Connexion
Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts.
At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no conflict whatsoever with Trump charging up to $100,000 monthly for instant API access to Truth Social posts that often break news from his administration.
Trump is the largest stakeholder and majority owner of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company that owns Truth Social, and the value of the API access comes largely from Trump’s role as president.
Apple continues to face backlash for removing ICE-tracking apps like ICEBlock from the App Store, a drastic step that seemed to be triggered by Trump administration claims that the apps endangered officers.
According to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Apple has no evidence to support claims that apps raised safety concerns. Instead, the lawmaker accused Apple of using immigrant deaths with no connection to the apps to justify censoring Americans who have the right to record ICE activity.
It appears that Apple is “working with the government to violate its customers’ First Amendment rights to record and report on the activities of their own government,” Raskin said in a letter to Apple sent Monday, CNN reported.
It’s not illegal to send an email telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials that their actions will haunt them, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, granting a preliminary injunction that blocks ICE from threatening to prosecute a critic for protected speech.
Back in January, David Streever sent a scathing three-paragraph email to then-acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons. Outraged by the killings of two Minnesota protestors against ICE, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Streever told Lyons that he was a “monstrous human being” who will eat himself “alive with shame” for defending officers who shot people who posed no threat and had no weapons. Comparing Lyons to an infamous high-ranking Nazi cop, Streever predicted that “even Trump” would one day turn on Lyons for defending the “obvious” slayings of Americans.
David Streever's email to ICE.
Credit:
via FIRE
“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever wrote. “You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
Larry Bushart, a retired Tennessee cop who was jailed for 37 days for posting a Trump meme on Facebook, won an $835,000 settlement Wednesday after suing the county and sheriff that he said jailed him in order to censor him.
In a press release, Bushart's legal team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) confirmed that Bushart agreed to dismiss his lawsuit in exchange for the "substantial settlement."
"I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated," Bushart said. "The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family."
On Wednesday, Afroman won a widely watched defamation lawsuit that seven cops filed after the rapper made music videos mocking them for conducting a 2022 raid of his home that resulted in no charges and no marijuana found.
Videos for songs like "Lemon Pound Cake," "Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera," and "Will You Help Me Repair My Door" used real footage from the raid, pulling from security camera footage and videos shot by Afroman's wife. Cops from the Adams County Sheriff's Office alleged they were humiliated and received death threats after the videos went viral.
Accusing Afroman of defamation, cops individually sought damages as high as $1.5 million. But Afroman's lawyer, David Osborne, argued this was a clear-cut First Amendment case. At trial, Afroman testified that cops had no one to blame for the reputational damage but themselves, arguing that "if they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit," The New York Times reported.
Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.
xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.
The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.
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