#DoJ

[aunti-christ-ine]

It's time for "MAGA" to rename itself

"MAD"

= Make America Dead❗️💀

Resignations have reduced the capacity of DOJ and FBI units that could help thwart an Iranian attack, former officials say. Trump administration officials say the units remain strong.

June 23, 2025, 2:00 AM MST / Updated June 23, 2025, 5:32 AM MST

By David Rohde

As the United States faces possible retaliatory attacks from Iran, a “brain drain” in top Justice Department and FBI national security and counterterrorism units could reduce their ability to prevent potential terror and cyberattacks from Tehran, according to six former senior DOJ and FBI officials.

Staff levels in the DOJ National Security Division’s Law and Policy section have dropped by as much as two-thirds, two former DOJ officials said. Its counterintelligence and export control section — which tracks foreign espionage in the U.S. by Iran and other foreign rivals — has lost about a third of its workforce, the former DOJ officials said.

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.

The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."

-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024

[my-midlife-crisis]

"How dare the judges get in Trump's way?"

That's how the government works...

It's called checks and balances

Your president has broken multiple amendments of the constitution and the judges are stopping him.

Trump is breaking the law.

again

and again

and again

The U.S. Constitution's checks and balances system, designed to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful, was created by the FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE UNITED STATES. While the idea of separating powers and implementing checks and balances had been explored by philosophers like Montesquieu, it was the Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison, who incorporated and refined these principles into the Constitution.

[political-us]

AOC: Know your rights

[reality-detective]

The DOJ files charges against New York, Gov. Hochul, AG James, and DMV Commissioner Schroeder over immigration policies. 🤔

[jangillman]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being "a monopolist" and acting "as one to maintain its monopoly." The judge concluded that key to Google's monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.

Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and quer y data. The technical term for this is "apocalyptically stupid." Releasing Google's click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.

Largely theoretical answers like "differential privacy" are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google's click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it's unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms' search engines.

Google only retains 18 months' worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.

(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your "how do I get an abortion in my red state" query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the "sought an illegal abortion" label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

And just to be clear, there's other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google's search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it's a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google's data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:

https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/

This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that's been dropped. I think there's a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.

In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as "structural separation" – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn't, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you're out of business.

Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.

In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.

This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn't hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who's suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.

One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.

No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company's behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that's suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they're getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they're providing 51% of the value.

Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source of bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

In other words, I think the DOJ is onto something here. That said, the devil is – as always – in the details. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, rather than standing it up as its own competing business, things could go very wrong indeed.

Any company that buys Chrome will know that it only has a certain number of years before Google will be permitted to spin up a new browser, and will be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome over that short period. So a selloff could make Chrome exponentially worse than Google, which, whatever other failings it has, is oriented towards long-term dominance, not a quick buck.

But if Google is forced to spin Chrome out as a standalone business, the incentives change. Anyone who buys Chrome will have to run it as a functional business that is designed to survive a future Google competitor – they won't have another business they can fall back on if Google bounces back in five years.

There's a good history of this in antitrust breakups: both Standard Oil and AT&T were forced to spin out, rather than sell off, parts of their empire, and those businesses stood alone and provided competitive pressure. That is, until we stopped enforcing antitrust law and allowed them to start merging again – womp womp.

This raises another question: does any of this matter, given this month's election results? Will Trump's DoJ follow through on whatever priorities the current DoJ sets? That's an open question, but – unlike so many other questions about the coming Trump regime – the answer here isn't necessarily a nightmare.

After all, the Google antitrust case started under Trump, and Trump's pick for Attorney General, the credibly accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz, is a "Khanservative" who breaks with his fellow Trumpians in professing great admiration for Biden's FTC chief Lina Khan, and her project of breaking up corporate monopolies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-nominates-khanservative-matt

What's more, Trump is a landing strip for a stroke or coronary, which would make JD Vance president – and Vance has also expressed his approval of Khan's work.

Google bosses seem to be betting on Trump's "transactional" (that is, corrupt) style of governance, and his willingness to overrule his own appointees to protect the interests of anyone who flatters or bribes him sufficiently, or convinces the hosts of Fox and Friends to speak on their behalf:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-second-trump-administration

That would explain why Google capo Sundar Pichai ordered his employees not to speak out against Trump:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-memes-poke-fun-company-rules-political-discussion-2024-11

And why he followed up by publicly osculating Trump's sphincter:

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1854207788290850888

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

This is a daily reminder Elon Musk is a megalomanic oligarch who doesn't care about the people, he can and will play hell on government systems regardless of damage to others. It's why he brought Donald Trump out, you don't need a secret cabal to focus on the evil rich cabal is right in front of our eyes.

[onlytiktoks]

[porterdavis]

[gwydionmisha]

Exceptions for the life of the mother are always a lie. No life threatening situation ever will qualify because it's not about preserving life; it's about exerting control at part of their christo-fascist agenda.

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

The resignations are similar to the Nixon administration's Saturday Night Massacre, where two top Justice officials resigned rather than squashing the Watergate investigation.

[my-midlife-crisis]

Elon Musk vs MAGA

I've been looking for this.

Elon says that teaching Americans isn't enough to get a job with SpaceX or Tesla.

American Musk supporters are not enough

You are not enough for Elon Musk.

You aren't even worth training.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

Trump was asked whether he’d considered pardoning the nine Trump supporters convicted of conspiracy to kidnap Democrat, Gov. Whitmer, in 2020. “I’m gonna look at it. I will take a look at it. It’s been brought to my attention,” Trump said. A federal judge sentenced the ringleader of the group, Barry Croft Jr., to over 19 years in prison and handed Adam Fox, another key player, 16 years. The Department of Justice’s new pardon attorney Ed Martin Jr. said that he would give the case a “hard look,” comparing the convictions to those of the January 6 insurrectionists Trump pardoned upon entering office. If Trump pardons these nine convicted felons, it will send a message to his army of MAGA domestic terrorists — do whatever crimes you want, as long as you're harming Democrats.

[democracyunderground]

OCCUPY DEMOCRATS

BREAKING: Sixteen brave federal agents strike back against Donald Trump's corruption by filing lawsuits against his Department of Justice and FBI to stop his planned retaliation against them. MAGA world never saw this one coming... The agents are currently still working for the government but say that a review being conducted of those who worked on the January 6th insurrectionist cases is groundwork for retaliation against them. The agents unleashed their lawsuits right before the noon deadline that the FBI had to deliver responses to a 13-question survey about agents' works on the cases to the Justice Department. The survey asked agents whether or not they, conducted surveillance, collected evidence, arrested individuals, or testified in court. "The purpose for this list is to identify agents to be terminated or to suffer other adverse employment action," a lawsuit filed by nine of the agents states, slamming the "unlawful and retaliatory" action. "Plaintiffs reasonably fear that all or parts of this list might be published by allies of President Trump, thus placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons," it adds. A second lawsuit filed by the seven other agents states that this review is a "potential vigilante action by those who they were investigating." The agents are right to be suspicious. Donald Trump is purging our government of anyone who respects the rule of law while simultaneously staffing it with loyalist MAGA goons. This is a hostile takeover of America and it cannot be allowed to proceed uncontested.x Please like and share!