rj

Today's links

• Disenshittification Nation: How Canada can defend itself from Trump, make billions of dollars, and build a new, global, good internet.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Project Blue Sky"; O'Reilly v Graham on inequality; Big Pharma's worst nightmare; Dissipation of rents; Shoelace v Ming vases; "Diviner's Tale": Great Humungous Snow Pile; Trudeau signs Harper's trade deal; On Comity (pts 1 & 2); What's that dingus called?
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Disenshittification Nation (permalink)

Yesterday, I gave the keynote address at the 2026 Digital Government Leaders Summit in Ottawa, Canada – an invitation only for CIOs, CTOs and senior technical personnel at Canadian federal ministries.

It was an honour to give this talk, and the organizers at the office of the CIO of the Government of Canada were kind enough to give me permission to post the transcript:

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Like all the best Americans, I am a Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for more than two decades, I flatter myself that I am still steeped in our folkways, and so as is traditional at events like this, I would like to begin by apologising.

I'm sorry.

I'm really sorry.

I know that at a tech event, you expect to hear from a speaker who will come up and tell you how to lose hundreds of billions of dollars building data-centres for the money-losingest technology in human history, a technology so wildly defective that we've had to come up with new, exotic words to describe its defects, like "hallucination." A technology that will never recoup the capex already firehosed on – let alone the trillions committed to it – and whose only possible path to glory is to somehow get so good that it makes millions of people unemployed.

But don't worry: you can't make the word-guessing program into a "superintelligence" by shoveling more words into it. That's like betting that if you keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will eventually give birth to a locomotive.

So I don't have any suggestions for you today for ways to lose billions of dollars. I don't have any ideas for how to destroy as many Canadian jobs as possible, I don't even have any ideas to make Canada more dependent on US tech giants.

No, all I have for you today is a plan to make Canada tens of billions of dollars, by offering products and services that people want and will pay for, while securing the country's resiliency and digital sovereignty, and winning the trade war, and setting the American people free, and launching our tech sector into a stable orbit for decades.

So once again, I'm sorry. So, so sorry.

I want to start by telling you a tariff story. It's not the story that started last year. It's a story that goes all the way back to the early 2000s. Indeed, the very start of this story dates back to 1998.

It starts in Washington, in October, 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a big, gnarly bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA) into law. Section 1201 – the "anti-circumvention clause" – of the DMCA establishes a new felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for anyone who bypasses an "access control" while modifying a digital system.

These penalties apply irrespective of why you're making that modification, and they apply even if the device you're modifying is your own property. Which means that if the manufacturer decides you shouldn't be able to do something with your digital device, well, you can't do it. Even if it's yours. Even if the thing you want to do is perfectly legal.

Right from the start, it was clear that this law was a bad idea. It was an enshittifier's charter. Once you ban users from modifying their own property, you leave them defenceless. The manufacturer can sell you a gadget and then push an over-the-air update that degrades its functionality, and then demand that you pay a monthly "subscription" fee to get that functionality back.

This is a law purpose-built for anyone who aspires to graduate from the Darth Vader MBA, where the first and only lesson is, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

Immediately upon the passage of this bill, two things happened: first, American tech companies started to rip off the American public, taking advantage of the fact that it was now a crime to disenshittify your own property; and second, the US Trade Representative went around the world in search of biddable public officials who could be flattered or bullied into bringing an anti-circumvention law onto their own country's lawbooks.

The US had to get all its trading partners to pass these laws, otherwise those countries' own tech companies would go into business selling tools to disenshittify America's defective tech exports: privacy blockers, jailbreaks, alternative clients, generic consumables, diagnostic tools, compatible parts and spares.

But if America could arm-twist its trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws, then those countries would shut down any tech entrepreneurs who posed a competitive threat to America's metastasizing, inbred tech giants, and the people in those countries would be easy pickings for America's tech giants as they plundered the world's cash and data.

Right from the start, the US Trade Rep targeted Canada for these demands. The only problem was that Canadians hated anti-circumvention law. We'd had a front row seat to all the ways that our American cousins were getting fleeced by their tech companies, and we had no desire to share their plight.

Plus, we've got some smart nerds here who could easily see themselves exporting very lucrative tools of technological liberation across the southern border. Hell, if we can supply America with reasonably priced pharmaceuticals through the mails, then we can surely sell them excellent anti-ripoff mods over the internet.

Paul Martin's Liberals took two runs at passing anti-circumvention law but failed hard. The architect of this project, a Toronto MP named Sam Bulte lost her seat over it, and the Liberal brand became so toxic in Parkdale-High Park that the seat flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Then it was Stephen Harper's turn. First, he tasked Jim Prentice with getting an anti-circumvention law through Parliament, and when Prentice failed, Harper turned to Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore with getting the ball over the line. Clement and Moore tried to rehabilitate the idea of anti-circumvention with a public consultation: "See? We're listening!"

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us wrote into the consultation to condemn the proposal. 53 Vichy nerds wrote in to support it.

Moore was clearly stung. Shortly after the consultation, he gave a keynote to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto, where he dismissed all 6,138 of us as "babyish…radical extremists."

Then Harper whipped his caucus and passed Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act, in 2012, pasting America's anti-circumvention law into our lawbooks. Now, I don't think that Moore and Clement were particularly motivated by their love of digital locks. Nor was Stephen Harper. Rather, they were under threat from the US Trade Representative, who told them that America would whack us with tariffs if we failed to arrange a hospitable environment for America's tech companies.

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but Trump whacked us with tariffs anyway. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep taking their orders. Indeed, you're a sucker if you do.

In the 15 years since we capitulated to America's policy demands, US Big Tech has grown too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.

To Canada's credit, we've tried a bunch of things to rein in Big Tech:

• We tried to get them to pay to link to the news (instead, they just blocked all Canadian news);

• We tried to get them to include Canadian content in their streaming libraries (they lobbied, sued and bullied their way out of it);

• We tried to make them pay a 3% tax, despite the fiction that all their profits are floating in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea (and they got Trump to terrify Carney into walking it back).

This is the "too big to jail" part. When a company is a couple orders of magnitude larger than your government, what hope do you have of regulating it? Back a couple years ago, when America's antitrust regulators were also riding Big Tech's ass, there was a chance that we could make a rule and they would help us make it stick.

But now that the CEOs of all the Big Tech companies personally gave the Trump campaign a million bucks each for a seat on the inauguration dais, and now that all the tech giants have donated millions to Trump's new Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House, and now that Apple CEO Tim Cook has assembled a gilded participation trophy for Trump on camera, we've got no hope of getting Big Tech to colour inside the lines.

So what are we to do?

Well, we could continue with our current response to the Trump tariffs. You know: retaliatory tariffs, where we make everything Canadians buy more expensive, because Canadians are famous for just loving it when their prices go up. This is a great way to punish Trump. It's like punching ourselves in the face as hard as we can, and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "ouch."

But there's another way: now that we're living with the tariffs we were promised we could avoid by passing an anti-circumvention law, why don't we get rid of that law? There is so much money waiting for us if we go into business disenshittifying America's defective tech products.

Take just one example: app stores. Apple takes 30 cents out of every dollar that an Apple user spends in an app. If your app tries to use another payment method, they'll turf it out of the App Store. And of course, iPhone owners can't replace Apple's app store with another one, because the iPhone has an "access control," so it's a crime to change your app store.

30% is an insane transaction rake. I mean, here in Canada, we make person-to-person payments for free. Visa – an enshittified monopolist if ever there was one – charges 3-5%. Apple charges Thirty. Percent.

Do you have any idea how lucrative this is? It is literally the most lucrative line of business Apple is in. It makes Apple more pure profit than any other line of business, even more than the $20b cash bribe Google pays them every year not to make a competing search engine. $20b is chump-change. Apple makes one hundred billion dollars a year on this racket.

They impose a 30% tax on the whole digital economy, and they get to self-preference. So if you want to sell ebooks or videos on an app, Apple charges you 30%, but when Apple sells ebooks and videos on its own apps, it doesn't charge itself 30%. And they get to structure the market. They can exclude any app they want, for any reason, and then no Apple customer in the world can have that app.

Last fall, Apple banned an app called "ICE Block." That's an app that warns you if there are ICE thugs nearby, so you can avoid getting kidnapped and sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp or shot in the face by a guy with a Waffen SS tattoo under his plate carrier and a mask over his nose. Apple classed ICE murderers as a "protected class" and yanked the app.

So imagine for a sec that Canada repealed Bill C-11, belatedly heeding the advice of those 6,132 people who wrote into James Moore and Tony Clement's consultation to warn them, basically, that this was going to happen. When that happens, some smart Waterloo grads, backed by some RIM money, can go into business making jailbreaking kits and app store infrastructure for iPhones, and they can sell these to everyone in the world who wants to operate their own app store, who wants to compete with Apple.

Offer the world a 90% discount on Apple's app tax, and you're talking about a ten billion dollar/year business. Maybe Canada will never have another RIM, but RIM had a tough business. They had to make hardware, which is risky and capital intensive. Legalize jailbreaking and we can let Apple make the hardware, and then we can cream off the hundred billion dollars in rents they book every year. That's a much better business to be in.

You know what Jeff Bezos said to a roomful of publishers when he started Amazon? "Your margin is my opportunity." But these guys are such crybabies. When they do it to us it's progress; when we do it to them, it's piracy.

I mean, come on. Elbows up, right? Move fast and break their things. Move fast and break kings.

You know all that stuff we failed to get Big Tech to do? Pay for news, put cancon in their streaming lineups? This is how we get it. We can't make Apple or Google or Netflix change their software. We can fine 'em, sure, but Trump will just order his judges not to issue court orders when we try to collect, and ban his banks from transferring the money.

In any game, the ref has to be more powerful than the players on the field. Otherwise, they'll do exactly what Big Tech has done to us: ignore our rulings and keep on cheating.

We don't have any hope of controlling what Big Tech does, but there is one thing we have total, absolute control over: what we do. We don't have to let American companies make use of our courts to shut down Canadian companies that disenshittify their defective products. The laws of Canada are under total and final Canadian control. Repeal Bill C-11, legalize jailbreaking, and we'll unshackle our technologists and entrepreneurs, and sic 'em on those subpar American products.

Meta takes the news out of its apps? Let 'em! We'll just start selling a multiprotocol alt-client, one that merges your Facebook, Insta, Twitter, Linkedin, Bluesky, and Mastodon feeds, blocks all the ads, blocks all the tracking, and puts the news back in your feed.

Netflix won't put Canadian media in their library? Fine! We'll start selling an alt client that lets Canadians search and stream from all the services they subscribe to, and adds in a PVR so you can record your favourite shows to watch later, or archive against the day that the streaming company ditches them. A video recorder would handily delete Amazon Prime's grinchiest scam, where all the Christmas specials move from the free tier to $3.99 rentals in November, and go back into the free tier in March. Just record the kids' most beloved Christmas specials in July and bring 'em out in December.

Think about this for a second: we uninvented the VCR. The VCR, one of the most popular, transformative technologies in modern history. A wildly profitable technology, too. Once all the video went digital, and once all the digital video threw in an "access control" that blocked recording, it became a crime to record digital cable, satellite, or streaming, unless you used the service's own PVR, which won't let you tape some shows, or skip ads, and which deletes your stored shows when the broadcaster decides you don't deserve to have them anymore.

It's not illegal to record a video stream, no more than it was illegal to record a TV show off your analog cable or broadcast receiver. The same fair dealing exemptions apply. But because it's illegal to bypass an access control, and the access control blocks recording, we uninvented the VCR. We made the VCR illegal. Not because Parliament ever passed a law banning VCRs, but because our anti-circumvention law allows dominant corporations to simply decide that certain conduct that they disprefer should no longer occur.

With Bill C-11, we've created "felony contempt of business model." In living memory, video recording changed the world and made billions of dollars. Today, we've all lost our video recorders. But we have more reason than ever to want a video recorder; to pay for a video recorder. There's fantastic amounts of money just sitting there on the table, money we've prohibited our entrepreneurs from making, in order to prevent the US from hitting us with the tariffs that they've just hit us with.

Let's be clear here: no one has the right to a profit. If you've got a business that sucks, and I make it not suck anymore, and your customers start paying me instead of you, well, that sounds like a you problem to me. I mean, does the Canadian government really want to decide which desirable products can and can't exist?

Look, I've mainlined Tommy Douglas since I was in red diapers, but that sounds pretty commie, even to me.

Which brings me to Canada's own sclerotic, monopoly-heavy commercial environment. After all, Canada is two monopolists and a mining company in a trenchcoat Which is not to say that our oligarchs are weak. They love to throw their weight around. I guess owning an entire maritime province can go to your head.

Will any of these guys step up to cape for America's tech giants? Do any of them benefit from our voluntary decision to let America walk all over us? Not really. But a little, at the margins. Guys like Ted Rogers make a lot of money by making us rent set-top boxes for our cable, which lock out recorders. Re-invent the VCR and Ted Rogers might have to sell his ivory-handled back-scratcher collection.

But let him squawk! He can afford the loss, and lest we forget, Ted Rogers made his second fortune renting us video cassettes to stick in our VCRs. When he did it, it was progress. If we do it to him, that's not piracy.

Man, there is so much money to be made by becoming the disenshittification nation. It's not just payments or video recorders. One of the main uses of access controls is blocking generic consumables, like inkjet ink. Parliament never made a law saying that people who buy a printer from HP have to buy their ink from HP, too. But because we made it illegal to bypass an access control, and because HP uses access controls to block generic ink, it's a felony to use cheap ink in your own printer.

The cartel of four giant inkjet companies know they have us trapped, and they have monotonically raised and raised and raised the price of ink, so that today, printer ink is the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit. At $10,000 per gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery lists with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.

Some smart Canadian technologists could buy every make and model of every printer, and prepare a library of jailbreaks that works across every one, and keep it up to date with every new software update as soon as it's pushed. Everyone in the world who wants to refill ink cartridges or manufacture generics could pay that company $25/month for access to the jailbreaking library and for support if a customer ran into a problem.

Every manic entrepreneur running a corner store with a Bitcoin ATM, knife-sharpening and Amazon parcel dropoff could add inkjet ink to their line of business. Multiply every guy with a folding table at a dry-cleaner who'll fix your phone or jailbreak your printer by $25/month, by 12 months/year, and you've got tens or hundreds of millions flowing into this country.

We would transform HP's billions into our millions, and the rest would be shared among the world's printer owners as a consumer surplus and freedom from a scummy rent-seeking racket.

There's more!

Every mechanic is paying $10,000 per manufacturer per year for the diagnostic tool that decrypts the messages on your car's CAN bus and turns your "check engine" light into an actual error, and you'd better bet your mechanic is passing that cost onto you. Canadian car hackers can buy every make and model of every car as it comes off the line, jailbreak it, and keep it jailbroken with every new over-the-air update, and sell every mechanic in the world a $50/month subscription to a bang up to date diagnostic tool.

The mechanic wins. The drivers win. Canada wins. The Big Three automakers eat dirt, which is fine. Looks like we're buying Chinese cars from now on, anyway, and Parliament never passed a law guaranteeing perpetual profitability to legacy automakers whose most innovative ideas consist of finding ways to rent you the accelerator pedal in your car, and new markets to sell the driving data they steal from you.

All kinds of devices can't be fixed because of our anti-circumvention law, Bill C-11. You've probably heard about the problems farmers have fixing their John Deere tractors. Farmers actually do the repairs on those tractors, installing the parts themselves, but the tractor's main computer will not activate those parts until the farmer pays a couple hundred bucks for a callout by a John Deere rep, who enters an unlock code that tells the tractor that John Deere got paid for this repair.

Farmers have been fixing their implements since prehistory. Since the invention of the plow.

Beamish is Europe's largest open-air museum, just outside of Newcastle. Here we'd call it a "pioneer village." They've rescued and relocated a whole Victorian village high street, an Edwardian colliery and workers' cottages, vehicles from all eras of British history, and they've got a farmhouse that sits on a Roman foundation.

That farmhouse has a forge. Because of course it does. Farmers have to be able to fix their stuff, because when the storm is coming, and you need to get the crops in, you can't wait for a service technician to find their way to the end of your lonely country road.

But John Deere has declared an end of history, and our Copyright Modernization Act let them do it. Farmers can't fix their tractors anymore, not because Parliament ever passed the "No Fixing Your Tractor Act." They didn't need to. They just passed an act that banned circumvention of access controls, which lets John Deere – and other rapacious American monopolists – conjure new felonies out of thin air. There's that "felony contempt of business model" again.

At this point you might be thinking, "Hold on a sec, didn't Trudeau whip his caucus to get a Right to Repair bill through Parliament in 2024?" You're right, he did: Bill C-244. It lets anyone fix anything…unless they have to bypass an access control in order to make the repair, in which case Bill C-11 makes that repair illegal. Canada's got a Right to Repair law that's big, bold, ambitious…and useless, a mere ornament, thanks to our anti-circumvention law, which we passed because the US promised us tariff-free access to US markets, a promise that the US has broken, and that we should never believe again.

Everything we've tried to do to make Canada safe for US tech exports has failed. They've failed because they're redistributive. We told them they could keep stealing money from our news companies so long as they gave some of it back. We told them they could keep stealing money from people who need to fix their property so long as they follow some rules. We told them they could keep stealing money from our market participants so long as they mixed some cancon in with their streaming libraries. Even our privacy laws are redistributive: sure, go on stealing Canadians' data, just promise to limit the ways you abuse it to a short list of permissible human rights violations.

You know what's better than redistribution? Predistribution. Rather than bargaining to recoup some of the value being stripmined from us, we can intervene technologically to prevent the theft in the first place: jailbreak our devices, abolish the app tax, block their monopoly ad insertions and replace them with open ad markets based on content, not surveillance, give users control over the media in their streaming libraries. Let Canadian businesses disenshittify our phones, TVs, tractors, cars and ventilators so anyone can fix them.

Ask any economist and they'll tell you that the very best strategy is to have an open, fair system in the first place. Rather than tolerating and even enshrining unfairness in the system, and then begging the beneficiaries of that unfairness to dribble a few crumbs to the hungry victims at their feet.

Perhaps all of this is unconvincing to you. Maybe you're not interested in our digital rights. Maybe you're not excited by the prospect of turning America's trillions into Canada's billions. Well, don't worry, I've got something for you, too: national security.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies or trading partners, it only has rivals and adversaries. He's also made it clear that he cannot be mollified. Any concessions we make to him will be treated as a sign of weakness, and an invitation to demand more. Give him an inch, he'll take a kilometer.

Give him an inch, he'll take Greenland.

This is undeniably scary, because Trump has lots of non-kinetic options for pursuing his geopolitical aims. First among them is attacking his adversaries through his tech companies. He's already started tinkering with this. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump went through the roof, and Microsoft obliged him by shutting down the court's access to its documents, emails, calendars and address books. They bricked the court.

Now, I should say here that Microsoft denies that they shut down the court to please Trump. They say it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a "he-said/Clippy-said" dispute between the human rights defenders at the ICC and the convicted monopolists at Microsoft, I know who I believe. What's more, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-centre. And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's happening right now.

Trump has demonstrated that he will both bully and bribe US companies into doing his bidding. Cross him and he'll put extra tariffs on the inputs you need to import from abroad, he'll take away your key workers' visas and deport them, he'll smack you with pretextual antitrust investigations, and sue you in his personal capacity.

But if you capitulate to him, he'll give you no-bid government contracts, and hand you billions to provide surveillance gear and prison camps to help with his programme of ethnic cleansing. The tech companies are up to their eyeballs in Trump's authoritarian takeover of the US. There's no daylight between Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other US tech companies and the Trump regime.

You can be certain that if – when! – Trump orders these companies to shut down a government ministry (perhaps your ministry) or a corporation (perhaps your corporation) that they will do so.

Everyone in the world is waking up to this. In the EU, they've just created a new "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar, and they're busily funding the "Eurostack," a set of open, auditable replacements for US tech silos that can run on EU-based data-centres.

But they're about to hit a wall. Because it doesn't matter how great those Eurostack services are. If you can't scrape, virtualize and jailbreak US Big Tech apps, so that you can exfiltrate your data, logs, file histories and permissions, no government ministry or large company can do that work by hand. It will challenge many households, who have entrusted US tech's walled gardens with their financial data, family photos, groupchats, family calendars, and other structures that are not easily ported without cooperation from the tech giants. They are not going to cooperate with a mass exodus from their services. They will do everything they can to impede it.

Building the Eurostack without legalizing circumvention is like building housing for East Germans in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how cool those apartments are, they're gonna sit empty until you tear down the wall.

And administrative software is just for openers. Remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine? These are permanently connected to John Deere's cloud, which is how the John Deere company was able to trace them to Chechnya, and how they were able to send an over-the-air kill signal to the tractor that permanently bricked them.

And yes, I'll freely admit that as a cyberpunk writer, this gives a little frisson of satisfaction. But if you only think about it for 10 seconds, you'll realize that this means that Deere can immobilize any tractor in the world, or pretty much every tractor in Canada (and the rest of our tractors are likely from Massey Ferguson, another US giant also in thrall to Trump that can brick its tractors over the air, too).

This is exactly the threat we were warned of if we let Huawei supply our 5G infrastructure. Remember that? That whole "Two Michaels" business that we got stuck in when we let the US convince us that Huawei was gonna install landmines in our technological infrastructure? Well, you know how the saying goes: "Every accusation is a confession."

But of course, China could brick the Chinese cloud-connected tech in Canada, like our solar inverters and batteries. The good news is that whether you're a US natsec hawk or a China natsec hawk, you have the same path out of this trap. Namely: repealing Bill C-11, and legalizing circumvention so that we can deke out the locked bootloaders on our infrastructure and install open, auditable, transparent firmware on them. Because that is an infinitely more reliable way to render your systems into a known-good state than arresting random executives from giant Chinese companies.

And the good news is, everyone else in the world wants this, too, because they're all facing the same risks as we are. So this isn't really a technological project, in the sense of having a bunch of duelling firms all competing to come up with their own proprietary answer to an engineering problem. It's more like a scientific project, in that we should have a commons, a git server filled with auditable, transparent, trustworthy drop-in code for whole classes of devices, from cars to TVs to smart speakers to ventilators to tractors to phone switches, that everyone contributes to and peer reviews.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in our science. No one gets to keep the math used to calculate the load stresses on the joists holding the roof over our head a secret. We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the characteristics of the alloys in those joists, or even the wires carrying electricity through the walls. We should not tolerate secrecy in how our digital infrastructure works, either.

After all, a modern building is just a fancy casemod for a bunch of computers. Take all the computers out of a hospital and it becomes a morgue. There's no secret medical science, and there should be no secret medical code, either.

So this is it. This is how we win. Trump has unwittingly recruited three armies to fight to end the enshittocene, the era in which all of our technology has turned to shit. There's the digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum since the 2000s); and then there's the entrepreneurs and investors (eager for a chance to turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions, making Canada into a global tech export powerhouse); and finally, there's the national security hawks (who correctly worry that we are at risk of a kind of cyberwarfare the world has never seen before).

Normally, cyberwarfare involves hackers associated with an adversary state breaking into your critical systems, but Microsoft doesn't have to break into your ministry's Office365 and Outlook accounts to spy on you or brick your agencies. They already have root on your servers. For Trump, this is cyberwarfare on the easiest setting imaginable.

I started throwing this idea around right after Trump announced his first round of tariffs. There was this Canadian think-tank that was soliciting suggestions for Canadian countermeasures, and I sent them this stuff, and they said, "Well, that would definitely work, but it'll make Trump really mad at us."

Which, you know, true. But anything that works will make Trump mad at us. So again, I must fall back on my Canadian heritage here and apologize.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that I don't have any empty gestures for us to deploy, only ideas for things that will work.

I mean, we can stick with the current plan, our retaliatory tariffs, which make everything we buy from America more expensive, and make us all poorer. That'll do something. Like, it'll certainly impose broad-spectrum pain on a bunch of American producers. If we decide to stop drinking delicious bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye, there's gonna be some corn farmer out there in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who'll have trouble making payments on his John Deere tractor. But what did that farmer ever do to us?

On the other hand, if we go into business selling everyone in the world (including that farmer) (including our own farmer) reliable, auditable, regulated, transparent drop-in firmware replacement for that tractor, then we free that farmer from the rent-extracting scams that John Deere uses to drain his bank account. And since we remain that guy's customer, maybe he'll side with us against Trump, along with the hundreds of millions of American technology users who we can also set free from the app tax, from commercial surveillance that feeds authoritarian state surveillance, from the repair ripoffs, from ink that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. They become our champions, too.

Because if we legalize jailbreaking, we will limit the blast radius of our counterattack, to the tech barons who each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais and their shareholders, who are not everyday Americans. Everyday Americans have gotten poorer every year for 50 years, thanks to wage stagnation, wage theft, economic bubbles and skyrocketing health, education and housing costs.

They'll tell you that most Americans own stock, but the amount of stock the average American holds rounds to zero. Nearly all US stock is held by the richest 10% of Americans – the ones who are backing Trump and getting rich off Trump – and legalizing jailbreaking is a targeted strike on just those people, which will only benefit our American cousins, the everyday people who've been abused for generations by these eminently guillotineable plutocrats.

Canada is in a good position to do this. We've got motive, means and opportunity, but we're not the only ones. Most of the countries in the world are situated to take advantage of this opportunity, to become the "disenshittification nation" that supplies the world with wildly profitable software tools that fix America's defective technology.

All it takes is one country defecting. That country gets to reap the benefit – the billions – of exporting those tools to the world, while the rest of us only get to enjoy the consumer surplus, the technology that works better and costs us less money and privacy to use.

You know how Ireland defected from the world's tax treaties and, through regulatory arbitrage, made billions luring the world's largest companies to establish domicile in Dublin, while depriving the world's tax collectors of trillions? Regulatory arbitrage is the game everyone can play. When a country decides to become the Ireland for disenshittification, the nation where it's legal to jailbreak locked technology, and export the tools to do so to everyone in the world with an internet connection and a payment method, they will get to reap the largest benefit. They'll grab the hoarded monopoly rents of America's tech giants and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket that launches their domestic tech sector into a stable orbit for generations.

Those American tech companies need to be relieved of the dead capital on their balance sheets. What are these companies doing with their looted trillions? Blowing it all on AI. They tell you there's a lot of money to be made with AI, but no one can tell you where it's going to come from.

This month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he's going to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars he's pissed away on AI by turning Google into the world's perfect engine for surveillance pricing. That's when a company uses surveillance data to predict how desperate you are, and jacks up the price to the highest amount they think they can get you to part with.

This is a terrible idea of course, but it's not just terrible in the sense of "this is an idea Google should be ashamed of." It's terrible in the sense of "this won't work because everyone will hate it and refuse to participate in it." It's just another harebrained scheme to finally find a way to make AI profitable, or at least less unprofitable.

Compare that with my anti-circumvention plan. I can tell you exactly where the money in my plan is going to come from: it's just sitting there on Big Tech's balance sheets, waiting for us to go get it. We'll make money by making products that people want, because it will make their tech better, and they will pay us for them.

I mean, I know that sounds old-fashioned. But what can I say? Sometimes, the old ways are best.

If there's one thing Canada is good at, it's going to other countries and digging up all their wealth. America's tech giants have buried trillions of dollars they stole from the world, and we know exactly where it is. What's more, we can dig it out from here. No travel required!

Let's go get it.

Their margin is our opportunity.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• A Canadian platform for writing and documents https://cdox.ca/

• Archivist Browser https://www.monodivision.com/

• Paranneaux Globes https://globesculptures.com/

• Reuters & RELX – Drop Your ICE Contracts! https://notechforice.com/lawletter/

• Betting Against Elon Musk’s Predictions on Polymarket Might be the New Inverse Cramer https://gizmodo.com/betting-against-elon-musks-predictions-on-polymarket-might-be-the-new-inverse-cramer-2000714552

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Censorship: Comparisons of Google China and Google https://blogoscoped.com/censored/

#20yrsago How the malicious software on Sony CDs works https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/26/cd-drm-attacks-disc-recognition/

#15yrsago DHS kills color-coded terror alerts https://web.archive.org/web/20110127084925/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/threat-level-advisory-death/

#20yrsago Pirating the Oscars: 2011 edition https://waxy.org/2011/01/pirating_the_2011_oscars/

#20yrsago Copenhagen to replace squatter town with condos, 1000% rent-hikes https://web.archive.org/web/20060205034919/https://cphpost.dk/get/93464.html

#20yrsago How do music CDs infect your computer with DRM? https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/30/cd-drm-attacks-installation/

#20yrsago Hollywood bigwigs answer your questions http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4653534.stm

#20yrsago Anti-copying malware installs itself with dozens of games https://glop.org/starforce/

#20yrsago Museum shoelace trip shatters three Qing vases https://web.archive.org/web/20060207031357/http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/01/30/britain.museum.ap/index.html

#15yrsago Morrow’s Diviner’s Tale is a tight, literary ghost story https://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/30/morrows-diviners-tale-is-a-tight-literary-ghost-story/

#15yrsago Bolt and fastener chart: what’s that dingus called? https://boltdepot.com/fastener-information/Type-Chart

#15yrsago Michael Swanwick’s demonic Great Humongous Snow Pile https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2011/01/great-humongous-snow-pile-in-back-yard.html

#15yrsago Science fiction writers, editors, critics and publishers talk the future of publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20110129021818/http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/01/mind-meld-the-future-of-publishing/

#10yrsago Tim O’Reilly schools Paul Graham on inequality https://web.archive.org/web/20160126044144/medium.com/the-wtf-economy/what-paul-graham-is-missing-about-inequality-a9f7e1613059#.cagyco904a

#10yrsago Profile of James Love, “Big Pharma’s worst nightmare” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/26/big-pharmas-worst-nightmare

#10yrsago Dissipation of Economic Rents: when money is wasted chasing money https://timharford.com/2016/01/how-fighting-for-a-prize-knocks-down-its-value/

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders: a left wing, twenty-first century Ronald Reagan? https://www.salon.com/2016/01/25/bernie_sanders_could_be_the_next_ronald_reagan/

#10yrsago Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky: smartass, soulful novel https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

#10yrsago San Francisco Super Bowl: crooked accounting, mass surveillance and a screwjob for taxpayers & homeless people https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/fuck-the-super-bowl/

#10yrsago Same as the old boss: Justin Trudeau ready to sign Harper’s EU free trade deal https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-eu-parliament-schulz-ceta-1.3415689

#10yrsago Danish government let America’s Snowden-kidnapping jet camp out in Copenhagen https://web.archive.org/web/20160126202504/https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly-til-danmark-for-at-hapse-snowden/

#10yrsago Model forwards unsolicited dick pix, chat transcripts to girlfriends of her harassers https://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/a-model-is-alerting-girlfriends-of-the-men-who-send-her-dick#.aukdQ6gYR

#5yrsago Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

#5yrsago Thinking through Mitch McConnell's plea for comity https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#comity

#5yrsago Further, on Mitch McConnell and comity https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#no-seriously

#5yrsago Petard (Part I) https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#captive-market

#5yrsago "North Korea" targets infosec researchers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#willie-sutton

#5yrsago Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#wealth-health

#5yrsago Brazil's world-beating data breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#sus

#5yrsago Twitter's Project Blue Sky https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#blue-sky

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

• Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
  https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

• Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1007 words today, 17531 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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Federal agents have frequently used so-called “less-lethal” weapons against protesters, including impact projectiles, tear gas and pepper spray, since the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration raids began last year. 

The use of less-lethal weapons (LLWs) has been controversial. While designed to incapacitate or control a person without causing death or permanent injury, they can cause serious or fatal injuries, especially when used improperly. 

Earlier this month, two protesters in California were reportedly blinded after US federal agents fired less-lethal rounds at their faces from close range. These incidents were part of a wave of violent clashes between agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and protesters across the country after the deadly shooting of US citizen Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis. 

In protests in Minneapolis immediately following Good’s death, one Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer was captured on camera firing a 40mm less-lethal launcher five times in less than five minutes, with several of these shots appearing to target protesters’ faces, which is against CBP’s own use-of-force policy. 

A Bellingcat investigation of DHS incidents in October 2025 also found about 30 incidents that appeared to violate a temporary restraining order (TRO) issued by an Illinois judge restricting how DHS agents could use LLWs.

It is not always obvious whether the use of a LLW is authorised or not, as DHS component agencies such as ICE and CBP have varying guidance on factors such as the level of resistance an individual needs to show before a certain type of force can be used, as well as how specific types of less-lethal weapons and munitions can be used. 

While CBP’s use-of-force policy as of January 2021 is available on its website, ICE does not include specific guidance on less-lethal weapons in its 2023 “Firearms and Use of Force” Directive, and does not appear to have any publicly available policy that outlines this guidance.

DHS did not respond by publication time to Bellingcat’s request for the most recent DHS, CBP and ICE use-of-force policies, or to questions about what less-lethal weapons were authorised for use by the department and its component agencies. 

The DHS use-of-force policy, updated in February 2023, states that the department’s law enforcement officers and agents may use force, including LLWs, “only when no reasonably effective, safe and feasible alternative appears to exist”. It also says agents may only use a level of force that is “objectively reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances” that they face at the time.

DHS has repeatedly defended its use of riot-control weapons in protests across the country, stating that it was “taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect [its] officers”. 

Here’s how to identify some of the less-lethal weapons that DHS agents, including those from ICE and CBP, have been seen using during recent immigration operations. 

Compressed Air Launchers or ‘PepperBall Guns’

Compressed air, or pneumatic launchers, are essentially paintball guns that fire 0.68mm balls which break on impact. Often, this releases a powdered chemical irritant such as oleoresin capsicum (OC) or PavaPowder – the same compounds typically found in pepper spray. 

Compressed air launchers can also be used with other projectiles, such as “marking” projectiles that use paint to mark an individual for later arrest, and projectiles intended to break glass.

These weapons are often referred to as “PepperBall” guns, named after the leading brand PepperBall. However, DHS agents have also been seen carrying compressed air launchers from different brands, such as the FN303, produced by FN America.

Many compressed air launchers resemble standard paintball guns, with a distinct hopper or loader, which holds the ball projectiles, mounted to the top. They also have a compressed air tank that might be mounted to the side, bottom, or inside the buttstock (or back) of the weapon.

Many compressed air launchers, and less-lethal weapons in general, have very bright colours such as orange to distinguish them from lethal weapons. 

However, some compressed air launchers require closer scrutiny to distinguish them from firearms. 

For example, federal agents have been seen carrying FN303 compressed air launchers in videos of immigration enforcement activities. This weapon may resemble a rifle or other firearm, as it is usually all-black and, unlike the TAC-SF series PepperBall guns, lacks a visible hopper. 

If closer examination is possible, this weapon can be identified by its distinct features, including a circular magazine, side-mounted compressed air tank and a hose connecting the firearm to the air tank.

The January 2021 CBP Use of Force Policy places several restrictions on the use of compressed air launchers, including that they should not be used against small children, the elderly, visibly pregnant women, or people operating a vehicle. It also states that PepperBall guns should not be used within 3 feet “unless the use of deadly force is reasonable and necessary”. When using the FN303, the minimum distance is increased to 10 feet. 

The CBP Use of Force Policy says that the intentional targeting of areas where there is a “substantial risk of serious bodily injury or death is considered a use of deadly force.” Agents are instructed not to target “the head, neck, spine, or groin of the intended subject, unless the use of deadly force is reasonable”. PepperBall and FN America provide similar warnings about avoiding vital areas to prevent serious injury or death.

According to a 2021 report by the US Office of Inspector General, CBP requires its agents to recertify their training to use PepperBall guns and FN303s every year, but ICE does not.   

40mm Launchers

DHS agents also use 40mm launchers to fire “Less-Lethal Specialist Impact and Chemical Munitions (LLSI-CM)”. These launchers resemble military grenade launchers, but are used to fire less-lethal ammunition, including “sponge” rounds that can disperse chemical irritants on impact. 

Federal agents have been seen using or carrying the B&T GL06 launcher in footage of multiple incidents reviewed by Bellingcat. They have also been spotted with other 40mm launchers, including Penn Arms 40mm multi-shot launchers, which have a six-round cylinder magazine. 

There are various less-lethal munitions available for 40mm launchers, including those whose primary function is “pain compliance” through the force of impact, chemical irritants or a combination of both. 

Videos of clashes between Border Patrol agents and protesters show these launchers being used with combination rounds designed to hit the target for pain compliance while also delivering a chemical irritant such as OC or CS. 

Other munitions dispense chemical irritants or smoke after being launched. For example, in the protests immediately following Good’s death, a Border Patrol agent was seen firing a 40mm munition that released multiple projectiles emitting chemical irritants in a single shot, consistent with the “SKAT Shell” by Defense Technology.

Defense Technology’s technical specifications for its 40mm Direct Impact Rounds, which agents have been seen armed with, state that the munitions are considered less-lethal when fired at a minimum safe range of 5 feet and at the large muscle groups of the buttocks, thigh and knees, which “provide sufficient pain stimulus, while greatly reducing serious or life-threatening injuries”.

A DHS Office of Inspector General Report in 2021 noted varying guidance on the use of 40mm launchers among the department’s component agencies: “ICE’s use of force policy indicates that the 40MM launcher is deadly force when fired at someone, while the CBP use of force policy only directs officers not to target a person’s head or neck.”

CBP’s 2021 use-of-force policy states that agents should “not intentionally target the head, neck, groin, spine, or female breast”, and that anyone in custody who has been subject to such munitions should be seen by a medical professional “as soon as practicable”.

As of publication, DHS had not replied to Bellingcat’s questions about whether the department had an internal policy or provided training to staff on the minimum safe distance for 40mm less-lethal launchers as recommended by the manufacturers.

Hand-Thrown Munitions

DHS agents have also been seen throwing some less-lethal munitions, such as flash-bangs, smoke and “tear gas” grenades or canisters by hand. 

These munitions activate a short delay after the grenade is employed. When they activate, flash-bangs or “stun” grenades emit a bright flash of light and a loud sound that is designed to disorient targets. Both smoke grenades and tear gas (also known as “CS gas” or “OC gas”) emit thick smoke, but the former just impedes visibility, whereas the latter also contains chemical irritants that sting the eyes. 

Defense Technology offers smoke grenades with hexachloroethane smoke composition, but most of their smoke grenades use “SAF-Smoke”, a less toxic terephthalic acid smoke composition. 

Hexachloroethane, while toxic, is not a nerve agent, despite misinformation surrounding the deployment of green colored smoke grenades in Minnesota by DHS personnel. 

The shape and general construction, colour, and any text can help identify these munitions.

Less-lethal munitions typically feature the manufacturer’s logo, the model name of the munition, and the model or part number. The text and manufacturer logo are typically colour-coded to indicate the type of payload the munition has, with blue indicating CS, orange indicating OC, yellow indicating smoke, green indicating a marking composition and black indicating munitions with no chemical payload. 

A 2021 analysis by Bellingcat and Newsy found that Defense Technology and Combined Tactical Systems, the two manufacturers which produce most of the less-lethal munitions used by federal agents, both list the model numbers of their products online. Publicly available price lists for Defense Technology and Combined Tactical Systems can also be used to identify specific munitions by their model numbers. 

CBP’s 2021 use-of-force policy states that hand-thrown munitions are subject to the same restrictions for use as munition launcher-fired impact and chemical munitions. 

Chemical Irritant Sprays

DHS agents have also been using handheld chemical irritant sprays, often colloquially referred to as “pepper spray” or “mace”.

These sprays come in a variety of sizes and concentrations containing CS, OC, or both. Sprays used by law enforcement usually have a canister size designated “MK-” followed by a number, with higher numbers indicating larger canister sizes. The concentration of chemical irritants contained in the spray is also indicated on the canister.

The effectiveness of OC sprays is determined by the concentration of major capsaicinoids, which are the active compounds in OC that cause irritation. These sprays are also affected by the type of aerosol dispersion, or stream, used. Different types of streams increase or decrease the range of the spray as well as the coverage area. 

Civilian and law enforcement sprays range from 0.18 percent to 1.33 percent major capsaicinoids, according to SABRE, a producer of law enforcement and civilian sprays. Civilian sprays in the US can have the same major capsaicinoid content as law enforcement sprays, but are restricted to smaller-sized canisters. 

Defense Technology sprays have different colour bands to indicate the percentage of major capsaicinoids in the spray for OC. If the spray is CS, the CS concentration is standardised at 2 percent. The company uses a white band for .2 percent, yellow band for .4 percent, orange band for .7 percent, red band for 1.3 percent and a grey band for sprays containing either CS or a combination of OC and CS.

SABRE sells a variety of concentrations and sprays as law enforcement products, including 0.33 percent, 0.67 percent, and 1.33 percent major capsaicinoid concentrations of OC, as well as CS, and combination CS and OC sprays. The specific concentrations of SABRE sprays and the type of stream can also be identified by the text on the canister. 

One Air Force Research Laboratory study found that some sprays may pose a significant risk of severe eye damage due to pressure injuries resulting from large aerosol droplets hitting the eye. 

Defense Technology’s technical specifications recommend a minimum distance of between 3 and 6 feet, depending on the specific spray. SABRE does not publicly provide their minimum safe deployment distances, but a Mesa Police Department document lists a minimum distance of six feet for the SABRE Red MK-9. CBP’s 2021 use-of-force policy does not provide any minimum use distances. 

CBP’s 2021 use-of-force policy states that OC Spray may only be used on individuals offering “active resistance”, and that it should not be used on “small children; visibly pregnant; and operators of motor vehicles”. 

Electronic Control Weapons

DHS agents have also been seen using electronic control weapons (ECWs), which are colloquially called TASERs after the original weapon invented for law enforcement use, in immigration-related raids. 

ECWs can deliver a shock upon direct contact or launch probes that embed in the targeted person, incapacitating them. 

A shock on contact, or a “drive-stun” feature, delivers localised pain while in direct contact. When properly deployed, the probes send signals to the body that cause muscles to contract. A person’s body “locking up” from muscle contractions is an indicator that an ECW has been deployed. ECWs may be capable of using either or both methods.

ECWs are typically painted a combination of black and bright yellow, but this varies between models. The bright colour of parts of tasers is a common feature to help distinguish an ECW from handguns used by federal agents. When viewed from the front, a circular gun barrel is visible on handguns, while ECWs feature multiple circular probes or rectangular covers on the cartridge. ECWs also usually have flashlights and lasers, although handguns may also be equipped with these features. Some ECWs may make audible sounds when armed or deployed.

Axon, the predominant manufacturer of ECWs, produces several models including the TASER 10 and TASER 7. Axon provides a policy guide on recommended use of its TASER models to law enforcement agencies, which recommends targeting below the neck from behind, or the lower torso from the front. It recommends avoiding sensitive areas including the head, face, throat, chest and groin. 

Axon also recommends against using ECWs against small children, the elderly, pregnant people, very thin people and individuals in positions of increased risks such as running, operating a motor vehicle, or in an elevated position “unless the situation justifies an increased risk”.

CBP’s 2021 use-of-force policy, in addition to restricting the use of ECWs against small children, the elderly, visibly pregnant women, and people operating a vehicle, states that they should not be used against someone who is running or handcuffed. However, the policy does state that there may be an exception to the rule against using ECWs on a running person if an agent has a “reasonable belief that the subject presents an imminent threat of injury” to an agent or another person. This threat, according to the policy, must “outweigh the risk of injury to the subject that might occur as a result of an uncontrolled fall while the subject is running”.

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Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here and Mastodon here.

The post Identifying ‘Less-Lethal’ Weapons Used By DHS Agents in US Immigration Raids and Protests appeared first on bellingcat.

To stay up to date on our latest investigations, join Bellingcat’s WhatsApp channel here

On January 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System, was shot and killed by federal agents on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooting comes just over two weeks after Renee Good was shot and killed by a federal agent in the same city. 

The United States Department of Homeland Security claimed Pretti was killed after an “armed struggle” with DHS officers and that it seemed he had wanted to “do maximum damage”. Yet video footage shared online, showing shortly before and during the incident, appears to contradict that claim.

Some of the earliest available footage of the encounter was posted to Instagram and shows an agent crossing the street to talk to Pretti who appears to be filming with his phone, which he is holding in his right hand. According to DHS, agents were conducting an immigration arrest in the area. 

The agent can be seen placing his hand on Pretti’s torso to push him back and away from the middle of the road towards the sidewalk. 

Another video shared on Reddit shows what happened after this initial contact, as well as the lead-up to the shooting. Pretti appears to put himself between two women after they were both shoved by a DHS agent. He is holding a cellphone, held sideways in his right hand.

An agent can then be seen spraying Pretti with a substance from a canister, and continuing to spray him as he turns his back to him. At least five additional federal agents approach and attempt to force Pretti to the ground while one appears to strike him with a spray can. 

Twenty-five seconds after Pretti is first sprayed, a shot is heard followed by nine more shots in the span of about six seconds. Additional video from the scene shows Pretti lying motionless on the ground.

Video Analysis

Bellingcat further analysed the Reddit video, a separate video posted to Facebook and others taken at the scene to break down the key moments of the shooting, splicing them together (see Bluesky post below) to view in more granular detail.

We’ve placed the available videos of the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis today into the same synchronised timeline and are continuing to analyse further.

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— Bellingcat (@bellingcat.com) 24 January 2026 at 20:39

Closer inspection of the videos shows that an agent appears to remove a weapon from the melee before the first shots are fired. 

In both the Reddit and Facebook video, a federal agent wearing a grey jacket can be seen approaching federal agents who are on top of and struggling with Pretti. Notably, the agent’s hands are empty as he approaches. He can be seen reaching into and rummaging amid the bodies. About twelve seconds later, he is seen carrying a handgun away from the scene. 

Another video, also posted to Reddit, shows the agent removing a gun from a holster in Pretti’s waistband before he is shot.

Several aspects of the gun the federal agent is seen moving away with appear to match the gun DHS claim belonged to Pretti (and which they posted to X), a Sig Sauer P320, chambered in 9mm. Some posts online mistakenly claimed the photo of the gun was old due to a misunderstanding of Google Reverse Image Search.

While some law enforcement agencies issue Sig Sauer P320 guns to their agents, the gun that DHS claims Pretti had is customized, and visually distinct from those that are standard issue. 

These distinct features include a white pistol grip, black pistol frame, brown slide, and a red dot sight mounted atop the slide. The red dot sight and these various colours are visible on the gun the federal agent is seen leaving with.

Before the agent who takes the gun leaves the scene, it appears someone shouts “gun”, as can be heard in this video that was posted to X, and another video posted to Reddit. 

This Reddit video also shows that almost immediately after the agent in the grey jacket leaves with the gun, a single gunshot can be heard, followed by nine other shots.

Slowing it down, the same video shows that as the federal agent in the grey jacket removes Pretti’s gun, an agent in a black beanie, who appears to have a line of sight on the gun being removed, begins to draw his own weapon. As soon as the agent in the grey jacket moves away with the gun and leaves, the agent in the black beanie steps to where the agent in the grey jacket had been with his finger on the trigger and fires the first shot. 

Two agents appear to fire their weapons from the footage available, one wearing a black beanie and another wearing a brown beanie, as can be seen in this video.

At the same time as the first shot is fired, the agent in the grey jacket is leaving with the gun taken from Pretti’s holster. An alternate angle appears shows that the slide of this firearm does not move to the rear. This would indicate that it was not fired. Multiple agents, including the agent in the grey jacket, look towards the man in the black beanie immediately after the first shot. Despite some online speculation, there is as yet no evidence that Pretti’s gun was fired.

Bellingcat synced and slowed three videos to show where the agent in the black beanie, and grey jacket, with both drawn guns are when the first shot occurs. What some commenters have suggested is impact marks appear to be snow, that is visible before any shots occur. 

Three-way video sync and slow+zoom showing the moment of the first shot before Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents in Minneapolis yesterday. There’s some claims that Pretti’s gun was the source of the first shot after it was taken from him, though in these videos it doesn’t appear that’s the case.

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— Jake Godin (@godin.bsky.social) 25 January 2026 at 18:33

What’s more, the agent with the black beanie’s right arm that was seen holding the gun moves backwards as the first shot is heard, likely due to the recoil from firing.

After firing once, the agent in the black beanie repositions, and then quickly fires three more shots at Pretti’s back at close range while he appears to try to stand up.

In this video, multiple agents are piled on top of Pretti while his hands can be seen in front of him, on the ground. His hands remain in front of him as the agent in the grey jacket recovers the gun and moves away.

Pretti collapses onto the ground after the first shots and the agents back away. A second agent (the one wearing the brown beanie hat) then draws his gun and fires at least one shot. This is the fifth shot that is heard. The agent in the black beanie can be seen and heard firing more shots. Shots five through ten all fired at Pretti’s motionless body.

The agents can be seen from another angle, with the agent in the black beanie visibly firing into Pretti’s motionless body.

A video taken shortly after the shooting shows two agents searching Pretti’s body with one appearing to be heard asking: “Where’s the gun?”.

Bellingcat contacted the Department of Homeland Security to ask why Pretti was shot and killed and whether he was in possession of his gun when the first shots were fired.

DHS did not respond by time of publication.

DHS and CBP statements have so far only stated that one agent fired shots, identifying them as an eight year veteran of Customs and Border Patrol who fired “defensive shots”. It is not known which of the two agents who appeared to fire shots in the videos analysed by Bellingcat is an eight year veteran of CBP. 

Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, on CNN the day after the shooting, when shown video of the gun being removed before the shooting and asked why border patrol agents shot an unarmed man said, “You don’t know he was unarmed. I don’t know he was unarmed.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, when asked if Pretti was unarmed, said on Meet the Press, “I do not know and nobody else knows either, which is why we’re doing an investigation”. 

In the same CNN interview, Bovino also said that “The victims are the Border Patrol agents.” and that “The suspect [Pretti] put himself in that situation.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said that Pretti was a legal gun owner with a permit to carry and did not have a criminal record.

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Jake Godin, Trevor Ball, Kolina Koltai and Carlos Gonzales contributed to this report.

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The post Alex Pretti: Analysing Footage of Minneapolis CBP Shooting appeared first on bellingcat.

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On Jan. 7 Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed by a federal agent on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The incident was captured on several separate videos and spread rapidly on social media. The videos were soon accompanied by competing analysis and narratives as to what had happened.

Bellingcat looked at five videos filmed during the incident, including one apparently from the phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Good.

While each video alone provides valuable information, the five together provide a fuller picture of the situation as it unfolded.

Synced Overview

One of the ways to visualise the full incident was by tracking the movements of the key players on an overview map, which Bellingcat did shortly after the incident on Jan. 7. 

Using eyewitness video shared by Daniel Suitor on Bluesky we tracked the movements of federal agents at the scene – including Ross as he moved around the street. The video also captured the position and movements of Good’s vehicle before, during and after the shots were fired.

We’ve also updated our animated map of the positions of agents and vehicles during the incident here with new footage published by @cnn.com that shows the shooter closer to a white SUV prior to the shootingbsky.app/profile/bell…

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— Bellingcat (@bellingcat.com) Jan 8, 2026 at 18:38

Close-Up View

Another video, filmed by a bystander and later shared by the Minnesota Reformer, shows a closer view of Ross’ movements in the moments immediately before the shooting. 

In the video, Ross can be seen with his phone in his left hand filming Good before he pulls his gun out of its holster with his right hand. Roughly one second elapses before he fires the first round through Good’s front window. Two more shots follow.

A still from that same video captures Ross as he walks past in the seconds after the shooting. A camera app appears open on his phone.

Agent’s Phone

On Jan. 9, a video filmed by Ross was published on X by a conservative news outlet called Alpha News. 

By syncing this video up with the other four available videos, it was possible to observe more of what occurred, including from Ross’ rough perspective. However, it is important to note that Ross was holding the phone slightly away from his body, so what appears in the video would be marginally different to what would have been his line of sight. 

In the footage, Good can be seen backing up before veering to the right as Ross and the camera move to her left. It is not clear from this footage exactly how close the car came to Ross, as the cellphone points up and away as the vehicle moves forward. Someone can be heard saying “whoa” before gunshots are heard. 

An angle captured from down the street (middle lower right in the synchronised video below and in full view here) – which some have suggested shows Ross being hit by the vehicle – does appear to show the vehicle pass close to the agent as he fires. However, the close-up video shared by the Minnesota Reformer (middle top and in full view here) shows Ross moving out of the way and to the side of the vehicle as he fires.

Another video published by CNN (middle lower left) shows a head-on view of the incident from surveillance footage.

New footage from the ICE agent’s phone who shot at Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis has emerged, posted by AlphaNews on X. We’ve placed that footage in a synced timeline with the other currently available footage.

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— Bellingcat (@bellingcat.com) Jan 9, 2026 at 21:23

Almost one week after the incident, protests have been held in Minneapolis and other cities in the US. 

US President, Donald Trump, and Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, initially said that Good had tried to run over an ICE officer after blocking the road, labelling her a “domestic terrorist”. However, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, said that version of events was “garbage” and disproven by the video footage.

On Monday Jan. 12, Noem, told FOX News that more ICE agents would be sent to Minnesota.

Individual links to each of the five videos detailed above can be found here, here, here, here and here.

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Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here and Mastodon here.

The post Analysing Footage of Minneapolis ICE Shooting appeared first on bellingcat.

 As promised, a pair of sketches (one complete with authentic coffee stain!) that I drew before writing Halcyon Years. I'd worked out the basic parameters of the story at this point, putting in the locales I knew I'd need, but there are a few bits and pieces which didn't end up playing much of a role in the book. All of the following is revealed in the first few chapters of the book, by the way, so no fear of giving away anything crucial - although if you'd like to go in totally cold, obviously, read no more.

The first one (click to embiggen) is a basic cross-section of Halcyon. I didn't really have a set idea of how big it needed to be, but 50 km long seemed about right for the type of story I was intending. I was thinking, very roughly, of something about the size of greater Los Angeles. I wanted there to be room enough for distinct settlements with countryside between them, not just one big city, and I also wanted roads and railway lines, and especially the former, so I could have cars. I decided that the ship would be completely closed, with no windows to the outside universe, and that there'd need to be a long, thick tube running down the middle to give the illusion of sky.

The little sketch to the bottom right of the picture is me working out for myself what rough percentage of the interior would be visible from any given position on the inner surface. As you can see, it's never possible to see the opposite side of the tube.

The second sketch (also click to embiggen) is the complete interior rolled out as a map:

As mentioned, there's stuff in there that doesn't come into the final story, and which may or may not be in contradiction with it, such as the island in the middle of Midlake. That was going to be a kind of private retreat for the DelRossos, but in the end I decided not to bother with it, just letting them have their estate and the luxury yacht. I wasn't going to draw another map just because the story took me in a slightly different direction.

Should these or tidied-up versions have been included in the book? I'm not sure. Perhaps because I wasn't a big reader of fantasy, I've never expected to see a map at the beginning of a book, and those few times when I encountered one in an SF context, I never found it all that helpful. But that's just me.