Patrick McKenzie

I was following along as this was happening and what was happening was much worse than I understood to be happening.

An example of something like, as we were growing up as children, would you ever think that the United States federal government would tell, I believe it was the state of Missouri,

Hey, you have town halls where like citizens can come in and speak their mind and advocate for their policy preferences.

And you probably have a civics class and talk about like the First Amendment and things.

Yeah.

Someone said something we don't like in a particular town hall.

Take down the recording from YouTube.

That happened.

That is a violation of the Constitution of the United States.

That is against everything in the traditions and laws and culture of the United States.

That is outrageous.

And yet it happened.

And we have not repudiated the notion of using tech as cat's paws or using, in some cases, this is like literally written in the decision, by the way, which I would urge everyone to read.

There was an individual in a non-governmental organization which was collaborating with the governmental organizations in doing this, which said, to get around, I'm not quoting exactly,

To get around legal uncertainty, comma, including very real First Amendment concerns, comma, in our ability to do this, rather than doing it in the government directly, we are outsourcing it to a bunch of college students who we have hired under the auspices of this program.

Like...

What?

Like, one, just as a dangerous professional here, you've violated the character from The Wire, Stringer Bell.

Stringer Bell's dictum on the wisdom of taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.

But you literally wrote that down in an email, right?