ted cruz – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Ted Cruz’s Dumb Plan To Punish States That Regulate AI By Withholding Broadband Grants Falls Apart

from the failed-extortion-plan dept

While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn’t quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states that attempt any oversight of AI.

The proposal was one of several cut to try and get the hugely unpopular GOP bill across the finish line. As it turns out, Cruz had a tough time getting enough support for his ignorant plan, and ultimately joined 98 other Senators in a 99-1 vote shooting down the amendment (Sen. Thom Tillis was the one dissenting vote):

“Facing overwhelming opposition from both Democrats and Republicans, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accepted defeat and joined a 99-1 vote against his own plan to punish states that regulate artificial intelligence.”

States are poised to get more than $42.5 billion dollars in broadband deployment subsidies as part of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD), a key component of the bill, had taken years of collaborative work between state and federal governments. In part because we needed to remap broadband access across every county in the United States.

A lot of this money is poised (as usual) to get dumped in the laps of telecom giants, which is a major reason Cruz’s gambit failed (AT&T drove heavy opposition by longtime AT&T ally Marsha Blackburn, who initially worked with Cruz on a “compromise” offering, before that collapsed entirely). But much of this money is also poised to go to really useful fiber upgrade proposals via efforts like regional cooperatives or community-owned broadband networks.

If the bill had passed states would have been faced with choosing between funding rural broadband, or avoiding oversight of increasingly reckless AI giants keen on ignoring what’s left of U.S. labor and environmental standards. They would have definitely taken the broadband money.

Cruz and the GOP have also been busy “helping” American broadband connectivity in other ways, like his recent successful effort to kill an FCC program that helped give poor rural schoolkids access to free Wi-Fi. As well as killing a program that made broadband more affordable for low-income Americans. And the illegal dismantling of the Digital Equity Act and its protections against broadband discrimination.

So while it’s nice Ted Cruz’s latest dumb effort failed, it’s hard to be celebratory. Republicans have been taking an absolute hatchet to every last federal effort to ensure our monopoly-dominated broadband networks are affordable. They’ve also effectively killed all federal consumer protection; policies that will reverberate in negative ways for decades to come.

The budget battle followed the fairly typical Republican playbook: make your initial offer so extremist and awful that any concessions are disguised to feel like a victory. But the final GOP budget bill remains a giant and unpopular piece of shit, and one of the most corrupt and disgusting attacks on vulnerable Americans in the history of modern politics.

Filed Under: ai, bead, broadband, high speed internet, infrastructure, moratorium, regulation, ted cruz, telecom, texas
Companies: at&t

GOP Moves Forward With Plan To Pull Billions In Broadband Grants From States That Attempt ANY AI Oversight

from the the-dumbest-and-cruelest-people-imaginable dept

Wed, Jun 25th 2025 05:35am - Karl Bode

Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation’s richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations.

One key part of the bill is a proposal to ban all AI oversight over the next decade. This is part of the so-far successful GOP effort to destroy all federal consumer protection, corporate oversight, environmental protections, and public safety oversight. Unfortunately the U.S. press hasn’t done a very good job illustrating what this means for everything from public health to national security.

The rich assholes and corporations pushing for this have a problem. If you kill federal consumer protection, states may rush in and fill the void. You saw this happen in areas like net neutrality and privacy. Courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility for things like consumer protection, it can’t then turn around and tell states what they can do.

So to prevent states from doing basic corporate oversight the GOP has had to get creative.

For example, to try and stop individual states from regulating AI in the wake of federal apathy, the GOP is including provisions in their giant bill that will try to ban states from receiving their share of $45 billion in broadband grants if they engage in any oversight of AI giants in the next decade. Any oversight. Even bare-bones environmental standards (see: Elon Musk’s xAI pollution problem in Memphis, or similar concerns about Meta’s AI data center environmental impact on parts of Louisiana).

The idea was proposed in early June by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and since then both the House and Senate have taken steps to codify it into the proposed bill.

“States that refuse to impose a moratorium will not get those dollars. Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute, an independent research institute, said the change could leave states in an uncomfortable dilemma, choosing between broadband dollars and the power to protect their constituents from AI harm.

“I can imagine that for lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, whose districts rely on BEAD funding for broadband access to their rural communities, it’s really a strange bargain,” Kak said.”

Some of what was originally in the gargantuan, ugly-ass bill has been jettisoned after the Senate Parliamentarian found they violated Senate norms and the law. But the state and federal ban on all AI oversight remains somewhat intact.

Granted anything done through reconciliation can be undone through reconciliation, so a “ten year ban” isn’t written in stone. And there’s some indication that the idea’s architect, Ted Cruz, is struggling to gain full Republican support for the ploy as he tries to thread the needle. With any luck that may result in the proposal being watered down and/or killed.

Still, it’s stupid and harmful and opens the door to a lot of potential problems.

As we noted previously, these broadband funds had already been awarded. States had already spent years carefully crafting their fiber investment plans on the basis of awarded funds. Now, if they attempt oversight of an AI industry that’s shown itself so far to be amoral and reckless, they risk harming their own communities by leaving them stuck without broadband access.

Unlike many past U.S. broadband subsidy programs, a lot of thought was actually put into this infrastructure bill program (BEAD, or the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program). It’s a major reason its taken so long. They tried to accurately map broadband access. Many states tried to ensure that a lot of money went to popular community-owned alternatives, and not just giant telecoms. It took years of collaboration between states, feds, and local communities to jointly develop these plans.

But there are also several layers of irony for long-time Techdirt readers. The GOP’s plan is harming their longstanding allies in “big telecom” (who risk losing billions in subsidies) to the benefit of their supposed ideological enemies in “big tech.” They’re also likely delaying the implementation of a broadband grant program they spent most of election season whining about taking too long.

Republicans are also busy trying to redirect billions of BEAD program dollars to their increasingly incoherent billionaire benefactor Elon Musk. It’s all just utterly, transparently buffoonish and corrupt, yet our press (and even many policy people) seem intent on normalizing it.

There are still a lot of moving parts. Again, several terrible aspects of the bill violate the law and Senate procedural norms and may be jettisoned. Others, like the plans to sell 250 million acres of public land, are getting no shortage of bipartisan blow-back. There are still chances for the bill to get better or much worse; but even any sort of “best” case scenario will be a historically corrupt (and historically deadly) piece of gargantuan shit that utterly fails to serve the public interest.

Filed Under: ai, automation, bead, broadband, corruption, fiber, oversight, regulation, ted cruz

Republicans Plan To Steal Billions In Already-Awarded Broadband Grant Money From States That Attempt ‘AI’ Oversight

from the corruption-dressed-up-as-big-boy-policy dept

Tue, Jun 10th 2025 09:31am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted how Republicans are busy screwing up the infrastructure bill’s $42.5 billion BEAD broadband grant program. After performatively whining that the program wasn’t moving quickly enough for their liking during the election season, the GOP announced it would be significantly slowing fund dispersal just to make life harder on poor people and to throw billions in new subsidies at Elon Musk.

To be very clear: this taxpayer funding had already been awarded to states years ago. Several states were just on the cusp of deploying next-generation, affordable fiber when Republicans decided to “fix” the program to the benefit of their billionaire benefactor.

Now Republicans are looking to cause even greater delays and legal battles by threatening to withhold billions in broadband grants from any states that try to engage in oversight of the “AI” industry.

The House had already approved a budget bill that attempted to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Now Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced budget reconciliation text in the Senate that would prevent states from getting their already-allotted broadband grant funds if they attempt to impose any oversight or regulation of automation.

From his proposal summary:

“Forbids states collecting BEAD money from strangling AI deployment with EU-style regulation.”

While most people don’t want onerous or badly written regulation that hurts automation innovation or locks in monopolies, a blanket ban is little more than ignorant corruption, especially given the sort of bad choices that corporations have been making with such technology (see: the use of faulty AI to deny Medicare to the elderly, the media industry’s use of AI as a bludgeon against labor, the dangerously rushed use of AI chatbots in mental health, or the ample new privacy questions being raised).

Despite a lot of whining, the federal U.S. approach to “regulating AI” so far has effectively consisted of zero oversight whatsoever. You’ll notice this still somehow isn’t enough for many tech giants or Marc Andreessen types; they want a blanket ban that effectively pre-empts the possibility of any sort of oversight, privacy, or consumer safety provisions that might protect the public from the whims of gentlemen like himself who have proven to have abysmal judgement and little to no functional ethics.

Between awful Supreme Court rulings, problematic executive orders, and regulatory capture, the Trump administration has effectively destroyed federal corporate oversight and consumer protection (something that still oddly isn’t getting enough attention in press or policy circles). That leaves states as the last refuge of any sort of compensatory oversight, which is why corporations — via the GOP — are now taking aim at state power.

Meanwhile this BEAD program was already facing up to two years of additional, unnecessary delays due to the GOP’s Elon Musk cronyism. Trying to bully and extort states into going easy on tech companies by stealing already allotted BEAD funding is inevitably going to cause endless new legal fights and even greater delay. It’s ignorant corruption dressed up as adult policy making.

The choice also exposes the ideological hollowness of a party that claimed to be looking to “rein in big tech” (read: bully them away from content moderating racist, right wing propaganda on the internet), and is now handing them a gift ensuring these companies are more unaccountable than ever.

Filed Under: ai, automation, bead, broadband, consumer protection, cronyism, infrastructure, llms, oversight, regulation, ted cruz

Ted Cruz Proudly Makes Broadband Shittier And Homework Harder For U.S. School Kids

from the making-life-harder-on-children dept

Wed, May 14th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online. The E-Rate budget was not increased.

Enter the Taco-Bell-fart-in-a-suit known as Ted Cruz, who last January introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) to kill the effort. Why? The effort upset companies like AT&T, which would obviously prefer it if the poor, rural families’ in question had to pay them for an expensive and unreliable rural wireless line. The CRA can be used to reverse rulings done within a set amount of time (usually 6 months).

So this week, that program quietly took another step toward destruction thanks to Ted Cruz’s idiotic efforts and the Republican-controlled Senate:

“The Senate approved a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to nullify the hotspot rule, which was issued by the Federal Communications Commission in July 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The program would be eliminated if the House version passes and President Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval.”

This sort of thing (helping kids with shitty home broadband do their homework) used to not be partisan, and it’s another example of how radical the modern GOP has become. And how our broken media has normalized that radicalization in really harmful ways.

Again, the destruction of this program comes at the direct request of telecom giants which didn’t like government access eroding their wireless revenues. But the sort of ignorant justifications the GOP threw out to justify the vote were just utterly unhinged gibberish.

Cruz’s original press release announcing his plan teeters in and out of typical far right nonsense, including completely false claims that this free hotspot program somehow “_censored kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints_.” Again, just complete nonsense by absolute weirdos, and part of a much broader effort to make sure U.S. broadband remains shitty and expensive to the benefit of big telecom.

Filed Under: broadband, education, fcc, hotspots, ted cruz, telecom, wifi, wireless

Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act

from the what-a-joke dept

Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act.

The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong. Instead of building on existing successful systems, or within the parameters of the First Amendment, Congress decided to create a new framework combining vague “duty of care” requirements with harsh criminal penalties — a combination that, as we’ve previously detailed, practically begs to be weaponized for censorship.

Most tellingly, Donald Trump — in endorsing the bill during his address to Congress — openly bragged about how he plans to abuse its provisions to censor content he personally dislikes. When the person championing your anti-abuse legislation is promising to use it for abuse, you might have a problem.

The bill is so bad that even the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of NCII and passing bills similar to the Take It Down Act, has come out with a statement saying that, while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems.

While supportive of the bill’s criminal provision relating to authentic nonconsensual intimate images, which closely resembles CCRI’s model federal law and state laws that have survived constitutional challenge, CCRI has serious reservations about S. 146’s reporting and removal requirements. Encouraging speedy removal of nonconsensual intimate imagery from platforms is laudable, but the provision as written is unconstitutionally vague, making it difficult for individuals and platforms to understand what conduct is prohibited or required. The provision is also unconstitutionally overbroad, extending well beyond unlawful imagery. Finally, the provision lacks adequate safeguards against abuse, increasing the likelihood of bad faith reports and chilling protected expression. Such flaws would be alarming under any circumstances; in light of the current administration’s explicit commitment to selectively enforcing laws for political purposes, they are fatal. CCRI cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.

These warnings echo what digital rights groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology and EFF have been shouting for months — only to be completely ignored by Congress. The concerns are not theoretical: the bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.

Yet despite these clear red flags, Ted Cruz announced that the House will take up the Senate’s fatally flawed version of the bill. This comes after leadership dismissed substantive criticisms during markup, including explicit warnings from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the bill’s potential for abuse.

That’s Cruz saying:

I am thrilled that the TAKE IT DOWN Act will be getting a vote on the House Floor early next week.

Thank you to [Speaker Johnson, Steve Scalise, and Brett Gurthrie] for their leadership and action to protect victims of revenge and deepfake pornography and give them the power to reclaim their privacy and dignity.

When this bill is signed into law, those who knowingly spread this vile material will face criminal charges, and Big Tech companies must remove exploitative content without delay.

The weird thing about this bill is that we already have systems to handle non-consensual intimate imagery online. There’s NCMEC’s “Take It Down” system, which helps platforms identify and remove this content. There’s StopNCII.org, a non-profit effort that’s gotten virtually every major platform — from Meta to TikTok to Pornhub — to participate in coordinated removal efforts. These systems work because they’re precise, transparent, and focused on the actual problem.

But apparently working solutions aren’t exciting enough for Congress. Instead of building on these proven approaches, they’ve decided to create an entirely new system that somehow manages to be both weaker at addressing the real problem and more dangerous for everyone else.

The problem here is pretty simple: If you give people a way to demand content be taken down, they will abuse it. We already have a perfect case study in the DMCA. Even with built-in safeguards like counternotices and (theoretical) penalties for false claims, the DMCA sees thousands of bogus takedown notices used to censor legitimate speech.

The Take It Down Act looks at this evidence of widespread abuse and says “hold my beer.” Not only does it strip away the DMCA’s already-inadequate protections, it adds criminal penalties that make false claims even more attractive as a censorship weapon. After all, if people are willing to file bogus copyright claims just to temporarily inconvenience their opponents, imagine what they’ll do when they can threaten prison time.

And imagine what the current Trump administration would do with those threats of criminal charges over content removals.

CDT’s Beeca Branum put out a statement this morning about how stupid all of this is:

“The TAKE IT DOWN Act is a missed opportunity for Congress to meaningfully help victims of nonconsensual intimate imagery. The best of intentions can’t make up for the bill’s dangerous implications for constitutional speech and privacy online. Empowering a partisan FTC to enforce ambiguous legislation is a recipe for weaponized enforcement that risks durable progress in the fight against image-based sexual abuse.”

“The TAKE IT DOWN Act, while well-intentioned, was written without appropriate safeguards to prevent the mandated removal of content that is not nonconsensual intimate imagery, making it vulnerable to constitutional challenge and abusive takedown requests. Moreover, its ambiguous text can be read to create an impossible requirement for end-to-end encrypted platforms to remove content to which they have no access.”

The most baffling aspect of this debacle is watching self-proclaimed progressive voices like Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout champion a bill that hands unprecedented censorship power to an administration they claim to oppose. This morning, both of them appeared at a weird press conference in support of the bill. While their recent embrace of various unconstitutional and censorial internet regulations is disappointing, their willingness to hand Donald Trump a censorship weapon he’s openly bragging about abusing is genuinely shocking.

The Take It Down Act will likely become law, and then we’ll get to watch as the Trump administration — which has already announced its plans to abuse it — gets handed a shiny new censorship weapon with “totally not for political persecution” written on the side in extremely small print. The courts might save us, but they’re already drowning in unconstitutional nonsense from this administration. Perhaps not the best time to add “government-enabled censorship framework” to their to-do list.

Update: Welp, late today this passed the House overwhelmingly, 409-2. The only two nay vote were from Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, ncii, notice and takedown, take it down, take it down act, ted cruz

Trump Promises To Abuse Take It Down Act For Censorship, Just As We Warned

from the take-what-down,-mr.-president? dept

During his address to Congress this week, Donald Trump endorsed the Take It Down Act while openly declaring his plans to abuse it: “And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

(You might think a former president openly declaring his intent to abuse a content moderation law would be big news. The media, apparently swamped with other Trump outbursts, didn’t even seem to notice.)

This is, of course, exactly what we (and many others) warned about in December when discussing the Take It Down Act. The bill aims to address a legitimate problem — non-consensual intimate imagery — but does so with a censorship mechanism so obviously prone to abuse that the president couldn’t even wait until it passed to announce his plans to misuse it.

And Congress laughed. Literally.

Let’s talk about non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) for a minute. (People used to call it “revenge porn,” but that’s a terrible name — it’s not porn, it’s abuse.) The tech industry, after a fairly slow start, has actually been reasonably good more recently at trying to address this problem. You’ve got NCMEC’s Take It Down system helping kids get abusive images removed. You’ve got StopNCII.org doing clever things with hashes that let platforms identify and remove bad content without anyone having to look at it. These aren’t perfect solutions, but they show what happens when smart people try to solve hard problems thoughtfully.

But Congress (specifically Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar) looked at all this work and said “nah, let’s just make websites legally liable if they don’t take down anything someone claims is NCII within 48 hours.” It’s the “nerd harder or we fine you” approach to tech regulations.

You can’t just write a law that says “take down the bad stuff.” I mean, you can, but it will be a disaster. You have to think about how people might abuse it. The DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system for copyright at least tried to include some safeguards — there’s a counternotice process, there are (theoretical) penalties for false notices. But TAKE IT DOWN? Nothing. Zero. Nada.

We already see thousands of bogus DMCA notices attempting to remove content with no basis in the law, even with those safeguards in place. What do you think will happen with a law that has no safeguards at all? (Spoiler alert: The president just told us exactly what will happen.)

Even given the seriousness of the topic, and the president’s support, you might think that Congress would care about the fact that the bill almost certainly violates the First Amendment, and thus would stand a high likelihood of being tossed out as unconstitutional. CDT tried to warn them, explaining that forcing websites to take down content without any court review creates some thorny constitutional problems. (Who knew that requiring private companies to censor speech based on unverified complaints might raise First Amendment concerns? Well, everyone who’s ever taken a constitutional law class, but apparently not Congress.)

Congress could have fixed those problems. But chose not to.

As currently drafted, however, the TAKE IT DOWN Act raises complex questions implicating the First Amendment that must be addressed before final passage. As a general matter, a government mandate for a platform to take down constitutionally protected speech after receiving notice would be subject to close First Amendment scrutiny. The question is whether a narrowly drawn mandate focused on NDII with appropriate protections could pass muster. Although some NDII falls within a category of speech outside of First Amendment protection such as obscenity or defamation, at least some NDII that would be subject to the Act’s takedown provisions, even though unquestionably harmful, is likely protected by the First Amendment. For example, unlike the proposed Act’s criminal provisions, the takedown provision would apply to NDII even when it was a matter of public concern. Moreover, the takedown obligation would apply to all reported content upon receipt of notice, before any court has adjudicated whether the reported image constitutes NDII or violates federal law, let alone whether and how the First Amendment may apply. Legally requiring such take-down without a court order implicates the First Amendment.

Even if you think the concerns about fake takedown notices are overblown, shouldn’t you want to make sure that the law would pass First Amendment scrutiny when it goes to court? It seems important.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that Congress paid attention. The Senate recently passed the Act via unanimous consent, and it’s now headed to the House with strong support. Earlier this week, Melania Trump endorsed the bill, and Donald Trump briefly mentioned it during his address to Congress, and as mentioned above, he explicitly revealed his plans to abuse it:

And Elliston Berry, who became a victim of an illicit deepfake image produced by a peer. With Ellison’s help, the Senate just passed the Take It Down Act and this is so important. Thank you very much, John. John Thune. Thank you. Stand up, John. [Applause] Thank you, John. Thank you all very much. Thank you and thank you to John Thune and the Senate.

Great job. To criminalize the publication of such images online is terrible, terrible thing. And once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. Thank you. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.

There it is — a sitting president openly declaring his intent to abuse a content moderation law to remove speech he doesn’t like. This isn’t speculation or paranoia about potential misuse — it’s an explicit promise, made in front of both houses of Congress, as well as multiple Supreme Court Justices, of his intent to weaponize the law against protected speech.

So here we are. Civil liberties groups have been jumping up and down and waving their arms about how this bill needs basic safeguards against abuse. The media, apparently suffering from Trump-crazy-statement-fatigue, has mostly yawned. Congress, eager to show they’re “doing something” about online abuse, doesn’t seem interested in the details.

And why would they be? The bill is framed as protecting people from having compromising imagery posted online. Who could be against that? It’s like being against puppies or ice cream.

But here’s the thing: When someone tells you they plan to abuse a law, maybe… listen? When that someone is the President of the United States, and he’s saying it in front of Congress and multiple Supreme Court Justices, maybe pay extra attention?

The good folks at EFF have set up an action alert asking people to contact their representatives about the bill. But realistically, the bill has a strong likelihood of becoming law at this point.

Look, I can already hear the counterargument: “NCII is so harmful that we need strong measures, even if there’s some collateral damage to free speech.” And yes, NCII is genuinely harmful. But here’s the problem — a law designed with giant, exploitable holes doesn’t actually solve the problem. If it becomes primarily a tool for the powerful to suppress criticism (as Trump just promised), victims of actual NCII will be left with a discredited law that courts may eventually strike down entirely. The real goal should be a targeted, constitutional solution — not a censorship free-for-all that the president openly plans to weaponize against his critics. That serves no one except those who want to silence opposition.

We’ve spent the last two decades watching the DMCA’s takedown system be abused to silence legitimate speech, even with its (admittedly weak) safeguards. Now we’re about to create a similar system with no safeguards at all, precisely when the president has announced — to laughter and applause — his plans to weaponize it against critics.

Congress is building a censorship machine and handing the controls to someone who just promised to abuse it. That’s not fighting abuse — that’s enabling it.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, amy klobuchar, censorship, donald trump, free speech, ncii, take it down, ted cruz

Trump’s Anti-‘Woke’ Task Force Is Combining Sloppy Search Terms With Nearly Nonexistent Vetting

from the if-you-can't-do-it-well,-do-it-hard dept

Trump’s second term has elevated a bunch of people who have no idea what they’re doing to positions of power where every blunder is just considered to be the acceptable outcome for an administration that likes breaking things even more than it likes moving fast.

The Department of Government Efficiency still isn’t an official government agency. And it’s headed by a billionaire who’s being encouraged to destroy the things he hates while funneling as many federal tax dollars into his own pocket as is (sub)humanly possible during this re-run of Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride.

The administration’s determination to destroy “DEI” and anything else it considers “woke” means nothing matters — not even massive collateral damage — so long as it’s able to put a few heads on stakes to satiate the bloodlust of its voting bloc.

Capitalizing on the worst aspects of everything — the “looking busy” aspects of bureaucracy with the desire to appease the sitting despot — Trump’s acolytes are doing more harm than cognizable good, and that’s even if you choose to define “good” as “targeted takedowns of things Trump doesn’t like.”

And so we get things like this: Ted Cruz — who has managed to leverage the insults Trump lobbed at his wife into a “useful idiots” position in the second Trump administration — declaring he’s uncovered tons of “woke” wastefulness in the $2 billion in science-related grants handed out by the Biden Administration. While it’s almost certain Cruz and his wife no longer sleep in the same bed (or, possibly, even the same time zone), it’s just as certain Cruz couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than direct some staffer or intern to run a blanket search on terms Cruz imagines might lead him to discover wasteful “woke” science.

How do we know this? Because the journalists at ProPublica performed their own sloppy, AI-enabled search on the database of “woke” grants released by Sen. Cruz.

When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, as they say. But pitting one lazy effort against another is extremely revealing. As ProPublica points out, this AI v. AI deathwatch resulted in the discovery of many projects which were determined to be “woke” simply because they referenced or acknowledged social inequalities or latent bias. While those would logically be some of the stuff the Trump administration would consider to be “woke” — you know, the acknowledgement of this nation’s often-racist history — the other stuff ProPublica found caught in Cruz’s anti-woke dragnet is pure science that likely only got flagged by Cruz’s sloppy search just because the research used terms idiots like Cruz apparently think only refer to DEI/”woke” agitating.

The mint plant mentioned in ProPublica’s headline is pulled from a $470,000 grant Cruz claims is “woke” because it uses the word “diversify” in its scientific sense (the biodiversity of the plant itself). It may have also been flagged because the research project expressed its support of any female scientist who joined the team.

Equally ridiculous are these projects, which were all declared woke AF by Cruz and the search results his staff never bothered to vet before posting the database on main.

There’s nothing “woke” or “DEI” about these efforts. And yet, they ended up in Cruz’s public database — one that’s headlined by Cruz’s assertion of facts not in evidence: “$2 Billion in Woke DEI Grants.” In Cruz’s hurry to supplicate The Boss (lest the boss start insulting him and his loved ones again), he couldn’t be bothered to ensure his publicly-accessible database wasn’t filled with false positives produced by the careless separation of search terms from their context.

Making things worse, this supposed deep dive was performed by staffers with zero scientific expertise, nor the attention span to review everything caught in the anti-woke dragnet.

Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Not that any of that matters to Trump or most members of the Republican party. As they have so often stated, “Our feelings don’t care about your facts.” Doing something right doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that something is being done. The bulls are running the china shop. NSF funding has already been shut down by the administration. A court order has blocked the denial of funding, but that’s only good news if we wish to pretend Trump and his buddies will comply with court orders they disagree with. And, so far, we’ve seen absolutely nothing that indicates they will.

Filed Under: censorship, dei, donald trump, fascism, ted cruz, war on woke

Ted Cruz Blocks FCC Plan To Bring Mobile Wi-Fi To School Kids For A Very Very Stupid Reason

from the taco-bell-fart-in-a-suit dept

Thu, Jan 30th 2025 05:26am - Karl Bode

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online. The E-Rate budget was not increased.

Enter the Taco-Bell-fart-in-a-suit known as Ted Cruz, who has introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) that would eliminate the FCC’s rule. Why? The effort likely upset companies like AT&T, which would obviously prefer it if the poor families’ in question had to pay them for an expensive wireless line. The CRA can be used to reverse rulings done within a set amount of time (usually 6 months).

Cruz’s press release announcing his change teeters in and out of typical far right weird stuff, including false claims that the kids using these services are “unmonitored” (in most states these options come with parental controls and monitoring). But this was the fun bit:

“The order also heightens the risk of censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints—a trend recently already seen in many districts.”

This idea that you must be exposed to MAGA race-baiting lies and bullshit to consider yourself well rounded has increasingly become a cornerstone of MAGA authoritarian ideology. The movement increasingly relies on propaganda to befuddle the public, because their actual policies (giving rich people tax breaks, letting corporations mercilessly fuck people over) aren’t all that popular.

The “proof” that Cruz points to is the recent kerfuffles surrounding NewsGuard, the company that tries to rate news organizations according to partisan and reliability bias. Trumplings are mad because NewGuard sometimes points out that right wing propaganda isn’t reliable or factual (though it has a long history of sometimes giving high marks to that very same right wing propaganda).

NewsGuard apparently partnered with The American Federation of Teachers to allow members to get the NewsGuard browser extension for free, but which has nothing to do with WiFi in schools, or any monitoring or blocking. Still, this agreement to offer free access to the browser extension seems to be causing Cruz to apparently suffer some sort of cognitive embolism.*

*Updated this paragraph to clarify NewsGuard’s partnership with AFT which is even less directly involved with school WiFi (i.e., not at all) than we originally reported. We regret the error of thinking that even Cruz’s ridiculous justification had a least some basis in truth.

This is all very very stupid for many reasons. One being that NewsGuard doesn’t even do that good of a job criticizing right wing bullshit and propaganda pretending to be real news. The other being that MAGA knobs keep trying to claim that any effort to call them on their bullshit is somehow “censorship.” It’s all part of an exhausting victimization complex that’s getting very, very old.

Again, some local telecom lobbyist very likely got Republicans to try and kill the measure thinking it hurts local wireless revenues. Cruz and other Republican sponsors of this effort quickly got to work dressing it up with some weird “we’re being censored” bullshit to distract everybody from their corruption. Now kids can’t do their homework. Typical MAGA stuff. Hooray for “populism.”

Filed Under: broadband, e-rate, fcc, schools, ted cruz, wifi, wireless

Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms

from the not-the-way-to-fix-this dept

You may have heard that the US government has a bit of a mess on its hands after House Speaker Mike Johnson worked out a somewhat carefully crafted compromise continuing resolution funding plan to keep the government open, only to have it collapse after Elon Musk screamed about how bad it was and how anyone who voted for it should be voted out of office.

Lots of very, very stupid people came up with lots of very, very stupid reasons for why the continuing resolution should have been rejected, and I imagine most of them don’t realize what it is they’re actually asking for, or how much harm it does when the government is shut down. Elon Musk isn’t going to suffer if the government is shut down, but lots of others will.

That said, I actually appreciate the underlying message that this is a stupid way to run the government, where Congress has to keep playing chicken with the debt ceiling for a budget that has already been approved, so that blowhards and know-nothings can fight over random shit just to keep the basics of the government functioning properly.

Amidst the recent political wrangling over the continuing resolution to keep the government funded, a controversial bill called the TAKE IT DOWN Act was quietly inserted into the continuing resolution at the last minute (earlier in the week I had been told it wouldn’t be included). Sponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar, the bill aims to make it easier for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (including such imagery generated by online AI tools) to get that content removed from online platforms. While well-intentioned, the bill as currently written raises significant concerns about potential abuse and infringement on free speech.

To be clear, the bill is trying to do something good: enabling people to get non-consensual intimate imagery taken down more easily, with a specific focus on recognizable computer-generated imagery, rather than just actual photographs. But there are significant problems with the methodology here. Even if we agree that the sharing of such imagery is a real problem and should be, at the very least, socially unacceptable, any time you are creating a system to enable content to be taken down under legal threat, you also have to recognize that such a system will inevitably be abused.

And the authors and supporters of TAKE IT DOWN seem to have completely ignored that possibility. It creates a system where someone who claims to be a victim of such sharing can send a notice that effectively requires a website to remove the targeted information.

Upon receiving a valid removal request from an identifiable individual (or an authorized person acting on behalf of such individual) using the process described in paragraph (1)(A)(ii), a covered platform shall, as soon as possible, but not later than 48 hours after receiving such request—

(A) remove the intimate visual depiction; and

(B) make reasonable efforts to identify and remove any known identical copies of such depiction.

The law applies to any online or mobile service that “provides a forum for user-generated content, including messages, videos, images, games, and audio files.” This means the law would impact not just big social media companies, but also small forums, hobby sites, and any other online community where users can share content.

Those forums would then be required to remove any content if they receive a “valid removal request” within 48 hours while also making “reasonable efforts to identify and remove any known identical copies of such depiction.” What exactly constitutes “reasonable efforts” is left vague, but it’s not hard to imagine this meaning platforms would have to implement costly and error-prone automated content matching systems. For small sites run by volunteers, that’s simply not feasible.

But nothing in the law contemplates false notices. And that’s a huge problem. The only current law in the US that has a similar notice and takedown scheme is the DMCA, and, as we’ve been describing for years, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision is widely and repeatedly abused by people who want to takedown perfectly legitimate content.

There have been organized attempts to flood systems with tens of thousands of bogus DMCA notices. A huge 2016 study found that the system is so frequently abused to remove non-infringing works as to question the validity of the entire notice-and-takedown procedure. And that’s the DMCA which in theory has a clause that is supposed to punish fraudulent takedown notices (even if that’s rarely effective).

Here, the law doesn’t even contemplate such a system. Instead, it just assumes all notices will be valid.

On top of that, by requiring covered platforms to “identify and remove any known identical copies” suggests that basically every website will have to purchase potentially expensive proactive scanning software that can match images, whether through hashes or otherwise. Yes, Meta and Google can do that kind of thing (and already do!). But the person who runs a local book club forum or a citywide gardening forum isn’t going to be able to do that kind of thing.

The folks at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) recently wrote up an analysis of the law that calls out these problems:

The TAKE IT DOWN Act requires covered platforms, as soon as possible but not later than 48 hours after receiving a valid request, to remove reported NDII and to make reasonable efforts to identify and remove any known identical copies of such depictions. Doing so at scale, and in that timeframe, would require the widespread use of automated content detection techniques such as hash matching. Hashes are “digital fingerprints” that can be used by platforms to detect known images across their services once the image has been distributed and assists in removal of the identified content if it violates the platform’s use policy or the law. Many platforms already use hash matching for known NDII, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and terrorist and violent extremist content, though none of these processes is currently required by U.S. law. While TAKE IT DOWN does not expressly mandate the use of hash matching, since services already commonly use the technology to identify known-violating content, it would likely be understood to be a “reasonable effort to identify and remove” known NDII under the bill.

As currently drafted, however, the TAKE IT DOWN Act raises complex questions implicating the First Amendment that must be addressed before final passage. As a general matter, a government mandate for a platform to take down constitutionally protected speech after receiving notice would be subject to close First Amendment scrutiny. The question is whether a narrowly drawn mandate focused on NDII with appropriate protections could pass muster. Although some NDII falls within a category of speech outside of First Amendment protection such as obscenity or defamation, at least some NDII that would be subject to the Act’s takedown provisions, even though unquestionably harmful, is likely protected by the First Amendment. For example, unlike the proposed Act’s criminal provisions, the takedown provision would apply to NDII even when it was a matter of public concern. Moreover, the takedown obligation would apply to all reported content upon receipt of notice, before any court has adjudicated whether the reported image constitutes NDII or violates federal law, let alone whether and how the First Amendment may apply. Legally requiring such take-down without a court order implicates the First Amendment.

As CDT notes, at least adding some “guardrails” against abuse of the takedown process could help deal with the First Amendment problems of the bill:

To increase the chance of surviving constitutional scrutiny, the takedown provisions in the TAKE IT DOWN Act should be more narrowly tailored and include more guardrails. The Act currently does not include many of the DMCA’s guardrails intended to prevent abusive or malicious takedown requests. Even with those guardrails, complainants routinely abuse the DMCA takedown process, leading to the censorship of constitutionally-protected information and criticism. Under current processes, for example, complainants have successfully used the DMCA to take down negative video game reviews, silence parody, and shut down civil society YouTube accounts. The TAKE IT DOWN Act risks repeating this abuse by not expressly exempting commercial pornographic content from the takedown mechanism, only excluding matters of public concern from its criminal prohibitions (but not the takedown mechanism), and not including other protections, such as requiring complainants to attest under penalty of perjury that they are authorized to file a notice on a person’s behalf and other appropriate safeguards. While an NDII takedown mechanism should minimize burden on victims, such steps will mitigate the risks of abuse and the removal of content that cannot or should not be restricted from publication under the takedown mechanism.

The rise of AI-powered “nudify” apps and similar tools has understandably increased the urgency to address the creation and spread of non-consensual intimate imagery. But as concerning as that problem is, rushed and overly broad legislation like the TAKE IT DOWN Act risks causing its own harms. By failing to include robust safeguards against abuse, this bill would create a sprawling extrajudicial takedown system ripe for exploitation and suppression of legitimate speech.

Cramming such a consequential and constitutionally dubious measure into a must-pass spending bill is a disturbing way to legislate. If Congress truly wants to tackle this issue, it needs to slow down, consider the risks, and craft a narrower solution that doesn’t sacrifice crucial free speech protections in the name of expediency. Rushing to regulate away the problem, no matter how well-intentioned, will likely only create new problems, while simultaneously setting the extremely problematic general expectation that for any content Congress disapproves of, it can create laws that require removals.

That’s a dangerous road to start down, no matter how noble the initial cause may be.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, amy klobuchar, continuing resolution, dmca, free speech, non-consensual intimate imagery, notice and takedown, nudify, take it down act, ted cruz

Republicans: Helping Poor People And Minorities Afford Broadband Is Illegal Now, Sorry

from the this-is-why-we-have-nice-things dept

Tue, Nov 26th 2024 05:33am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted more than once that the 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies to the states. A lot of that money will be thrown in the lap of incumbents with long histories of empty promises, but a lot of it will be leveraged for genuine, major improvements in broadband options by ISPs, municipalities, cooperatives, and utilities.

Republicans, of course, voted against these improvements. At the same time, Republicans have lied repeatedly to their constituents and tried to take credit for them. They’ve also been whining for much of the last year about some pretty flimsy requirements requiring that ISPs have to try to make sure there’s a slower, more affordable option for poor people (the gall!).

They’ve had several show hearings about this massive indignity. Republicans are also simultaneously mad that nonprofits are poised to receive $1.25 billion in “Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program” grants to “support efforts to achieve digital equity, promote digital inclusion activities, and spur greater adoption of broadband among Covered Populations.” The horror.

There’s always been racial discrimination involved in determining both where fiber broadband gets deployed (“redlining”), and how much broadband costs. Data indicates big ISPs routinely skip over minority and low-income populations for upgrades (even when taking billions in taxpayer subsidies). Data also has shown Big ISPs charge minorities more money for slower service in many areas.

U.S. broadband generally sucks, and is patchier, slower, and more expensive than in most developed nations. And however bad it is, it’s routinely worse for low income and minority communities. That’s documentable and not, as Republicans like to insist, up for debate.

The government only just last year even acknowledged this was happening. Note they didn’t really do a whole lot about it beyond that; but even the action of acknowledging racism was involved in fiber upgrades was enough to send Republicans into a hissy fit.

The Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program’s NOFO (Notice of Funding Opportunity) states that grant winners must use the funding to serve members of “covered populations,” defined to include “individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority group.” Basically, it’s a bare bones effort to ensure that some money is spent shoring up the decades of discrimination in broadband deployment.

Republicans and Ted Cruz don’t like that (for what should be obvious reasons), so Cruz last week fired off a letter to the NTIA (which manages the program in conjunction with the states) insisting that trying to help poor minority communities afford broadband is “unconstitutional.” In large part because the corrupt, Trumplican-stocked Supreme Court has looked poorly on similar programs:

“NTIA has not yet finalized a grant for any Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program funding to any applicants. Therefore, NTIA still has time to reverse course before it breaks the law. As the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, we urge you to strike this unlawful Guidance now.”

Cruz, likely the incoming chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, is also calling for a pause of the Broadband Equity Access And Deployment (BEAD) infrastructure program more generally. In part because Republicans want to redirect subsidies away from community owned broadband initiatives (that focus on affordable fiber), and toward AT&T, Comcast, and Elon Musk’s expensive satellite services.

Of course guys like Cruz, who happily rubber stamp every unconstitutional whim King Donald has, couldn’t actually care any less about what is or isn’t constitutional. They’re simply upset that the federal government identified systemic racism and made the slightest effort to do something about it. All the legal arguments are just decorative, and routinely aren’t based in reason or precedent.

Republicans just genuinely despise helping the plebs. You might recall House Republicans tried to ban towns and cities from offering their residents affordable community broadband during peak COVID. They killed a COVID-era program that provided a $30 broadband discount for poor people. And they broadly support telecom monopolies’ quest to rip off captive customers in uncompetitive markets.

This is usually framed as a concern about taxpayer costs or “government overreach”; a concern that’s absent when it comes time to hand out fat subsidies to their cronies like AT&T, Comcast, or Elon Musk, or threaten journalists’ broadcast licenses for protected speech. The pseudo-legalese to justify the corruption and racism is the flimsiest, laziest scaffolding imaginable to disguise the active disdain the party has for poor minority communities. And given the corrupt nature of the courts, it often succeeds.

Keep in mind: it’s not like these Democratic equity programs are hugely transformative. They’re often the flimsiest effort imaginable to address longstanding systemic inequity. The FCC’s belated acknowledgement of racial discrimination in broadband earlier this year, for example, couldn’t even state offending ISPs by name or provide any real solutions for past inequities.

But even these day-late-dollar-short efforts are deemed radical and illegal by corrupt Republicans like Cruz. And when our broken press can be bothered to cover these efforts (see: Fox News), they take Republican opposition in exclusively good faith, utterly refusing to illustrate the inconsistent reasoning or underlying discrimination. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: bead, bigotry, broadband, digital divide, discrimination, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, racism, redlining, ted cruz