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Latest episodes
FTC asks if social media platforms should stop impersonation scam ads
The 2024 Impersonation Rule reaches the impersonator and not the company optimizing the ad — a gap the FTC frames in Coasean terms as an unpriced externality. The agency already tried to close it with a means-and-instrumentalities provision, dropped it in December 2024 after commenters objected that it came through the wrong procedural door, and has now re-asked the identical question through that door, five years after it started.
British Ministry of Defence hid 97 million records from Afghanistan inquiry
A statutory inquiry has no investigators of its own, so its whole evidentiary base is whatever the audited institution says it holds. The failure here is not a lie or a leak — it is 3 years of answers given without the archive being searched, from a department that apologised for exactly this in May 2024, and which only replied to the inquiry once a public hearing was listed.
DOJ Audit Reveals No Plan To Protect Judges From Commercial Data Brokers
The exposure is built entirely from commercially collected records rather than any breach, so there is no system to harden and no law to comply with — the auditors looked for a governing rule and found none, which is why an inspector general's concurrence is the only lever in the story.
FAA Cannot Detect GPS Spoofing In Real Time, GAO Report Finds
The finding is not that attacks happen. It is that the agency responsible has no instrument to observe one in progress, so detection is outsourced to pilot reports filed after landing, and every domestic count is therefore an estimate.
DHS Retaliation Complaints Surge But Only Coast Guard Findings Emerge
A complaint count measures who filed; a finding count measures what the system concluded. The components generating the most complaints produce no findings, and nearly all findings come from the one service already under sustained outside scrutiny.
HHS Failed To Include Cybersecurity Controls In 988 Suicide Hotline Contracts
The security obligations were supposed to live in two contracts. HHS wrote the standard and defined the oversight roles, then never carried the required control areas into the instruments that would have made them enforceable, so there was nothing to audit against.
AP sues to unseal immigration court records hidden by federal rule
Nothing here is sealed. Rule 5.2(c) does not hide the file; it relocates the public, making the record available only at the courthouse. The AP's sharp argument is that this is a CONTENT-BASED restriction — the trigger is the subject of the lawsuit, not the sensitivity of any document, so the identical page is remotely readable in a contract case and not in a removal case. Content-based means strict scrutiny. And the docket being made hard to reach is the first point at which anyone outside the executive branch reviews the case: immigration judges are DOJ employees and the BIA is appointed by the Attorney General.
Universal Music Sues DistroKid Over Unlicensed AI Music Pipeline
UMG is not fighting AI music — it settled with Udio, Warner settled with Suno, and the expanded Suno case moved toward partnership. UMG said outright this suit is not aimed at AI music that is clearly disclosed. The line being enforced is licensed machine music versus unlicensed machine music, and the defendant is the distributor, where the money changes hands. The legal engineering matters more than the damages: the copyright claim must clear the 1998 DMCA safe harbour, but the deceptive-trade-practices claim asks whether DistroKid told the market the truth about itself — a question the safe harbour was never written to answer.
New Zealand agencies ignored warnings about Phillips children hidden in bush
The system did not lack information. It received the warnings, the sightings, and an entire first disappearance it had already prosecuted — and routed each into a category that disposed of it. The first 19-day disappearance was filed as wasting police resources. The mother's warnings were filed as a parenting dispute. Her Victim Support application was declined on the basis that they were not victims of a crime. And concealment and isolation were not recognised in the Child Protection Protocol as forms of harm at all. The government's remedy is to add them — which is an admission that the category was missing.
Trump administration rescinds Endangered Species Act harm definition after Supreme Court shift
In 1995 the Supreme Court upheld this exact regulation 6-3 in Babbitt v. Sweet Home — under Chevron, holding it a PERMISSIBLE reading of the statute rather than the required one. Loper Bright (2024) overruled Chevron and replaced 'permissible' with 'the single best reading.' The agencies then rescinded the rule adopting Scalia's Sweet Home dissent. The dissent did not win by being reversed; it won because the standard of review changed underneath the majority. A ruling that an agency MAY read a statute a certain way is also a ruling that it NEED NOT — so the 1995 victory is precisely what made the 2026 repeal available.
VA Report Shows Severe Nurse Shortages But Does Not Measure Actual Vacancies
A 'severe shortage' under 5 C.F.R. 337.204 means an occupation is hard to fill and expressly does not indicate vacancies — a facility can report one with zero vacancies or a hundred. The statute (38 U.S.C. 7412) exists so the Secretary may consider special hiring authorities for those occupations. The number is a trigger for hiring flexibility, which is why 'no recommendations' is coherent rather than negligent. It is being read publicly as a casualty count, and it was never built to be one.
FBI Innovation Center Lacks Required Cost Estimate Despite 229 Million Dollar Contract
The independent government cost estimate exists for exactly one purpose: to give someone who was not in the room a number of their own to judge the price against. Without a contract-specific one documented at the time, and with the end-of-project disputes resolved in an undifferentiated lump-sum settlement, there is nothing to measure against at either end. The $0 in questioned costs is therefore not a finding that the money was well spent — it is a measurement that could not be taken.