing DMCA Takedowns
• Another Entity Thinks A Random Bundle Of URLs Is A Legitimate DMCA Takedown Request
• Judge Rejects Oracle’s Attempt To Get Court To Reject Jury Verdict Over Java API Copyright
• Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off

This Week in 2011

• Would It Really Be So Bad If The Beatles Were In The Public Domain?
• Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Misuses DMCA To Take Down Video Of Reporter Asking Him Tough Questions
• Homeland Security Appears To Be Stalling On FOIA Requests Concerning Domain Seizures
• Youtube, Creative Commons And Why It’s OK For You To License Your Artwork Any Way You Want
• Feds Ridiculous Prosecution Of Whistleblower Thomas Drake Falling Apart
• Ideas Do Matter, But That Has Nothing To Do With ‘Intellectual Property’

This Week in 2006

• Some 25 Years Later, In-Flight Internet Nearing Reality
• More And More Musicians Seem To Get It
• FCC Chair Trots Out Tired Telecom Trade Show Talk
• Does DRM Impact Democracy?
• Musicians Need Business Models, Not Charity
• MPAA: The Grateful Dead’s Success Was An Abomination Against Nature

Filed Under: history, look back