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    Another Reason People Fear the Government

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    Why do Americans have such deep distrust of their government?It’s a simple question with a complex answer, but here’s part of the reason: All too often, the government wrongfully inflicts profound harm on American citizens and then leaves them with no recourse. It violates the law and leaves its victims with no way to be made whole.Let me give you two recent examples, both taken from Supreme Court cases that were argued this term and have not yet been decided.In the predawn hours of Oct. 18, 2017, an F.B.I. SWAT team detonated a flash-bang grenade at a home at 3756 Denville Trace in Atlanta. A team of federal agents rushed in.The family inside was terrified. Hilliard Toi Cliatt lived there with his partner, Curtrina Martin, and her 7-year-old son, Gabe. They had no idea who had entered their house. Cliatt tried to protect Martin by grabbing her and hiding in a closet.Martin screamed, “I need to get my son.” The agents pulled Cliatt and Martin out of the closet, holding them at gunpoint as Martin fell to the floor, half-naked. When they asked Cliatt his address, “All the noise just ended.”He told them: 3756 Denville Trace. But it turned out they were supposed to be at 3741 Landau Lane, an entirely different house down the block. The agents left, raided the correct house and then returned to apologize. The lead agent gave the family his business card and left the family, according to their Supreme Court petition, in “stunned disbelief.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Google’s Antitrust Case Could Upend the A.I. Race

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      A federal judge issued a landmark ruling last year, saying that Google had become a monopolist in internet search. But in a hearing that began last week to figure out how to fix the problem, the emphasis has frequently landed on a different technology, artificial intelligence.In U.S. District Court in Washington last week, a Justice Department lawyer argued that Google could use its search monopoly to become the dominant player in A.I. Google executives disclosed internal discussions about expanding the reach of Gemini, the company’s A.I. chatbot. And executives at rival A.I. companies said that Google’s power was an obstacle to their success.On Wednesday, the first substantial question posed to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, after he took the stand was also about A.I. Throughout his 90-minute testimony, the subject came up more than two dozen times.“I think it’s one of the most dynamic moments in the industry,” said Mr. Pichai. “I’ve seen users’ home screens with, like, seven to nine applications of chatbots which they are trying and playing and training with.”An antitrust lawsuit about the past has effectively turned into a fight about the future, as the government and Google face off over proposed changes to the tech giant’s business that could shift the course of the A.I. race.For more than 20 years, Google’s search engine dominated the way people got answers online. Now the federal court is in essence grappling with whether the Silicon Valley giant will dominate the next era of how people get information on the internet, as consumers turn to a new crop of A.I. chatbots to answer questions, find solutions to their problems and learn about the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Rebukes Apple and Orders It to Loosen Grip on App Store

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      The ruling was a stinging defeat for Apple in a long-running antitrust case brought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, on behalf of app developers.A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at the company of lying.In her earlier ruling, Judge Gonzales Rogers ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with external links to pay developers directly for services. The apps could then avoid the 30 percent commission that Apple charges in its App Store and potentially charge less for services.Instead, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said on Wednesday, Apple created a new system that forced apps with external sales to pay a 27 percent commission to the company. Apple also created pop-up screens that discouraged customers from paying elsewhere, telling them that payments outside the App Store may not be secure.“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.In response, she said Apple could no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store. She also restricted the company from writing rules that would prevent developers from creating buttons or links to pay outside the store and said it could not create messages to discourage users from making purchases. In addition, Judge Gonzalez Rogers asked the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate the company for criminal contempt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge’s Ruling

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      Prosecutors have said they will appeal the decision, although they lost a similar appeal this year.When a military judge threw out a defendant’s confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons.The prisoner’s statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation.But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006.The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot.The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was “so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning.”“However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement — all while being continually questioned and conditioned — is just as egregious” as the physical torture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Disney Worker Who Hacked Menus Gets 3 Years in Prison

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      The fired employee admitted that he changed prices, added profanity, and altered menu items so they appeared to be free of certain allergens.A former employee of Walt Disney World who hacked into menus used by its restaurants and edited them — changing prices, adding profanity and altering listed allergens — was sentenced to three years in prison by a federal judge in Florida this week.None of the changes, including falsified information about food allergens that could have been harmful to visitors, ever appeared before the public, according to court records. The menu alterations were caught and court records show that none of the changes ever reached the printing stage.The former employee, Michael Scheuer of Winter Garden, Fla., was sentenced on Wednesday in federal court in Orlando, Fla., after pleading guilty in January to one count of computer fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.Mr. Scheuer, 40, was ordered to pay restitution of about $620,000 to Disney and $70,000 to the unidentified software company that provides Disney with its menu creation program.While court documents do not mention Disney World, menus that were entered into evidence in Mr. Scheuer’s case are from the hundreds of restaurants at Walt Disney World in Orlando.Disney World representatives did not respond to messages seeking comment.In early June 2024, Mr. Scheuer had returned from paternity leave, court documents show. A few days later, he had an argument with a supervisor about menu creation, according to the documents, and he was told that he would be suspended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks Trump Order Ending Union Protections for Federal Workers

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      An order signed by President Trump last month was aimed at stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers.A federal judge in Washington blocked President Trump from ending collective bargaining with unions representing federal workers, stymying a component of Mr. Trump’s sweeping effort to strip civil servants of job protections and assert more control over the federal bureaucracy.Judge Paul L. Friedman of the Federal District Court in Washington ruled in favor of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents tens of thousands of federal workers across the government. Without including an opinion explaining his decision, Judge Friedman ruled that the executive order from Mr. Trump was unlawful, and he granted a temporary injunction blocking its implementation while the case proceeded.“An opinion explaining the court’s reasoning will be issued within the next few days,” Judge Friedman wrote in the two-page order.The order, if implemented, would strip collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers, effectively banning them from joining unions.Those unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government. With every stroke of the pen from Mr. Trump enacting new orders aimed at tightening control over the federal bureaucracy, federal worker unions have responded with lawsuits, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.Mr. Trump had framed his order stripping workers of labor protections as critical to protect national security. But the union noted that it targeted agencies across the government, some of which had no obvious national security portfolio, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.“The administration’s own issuances show that the president’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns,” the suit said, “but, instead, a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions.” More

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      U.S. Asks Judge to Break Up Google

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      The Justice Department said that the best way to address the tech company’s monopoly in internet search was to force it to sell Chrome, among other measures.The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.“Your honor, we are not here for a Pyrrhic victory,” David Dahlquist, a Justice Department lawyer, said in his opening statement. “This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws.”The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.The legal troubles could hurt Google as it battles OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta to lead a new era of artificial intelligence. Google has increasingly woven A.I. into its search. But the Justice Department has told Judge Mehta he should make sure Google cannot parlay its search monopoly into similar dominance in A.I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Urgent Supreme Court Order Protecting Migrants Was Built for Speed

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      There are sculptures of tortoises scattered around the Supreme Court grounds. They symbolize, the court’s website says, “the slow and steady pace of justice.”But the court can move fast when it wants to, busting through protocols and conventions. It did so around 1 a.m. on Saturday, blocking the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.The court’s unsigned, one-paragraph order was extraordinary in many ways. Perhaps most important, it indicated a deep skepticism about whether the administration could be trusted to live up to the key part of an earlier ruling after the government had deported a different group of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.That unsigned and apparently unanimous ruling, issued April 7, said that detainees were entitled to be notified if the government intended to deport them under the law, “within a reasonable time,” and in a way that would allow the deportees to challenge the move in court before their removal.There were indications late Friday that the administration was poised to violate both the spirit and letter of that ruling. Lawyers for the detainees said their clients were given notices that they were eligible to be deported under the law, the Alien Enemies Act. The notices were written in English, a language many of them do not speak, the lawyers said. And they provided no realistic opportunity to go to court.The American Civil Liberties Union, racing against the clock, filed its emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday evening — Good Friday, as it happened — and urged the court to take immediate action to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Pauses for Now Contempt Proposal by Trial Judge

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      A federal appeals court on Friday night put off for the moment a plan by a trial judge to open contempt proceedings to determine whether the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month stopping flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under a powerful wartime statute.In a single-page order, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that it was entering what is known as an administrative stay to give itself more time to consider the validity of the contempt proposal by the trial judge, James E. Boasberg.On Wednesday, Judge Boasberg, concerned that the White House had ignored his order to pause all deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, gave Trump officials a choice. He said they could provide the men who were sent without hearings to El Salvador the due process they had been denied or they could face a searching contempt investigation into who among them was responsible for having not complied with his directives.In court papers filed on Friday morning, lawyers for the Justice Department told the appeals court that neither option was acceptable. The lawyers accused Judge Boasberg of overstepping his authority by seeking, on the one hand, to tell the Trump administration how to conduct foreign policy and, on the other, to effectively try to assume the role of an investigating prosecutor.The appeals court made clear that it was not ruling on the merits of the Justice Department’s accusations. The panel simply wanted additional time to consider the complexities of Judge Boasberg’s plan.That plan, laid out in an order this week, suggested that the judge was trying to pin down who in the administration was behind what he called the “willful disregard” of his oral instructions issued during a hearing on March 15. Speaking from the bench that day, he said any deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act needed to be halted at once and that any planes already in the air should turn around.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More