The Bogosity Podcast, early and ad-free!
Become a subscriber at Patreon, SubscribeStar, or Discord.
Use the links at donate.bogosity.tv.
Welcome to the Bogosity Podcast for the week of December 7 2025,
the podcast that ain't chicken 'til it's lickin' good and fried.
This is your host, Shane Killian. Let's barbarize the News of the Bogus.
One of the cases we've been following for years is finally over,
specifically Fani Willis's RICO case against Donald Trump, which was lawfare and corruption from the word go.
The case was taken from her following allegations of malfeasance with her special prosecutor,
with whom she was having an affair and paying hundreds of thousands of
dollars of taxpayer money so he could take her on cruises.
Hey, remember when they asked her about it on the stand,
and she said it's nothing unusual because every black woman has piles of cash in their homes?
Anyway...the courts took the case from her and left it to another prosecutor's office to pick up.
The one it went to was prosecutor Pete Skandalakis, who decided, quote:
"In my professional opinion, the citizens of Georgia are not served
by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years."
He said he ended the case, quote: "to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality."
He explained: "This entire case, from the initiation of the District Attorney's investigation in 2021 to the present,
is without precedent. A former President of the United States was indicted, along with 18 others,
in a RICO indictment unequalled in Georgia history for its sweeping, nationwide scope,
alleging 161 overt acts, 41 criminal counts, and 30 unindicted co-conspirators.
The District Attorney who initiated the investigation
was ordered to remove herself or her special assistant from the case.
It is not illegal to question or challenge election results.
Our nation's foundational principles of free speech and electoral scrutiny are rooted in this very freedom.
The State of Georgia is no stranger to such challenges.
In 2018, Ms. Stacy Abrams questioned the legitimacy of Brian Kemp's victory in the gubernatorial race.
Likewise, in 2020, many Republicans struggled to accept the reality
that President Donald J. Trump did not win the popular vote in Georgia or in other key states
and therefore lost the presidential race.
To this day, a significant number of individuals continue to reject that outcome."
Elections, he explained, are often contested, and really should be.
Georgia knows all about that, because we've covered several examples on this podcast over the years.
Funny how only the 2020 general election was completely flawless and had no problems whatsoever,
to the extent that claiming otherwise is a RICO violation.
"As a prosecutor, I am loath to use the criminal justice system
to pursue law-abiding citizens who, in good conscience and upon the advice of counsel,
were asked to perform certain tasks in connection with the litigation of an election challenge.
Attempting to criminalize the actions of these sixteen Republican Electors,
and the three in particular, is a path I oppose and will not pursue."
He explained that mostly we're talking about people following the advice of attorneys,
and if we're going to start prosecuting people when attorneys give them bad advice, we're all in trouble.
And if it is true that the attorneys gave them bad advice,
the remedy for that lies with their respective state bar associations.
"Never before, and hopefully never again, will our country face circumstances such as these.
The role of a prosecutor is not to satisfy public opinion or achieve universal approval;
such a goal is both unattainable and irrelevant to the proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
My assessment of this case has been guided solely by the evidence, the law, and the principles of justice."
You have the right to free speech.
You have the right to seek redress of grievances.
You have the right to peaceably assemble for that purpose.
And above all, you have the right to criticize a corrupt government
who engaged in one dirty trick after another to corrupt the votes
and make it so that Republican observers couldn't check them,
without deranged sub-IQ prosecutors harassing you for years in court
so they can enrich themselves at your and the taxpayers' expense.
I would hope all that would be obvious by now!
Presenting: the greatest game this side of Yuggoth!
You are H.P. Lovecraft's cat, and your name is Ni***
...Right. We can't say that on a podcast. Anyway, that's the point: Your name is a joke to him.
So now, you are out for revenge!
Using the Necronomicon, you come to the present day to buy a gun
to go vanquish him once and for all.
But the Necronomicon is devious, and it summoned Lovecraft's monsters as well.
Now, in a crumbling world, you must fight for the revenge you seek.
Fight monsters. Gain allies. Buy guns and armor for yourself and your team.
Defeat the bosses of each level.
Then get your revenge against Lovecraft himself.
Play Lovecraft's Cat! The link is at cat.bogosity.tv.
Yeah, we're doing cat.bogosity.tv, not...that other one.
What, you want me to get kicked off the Internet or something?
It's actually kind of exciting to see a case we've been covering from the very start go up to the Supreme Court.
They heard oral arguments this week in Cox v. Sony,
the case that will determine whether entire households, entire businesses,
entire regions can be cut off because some corporation claims that one person is pirating.
Funny...You'd think that'd be a no-brainer!
Yet, a jury ordered the ISP to pay $1 billion to the music labels for contributory liability to Internet piracy.
Or, not to put too fine a point on it: they were ordered to pay $1 billion for doing nothing.
So this case is going to determine whether or not ISPs should be unpaid enforcers for the RIAA,
disconnecting customers solely on their say-so.
For an hour and 40 minutes, they heard from Cox, from the federal government
who also thought what happened was silly, and from the record labels.
Starting with Cox's attorney, E. Joshua Rosenkranz.
No word on who his law partner is, or if his law firm is called Rosenkranz and Guildenstern.
(Oh, come on—you know I had to!)
ROSENKRANZ: The consequences of Plaintiff's position are cataclysmic.
There is no surefire way for an ISP to avoid liability,
and the only way it can is to cut off the Internet, not just for the accused infringer,
but for anyone else who happens to use the same connection.
That could be entire towns, universities, or hospitals.
Turning Internet providers into Internet police will wreak havoc with the essential medium
through which modern public engages in commerce and speech.
KILLIAN: There were three standards, the first being the "purpose" standard.
Liability requires proof of affirmative intent to foster piracy,
and that does not mean ignoring harassing emails from screeching cartel members!
Even if you can believe their claims, that's not enough.
There needs to be something else, such as advertising the illegal uses. As Gorsuch explained:
GORSUCH: The statute doesn't mention secondary liability, so we should be cautious.
And in fact, in Central Bank of Denver,
we refused to infer secondary liability in a statute that had no explicit cause of action.
But here we are. Sony did it, so okay.
The narrowest version of that requires purpose.
And we've said that many times: Knowledge isn't enough.
KILLIAN: And Kavanaugh agreed:
KAVANAUGH: On the word purpose, I think that's going to be key, and it's kind of a slippery word in this context.
Mere knowledge alone cannot show purpose.
KILLIAN: The second is that the Internet is a passive utility.
Just because Internet access enabled them to pirate isn't enough.
They couldn't do it without power, either.
What if they had gone to the power company and told them to switch off the power for the infringers,
since the kilowatt-hours they were given enabled them to pirate?
That would be pretty silly, wouldn't it?
The Internet has become a vital utility for everyday communication, banking, commerce,
speech and expression, even vital activity such as health care.
Should an entire hospital be cut off just because some of their patients used their Wi-Fi to engage in piracy?
That sounds like what the RIAA is wanting to happen!
Universities were another example that was brought up,
which prompted Alito to say to Paul Clement, attorney for the record labels:
ALITO: What is an ISP supposed to do with a university account that has, let's say, 70,000 users.
What is the university supposed to do, in your view?
CLEMENT: The university is supposed to, under those circumstances,
the ISP is supposed to sort of have a conversation with the university.
Now, the ISP's policy to the university says you can't use this service
or allow your service to be used for copyright infringement. So that's—
ALITO: So, yeah, all right, the ISP tells the university,
look, you know, a lot of your 50,000 students are infringing my copyright. Do something about it.
Now, the university then has to try to determine which particular students are engaging in this activity.
And let's assume it can even do that.
And so then it knocks out a thousand students.
And then another thousand students are going to pop up doing the same thing.
I just don't see how it's workable at all.
KILLIAN: And the third is the Twitter defense.
In Twitter v. Taamneh, the Supreme Court ruled that Twitter (now X)
cannot be held liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act for aiding and abetting terrorism
just because they failed to prevent terrorists from accessing their platform.
An ISP, being much more passive than a social media website,
should prevail under this standard.
Gorsuch pretty much agreed:
GORSUCH: Well, a cautionary tale maybe to take account of where patent law is,
that Sony relied on in part, for example. I mean, in Central Bank of Denver, as you well know,
the Court refused to imply any aiding-and-abetting liability under the Securities Exchange Act.
And, you know, so Sony sits in some tension with our law right there. Isn't that a flag on the field for us?
KILLIAN: Of course, Sotomayor was as stupid as always:
SOTOMAYOR: If I'm a gun dealer and I'm selling to someone who says to me, I'm going to kill my wife with this gun,
I think the common law would say, you knew what he was going to do with the gun. You joined in.
KILLIAN: And as usual, she doesn't understand even basic concepts of justice:
SOTOMAYOR: Meaning if you know that a particular location and someone in it is committing a crime
and you're supplying to that person and perhaps others, it doesn't matter what the others are doing.
KILLIAN: Wow! It doesn't matter what the others are doing!
Just punish them all for the acts of the one!
SOTOMAYOR: There are things you could have done to respond to those fringers (sic),
and the end result might have been cutting off their connections,
but you stopped doing anything for many of them.
You didn't try to work with universities and ask them to start
to look at an anti-infringement notice to their students.
You could have worked with a multifamily dwelling and asked
the people in charge of that dwelling to send out a notice or to do something about it.
You did nothing. And in fact, Counselor, your client's sort of laissez-faire attitude
towards the respondents is probably what got the jury upset.
ROSENKRANZ: To your point, Your Honor, that we didn't work with universities, we most certainly did!
The first several steps, the 13 steps, are all about contacting them,
cutting them off, which we did 67,000 times in the course of this period.
That's thousands every month, and third, the program stopped infringement
by 98% of the people who were accused of infringement. That is not nothing, Your Honor.
KILLIAN: And just in case you were wondering if Jackson would be any better:
JACKSON: Suppose I come to you and I want to buy your services.
I tell you that I, as a customer, am addicted to infringing on the internet. I've been sued before.
I know what I'm doing is illegal, but I just keep doing it.
And not only that, Cox, based on where I live, is my only option.
At my new house, it's the only way that I can get Internet services.
If Cox sells to me, knowing all of that, you still say no liability for secondary liability in that situation.
ROSENKRANZ: That's correct, Your Honor. The facts you recited are facts that would make it totally plausible
and, in fact, would invite the Plaintiffs here to sue that infringer directly.
They have recourse in a situation like that.
The common law also requires a culpable act, not the equivocal act of selling to everyone on equal terms.
Smith and Wesson says that, and Twitter says that, too.
KILLIAN: Yeah! Go after the people committing the act, not basically innocent bystanders.
Fortunately, Clement was given a pretty good pounding by Gorsuch:
GORSUCH: Even under your standard, that's not what the Fourth Circuit did, right?
It didn't say, did you have specific knowledge of individual users who are infringing,
and did you do something special with regard to them such that you were
substantially certain that you know that they would, in fact, infringe?
We'd have to reverse under your standard, too!
- CLEMENT: I don't think so. - GORSUCH: The one you're peddling today.
That's not what they held.
CLEMENT: Well, I think you and I just read this Fourth Circuit case differently.
I read the Fourth Circuit opinion by Judge Rushing to specifically say the
substantial certainty test is what's being applied and is what makes it—
GORSUCH: In gross. They applied it in gross.
And we've got an amicus brief from some intellectual property scholars that say that was wrong.
CLEMENT: The Fourth Circuit says that once you have knowledge that the same customer or address—
GORSUCH: No, no, not address, not address, because it could be a lot of people at the address.
The customer. And that analysis isn't what the Fourth Circuit did.
CLEMENT: I-I-I-I think that is the common law still. I don't think you need—
GORSUCH: I know a group of people, I know somebody in this group of people was involved, and I did nothing?
That's not substantial certainty. And we have two options.
One, we could take the additional step and say that,
because this is an implied-ish cause of action, we're going to construe it very narrowly.
The other alternative would be to say it's purpose, and reverse and remand.
And Mr. Malcolm invited you to say whether you thought you could prevail under that standard below.
CLEMENT: Well, obviously I'd prefer door number three, but I would also prefer—
GORSUCH: I understand door number—
CLEMENT: Whatever the standard is, I'd prefer a chance to pursue that,
and I would think even under purpose, there has to be room
for treating somebody that says "F— the DMCA!" differently
from somebody that tries their level best to comply, and doesn't.
KILLIAN: Wow! So a direct attack on freedom of speech!
That was the quiet part out loud!
The only difference he specified was that the person was or wasn't saying "F— the DMCA."
That is absolute content-based censorship.
I would love to have seen a video so I could see the look on Gorsuch's face then.
Did he and the other justices pick up on that?
You use conduct to infer intent. You cannot use protected expression to impose liability.
Fortunately, even the best case scenario for the labels doesn't seem to be giving them what they want.
Even the more corporatist judges were arguing for a more moderate viewpoint.
At the same time, although I hope the majority finds for common law and freedom of speech,
I'm never all that hopeful where the Supreme Court is involved.
After all, this is the same court that, earlier this year,
said that blatantly unconstitutional content-based identity verification was a-okay!
But even going a little bit towards the record labels means contributory liability for infrastructure.
So where would it end? The phone company? Cloud hosting? VPN? Discord server admins? Tesla charging stations?
It all becomes fair game if this decision goes the wrong way.
I'm gonna give Rosenkranz the last word:
ROSENKRANZ: If Plaintiffs want to bring an action that is based upon specific known infringers,
they can bring that case under their rule against ISPs.
This Court cannot affirm on that basis, though, and neither can the courts below.
Let's talk about how this case was tried.
There is no proof of any specific known infringer that is a human being
who actually did any of the things that some of these hypotheticals spun out.
Even if you focus on households,
there is no way to disaggregate precisely for the reason that Justice Gorsuch points out:
Plaintiffs tried a case in gross as to 57,000 subscribers, no individual circumstances.
Plaintiffs never tried to disaggregate in any way as to the people who they see,
who they claim can sustain this verdict.
You can't infer liability from the blank page, and Congress said not to do that.
The DMCA is also no panacea. ISPs have no certainty that they will keep the safe harbor.
A lay jury decides whether an ISP has acted reasonably and whether terminations are appropriate.
Justice Alito asked, what is an ISP supposed to do when confronted with a university?
My friend gave an answer: Have a conversation.
That's a terrible answer from the perspective of the company
that is trying to figure out what its legal obligations are facing crushing liabilities.
I have an answer: How about a conversation with
the ISPs where they talk about how to work out things together?
Maybe they kick in a little money.
Now, they won't get billion-dollar verdicts, but if they believe that the programs that Cox
and others have aren't satisfactory, they can design better programs and help pay for them.
Over in Spain, we're also having a fight for the right to have basic Internet infrastructure.
DDoS-Guard is an infrastructure company which provides both hosting services and DDoS protection.
They're claiming that Spain's football association LaLiga
has become a de facto regulator with the authority to interfere with Internet infrastructure.
Let's start with the European Commission's report
as to whether its Recommendation of May 2023 had had any effect against pirate streaming.
It hadn't.
So LaLiga says the only solution is to do more of what didn't work before.
This, despite LaLiga claiming to have reduced piracy of its content by 60%, under existing legislation.
LaLiga was given authority by the Spanish courts to block almost any site or service
facilitating access to pirate streams.
When Cloudflare pushed back, LaLiga responded by blocking Cloudflare access by Spanish ISPs.
And, of course, that ends up blocking Cloudflare access by all of the legitimate users as well.
So this is of great interest to DDoS-Guard, which provides roughly the same kind of service.
They worry that, in the event LaLiga trains their sights on them, they would have no legal recourse.
Their Head of Web Application Protection, Dmitry Nikonov, said, quote:
"This is happening right now, in the fall of 2025, and the scale of this phenomenon is astonishing.
It seems LaLiga is beyond control.
LaLiga can essentially apply a 'piracy' mask to entire ranges of addresses,
often affecting endpoints that are not directly related to illegal broadcasts."
So now football matches have become the pretext for large-scale censorship,
and Nikonov worries about LaLiga becoming a private regulator.
Quote: "If the football league has such powers today,
then nothing will stop other major players from acquiring them tomorrow.
We're talking about media holdings, streaming companies,
and corporations for whom content is not entertainment, but a source of profit.
Under the guise of copyright protection, a tool is emerging that allows commercial players
to directly influence the accessibility of parts of the internet, bypassing legal proceedings."
He says that their unchecked power forces them to implement DNS and BGP filtering.
BGP is like the traffic lights of the Internet.
Give them power over the traffic lights and they can stop anyone they want.
Of course, they also stop everyone else on that road, regardless of where they want to go!
Quote: "As a result, telecom operators are becoming the enforcers of state anti-piracy policies.
What we're facing is no longer an isolated failure,
but a testing of a model that sets a precedent for new internet governance—
a private corporation, through the regulator, gains de facto access to leverage over network infrastructure."
Which is exactly what we're hoping to avoid with the Cox ruling, as explained in the previous segment.
And a ruling the wrong way would make us just like Spain, where, quote:
"Anyone who gains access to regulatory levers
automatically gains power over the infrastructure used by millions of people.
In other words, the internet today is no longer a distributed network,
but a set of control points, each of which becomes a juicy target."
A target that, sooner or later, will become pointed at you.
And now it's time to premedicate this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is still around, and yes, she's still blaming everyone else for her own failings.
She spoke at an event for the Israeli newspaper Hayom about misinformation—
i.e., stuff on the Internet she doesn't agree with.
She remains utterly convinced that she would be president if the voters stopped listening to social media
and listened only to the traditional, credentialed media experts.
She also says that the reason why so many young people, even Jewish people,
have turned against Israel over the Gaza war is all the fault of TikTok.
HILLARY: That our students—smart, well-educated, young people from our own country, from around the world—
where were they getting their information?
They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok.
That's a serious problem. It's a serious problem for democracy, whether it's Israel or the United States,
and it's a serious problem for our young people.
More than 50% of young people in America get their news from social media.
So, just pause on that for a second.
They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up,
some of them not at all representing what they claim to be, uh, showing, and that's where they get their information.
KILLIAN: Of course, we were following the Russian interference story from the start
and could easily tell it was bogus,
even just from listening to the legacy media and not the socials.
It also turns out that foreign governments influencing social media
just wasn't as big a thing as they made it out to be.
They weren't doing anywhere near as much of it as Hillary and her compadres were claiming,
and what they were doing wasn't all that effective.
Now she's saying that the reason people aren't all gung-ho behind
Israel's absolute slaughter of Gaza is because of TikTok.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around:
Maybe young people aren't falling for the lies anymore, and that's being reflected in social media.
She just can't handle the thought of people not just blindly agreeing with an interventionist foreign policy.
She just can't handle the thought of a whole large segment of the population being for peace.
She just can't handle the thought of people not trusting the news media once again,
after they lied about Iraq, lied about Afghanistan, lied about every other war.
And in addition, lied about Russian election interference,
lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, and so many other things we've covered.
Yes, there's a lot of misinformation on the socials, but there's also a metric tonne of it on the legacy media!
In fact, that's given this very podcast a lot of material!
But the great thing about the Internet is, everyone gets a say.
If you see something that you believe is wrong, counter it.
The marketplace of ideas has always proven itself far superior to authoritarian propaganda.
No, the reason why Hillary's upset is that her side's losing and she knows it.
On the socials, you can't stop the images of devastation from Gaza.
You can't stop the images of starving and dying children.
You can't stop the doctors and emergency responders
from telling people of the horrible things they've seen Israeli forces do.
Actually, in my experience, all I see on TikTok are cat videos, clips from celebrities I've never heard of,
students recording each other in embarrassing situations,
and AI-generated women of unrealistic proportions.
Hell, I did a search for Gaza and only came up with clips from PBS, CNN, and Reuters!
But it's always the same: the biggest manipulators whine the loudest about other people manipulating you.
So all of that makes Hillary this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
And now let's hyperultraconglomerationalisticalify this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
As if the UK hasn't done enough to embarrass itself lately,
like arresting a guy for using a gun legally in the US as soon as he got back home,
now they're ramping up the immensely unpopular and inaccurate
facial recognition systems we've covered a couple of times before.
The UK Home Office published a 33-page document
detailing how they're going to implement facial recognition
and other, quote: "biometric and inferential technologies."
They complain about the common law rules making it
too difficult for them to use the tools, quote: "at significantly greater scale."
Yeah, maybe you should stop and think about why it does that.
They're calling it "the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching"
and brag that it goes beyond face matching, as if that's something people would like.
Last year, the Home Office spent £12.6 million on facial recognition,
£2.8 million on national live facial recognition systems,
and is allocating a further £6.6 million for the following year.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, let them have it, quote:
"For our streets to be safer the government need to focus their resources on real criminals
rather than spending public money turning the country into an open prison
with surveillance of the general population.
Facial recognition surveillance is out of control,
with the police's own records showing over seven million innocent people in England and Wales
have been scanned by police facial recognition cameras in the past year alone.
Live facial recognition could be the end of privacy as we know it.
With the government now threatening to introduce mandatory ID cards with our facial biometrics on them too,
we are hurtling towards an authoritarian surveillance state that would make Orwell roll in his grave."
The Home Office bragged that this was the biggest police innovation since DNA. Quote:
"But we would never accept DNA checkpoints across our high streets
and nor should we accept widespread face recognition checkpoints,
treating us all like criminals in a constant line up."
Carlo mentions the victims of crime and other vulnerable people
who are often harassed by police due to the technology,
such as a community worker they wrongly stopped and questioned for half an hour.
"If the government intends to take the public's views in this consultation seriously,
they should immediately stop the police's widespread use of facial recognition surveillance pending the outcome
but instead they have just funded a major expansion of these cameras across our towns and cities.
Laws in Europe protect the public against facial recognition mass surveillance,
but Britain is an outlier in the democratic world with the public now watched by these cameras
and treated like suspects on an almost daily basis."
Libertarians often claim that our Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper,
but at least paper offers you some resistance against the tide of increasing surveillance.
The UK is an example of what happens when you don't even have that much,
even when the system is massively unpopular.
So all of that makes IngSoc—uh, I mean, the UK this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
Well, that wraps up this "I trust the jester's reputation is based
upon many years of accomplishment" edition of the Bogosity Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please go to donate.bogosity.tv for several ways to support,
and discord.bogosity.tv to join the discussion.
Subscribe at the Discord, Patreon, or SubscribeStar and you can listen early and ad-free.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, here's a quote from William Douglas:
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector
will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security,
to law and order and the like."
The Bogosity Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
4.0 International license.