[ SECRET POST #6955 ]
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fandomsecrets⌈ Secret Post #6955 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 23 secrets from Secret Submission Post #993.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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techdirt_feedThe Trump administration’s penchant for announcing or celebrating its various dumbass policies via pop culture video game memes marches on, it seems. We talked about this sort of thing previously when the administration built an ICE recruitment video to mimic the intro to the Pokémon cartoon show (gotta catch ’em all… get it?), as well as ICE recruiting memes utilizing imagery from the Halo series of games (aliens… get it?). Despite the blatant and obvious use of imagery and IP from both games, both Nintendo and Microsoft were remarkably silent about it all. What’s wrong, guys? Fascist got your tongue?
But because they couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger over what is a pretty clear infringement of their trademarks and/or copyright, the administration was emboldened and has done it again. This time it’s in service of announcing something more tame, the reintroduction of whole milk into schools. And the administration did so by mocking up an image from beloved farming sim Stardew Valley.
So, here we have an undoubtedly AI mock-up of an image from Stardew Valley, a game I personally adore, with Trump inserted to celebrate this minor thing that RFK Jr.’s crew championed out of Congress. Is whole milk in schools some horrible thing? Look, I only have so much anger to spare, folks, and I’m not killing the budget by spending it on this. But I do have to wonder if developer Concerned Ape will do what Nintendo and Microsoft did not and voice some flavor of objection to the use of its IP by an administration busy doing the fascism elsewhere. While IP enforcement isn’t generally my kink, I sure as shit wouldn’t want my IP associated with Trump. On that, we’ll have to wait and see just how concerned the ape can get, I suppose.
But there’s also a nice little shitpost easter egg buried in that image. Take a look at the money counter in the upper right corner of the image.
Trump was the 45th President, claims he won the 2020 election and should have been the 46th President, he is the 47th President, and he’s flirted with the idea that he shouldn’t be bound by silly bullshit like our Constitution and should be allowed another term and become the 48th President. 45464748… get it?
I do, and it’s frightening rhetoric that is designed to do one of two things. The more innocuous option is that Trump and his cadre of imps enjoys upsetting more than half of the American population by scaring them into thinking he’s going to upend our rule of law and stay in office. It’s cruel. It’s designed purely to cause emotional reactions and “lib tears.” It’s on brand.
Or it’s a somewhat subtle nod that he’s not fucking around about that at all and intends to stay in power (again) despite how our system is legally designed to work.
Trump is the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and has held onto the debunked claims that he won the presidency against Joe Biden in 2020. He has also publicly said he’s open to a third term, which would be in violation of the 22nd amendment, but Trump doesn’t seem to think the law applies to him. Steve Bannon, the ex-chief-strategist of the Trump administration, has also said that Trump will have a third term, while also reportedly planning to run himself. So these numbers seem to be a thinly veiled threat that Trump wants to be president again in 2028.
These people aren’t funny, but they are dangerous. Even if this wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, there is no choice but to do so.
Meanwhile, we’ll see if Concerned Ape acts against the use of its IP, as I think it probably should.
Can You Trust Mark Meador?
Jan. 20th, 2026 21:38techdirt_feedThe FTC remains politicized. One commissioner is leading the way—when it suits him.
The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan was not a well-run institution. I wrote about this at the time, often and at length, and I regret nothing. But wow—wow—would you be forgiven for thinking that the goal of new management is to make Khan’s tenure look good by comparison. There is plenty to say about this sorry state of affairs, but for now let’s focus on a single commissioner.
Why just one? Isn’t the FTC a multi-member body? Well, these days the agency is something of a husk. President Trump has purported to fire two commissioners—the Democrats, naturally. The FTC Act says he cannot do that, but the Supreme Court appears poised to bless the move on constitutional grounds (a serious mistake). A third commissioner, Melissa Holyoak, recently departed after a brief stint. And rumors swirl that the chair, Andrew Ferguson, will soon take on a second job overseeing a nationwide fraud unit at the Justice Department.
That leaves Mark Meador. He may soon be the lone commissioner who has not been defenestrated, jumped ship, or been pulled into a dual role.
Last week I saw Meador speak at an antitrust conference in the Bay Area. As a matter of policy, his remarks were not to my taste. He aired a familiar set of complaints about modern tech products. Apple’s “liquid glass” is confusing; Google’s AI overviews—that stuff that now appears above the search results—are annoying; AI-generated cat videos, and short-form video more generally, are bad for the soul. It is certainly true that tech companies have many bad ideas. It does not follow that Mark Meador knows better. Yet he spoke with complete confidence in his own superior vision for the tech industry. He knows what the social media market should look like. He knows how to “win the AI race the right way.” The man is, apparently, a prophet.
Some of Meador’s gripes were not really about products at all, but about people. People shouldn’t like short-form video. The government, Meador seemed to suggest, must protect them from themselves. You might say that Meador wants to replace the consumer-welfare standard, under which the FTC protects markets that work to give people what they want, with a moral-welfare standard, under which the FTC pushes markets to give people what they are supposed to want—as determined by Mark Meador.
Maybe people should be more virtuous. But what business is that of the FTC? The FTC Act makes commissioners competition regulators, not philosopher-kings or morality police.
One European lawyer I spoke with at the conference seemed rather taken with Meador’s speech. He wants to crack down on Big Tech, after all; what’s not to like? I tried to explain how Meador plainly judges companies by a moral code, and why that code should give any upstanding European pause. Meador is committed to “the just ordering of society that best facilitates human flourishing.” He speaks unabashedly of the need for “beauty and virtue,” “moral values,” and “tradition and custom.” He peppers his writing (yes, his antitrust writing) with theological language, referring to human beings as “embodied souls seeking communion with their fellow man and their Creator.” The undertone—the dog whistle, if you will—is not Brussels-style social democracy. It is national conservatism, if not flat out Christian nationalism.
Which brings me to my real objection to Meador’s appearance. In Palo Alto, he was mild, reasonable, even conciliatory. The speech itself was a little misguided but pleasant enough. The problem was what it concealed: the other Mark Meador, and the other FTC.
In his speech, Meador called for apolitical enforcement. Antitrust, he said, should not serve an “unrelated political agenda.” It should not target disfavored industries. He and the agency should not “make decisions according to how political winds are blowing.”
How rich. Maximally politicized enforcement has characterized the Trump administration at large, and the Trump FTC in particular. Consider the Omnicom–IPG settlement. The FTC allowed two major advertising firms to merge, but only after restricting the new entity’s ability to withhold advertising dollars based on a publisher’s viewpoints. The settlement is a transparent assault on advertising firms’ First Amendment right to boycott publishers on grounds of social or ideological principle. It is also a nakedly political effort to redirect advertising dollars toward right-wing outlets.
Or consider the FTC’s hapless social-media “censorship” inquiry. This move, too, is an attack on First Amendment rights—this time, platforms’ right to moderate content as they see fit. And this move, too, is aimed at helping the right, specifically those right-wing speakers who insist—baselessly, by and large—that platforms have “silenced” them. Take also the FTC’s foray into debates over gender medicine. The FTC is not a medical regulator; it has no expertise in this area. But transgender issues are at the center of the culture war, so the agency could not resist weighing in, thumb firmly on the scale for the political right.
For Meador to sit in Palo Alto and sermonize about ignoring political winds was an insult to anyone paying attention to his agency or the administration it serves.
Equally striking was the contrast between Meador’s tone inside the conference room and the tone he and the FTC adopt elsewhere. In his remarks, Meador urged listeners not to “draw up battle lines.” Washington and Silicon Valley, he said, should root for each other’s success. During the Q&A, he endorsed a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. He expressed distaste for heated rhetoric from private parties—inflated claims about the stakes of litigation or boasts about whipping the FTC in court. Such talk amounts, he complained, to “melodramatic atmospherics.”
But Mark Meador and the Trump FTC do melodramatic atmospherics with the best of them. Last year, for instance, the FTC convened a conference titled “The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families.” The title was all too fitting: the whole event was slanted, overheated, and self-righteous. Meador led the charge. He likened “the battle over the ‘attention economy’” to “the fight against Big Tobacco.” He argued that social media companies sell an addictive and harmful product; that they must keep children hooked, “craving the next fix, the next puff, the next notification”; and that they peddle lies in their defense.
No doubt this jeremiad resonates with some. I think it’s nonsense. But the point here is not whether Meador is right or wrong. It’s that he is two-faced. In Silicon Valley, he presents himself as mildly uneasy about short-form video. Elsewhere, he portrays social media companies as irredeemable reprobates, scarcely distinguishable from cigarette manufacturers. The Meador we saw projected reasonableness. In reality, he is a fanatic.
What Meador concealed about himself pales, though, beside what he concealed about the FTC. Excuse me, commissioner, did you just say you oppose overheated rhetoric? Where were you after the FTC lost its antitrust case against Meta?
The defeat was not surprising. The case was weak from the outset, failing to grapple with competitors such as YouTube and TikTok. It was dismissed in a careful opinion written by an able judge. That judge, James Boasberg, also ruled against the Trump administration’s reprehensible efforts to hustle men, without due process, to a prison in El Salvador. In response to that ruling, some GOP lawmakers launched a campaign to impeach him. The case for impeachment is risible. But that did not stop the FTC from exploiting it. After the Meta loss, an FTC spokesperson, Joe Simonson, sneered: “The deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment.”
This statement is an embarrassment. Everyone at the FTC should be mortified by it. But there it is. Mark Meador has no standing to lecture others about decorum.
Nor should we expect this to be an isolated lapse. The second Trump FTC has been staffed with people who are terminally online. In a sense, they are the dog that caught the car: they have memed their way into an amount of power they are neither competent nor responsible enough to wield.
This became obvious when the FTC set out to punish Media Matters. The organization had published a study finding that ads appeared next to hate speech on the alt-right-friendly platform X. The agency then launched a sweeping investigation (another example, contra Meador, of the FTC’s overtly political posture). The courts blocked the probe, finding it to be retaliation for constitutionally protected speech. Evidence of a retaliatory motive included, almost comically, some FTC staffers’ big fat mouths. Before joining the agency, a cadre of young edgelords had been spending their time spouting off on social media. Joe Simonson (he of the appalling comment after the Meta loss) had mocked Media Matters for employing “a number of stupid and resentful Democrats.” Another staffer had called the group “scum of the earth.”
This is the backdrop to Meador’s calls, in Palo Alto, to lower the temperature. Spare us, commissioner.
The word at the conference was that the FTC is in disarray. Many experienced attorneys and economists accepted one of the Trump administration’s buyout offers. Others concluded, after a return-to-office mandate, that if working for the FTC was going to be a hassle—don’t forget those “five things you did this week” emails!—they might as well leave for higher pay. I heard this from a former government official who had himself recently decamped to private practice. When I asked this refugee about the FTC’s ambitions to police social media or wade into gender medicine, he said he would not be surprised if the agency ultimately accomplishes very little. Who knows. But the intuition is sound: you cannot decimate and demoralize an agency and then expect it to move regulatory mountains.
When Meador was appointed, Tyler Cowen summed things up nicely, concluding that he “is just flat out terrible,” including for his inability to maintain “a basic level of professionalism.” Is he lonely at the top? With the agency hollowed out, Meador may be a king without a throne. One can only hope that his capacity for mischief will be constrained by the wreckage below.
Corbin K. Barthold is Internet Policy Counsel at TechFreedom. Republished with permission from Policy & Palimpsests
Statutory Damages: The Fuel of Copyright-based Censorship
Jan. 20th, 2026 21:15eff_feedWe're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Imagine every post online came with a bounty of up to $150,000 paid to anyone who finds it violates opaque government rules—all out of the pocket of the platform. Smaller sites could be snuffed out, and big platforms would avoid crippling liability by aggressively blocking, taking down, and penalizing speech that even possibly violates these rules. In turn, users would self-censor, and opportunists would turn accusations into a profitable business.
This dystopia isn’t a fantasy, it’s close to how U.S. copyright’s broken statutory damages regime actually works.
Copyright includes "statutory damages,” which means letting a jury decide how big of a penalty the defendant will have to pay—anywhere from $200 to $150,000 per work—without the jury necessarily seeing any evidence of actual financial losses or illicit profits. In fact, the law gives judges and juries almost no guidelines on how to set damages. This is a huge problem for online speech.
One way or another, everyone builds on the speech of others when expressing themselves online: quoting posts, reposting memes, sharing images from the news. For some users, re-use is central to their online expression: parodists, journalists, researchers, and artists use others’ words, sounds, and images as part of making something new every day. Both these users and the online platforms they rely on risk unpredictable, potentially devastating penalties if a copyright holder objects to some re-use and a court disagrees with the user’s well-intentioned efforts.
On Copyright Week, we like to talk about ways to improve copyright law. One of the most important would be to fix U.S. copyright’s broken statutory damages regime. In other areas of civil law, the courts have limited jury-awarded punitive damages so that they can’t be far higher than the amount of harm caused. Extremely large jury awards for fraud, for example, have been found to offend the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. But somehow, that’s not the case in copyright—some courts have ruled that Congress can set damages that are potentially hundreds of times greater than actual harm.
Massive, unpredictable damages awards for copyright infringement, such as a $222,000 penalty for sharing 24 music tracks online, are the fuel that drives overzealous or downright abusive takedowns of creative material from online platforms. Capricious and error-prone copyright enforcement bots, like YouTube’s Content ID, were created in part to avoid the threat of massive statutory damages against the platform. Those same damages create an ever-present bias in favor of major rightsholders and against innocent users in the platforms’ enforcement decisions. And they stop platforms from addressing the serious problems of careless and downright abusive copyright takedowns.
By turning litigation into a game of financial Russian roulette, statutory damages also discourage artistic and technological experimentation at the boundaries of fair use. None but the largest corporations can risk ruinous damages if a well-intentioned fair use crosses the fuzzy line into infringement.
“But wait”, you might say, “don’t legal protections like fair use and the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protect users and platforms?” They do—but the threat of statutory damages makes that protection brittle. Fair use allows for many important re-uses of copyrighted works without permission. But fair use is heavily dependent on circumstances and can sometimes be difficult to predict when copyright is applied to new uses. Even well-intentioned and well-resourced users avoid experimenting at the boundaries of fair use when the cost of a court disagreeing is so high and unpredictable.
Many reforms are possible. Congress could limit statutory damages to a multiple of actual harm. That would bring U.S. copyright in line with other countries, and with other civil laws like patent and antitrust. Congress could also make statutory damages unavailable in cases where the defendant has a good-faith claim of fair use, which would encourage creative experimentation. Fixing fair use would make many of the other problems in copyright law more easily solvable, and create a fairer system for creators and users alike.
techdirt_feedYou really can’t make this stuff up.
On Friday, the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs posted to Twitter/X condemning Nicaragua’s government for—and I quote—”detaining Nicaraguans for liking posts online,” calling it evidence of “how paranoid the illegitimate Murillo and Ortega regime is.” The Bureau demanded “the unconditional release of all political prisoners” and declared that “freedom means ending the regime’s cycle of repression.”
Stirring stuff. Very pro-free-expression. One tiny problem: the very same day, a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the US government doing… essentially the same thing. Hat tip to the excellent Chris Geidner from Lawdork for calling out the contrast on Bluesky.
The lawsuit, brought by Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation along with two anonymous noncitizen students, challenges the government’s practice of revoking visas and initiating deportation proceedings against people lawfully present in the United States based on their speech—including, notably, their social media activity. As we’ve covered here at Techdirt, the State Department has made reviewing social media profiles a regular part of the visa process, and has been actively targeting people for their online expression.
The court’s ruling lays out in pretty damning detail just how aggressively the government has been going after people for their protected speech. From the order:
In March 2025, DHS and ICE began aggressively targeting lawfully present noncitizens for protected speech, particularly at universities. Plaintiffs point to the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi as emblematic of the Government’s enforcement strategy.
And what exactly did these individuals do that warranted arrest, detention, and deportation proceedings? Let’s see:
Ms. Öztürk is a PhD student at Tufts University who is lawfully present in the United States on an F-1 student visa. Ms. Öztürk co-authored an opinion article in the Tufts student newspaper that criticized the university’s refusal to adopt several resolutions approved by the undergraduate student senate urging the University to, among other things, recognize a genocide in Gaza and divest from Israeli companies… On March 25, 2025, six plain-clothes federal officers surrounded Ms. Öztürk on the street outside her home, detained her, and transported her to a Louisiana immigration jail.
She wrote an op-ed in a student newspaper. A DHS spokesperson claimed her editorial “glorified and supported terrorists.” It did not. It criticized the university’s policies, and did nothing to glorify or support “terrorists.”
The court also details what government officials have been saying publicly about this enforcement strategy.
DHS posted on Twitter that anyone who thinks they can “hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism—think again.” Stephen Miller bragged that “The State Department has revoked tens of thousands of visas, and they’re just getting started on tens of thousands more.” The US government isn’t hiding the fact that they’re combing US social media to figure out who to detain.
One of the plaintiffs—Jane Doe—is on the Canary Mission website, a private list of people which MAGA folks claim are anti-Israel and which the government has apparently been using as a shopping list for who to kidnap and deport. From the ruling:
Jane Doe was listed on the Canary Mission website, which is an anonymously and privately run website that publishes personal information of individuals and organizations that the Canary Mission personally deems “anti-Israel.” In their motion and during the hearing, the Government explained that DHS had asked ICE to generate “reports” for the State Department on individuals listed on the Canary Mission website to aid in decision-making about visa revocations. Notably, before the Government brought enforcement actions against them, Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi all had profiles published about them on the Canary Mission website.
The US government is actively monitoring people’s social media, revoking visas over protected speech, and using an anonymous website that doxxes pro-Palestinian activists as a source for enforcement targets.
And then the State Department has the audacity to criticize Nicaragua for “detaining Nicaraguans for liking posts online.”
Remember, the State Department’s tweet said that this kind of behavior shows “how paranoid and illegitimate” the regime is. We agree.
The hypocrisy is coming so fast it’s hard to keep up, but this one deserves special mention because the State Department is literally condemning other countries for the exact policy it’s implementing, and getting called out about it in court.
Nicaragua is paranoid and illegitimate for targeting social media activity, but when the US does it, we’re… protecting national security? Fighting antisemitism? The framing changes but the underlying action is the same: using the power of the state to punish people for their online expression.
The court, for its part, found that the plaintiffs’ fears of enforcement were entirely reasonable given the government’s very public campaign of targeting people for their speech:
Jane Doe and John Doe have sufficiently alleged that their behavior falls into the crosshairs of the Government’s stated enforcement priorities. The Government has also not disavowed plans to continue invoking the Revocation and Deportation Provisions.
In other words: the government isn’t even pretending it won’t keep doing this. And yet somehow it’s Nicaragua that needs to be lectured about freedom?
Maybe someone at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs should walk down the hall and have a chat with their colleagues about what “freedom means ending the regime’s cycle of repression” actually looks like in practice. Because right now, the State Department’s position appears to be: targeting people for their social media activity is evidence of a paranoid, illegitimate regime—unless we’re the ones doing it.
Snowflake challenge, day 10
Jan. 20th, 2026 20:57flo_neljaI'm bad at this, I'm sad to be bad at fanmixes because I love them, but three songs? I can probably find three songs about Illyana Rasputin.
* Emily Jane White, Hole in the Middle
Everybody's got a little hole in the middle
Everybody does a little dance with the devil
And you know I'm evil now, and you shout it loud and proud
* Radiohead, Climbing up the walls
And either way you turn, I'll be there
Open up your skull, I'll be there
Climbing up the walls
* May and Robot Koch, Bad Kingdom
Vacuous winter stare
Worn out version of yourself
Too tough to fall
But not strong enough to turn
And just a bonus where the song globally doesn't work except for one line
* Marina and the Diamonds, Buy the Stars
Oh, we don't own our heavens now
We only own our hell
And if you don't know that by now
Then you don't know me that well
💾 The Worst Data Breaches of 2025—And What You Can Do | EFFector 38.1
Jan. 20th, 2026 19:14eff_feedSo many data breaches happen throughout the year that it can be pretty easy to gloss over not just if, but how many different breaches compromised your data. We're diving into these data breaches and more with our latest EFFector newsletter.
Since 1990, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue tracks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) surveillance spending spree, explains how hackers are countering ICE's surveillance, and invites you to our free livestream covering online age verification mandates.
Prefer to listen in? In our audio companion, EFF Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski explains what you can do to protect yourself from data breaches and how companies can better protect their users. Find the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.
EFFECTOR 38.1 - 💾 THE WORST DATA BREACHES OF 2025—and what you can do
Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight to protect people from these data breaches and unlawful surveillance when you support EFF today!
eff_feedEarlier this month, Iran’s internet connectivity faced one of its most severe disruptions in recent years with a near-total shutdown from the global internet and major restrictions on mobile access.
EFF joined architects, operators, and stewards of the global internet infrastructure in calling upon authorities in Iran to immediately restore full and unfiltered internet access. We further call upon the international technical community to remain vigilant in monitoring connectivity and to support efforts that ensure the internet remains open, interoperable, and accessible to all.
This is not the first time the people in Iran have been forced to experience this, with the government suppressing internet access in the country for many years. In the past three years in particular, people of Iran have suffered repeated internet and social media blackouts following an activist movement that blossomed after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman murdered in police custody for refusing to wear a hijab. The movement gained global attention and in response, the Iranian government rushed to control both the public narrative and organizing efforts by banning social media and sometimes cutting off internet access altogether.
EFF has long maintained that governments and occupying powers must not disrupt internet or telecommunication access. Cutting off telecommunications and internet access is a violation of basic human rights and a direct attack on people's ability to access information and communicate with one another.
Our joint statement continues:
“We assert the following principles:
- Connectivity is a Fundamental Enabler of Human Rights: In the 21st century, the right to assemble, the right to speak, and the right to access information are inextricably linked to internet access.
- Protecting the Global Internet Commons: National-scale shutdowns fragment the global network, undermining the stability and trust required for the internet to function as a global commons.
- Transparency: The technical community condemns the use of BGP manipulation and infrastructure filtering to obscure events on the ground.”
Read the letter in full here.
Because ICE Is Losing In Minnesota, Hegseth Is Prepping For Actual Martial Law
Jan. 20th, 2026 18:48techdirt_feedLOL this government thought actual murder would shut Minneapolis down. You absolute idiots. Whatever kills us makes us stronger. And I say that as only a part-time Minnesotan. I’ve split time between there and South Dakota over the past couple of decades. And Minneapolis never fails to impress.
The administration went all in on Minneapolis after a MAGA grifter claimed a bunch of fraud was being perpetrated by Somali-Americans. Trump, of course, believed this because he hates Minnesota, Somalis, Ilhan Omar, and anything else that looks like it might be a grassroots reaction to his Ministry of Hate.
Cue this latest move by the government, which is still in the “pending” pile. But don’t expect this leash to be held in check for long.
The Pentagon has ordered 1,500 US troops based in Alaska to prepare to deploy to Minnesota as a precautionary measure in case the administration decides to send them, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The unit of the 11th Airborne Division is a cold-weather unit nicknamed “The Arctic Angels.”
Hey, good luck with that. Local businesses are far less willing to feed and house federal officers, given the risk it poses to their own businesses once the locals discover where ICE is shacking up and/or getting its coffee. While DHS officials love to claim any refusal to house federal officers is unamerican af, the reality is that local business owners don’t want the negative publicity and negative public action housing ICE officers might provoke.
You’d think a shrewd businessperson such as Donald Trump would understand. After all, he’s made a career out of strategic bankruptcies and investing in gold leaf futures. He should sympathize with small business owners who don’t want to be whistled/ice-cubed/TripAdvisored into non-existence. But he doesn’t because he only cares about Trump and thinks everyone should be asking “Where’s Trump?” whenever he fails to post to his own social media service 5-10 times a day.
“Arctic Angels” my Midwestern white ass. These won’t be angels. They’ll be on the wrong side of history for as long as history persists, which tends to be forever. (Just ask the Roman Empire figures you idolize, you stupid white nationalist fucks.)
It’s not just the Army that might be coming for Minneapolis, the home of Minnesota Nice and interpretations of cold weather that defy scientific measurement. You may have trained in Alaska, but have you ever been whistled into submission by people who know how to walk on ice without falling flat on their ass?
I submit to you that you are not ready to deal with Minnesota. No one is. The administration is still flustered by Portland, Oregon, where inflatable animal costumes have beaten ICE into semi-submission.
Bringing in the FBI isn’t going to change anything, especially when it’s still headed by an insurrection enabler that has been elevated to a level of infamy even his worst enemies would only hesitantly wish on him:
At the same time, the FBI is sending messages to its agents nationwide seeking volunteers to temporarily transfer to Minneapolis. It wasn’t immediately clear what the FBI would ask agents who volunteered to travel to Minneapolis to do.
The FBI already has a pretty big building in Minneapolis. Yep, that’s all theirs and I know because last December, I spent three days in the hotel facing it while visiting my family.
Bringing in more FBI agents may fill those officers a bit more, but it won’t make Minneapolis any less of the FOAD monster it has morphed into in response to a vengeful federal invasion.
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has pledged to send out National Guard troops to protect Minnesotans and their rights. The federal government, on the other hand, has only promised to send out more guys with guns to protect the government.
“We have to send more officers and agents just to protect our officers to carry out their mission,” ICE Director Todd Lyons said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “The majority of those are there to protect the men and women who are already there. Now we need 10-15 officers per arrest to protect each other” against protesters.
If you cowards can’t arrest someone when faced with the combined forces of whistles and GTFO shouts without assembling half a platoon, you’re definitely in the wrong business. If you think sending more officers and actual military troops will keep Minneapolis residents from making it hard for you to be as racist as you want to be… well, just look at the response you provoked after murdering someone just because she made it clear she wasn’t intimidated by you.
Trump wants a war. But he’s not smart enough to choose his battles. Unless he’s got the willpower to push past the few guardrails keeping him in check, he’s going to be America’s next Custer — a man so secure in his white-makes-right philosophy that he won’t recognize that he’s in over his head until it’s far too late.
And the analogy fits: they’re both prime examples of the “meritocracy” a bunch of lesser failures claim makes this country great. On one hand, we have a thrice-divorced “deal maker” who’s more famous for his bankruptcies than his business successes. On the other hand, we have Custer, who’s absolutely the mold they cast MAGA from:
Custer graduated in 1861 from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, last in his class.
Not only last in his class, but last in his class of only 34. Most West Point classes exceeded 100 cadets, but with the Civil War an ongoing concern, many of Custer’s betters had already volunteered to serve, rather than (lol) compete with Custer for the worst grades.
Bring it on, losers. The Midwest will fuck you up in ways you New York elites (yes, that’s you, Trump) can’t even imagine.
Daily Deal: Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle
Jan. 20th, 2026 18:44techdirt_feedLinux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today’s businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. This hands-on Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle will help you prepare for the CompTIA Linux+ and the Novell Certified Linux Professional certification exams. It’s on sale for $50.
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Personalised bingo card offer
Jan. 20th, 2026 18:16thisbluespiritAnyway, thought of something fannish and fun I could do if anyone wanted it - I made a personalised bingo card for
theseatheseatheopensea once, which was fun, and I do always love doing that kind of thing. So...... if anyone else would find a custom-made bingo card (for writing/creating prompts) fun/useful/inspiring, comment here and I will have a go at making you one!
(I'll use the Bingo Generator, so it's very easy, and if I fail and include some rubbish prompts, a new card without such prompts can magically be re-generated with no trouble. Will do any size from 2x2 to 5x5.)
So just comment here if you'd like one & say what size card you'd prefer. You can also point me to/away from any fandoms/prompt types etc if you'd like, but no need. (If I'm really stuck for some reason, I'll just ask you for some pointers!)
techdirt_feedLook, I know we’ve all gotten somewhat numb to the constant stream of unhinged pronouncements from the White House. At some point, the brain develops defense mechanisms. But every now and then, something comes along that is so transparently, obviously, undeniably insane that it demands we stop and actually process what is happening.
This weekend was one of those moments.
President Trump sent a text message to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre that was subsequently leaked to PBS and reported on by the New York Times. And I genuinely need you to read this, because summarizing it doesn’t do justice to how absolutely deranged it is:
Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
Let me be absolutely clear about what you just read: The President of the United States is explicitly stating that because he didn’t receive an award he wanted, he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace” and is therefore justified in threatening to forcibly take territory from a NATO ally.
This is the stated reasoning. From the President. In writing. To a foreign head of state.
And this only came after Trump first announced illegal and unnecessary tariffs on products from Europe for not just handing him Greenland (which is actually a tax on Americans, since that’s who pays the tariffs). Støre’s initial text message to Trump was an attempt to get him to calm down and to stop doing ridiculously antagonistic shit like taxing Americans because foreign countries won’t just hand Trump an entire territory he’s unhealthily obsessed with.
I want to focus on a few layers of insanity here, because they compound on each other in ways that should be making every American deeply uncomfortable.
First: Trump is yelling at the wrong country about the wrong thing.
The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded by the Norwegian government. It is awarded by an independent five-member committee chosen by Norway’s parliament. Prime Minister Støre had to patiently explain this (again) in response:
As regards the Nobel Peace Prize, I have on several occasions clearly explained to Trump what is well known, namely that it is an independent Nobel Committee, and not the Norwegian government, that awards the prize
This is not obscure information. This is how the Nobel Prize has worked since 1901. The fact that the President either doesn’t know this or doesn’t care is already disqualifying. But we’re just getting started.
Also, Greenland is a territory of Denmark. Denmark, notably, is not Norway. Norway is not Denmark. Greenland is not controlled by Norway, just like Norway’s government doesn’t determine who gets the Nobel Peace Prize and… why are we even talking about this?
Second: He’s openly admitting his Greenland obsession has nothing to do with national security.
For months, the official line has been that acquiring Greenland is somehow essential for American national security. But here’s Trump, in his own words, saying the quiet part extremely loud: the real reason is that his feelings got hurt over a prize. The “national security” framing was always pretextual nonsense, and now we have the President himself confirming it. Beyond the fact that the threat to take Greenland has, itself, done a tremendous amount of damage to US national security, Trump’s linking it to the prize undermines every other claim.
If Greenland were actually critical to American security interests, the Nobel Committee’s decisions would be completely irrelevant. The fact that Trump is explicitly linking the two reveals the entire enterprise as what it always was: the wounded ego of a man who desperately wants validation and will threaten sovereign nations to get it.
Third: “There are no written documents” is weapons-grade historical illiteracy.
Denmark’s connection to Greenland stretches back over 300 years. There are, in fact, extensive written documents, including treaties that the United States itself has signed recognizing Danish sovereignty over Greenland. A 2004 defense pact between the U.S. and Denmark—which already grants the US tremendous rights to make use of Greenland for the US military—explicitly recognizes Greenland as “an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark.” In 1916, when Denmark sold what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands to the United States, the treaty included an explicit clause where the U.S. agreed not to object to Danish interests in Greenland.
But sure, “there are no written documents” and “boats landing” is apparently the level of historical analysis we’re working with now. (We won’t even get into the question of what it means for the United States that “boats landing here hundreds of years ago” gives you no rights to the land).
Fourth: He’s threatening to invade a country because he didn’t get a Peace Prize.
Like, what the fuck are we even doing here?
Also, no, he didn’t stop “8 wars PLUS.” Stop letting him get away with lying about this. He’s taking credit for a ton of other things that weren’t wars, that aren’t over, or that he had nothing to do with.
Fifth: This is 25th Amendment territory, and everyone knows it.
The 25th Amendment exists precisely for situations where a President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” When the President openly states that his bellicose foreign policy is being driven by a grudge over not receiving a peace prize—and that this grudge means he no longer feels obligated to pursue peace—we are describing someone whose judgment is fundamentally compromised.
Some people are actually (finally!) saying this out loud. Senator Ed Markey tweeted simply: “Invoke the 25th Amendment.” Rep. Eric Swalwell tweeted just “25” with a copy of the letter. The Daily Beast ran a piece with the headline “Trump’s Insane New Threat Leaves No Doubt: It’s Time for the 25th Amendment.“
As the Daily Beast put it:
It is clearly not rational to start a war because your feelings got hurt by not winning a prize that you were not even eligible for. It is certainly not rational to sabotage the country’s national security—emboldening Russia and China—over those hurt feelings.
But here’s what’s actually happening: basically everyone in a position to do something about this is pretending everything is fine.
The normalization machine is working overtime.
The same people who would be absolutely losing their minds if any Democratic president sent a message like this to a foreign leader are now either silent or actively running interference. A decade ago, as a political rival, Ted Cruz once warned that we’d wake up one day to find a President Trump had nuked Denmark. And yet now he’s actively supporting Trump’s lunacy.
Or take Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. In December of 2024 after Trump was re-elected, but before he took office, the Senator went on TV to talk up how Trump was the non-interventionist President who would keep the US out of foreign wars.
Well, I think that’s a longer discussion and a discussion that President Trump had in his first term. I do think we’re entering a new phase, though, of realism in this country. President Trump will be less interventionist, and we get back to our core national interests. Principally defending the homeland, the Indo-Pacific, and China, and so I think that’s a longer term conversation.
We’ll make sure everybody is safe over there. That’s the first order of business, but, again, I think people have had enough of these forever wars all across the world. We can’t be everywhere all at once all the time. That’s just not our capability, so I think that I’m welcoming President Trump coming with this agenda.
Yet, over the weekend he tweeted out a long thread arguing that “territorial expansion is a time-honored American tradition” and that it’s “in our blood” to acquire Greenland (leaving out that the examples he gave of the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska did not come with a mad President demanding we get the land or we’d attack).
And the most galling part? Everyone knows. Everyone knows this is insane. The Republicans know it. The Democrats know it. Foreign leaders definitely know it. The Norwegian Prime Minister had to respond to an unhinged text message from the leader of the free world as if it were a normal diplomatic communication. Denmark’s foreign minister had to issue statements about how “you can’t threaten your way to ownership of Greenland” as if that’s a thing that should ever need to be said to an American president.
Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who is not seeking reelection (funny how that works), actually said what everyone is thinking. When he saw the letter, he simply tweeted: “Very embarrassing conduct.”
That’s the most honest assessment you’ll get from a sitting Republican member of Congress. And notice he’s only willing to say it because he’s on his way out.
What are the actual consequences here?
Trump has now announced 10% tariffs on goods from the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland—all NATO allies—as punishment for not supporting his acquisition of Greenland. When asked if he’ll follow through, he said “100%.” It’s a silly question all around, but to date, much of the media had treated Trump’s weird infatuation with Greenland as if it were a joke, rather than deadly serious.
When asked if he would use military force to seize Greenland, the President of the United States responded: “No comment.”
The President won’t rule out military action against NATO allies because he didn’t get a peace prize.
Because he didn’t get a peace prize. Peace. Prize.
The EU is holding an emergency summit. Denmark has said that U.S. military action in Greenland would spell the end of NATO. European allies are deploying troops—symbolic numbers, but troops nonetheless—to Greenland. We are watching in real-time as the post-World War II international order that the United States built and led for 80 years crumbles because one man’s ego couldn’t handle not getting an award.
And Russian state media? They’re gloating. As the BBC reported, pro-Kremlin outlets are full of praise for Trump’s Greenland push, which kinda highlights that Trump’s claim that we need Greenland to protect us from Russia is bullshit. Russia is loving this mess. Putin couldn’t have designed a more effective way to fracture NATO if he’d tried. And he tried.
“Standing in the way of the US president’s historic breakthrough is the stubbornness of Copenhagen and the mock solidarity of intransigent European countries, including so-called friends of America, Britain and France,” writes Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
“Europe does not need the American greatness that Trump is promoting. Brussels is counting on ‘drowning’ the US president in the midterm congressional elections, on preventing him from concluding the greatest deal of his life.”
This is not normal. Stop pretending it is.
I’ve written before about how Techdirt has become something of a democracy blog, because when the fundamental institutions that allow for things like innovation and free speech are under attack, everything else becomes secondary. This is one of those moments.
A President who openly admits his foreign policy is driven by personal grievances over awards he didn’t receive is not fit for office. A President who threatens to invade NATO allies and won’t rule out military force against them is a danger to global stability. A President who doesn’t understand (or doesn’t care) that the Nobel Committee is independent from the Norwegian government has no business conducting diplomacy.
These aren’t controversial statements. They’re obvious. Everyone knows it.
But none of the political elite want to act. For nearly a decade now there’s been this weird paralysis where opposing Trumpian nonsense is treated as simply not allowed. Why? Because his most vocal supporters might get upset? So fucking what. He’s ripping apart the global order over a personal grievance. He’s already destroyed so much goodwill and soft power that it will take decades to recover—if recovery is even possible.
The fact that it’s taken until now to even begin discussing the 25th Amendment is already a travesty. That no one with actual power will do anything about it is the real indictment.
We’re protecting a mad king because those who could stop it are too scared of random troll accounts on X (not to mention the world’s richest man) possibly mocking them for not being loyal enough to the mad king.
Using an Unmarked Aircraft to Attack an Alleged Drug Boat: Is it Perfidy?
Jan. 20th, 2026 13:52just_security_feedReports have surfaced that a military aircraft used in the highly controversial Sept. 2, 2025, strike on an alleged drug boat, as well as a follow-on strike as two survivors were clinging to its wreckage, was imitating a civilian aircraft (see here and here). Reportedly, the aircraft had no military markings and carried weapons internally, but its transponder was “squawking” its military status. The aircraft apparently swooped in low over the boat, which turned back toward Venezuela, before attacking it and killing nine on board. Two shipwrecked crewmembers and the remains of the boat were then destroyed in a second strike (see analysis of the attacks here and here).
Most discussion of disguising the aircraft’s military character has focused on whether doing so violates the law of armed conflict (LOAC) prohibition on perfidious attack, which involves feigning protected status under LOAC to kill the enemy. This article explains that using an aircraft not marked as military in character is lawful during peacetime and that, had there been an ongoing armed conflict (there was not), the attack would not have been perfidious under LOAC. However, if conducted as reported and if an armed conflict had been underway, the operation might have violated a separate LOAC obligation requiring that only military aircraft exercise belligerent rights, such as conducting attacks.
It is important to clarify at the outset that both the first and second strikes on the boat were clearly unlawful on other grounds (see here, here, and here). Moreover, it is difficult to see any operational merit in using an aircraft that appeared to be civilian to conduct the attack, although in the face of the administration’s lack of transparency, the wisdom of doing so is difficult to assess. That said, it is telling that subsequent attacks, which were likewise unlawful, appear to have been carried out by appropriately marked military platforms.
Which Body of Law Governs?
The administration claims that the drug boat strikes took place in the context of a non-international armed conflict to which LOAC rules apply. That claim is simply wrong (see the Just Security collection of articles on the attacks). The U.S. sinkings of alleged drug boats, at least until the U.S. attack on Venezuela (and still in cases lacking a sufficient nexus to that conflict), were governed instead by international law rules applicable in peacetime. This is because neither of the two requirements for the existence of a non-international armed conflict, an armed conflict between a State and an “organized armed group,” was satisfied at the time of the attack (or any time since). As explained previously in greater depth, 1) the drug cartels and gangs concerned do not qualify as “organized armed groups under LOAC, and 2) the violence between the United States and the drug cartels and gangs had not reached the requisite degree of intensity on Sept. 2 (DoD Law of War Manual, § 17.1.1; Tadić, para. 70).
As a consequence, LOAC rules such as the prohibitions on attacking civilians and civilian objects, the qualification of shipwrecked individuals as protected persons who are hors de combat, and the prohibition on perfidy do not apply. Instead, the strike was an “internationally wrongful act” by the United States in violation of the right to life of those aboard the boat and an act of murder by some of those involved under the domestic criminal law of States that enjoy prescriptive (lawmaking) jurisdiction over the incident, such as the State of nationality of the participants in the strike and of those who were killed (see our discussion here).
As to the aircraft that conducted the Sept. 2 strike appearing to be of civilian character, the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation provides that “Every aircraft engaged in international air navigation shall bear its appropriate nationality and registration marks” (art. 20). However, the Convention explicitly excludes “State aircraft,” a category that includes “[a]ircraft used in military… services” from its reach (art. 3; with limited exceptions that are not relevant here). While there is a strong peacetime practice among States of identifying military aircraft using national rondels or insignia, tail markings, serial numbers, and unit or service identifiers, there is no international law obligation dictating how State aircraft must be marked. The use of an aircraft that appeared to have civilian (civil) status to mount the attack made it no more unlawful than it already was.
Did the Attack Violate the Perfidious Attack Rule? (had there been an armed conflict)
As noted, there was no armed conflict, and therefore, no violation of the prohibition on perfidious attack. However, even if an armed conflict had been underway, the use of an aircraft that appeared to be civilian would not, in the attendant circumstances, have qualified as a perfidious attack.
There is universal agreement that under customary law, it is prohibited to kill or wound the enemy by resorting to perfidy (§ 5.22.2; see also ICRC Customary IHL study, rule 65). The DoD Law of War Manual defines perfidy as “acts that invite the confidence of enemy persons to lead them to believe that they are entitled to, or are obliged to accord, protection under the law of war, with intent to betray that confidence” (§ 5.22.1). A long-standing prohibition (see, e.g., 1863 Lieber Code, art. 16; 1899 Hague II and 1907 Hague IV Regulations, art. 23(b)), in treaty law, it is found in Article 37(1) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I for Parties to the instrument (the United States is not a Party). That provision extends the prohibition to perfidious capture.
The applicability of the rule in non-international armed conflict is not entirely settled, an important point in light of the (flawed) U.S. claim that the attack occurred in that context. The DoD Law of War Manual discusses perfidious attack only in the context of an international armed conflict (conflict between States), although it does not expressly exclude application in a non-international armed conflict. However, the prevailing, and better, view is that it is likewise barred in such conflicts, with the ICRC setting out strong support for that position in its Customary International Humanitarian Law study’s catalogue of practice. This is also the conclusion of a study by the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (NIAC Manual, § 2.3.6). And the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court includes perfidy as a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflict (arts. 8(2)(b)(xi) and 8(2)(e)(ix), respectively).
There is no question that civilian status is among the protected statuses that may not be feigned to attack the enemy. Indeed, “feigning civilian status and then attacking” is one of the five examples of perfidious attack in the DoD Law of War Manual (§ 5.22.3). And there is equally no question that the rule extends to aircraft. The international group of experts who prepared the HPCR Manual on the International Law Applicable to Air and Missile Warfare (Harvard AMW Manual) concluded that “[i]t is perfidious for a military aircraft to feign the status of a civilian aircraft,” giving as examples “painting civilian markings on a military aircraft” (commentary to rule 114(b); The Harvard AMW Manual confirmed that leveraging perfidy to “kill or injure an adversary” is unlawful in the aerial environment (rule 111). The Canadian Law of Armed Conflict at the Operational and Tactical Levels manual likewise provides that “using false markings on military aircraft such as the markings of civil aircraft” is among the “examples of perfidy in air warfare if a hostile act is committed” (§ 706(3)(a)).
The aircraft at issue in the Sept. 2 U.S. strike did appear to be a civilian aircraft. And, while it was apparently squawking its military status, those aboard the boat that it was engaging would have been unable to acquire that signal. However, that does not end the analysis. There are two reasons the Sept. 2 attack would not constitute perfidy had it occurred during an armed conflict (as a reminder, it did not).
First, a perfidious attack requires a specific intent. As noted in the DoD Law of War Manual, “The key element in perfidy is the false claim to protections under the law of war in order to secure a military advantage over the opponent” (§ 5.22.1, emphasis added). That military advantage can, for instance, be catching the enemy unaware or preventing the enemy from realizing the need to flee.
Operationally, it is difficult to imagine how such military advantages could have played a role in the U.S. decision to use the aircraft. As has been demonstrated in the 35 drug boat strikes to date (and surely would have been apparent at the time of the first strike at issue here), U.S. forces can attack them with impunity, without risk, and with great tactical success. While it is true that the Sept. 2 strike was the earliest, it is hard to imagine why a very robust force would be concerned that a boat in transit that already had been located by U.S. forces might be able to get away if it spotted a military aircraft in the area, and that therefore they had to employ one appearing to be civilian to lull the crew into complacency. And in terms of vulnerability to attack from those aboard the boat lest they be alerted, it is unlikely that the boats posed much of a threat to intercepting aircraft or vessels had they been identifiable as military platforms – that is, reporting to date has not indicated the boats were armed with weapons that could have posed such a threat. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the U.S. armed forces conceived a plan to sneak up on the drug boats to execute the strike successfully. This being so, the operation would not amount to perfidy had there been an armed conflict.
A second possible reason is that perfidious attack is limited to circumstances in which the specific intent is to feign protected status in order to kill or wound persons. The prohibition arguably does not extend to actions targeting objects; in other words, killing or wounding must be the intention, not the consequence. As noted in Bothe et al.’s New Rules for Victims of Armed Conflict commentary on Article 37, “sabotage or the destruction of property as such through the use of perfidious deception is not prohibited (page 234; see also Dinstein, page 305).
By this interpretation, even if the U.S. forces intended to feign civilian status to trick the boat crew, if the boat allegedly laden with drugs was the target, not the crew, the requisite intent may not have been present. True, those aboard the boats were almost certainly going to be incidentally killed or wounded. However, if the mission was solely to stop the shipment of drugs, not to deprive the cartels or gangs of those who transport them, that would be relevant to application of the perfidy rule.
Despite the lack of access to all the facts, the intent requirements described above would seem to preclude characterization of the use of the seemingly civilian aircraft to mount the Sept. 2 attack as perfidy (again, assuming the prohibition on perfidy applies during non-international armed conflict and according to the erroneous U.S. view that such a NIAC was ongoing).
Was the Use of the Aircraft to Conduct the Attack Lawful?
It is well-settled in international law that “only military aircraft are entitled to engage in attacks in armed conflict” (DoD Law of War Manual, § 14.3.3.1; see also UK LOAC Manual, ¶ 12.34). This long-standing rule is based on the authoritative, albeit non-binding, 1923 Hague Rules of Air Warfare (art. 13).
The Harvard AMW Manual experts agreed with the rule in principle, but concluded that it did not bar the use of civilian aircraft during non-international armed conflict, which the administration (wrongly) claims to have been engaged in on Sept. 2 (Harvard AMW Manual, rule 17(a) commentary). To support its position, it pointed to the use of law-enforcement aircraft during such conflicts.
No such caveat appears in the DoD Manual, even though it post-dated the AMW project. Similarly, the UK Law of Armed Conflict Manual fails to distinguish the application of the rule in international and non-international armed conflict. And the German Law of Armed Conflict Manual appears to accept the rule in all armed conflict, noting, “Only military aircraft are entitled to conduct air operations. This also applies to all enforcement actions that do not in themselves entail the use of weapons such as intercepting, diverting or forcing to land other aircraft for the purpose of inspection” (¶ 1115).
If the Harvard AMW experts are right, there would be no violation of the limitation. But if the rule applies to all armed conflicts, the question becomes whether the aircraft is of military character.
The Harvard AMW Manual experts defined a military aircraft as “any aircraft (i) operated by the armed forces of a State; (ii) bearing the military markings of that State; (iii) commanded by a member of the armed forces; and (iv) controlled, manned or preprogrammed by a crew subject to regular armed forces discipline” (rule 1(x), rule 13(j)). The requirement of being marked is based on the Hague Rules of Air Warfare (art. 3).
The UK’s LOAC manual is in agreement with the marking requirement (¶ 12.10), as is the Canadian Law of Armed Conflict Manual (§ 704) and the German manual(¶¶ 349, 1103). By these standards, the aircraft’s failure to be marked as military precludes its qualification as a military aircraft, and therefore it was unlawful for it to exercise the belligerent right of conducting attacks (again, assuming the limitation applies in a non-international armed conflict, and that such a conflict was in fact occurring, which it was not).
Interestingly, the DoD Law of War Manual takes a broader approach: “Military aircraft may be understood as aircraft that are designated as such by a State that operates them. The United States has not ratified a treaty that requires certain qualifications before an aircraft may be designated as military aircraft.” It cautions that while “[m]ilitary aircraft are customarily marked to signify both their nationality and military character … circumstances may exist where such markings are superfluous” (§ 14.3.3). In explanation of when such marking may be superfluous, a footnote cites as an example situations in which “no other aircraft except those belonging to a single state are flown” (citing the 1976 Air Force Pamphlet 110-31).
Yet, it merits note that the Air Force Pamphlet cited by the DoD’s Law of War Manual also states that “while engaging in combat operations, military aircraft, as entities of combat in aerial warfare, are also required to be marked with appropriate signs of their nationality and military character” (§ 7.4, emphasis added). In other words, it appears that despite the mention of situations in which marking is superfluous in the DoD Law of War Manual, the U.S. position tracks those of other States vis-à-vis the circumstances at hand. At least with respect to belligerent rights, such as the right of attack, the aircraft concerned must be appropriately marked as military.
Conclusions
From the analysis above, a number of conclusions can be drawn about the Sept. 2 use of an aircraft to conduct the attack on the alleged drug boat.
- As there was no armed conflict, the law of armed conflict, including the prohibition of perfidious attack, was inapplicable. Instead, the U.S. attack violated the right to life of those aboard the boat and may have constituted murder by some of those involved.
- As the incident did not occur during an armed conflict, there was no requirement to mark the aircraft as a military aircraft.
- Had the law of armed conflict applied because the situation qualified as an armed conflict (it did not), the rule prohibiting perfidious attack would not have applied since U.S. forces likely did not intend to deceive the adversary to secure a military advantage.
- Even if U.S. forces did want to deceive those aboard the boat to achieve a military advantage, the prohibition on perfidious attack arguably only applies to situations in which the goal is to kill or wound, not to damage or destroy objects like drugs and boats transporting them (which may have been the case in this strike).
- Only military aircraft may conduct attacks during an international armed conflict. Whether this rule applies to non-international armed conflict is less settled.
- To qualify as a military aircraft during an armed conflict, the prevailing view is that aircraft must be marked as such, at least while engaged in combat operations.
- If the limitation of attacks to military aircraft applies during a non-international armed conflict, and such a conflict had been underway (it was not), the use of an unmarked aircraft to conduct the Sept. 2 attack would have been a LOAC violation.
The confused and confusing discussion that resulted when the use of a military aircraft to conduct the Sept. 2 attack came to light underscores the importance of first identifying the applicable body of law before rendering legal analysis. It also drives home the unintended knock-on consequences of asserting unsupportable legal claims, as this administration has repeatedly done. Indeed, but for its legally incorrect claim that a non-international armed conflict was underway at the time, the use of an aircraft that was not marked as military would have raised no additional legal issues at all beyond the unlawfulness of the strike itself.
The post Using an Unmarked Aircraft to Attack an Alleged Drug Boat: Is it Perfidy? appeared first on Just Security.
techdirt_feedTed Cruz last week chaired a Senate hearing dubbed “Plugged Out: Examining the Impact of Technology on America’s Youth.” The hearing spent a lot of time doubling down on the scary-sounding, often-baseless stories lawmakers tell themselves as they push terrible laws like KOSMA to “protect the children” from a completely unproven link between social media and mental health problems.
Laws like KOSMA, as we’ve repeatedly reported, are unconstitutional messes that often create more problems than they profess to solve. And lawmakers like Ted Cruz, which we’ve also documented repeatedly, have shown time and time again how they aren’t actually interested in protecting kids (from tech giants or anything else), or doing any of the heavy lifting (like, say ensuring everyone has access to affordable mental health care or affordable broadband) required to actually help anybody.
But when it comes to Ted Cruz, it’s even worse than all that. Last year we noted how Cruz was at the forefront of efforts to kill FCC reforms that made it easier and cheaper for kids to access the internet and do their homework.
More specifically, Cruz leveraged the Congressional Review Act to kill FCC modifications to the E-Rate program that allowed school libraries to offer kids free Wi-Fi hotspots. This was a broadly popular, uncontroversial program that made it easier for rural, low-income kids to get online. And Cruz killed it because companies like AT&T don’t want the government offering alternatives to their overpriced service.
Cruz, of course, couldn’t just openly announce that telecom lobbyist corruption resulted in him killing a helpful program with broad, bipartisan support. So he made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how this Wi-Fi program was “censoring Conservative viewpoints” and resulting in kids running amok unsupervised online. As we debunked in detail it was all lies; he just threw a bunch of nonsense at the wall, and our lazy, shitty press parroted much of it unskeptically.
Fast forward to last week and Cruz’s support for the awful KOSMA bill. Cruz actually took time out in his grandstanding “protect the children!” hearing testimony to pat himself on the back for the fact he made it harder for rural American schoolchildren to access the internet:
“During the Biden administration, not only did Congressional Democrats give billions of dollars to the FCC to buy personal internet devices for children, but the Biden FCC sought to bankroll kids’ unsupervised internet access and undermine parental rights by expanding the E-Rate program to install Wi-Fi hotspots off campus, including on school buses and in students’ homes.“
Cruz is, as usual, lying. The expanded Wi-Fi hotspot program didn’t cost the FCC any additional taxpayer money whatsoever. They leveraged existing E-Rate funds to ensure the most disadvantaged, rural kids (many of whose parents voted for Trump) had access to affordable Internet when not on school grounds, either via a cheap access point at home, or a cheap access point on a local bus or bookmobile.
Again, the Republican opposition to this wasn’t rooted in any sort of good intention. AT&T and Verizon simply don’t like the precedent of the government offering affordable (or free) broadband internet access to people. Even people in areas their networks don’t reach. They’d much rather those families be stuck paying an arm and a leg for spotty, expensive, often unreliable broadband access.
Cruz dressed up his lazy corruption as some sort of noble “protection of the children,” a pretty common refrain in DC policy circles. And because the U.S. press generally sucks (in part due to the Republican assault on media consolidation and ownership limits), he was broadly allowed to lie repeatedly about this without being seriously challenged in the media.
To make matters worse, he’s leveraging his corrupt protection of the Republican-coddled telecom industry as some sort of noble justification for passing shitty, half-cooked legislation on a completely different front. But as is so often the case, the “protect the children” and race-baiting, culture war trolling generally exists to divide and disorient the public so they don’t cooperatively target the real problem: rich assholes.
In the case of KOSKA, as we saw with the fake GOP antitrust inquiries into “big tech,” or fake concerns about “free speech,” Cruz’s interest isn’t in actually reining in big tech or helping kids. His interest is in finding leverage points over modern media giants that can be used to bully them into protecting and coddling authoritarians and their rank propaganda, a gambit that’s proven to be quite successful so far.
The EU Discovers Emergency Powers: Russian Assets Edition
Jan. 20th, 2026 13:28just_security_feedAmerican presidents, and President Donald Trump in particular, have dramatically increased the use of emergency powers in the last few years. They have used emergency powers to pursue aggressive economic sanctions policies, forgive student loan debt, and overhaul U.S. trade policy, among many other things. It turns out that the U.S. executive branch is not alone in treating emergency powers like bottomless sources of legal authority. The European Union has done this too. And not unlike in the United States, the more aggressive the EU got in using executive authority, the more political and judicial backlash it faced.
The most recent illustration of the EU leaning into emergency powers is its reliance on an emergency provision in the EU treaties, Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), to indefinitely immobilize roughly $246 billion in Russian Central Bank assets and reserves held by European financial institutions, and prevent the enforcement of contrary judgments. The EU also contemplated, but did not ultimately pursue, a follow-on measure that would allow it to borrow against those assets to provide loans to Ukraine to support its reconstruction. Instead, an overwhelming majority of European States agreed to borrow over $100 billion for Ukraine against the EU budget, to be repaid only once Russian reparations arrive. These moves raise serious questions under both international and EU law, and they have quickly triggered a strong political and legal response.
Those concerns notwithstanding, many have sympathized with the desire of major EU players to find creative ways to support Ukraine. We have argued in our article, Emergency Powers for Good, that certain measures at odds with the current international and domestic legal framework could nevertheless be justified. We developed a test that upholds some emergency measures that transform a society rather than returning it to the status quo before the emergency. Our test to justify transformative emergency measures requires a genuine emergency, broad consensus, protection of particularly vulnerable groups, and time limits.
Most U.S. emergency measures that pushed even the limits of the permissive U.S. emergency framework—such as President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan and Trump’s border wall project—do not pass this stringent test. We had to go back to President George W. Bush’s bailout of the auto-industry, with the support of Democratic congressional leadership and both the outgoing and newly elected-president, to find an emergency measure that would pass our test.
In contrast, we favorably assessed key EU emergency responses to the Covid pandemic, such as the transformative one trillion New Generation EU stimulus package that reshaped the EU economy. Now, we’re revisiting our analysis for the current emergency the EU faces: the growing threat from Russia and the Trump administration’s rejection of the Transatlantic Alliance in favor of peace with Moscow. We argue that although it would have been difficult to justify borrowing against Russian assets, not only because of the strong international law protections for sovereign funds—but also because of forceful opposition from a sizeable minority of European States—the alternative plan to borrow against the EU budget to help Ukraine passes our stringent test.
The “Sleeping Beauty” of the EU Treaties?
Until recently, the EU—ostensibly a creature of limited competences—hardly ever relied on residual emergency authority to make new law. But in the wake of Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU rediscovered a forgotten emergency provision in its founding treaties: Article 122 TFEU. Article 122(1) provides that
… the [EU] Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide… upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy.
Article 122(2) further provides that
[w]here a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant… Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned.
The main advantage of using Article 122 over standard sources of authority is that it allows a super-majority of member States to circumvent more complicated EU lawmaking procedures. Of particular relevance here is the fact that most EU Council decisions related to EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) must be adopted unanimously. By contrast, Article 122 only requires a super-majority of member States for a regulation to be approved. Additionally, fewer EU institutions need to opt in for a regulation to be passed under Article 122. Both the EU Council and the Parliament need to agree with the Commission’s proposal in the ordinary legislative procedure.
The appeal of relying on Article 122 should be clear. Unanimity is elusive in a body consisting of 27 member States. Several members have become regular spoilers that effectively veto major EU initiatives or constantly extract exorbitant concessions in return for their vote. And Parliament operates under a different incentive system than the more technocratic Commission and Council.
Yet it was only recently that Article 122 came to the fore of EU lawmaking. Since the current version of the EU treaties entered into force in 2009, the EU invoked Article 122 a total of 22 times. Seventeen of those regulations were enacted after 2020. The EU relied on Article 122, among other instances, to effectively double the EU budget and realign EU investment and energy policies. This was in response to the economic damage wrought by Covid, and the threat to EU energy supply after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alberto Gregorio de Merino, the EU Commission’s top lawyer, has called Article 122 the “sleeping beauty” of the EU treaties; a provision that existed in some form since the 1950s, but was only recently rediscovered as a basis for far-reaching EU legislation under the guise of emergency.
More recently, the EU invoked Article 122 to address the war in Ukraine beyond the energy crisis. In March 2025, the Council relied on Article 122 to create the so-called SAFE instrument for the EU defense industry. SAFE provides financial assistance up to €150 billion to EU members to allow them to increase public investments in the European defense industry. The Council justified the use of emergency authority for this measure by citing “the current exceptional security context” and the “need to make urgent and massive investments in the EU’s defence manufacturing capacities.”
The use of Article 122 for this purpose did not go unopposed. The EU Parliament is pursuing litigation against the Council and Commission, primarily challenging the decision to end-run Parliament by relying on Article 122. The objection is not to the substance of the measure, but rather the use of emergency authority and the truncated procedure it allows—at the expense of the only democratically elected EU body. What the Parliament seeks is for the measure to stay in place, and for member States to be able to borrow and build up their defense industries, until new legislation that accomplishes the same goal with EU Parliament input is passed.
The Russian Central Bank Measures
For some time now, there has been talk of permanently seizing the assets of the Central Bank of Russia or repurposing them to support the reconstruction of Ukraine. But the United States and the EU have stopped short of taking that step. Freezing roughly $300 billion in Central Bank assets between the United States, the EU, and other G7 members was already a stretch. An asset freeze may be justifiable under international law as a countermeasure against Russia’s many violations of foundational international law norms. Yet countermeasures must be temporary and reversible. Permanently seizing central bank assets is a different proposition entirely.
Under international law, central bank assets are immune from execution in foreign States. Unlike the broader law of State immunity, which has developed sizable exceptions for commercial activity over time, the immunity of central bank assets has only grown stronger. Underlying this protection is a combination of reciprocity concerns and respect for the special function central banks preform in national and international economies. The International Court of Justice’s recent ruling in Certain Iranian Assets (Iran v. United States) did not disturb this legal status quo. Although the Court effectively sanctioned the attachment of $1.75 billion in Iran’s Central Bank assets in the United States to satisfy domestic judgements issued in favor of victims of Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks, the ICJ skirted the substance of the central bank immunity question.
On the domestic level, senior members of the Biden administration officially stated they believed the United States lacked domestic or international legal authority to permanently seize Russia’s central bank assets and transfer them to Ukraine. The U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act explicitly recognizes the immunity from execution of central bank assets. U.S. domestic law gives the president extremely broad authority to regulate economic transactions if he declares a national emergency. But seizure (vesting) authority exists only during an armed conflict in which the United States is a direct participant. There are some relatively narrow exceptions, but none straightforwardly apply to wholesale confiscation of Russian Central Bank assets. Although the United States has certainly played a central role in the Ukraine war, it is highly doubtful it is in an outright state of war with Russia. Nor, we suspect, is this a legal position the Trump administration would be willing to embrace. The political and legal ramifications of the United States essentially declaring war on Russia are a strong deterrent.
By contrast, key EU members have increasingly shown flexibility with respect to the disposition of the Russian Central Bank assets held in EU financial institutions, primarily in Belgium. With the U.S. role and degree of support for Ukraine constantly shifting under Trump, and transatlantic relations in a deep state of disrepair, the EU has found itself isolated in its effort to prevent Russia from further increasing its hold on Ukraine and threatening EU members directly. Supporting Ukraine by tapping into the blocked Russian assets gained political traction.
As a first step, the EU in December again invoked Article 122 to indefinitely immobilize the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank within its jurisdiction and prohibit their return to Russia. Until now, the EU had to periodically extend the measures freezing the assets, and securing the necessary support from member States each time became taxing and uncertain. Members friendly to Russia, such as Hungary and Slovakia, have separated themselves from the bloc on this issue.
The new immobilization regulation “establishes exceptional and temporary emergency measures addressing the serious economic difficulties within the Union caused by Russia’s actions … and the risk of further deterioration of the economic situation in the Union.” It states that the “measures aim to avoid a serious deterioration of the economic stability in the Union and its Member States by preventing significant resources being made available to Russia to continue its actions in the context of the war of aggression against Ukraine.”
In other words, the regulation frames the situation with Russia as constituting an economic emergency for the Union, and asserts a causal relationship between releasing Russian Central Bank assets and supporting Russia’s nefarious activities affecting the EU. At the same time, the Regulation makes clear that the measure does not alter the property rights in the assets. It highlights the temporary and reversible nature of the action, likely to address concerns under international law. The regulation also makes unenforceable in the EU arbitral tribunal decisions and court judgments that Russia might obtain, building on a controversial line of EU jurisprudence invalidating intra-EU investment arbitration.
While the indefinite freezing of the assets can by justified under international law, the use of Article 122 for this purpose raises substantial questions under EU law. Normally, economic sanctions measures are adopted under the CFSP chapter of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Article 215 of the TFEU, which governs economic sanctions (“restrictive measures” in EU speak). Under Article 31 TEU, an EU Council decision adopted unanimously is required as a first step. Clearly, the use of Article 122 in this instance was designed to circumvent opposition by member States more partial to Russia and immunize the immobilization of Russian Central Bank assets against future reversals. Critics within the EU again charged that powerful member States are using emergency authority to circumvent the appropriate, specific legal mechanism for amending EU sanctions.
The objections to the use of Article 122 proved powerful. EU members including Germany sought to rely on the provision to not only immobilize Russian assets, but also to borrow against them to provide forgivable loans to facilitate the reconstruction of Ukraine. That type of action would cross the legal line between temporary and likely permissible freezing of the assets to something that resembles permanent seizure. The EU proponents of the move tried to address the permanence and irrevocability concern by structuring the loans so that the money would be paid back eventually. But that would only happen after Ukraine receives reparations from Russia for the latter’s grave international law violations. We are not holding our breath.
Key EU actors like Belgium, where most of the assets are held, vehemently opposed the initiative and reliance on Article 122 to facilitate it. Scholars argued the move would be unlawful under EU law, because the Union would again be end-running the normal constitutional process specific to restrictive measures and excluding certain members. Eventually, the initiative failed. In late December, the EU approved €105 in loans for Ukraine without involving the Russian assets. Twenty-five of the EU’s 27 member States firmly supported this measure. It is unclear what legal authority the EU will invoke to operationalize such a plan. Article 122 is again a leading contender.
The Correct Role for Emergency Powers
Recent U.S. and EU practice on major regulatory initiatives reveals similar trends of fallback to emergency powers. Emergency authority, by its very nature, entails simplified procedures and broad discretion, giving executives substantial leeway to advance their desired policies when other legal routes are inconvenient or foreclosed. These trends are motivated in part by growing political polarization that makes legislative progress through standard routes difficult or entirely unattainable. They are also a product of increasingly powerful executives who have their own views about what the rule of law entails. And sometimes, they are necessary responses to true crises.
As a legal matter, borrowing against Russian frozen assets against an expectation of unlikely future Russian reparations is likely unlawful under international law. And it would be another untested extension of Article 122 that raises internal EU federalism and separation of powers issues. The latter problem would likewise arise if the loan to Ukraine that the EU Council just greenlit is grounded in Article 122. Although Article 122 broadly refers to measures “appropriate to the economic situation,” it specifies classic economic harms like supply chain disruption or energy crises. Collateral damage from the war in Ukraine and localized Russian aggression does not neatly fit in this category. Indeed, foreign and security policy is an area in which member States reserve their competence. Overriding member States with emergency authority seems to conflict with the limited nature of EU competence. At the same time, the current exceptional situation with Russia is exactly the kind of situation for which emergency authority exists. A broad reading of the text of Article 122 would extend it to this crisis.
That said, perhaps the best way to describe what we have here is an “unlawful but justified” situation. Our framework in Emergency Powers for Good would uphold a formally unlawful emergency measure under certain conditions: a real emergency, temporariness, protection for particularly vulnerable groups and broad consensus in support of the measure. In our view, an EU loan to Ukraine excluding Russian assets would easily meet those tests.
The post The EU Discovers Emergency Powers: Russian Assets Edition appeared first on Just Security.
Early Edition: January 20, 2026
Jan. 20th, 2026 13:09just_security_feedSignup to receive the Early Edition in your inbox here.
A curated guide to major news and developments over the weekend. Here’s today’s news:
GREENLAND
In a late-night flurry of posts to his Truth Social account, President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to take Greenland and said he would meet with European leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to talk about the spiraling crisis. He is expected to arrive at the Forum on Wednesday. In one of his posts, he said he’d told NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, “Greenland is imperative for National and World security. There can be no going back.” Trump also posted at 12:58 a.m. an AI-generated image of himself in the Oval Office with European leaders and displaying a map where the United States, Canada, and Greenland are covered in the American flag. The Financial Times reports; Michel Rose and Stine Jacobsen report for Reuters.
During his social media spree, Trump also posted screenshots of private messages he’d received from world leaders over Greenland, including one from French President Emmanuel Macron that read, “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.” CNN reports.
Trump also criticized the United Kingdom’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a deal his administration previously supported, calling it an act of “great stupidity.” He said it was another reason the United States needed to acquire Greenland. Haley Ott for ABC News.
Over the weekend, Trump continued to push for American control of Greenland, risking damaging relations with Europe beyond the point of repair. Following Trump’s threats of economic coercion and military invasion of a NATO ally, “Veteran observers of European politics said the alliance between Europe and the United States that formed in the aftermath of World War II had already been fundamentally altered,” Michael D. Shear reports for the New York Times.
On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that if the United States did not get a deal to buy Greenland, he would first impose a 10 percent tariff “on any and all goods sent to the United States of America,” from a certain group of European countries in February. He threatened to raise the rate to 25 percent in June. The threats upended months of trade negotiations between the United States and Europe. Adam Gabbatt, Robert Mackey, and Callum Jones for The Guardian.
In response, European capitals are considering hitting the United States with €93 billion in tariffs. “The retaliation measures are being drawn up to give European leaders leverage in pivotal meetings with the US president at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, officials involved in the preparations said.” Henry Foy and Mercedes Ruehl report for the Financial Times.
In a text message to Norway’s prime minister Trump said that because he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace,” and therefore was pursuing the “Complete and Total Control of Greenland” in the interests of the United States. The text was forwarded by the White House to multiple European ambassadors in Washington. Geir Moulson and Jill Lawless report for the Associated Press.
Following a weekend of escalating U.S. threats, Denmark deployed additional troops to Greenland on Monday. Richard Milne, Henry Foy, Barbara Moens, and George Parker report for the Financial Times.
Over the weekend, thousands of people marched in Copenhagen to protest Trump’s escalating threats. “The crowd, waving Greenlandic flags, chanted ‘Greenland is not for sale.’ Many demonstrators wore red hats in Trump’s own ‘Make America great again’ fashion that read, ‘Make America go away.’” Barbara Sprunt for NPR.
A small European troop deployment to Greenland last week for an Arctic security exercise was viewed by some European officials as having been misread in Washington and as helping spur Trump’s retaliatory rhetoric and tariff threats, the Financial Times reported, citing officials and diplomats. The move was framed as a show of solidarity with Denmark and an “Arctic security” signal, but some diplomats said the messaging was too subtle or too easily misconstrued, while others doubted any reframing would have changed Trump’s response. Charles Clover, Richard Milne, and Amy Kazmin report.
TRUMP’S “BOARD OF PEACE”
When it brokered a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, the Trump administration announced that a “Board of Peace” would oversee the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip, but it became clear over the weekend that Trump intends it to have a more ambitious mandate, “potentially rivaling the United Nations in what would be a major upheaval to the post-World War II international order,” reports Matthew Lee for the Associated Press.
The Times of Israel published the full text of the board’s charter, which it says “was attached to the invitations sent out to dozens of world leaders who were asked to join Trump on the panel tasked with overseeing the postwar management of Gaza.”
Trump has named himself chair of the international organization and given himself veto power. He has invited world leaders to join the board, telling them if they pay $1 billion, they can secure a permanent seat while those countries that do not pay will have a three-year membership. “On Friday, Trump announced seven members on a founding executive board, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and former British prime minister Tony Blair. Three others include World Bank President Ajay Banga, deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel and billionaire private equity chief Marc Rowan.” Lauren Kaori Gurley and Michael Birnbaum report for the Washington Post.
France rejected Trump’s offer to join the “Board of Peace” and Trump responded on Monday by threatening a 200 percent tariff on French wine. The statement from the office of French President Emmanuel Macron said the board’s charter “goes beyond the framework of Gaza and raises serious questions, in particular with respect to the principles and structure of the United Nations, which cannot be called into question.” Clea Caulcutt for POLITICO.
Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to join the Board of Peace. “Later on Monday, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said President Alexander Lukashenko also received an invitation to join the board.” Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova for CNN; Bloomberg reports.
Israel has also been invited, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters, though it was not immediately clear whether Israel has accepted. Reuters reports.
Trump wants to hold a signing ceremony for the Board of Peace this week at Davos, which, along with the crisis over Greenland, is “transforming this week’s annual gathering of the global elite into an emergency diplomatic summit.” Cat Zakrzewski and Emily Davies report for the Washington Post.
MINNESOTA
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the state’s National Guard on Saturday to support local law enforcement and emergency agencies as protests continue in Minneapolis over federal immigration enforcement, though troops have not been deployed to city streets and remain “staged and ready to respond.” Guard units have been pictured preparing equipment and are expected to assist with public safety and protection of peaceful assembly should conditions deteriorate. Holly Yan, Hanna Park, Sydney Bishop, Zoe Sottile report for CNN.
Up to 1,500 active-duty U.S. soldiers, primarily from two infantry battalions of the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division, have been placed on prepare-to-deploy orders for a possible mission to Minnesota, the Pentagon confirmed to reporters, though no decision has been made on whether the troops will actually be sent. Konstantin Toropin reports for the Associated Press.
The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over whether their public statements unlawfully impeded federal immigration enforcement, with grand jury subpoenas issued as part of the probe but not yet received by either office, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials said the investigation is proceeding under a rarely used Civil War–era obstruction statute, based on a theory that state and local leaders conspired to interfere with federal agents. NBC News reported the statute was highlighted in a recent memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi that outlined legal tools prosecutors could use to pursue cases against individuals the administration has described as domestic extremists. Ryan J. Reilly and Peter Alexander report for NBC News.
On Friday, a federal judge in Minneapolis ordered ICE agents and other immigration officials to stop using excessive force against protesters while conducting their operations in the city. The judge’s order included detailed accounts of how ICE agents are treating people in the city: “A protester detained, her bra removed and wedding ring cut off, and some of her clothes never returned. The ‘gratuitous deployment’ of pepper spray. A couple’s car surrounded by agents, who pointed semiautomatic weapons at them at close range.” Stephanie Saul reports for the New York Times.
On Monday, the Trump administration said it was appealing the judge’s preliminary injunction. Mitch Smith for the New York Times.
The Justice Department is also asking the court to allow its surge of ICE agents in Minnesota to continue after a lawsuit was filed last week by state and local officials claiming that the deployment was unconstitutional. Minnesota had pushed for the federal judge to immediately block the deployment of 3,000 federal agents but she made no rulings last week. Mitch Smith reports for the New York Times.
Multiple attorneys say people being detained during ICE operations in Minnesota are being denied the constitutional right to see an attorney by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “Four attorneys told ABC News they have been denied access to their clients at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where they are being held,” Matt Rivers, Janice McDonald, and Armando Garcia report.
The FBI determined shortly after Renée Good’s killing that “sufficient grounds existed to open a civil rights probe into the actions of Jonathan Ross, the officer who shot Good.” The Justice Department says no such investigation exists. Perry Stein reports for the Washington Post.
Protesters interrupted a church service in St. Paul, MN, on Sunday. Protesters chanted outside a church where one of its pastors appears to also be the acting director of ICE’s field office for enforcement and removal operations in St. Paul, Lauren McCarthy, Maia Coleman, and Emily Cochrane report for the New York Times.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will investigate Sunday’s church protest, officials said. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon cited violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Andy Rose and Elise Hammond report for CNN.
IRAN
Iran’s judiciary signaled Sunday that some people involved in the recent unrest could still face execution, despite Trump’s suggestion otherwise. Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said certain protest-linked conduct is being treated as “moharebeh,” or “waging war against God,” an offense that can carry the death penalty, and warned the cases would be “quickly prosecuted and punished.” He also said anyone who “collaborates with the enemy” during unrest would be punished under “clear” legal provisions. Billy Stockwell reports for CNN.
Iranian protester Erfan Soltani remains alive and in good physical health after fears he would be executed on Wednesday, a relative and a human rights group said. CNN.
A senior Iranian official confirmed the death toll from last week’s protests has topped 5,000, including about 500 members of the security forces, with some of the deadliest unrest in Iran’s Kurdish northwest. Reuters reports.
SYRIA
After several days of clashes, Syria’s government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) reached a ceasefire agreement on Sunday, with President Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi agreeing that the SDF would pull back from key Arab-majority areas including Raqqa and Deir al-Zor. The deal also contemplates the SDF’s integration into Syria’s armed forces and the handover to Damascus of oil and gas sites, border crossings, and detention facilities holding Islamic State suspects. The Associated Press reports.
Turkish officials said Monday that the agreement’s terms to cede territory to Damascus could clear Ankara’s main impediment to restarting Turkey’s stalled peace process with the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group. Reuters.
An unknown number of Islamic State (IS) detainees escaped from Shaddadi prison in Syria’s Hasaka region amid renewed fighting around the detention facilities in the northeast and a security breakdown that left control of the site contested, with Damascus and the SDF trading blame over how control was lost. The SDF said the prison—one of three the SDF controls in the Hasakah region—came under repeated assault by “Damascus factions” and that its forces repelled the attackers several times before temporarily losing control, adding that several of its fighters were killed and more than a dozen others wounded. Ghaith Alsayed for the Associated Press.
Syrian authorities said around 120 IS detainees escaped from Shaddadi prison, adding that government forces moved into the area after the breakout and had recaptured 81 during sweep operations, with searches ongoing. Kurdish outlet Rudaw, citing an SDF spokesperson, put the number far higher—around 1,500 escapees. Reuters.
The SDF said it made repeated appeals to a nearby U.S.-led coalition base for assistance during the assault on Shaddadi prison by “Damascus factions,” but that the coalition did not intervene. The SDF added that dozens of its fighters were killed or wounded while defending the facility. Reuters.
U.S. Central Command said a U.S. strike in northwest Syria on Friday killed an Al Qaeda affiliate leader, Bilal Hasan al-Jasim, whom it described as “an experienced terrorist leader.” CENTCOM said al-Jasim helped plan attacks and was directly linked to the ISIS gunman who carried out the Dec. 13 ambush near Palmyra that killed two U.S. service members and an American interpreter and wounded other U.S. and Syrian personnel. Marlene Lenthang reports for NBC News.
TARIFFS AND OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS
If the Supreme Court rejects the legal foundation for Trump’s tariff program, the administration would move “the next day” to reimpose similar levies under other authorities, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said. In a Jan. 15 interview, Greer said the White House has “a lot of different options.” Ana Swanson for the New York Times.
U.S. consumers and importers paid about 96 per cent of the cost of last year’s U.S. tariff increases, with foreign exporters absorbing only about 4 per cent through lower prices, new research from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found—cutting against Trump’s repeated claim that foreigners are footing the bill. Using roughly $4 trillion in shipment data from between Jan. 2024 and Nov. 2025, the researchers also found that after surprise tariff hikes on Brazil and India in August 2025, exporters largely did not cut unit prices to offset the tariffs, instead shipping less to the United States, pointing to higher U.S. prices over time and reduced export volumes rather than “foreign-paid” tariffs. Tom Fairless reports for the Wall Street Journal.
The National Guard will remain deployed in Washington, D.C., through 2026. About 2,400 troops are currently stationed in the city and they are mostly from Republican-controlled states. Steven Beynon reports for ABC News.
The three highest-ranking U.S. Catholic archbishops said Monday that recent U.S. actions on Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland raise “basic questions about the use of military force” and have put America’s moral role “under examination.” Michelle Boorstein and Anthony Faiola report for the Washington Post.
Chief Immigration Judge Teresa Riley emailed immigration judges instructing them that they are not bound by federal court rulings requiring bond-hearing eligibility for many detainees, according to documents the ACLU of Massachusetts filed with a Boston federal court Friday. The ACLU said the directive shows a deliberate effort to disregard those rulings, with a hearing scheduled for today. Reuters reports.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LITIGATION
A D.C. federal judge declined to pause the administration’s new seven-day notice requirement for congressional visits to ICE detention facilities, explaining in a Monday order that the policy constitutes a new agency action not covered by her prior ruling and that the lawmakers raised the challenge through the wrong procedural mechanism. Michael Kunzelman reports for the Associated Press.
According to an international coalition of lawyers’ groups, it is now dangerous to be a lawyer in the United States. “The Day of the Endangered Lawyer, an annual event to raise awareness of risks to members of the profession, has in recent years picked Belarus, Iran and Afghanistan as its subject. For 2026, it has chosen the US.” Kaye Wiggins for the Financial Times.
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ICYMI: Yesterday on Just Security
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Let Not Arrogance Be Our Doom
by Bishop Garrison
The New Civil Rights “Backstop”: How DAs and AGs Can and Must Investigate ICE Abuses
by Jonathan Wroblewski
The post Early Edition: January 20, 2026 appeared first on Just Security.
Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?
Jan. 20th, 2026 12:08bruce_schneier_feedEighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads.
Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search feature in late 2024 and its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in October 2025, it kicked off a race to capture online behavioral data to power advertising. It’s part of a yearslong turnabout by OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI “unsettling” and now promises that ads can be deployed in AI apps while preserving trust. The rampant speculation among OpenAI users who believe they see paid placements in ChatGPT responses suggests they are not convinced.
In 2024, AI search company Perplexity started experimenting with ads in its offerings. A few months after that, Microsoft introduced ads to its Copilot AI. Google’s AI Mode for search now increasingly features ads, as does Amazon’s Rufus chatbot. OpenAI announced on Jan. 16, 2026, that it will soon begin testing ads in the unpaid version of ChatGPT.
As a security expert and data scientist, we see these examples as harbingers of a future where AI companies profit from manipulating their users’ behavior for the benefit of their advertisers and investors. It’s also a reminder that time to steer the direction of AI development away from private exploitation and toward public benefit is quickly running out.
The functionality of ChatGPT Search and its Atlas browser is not really new. Meta, commercial AI competitor Perplexity and even ChatGPT itself have had similar AI search features for years, and both Google and Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch by integrating AI with their browsers. But OpenAI’s business positioning signals a shift.
We believe the ChatGPT Search and Atlas announcements are worrisome because there is really only one way to make money on search: the advertising model pioneered ruthlessly by Google.
Advertising model
Ruled a monopolist in U.S. federal court, Google has earned more than US$1.6 trillion in advertising revenue since 2001. You may think of Google as a web search company, or a streaming video company (YouTube), or an email company (Gmail), or a mobile phone company (Android, Pixel), or maybe even an AI company (Gemini). But those products are ancillary to Google’s bottom line. The advertising segment typically accounts for 80% to 90% of its total revenue. Everything else is there to collect users’ data and direct users’ attention to its advertising revenue stream.
After two decades in this monopoly position, Google’s search product is much more tuned to the company’s needs than those of its users. When Google Search first arrived decades ago, it was revelatory in its ability to instantly find useful information across the still-nascent web. In 2025, its search result pages are dominated by low-quality and often AI-generated content, spam sites that exist solely to drive traffic to Amazon sales—a tactic known as affiliate marketing—and paid ad placements, which at times are indistinguishable from organic results.
Plenty of advertisers and observers seem to think AI-powered advertising is the future of the ad business.
Highly persuasive
Paid advertising in AI search, and AI models generally, could look very different from traditional web search. It has the potential to influence your thinking, spending patterns and even personal beliefs in much more subtle ways. Because AI can engage in active dialogue, addressing your specific questions, concerns and ideas rather than just filtering static content, its potential for influence is much greater. It’s like the difference between reading a textbook and having a conversation with its author.
Imagine you’re conversing with your AI agent about an upcoming vacation. Did it recommend a particular airline or hotel chain because they really are best for you, or does the company get a kickback for every mention? If you ask about a political issue, does the model bias its answer based on which political party has paid the company a fee, or based on the bias of the model’s corporate owners?
There is mounting evidence that AI models are at least as effective as people at persuading users to do things. A December 2023 meta-analysis of 121 randomized trials reported that AI models are as good as humans at shifting people’s perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. A more recent meta-analysis of eight studies similarly concluded there was “no significant overall difference in persuasive performance between (large language models) and humans.”
This influence may go well beyond shaping what products you buy or who you vote for. As with the field of search engine optimization, the incentive for humans to perform for AI models might shape the way people write and communicate with each other. How we express ourselves online is likely to be increasingly directed to win the attention of AIs and earn placement in the responses they return to users.
A different way forward
Much of this is discouraging, but there is much that can be done to change it.
First, it’s important to recognize that today’s AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, for the same reasons that search engines and social media platforms are.
The problem is not the technology itself; fast ways to find information and communicate with friends and family can be wonderful capabilities. The problem is the priorities of the corporations who own these platforms and for whose benefit they are operated. Recognize that you don’t have control over what data is fed to the AI, who it is shared with and how it is used. It’s important to keep that in mind when you connect devices and services to AI platforms, ask them questions, or consider buying or doing the things they suggest.
There is also a lot that people can demand of governments to restrain harmful corporate uses of AI. In the U.S., Congress could enshrine consumers’ rights to control their own personal data, as the EU already has. It could also create a data protection enforcement agency, as essentially every other developed nation has.
Governments worldwide could invest in Public AI—models built by public agencies offered universally for public benefit and transparently under public oversight. They could also restrict how corporations can collude to exploit people using AI, for example by barring advertisements for dangerous products such as cigarettes and requiring disclosure of paid endorsements.
Every technology company seeks to differentiate itself from competitors, particularly in an era when yesterday’s groundbreaking AI quickly becomes a commodity that will run on any kid’s phone. One differentiator is in building a trustworthy service. It remains to be seen whether companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can sustain profitable businesses on the back of subscription AI services like the premium editions of ChatGPT, Plus and Pro, and Claude Pro. If they are going to continue convincing consumers and businesses to pay for these premium services, they will need to build trust.
That will require making real commitments to consumers on transparency, privacy, reliability and security that are followed through consistently and verifiably.
And while no one knows what the future business models for AI will be, we can be certain that consumers do not want to be exploited by AI, secretly or otherwise.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Conversation.
Tuesday @ 9:47 pm
Jan. 20th, 2026 21:47alisxFRIEND: I saw you took about half of the plushies, but I couldn’t figure out why that half. Like, they’re a bit random to start with, but . . .
ME: We’ll I took the ones that were most meaningful. So the moths, my godmonster, Cthulhu, and Tim.
FRIEND: . . . that clears nothing up.