from the shadow-court dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court.

These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent. 

The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked — and has done so with little to no explanation. 

These emergency decisions have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent. The outcomes have been consequential: The high court has used the process to limit federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions and diminished Congress’ authority over federal agencies, and it has allowed for the detention of American citizens by immigration agents. 

ProPublica analyzed over two decades of Supreme Court rulings, which cover all of the years under Chief Justice John Roberts and go as far back as the online archives allow. We found that when the last court term ended, justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, as opposed to 56 orders on the more traditional merits docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions.

Legal scholars and court watchers were shocked by our finding. They told ProPublica it’s likely the first time in modern history that so many consequential decisions were made in secret by its nine members.

“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst. He said that our findings reinforce the appearance that the justices are voting on their political preferences. 

“That’s the real blow to the court’s credibility,” he said.

Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to a detailed list of questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House wrote, “President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the Administration’s lawful agenda. President Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives on which he was elected.”

For the First Time in Two Decades, Decisions on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Outnumber the Merits Docket

There are two ways to get a decision from the Supreme Court. One is to exhaust your appeals to lower courts and ask to argue your case in front of the high court. The justices determine whether to take the case on, and if they do, lawyers argue their case in front of them. The other is to petition the justices directly via the emergency docket — to freeze a lower court ruling or government policy while the case goes through appeal.

The appeals to the emergency docket have long outnumbered those to the merits docket, but most are procedural requests or requests to stay execution for capital offenses. When those are removed, what’s left is known as the shadow docket — cases that seek to skip the usual order of things and ask for a quick ruling from the court’s justices.

The modern shadow docket was born in 2016 when the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, experts say. Papers obtained by The New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with longtime precedent. The conservative justices, meanwhile, forcefully argued that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway and that it would put too much of a burden on the energy industry.

Driven by its numerous losses in lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action on its appeals.

The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed just eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration filed 32 in 2025 alone, an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found.

The increased willingness of the Roberts court to intervene on Trump’s behalf — as well as in other issues that favor conservatives and Trump allies — has upended American life, said Donald Ayer, a former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

“On many subjects of real importance to our future, they’ve demolished what used to be the law,” he said.

Public scrutiny of the shadow docket ramped up in September 2021 after the Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph, unsigned opinion that further rolled back abortion rights established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In the order, the court refused to block Texas’ Senate Bill 8, the “Heartbeat Act,” which banned abortion after an embryo’s cardiac activity is detectable, typically at six weeks of pregnancy and before many people know they are pregnant. Protests erupted nationwide, and the Senate held a hearing on the shadow docket.

In an unusual public acknowledgement, Justice Elena Kagan referenced the shadow docket by name in her scathing dissent, accusing the majority of green-lighting a “patently unconstitutional law” with only a cursory review in less than 72 hours.

“In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decisionmaking — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend,” Kagan wrote.

That an opinion was even issued and that four of the justices signed their names to it was uncommon. On the shadow docket, justices do not have to make their votes known. In rare cases, their votes are revealed in terse indications that they grant or deny the application, or even more rarely, as an opinion. We found that just 17% of votes cast had any sort of public record of a vote or opinion.

Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito contended that the court isn’t to blame for the rise in shadow docket cases. “We do not file these emergency applications,” he said. “Parties file them.”

The debate has continued. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently green-light harmful acts that do real damage,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during an April speech on the shadow docket at Yale Law School.

Until this past Supreme Court term, emergency applications fluctuated year to year but showed no clear upward trend. The applications are given first to a single justice, who decides if a case is worth referring to the full court. In recent years, justices have referred more of such appeals for a review and vote by the full court.

Last term, when there were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, the appeals to the shadow docket finally overtook those to the merits docket.

Emergency Applications Referred for a Full Court Vote Have Risen Sharply

The cases were consequential. On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.

Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.

And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives — an effort touched off by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.

Roberts once signed on to a Kagan dissent that assailed the shadow docket. But our analysis found that he has referred more substantive cases for a vote by the full court than any other justice, going from just one in the 2005 term when he joined the court to nearly half of all referrals in the last term.

There is an additional difference between the shadow docket and the merits docket. After the court holds public argument, the justices’ ultimate merits decisions are closely watched and extensively covered by the press. The summer’s “decision season,” when the final and most significant rulings come down, has a predictable cadence that ends when the justices go on summer recess. Not so with the shadow docket. Increasingly, the justices are making big decisions after they’ve issued their final merits docket decision, when public attention has waned.

A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., have sponsored legislation to make the shadow docket more transparent.

Raskin told ProPublica that the court’s legitimacy has fallen with every significant decision made without “real opinions or analysis.”

“Lower federal courts have been deciding against the Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases with weighty and well-reasoned opinions,” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things get to the twilight zone of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court is overturning 100-page opinions with a flippant sentence or two.” He added, “The result is a body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court rubber stamping the madness and folly of the Trump Administration.”

“The jurisprudence of the Roberts Court today is as murky as the green algae water in the Reflecting Pool.”

How We Reported This Story

To compare the number of cases on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to the traditional merits docket, we compared emergency applications listed on the court’s online docket search with counts of decisions compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025 Release 01). For the merits docket, we counted only signed decisions in argued cases, the typical format for those rulings.

The court’s online docket goes back to the year 2000, but our analysis looks at Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025, where emergency applications are easily identified by the letter “A” in their docket number.

We identified more than 27,000 emergency applications during that period, including thousands of requests that are not commonly understood to be a part of the shadow docket. Most appeals to the emergency docket are the type of requests that were traditionally handled there: procedural requests, such as extending the time to file, and requests to stay execution for capital offenses. The remainder are the focus of our reporting.

Substantive Shadow Docket Cases Are a Small Fraction of All Emergency Applications

We defined a substantive application on the shadow docket as any filing where the full court was asked to intervene in the traditional appeals process, such as staying a lower court’s order. 

Most of the cases we excluded are decided by just one justice, each of whom oversees one or more federal circuits and has the power to refer filings to the wider court. When the cases are referred to the full court, they are the subject of a vote by the justices. We ran our approach by multiple experts, all of whom found it sound.

A filer can appeal to another justice if their application is denied. The next justice to receive the application always refers it to the full court. We did not include these renewed applications because our analysis found the court has never granted one.

The court has labeled capital punishment cases only since the October 2017 term. To identify them prior to that, we flagged applications for stays of execution. We then manually reviewed every case referred to the full court. For applications decided by a single justice, we used an AI model to flag potential capital cases by examining the parties on the application and the relief requested. The model flagged over 60 possible capital cases, and those were manually reviewed. Despite our effort, it is possible some capital cases may still be included in our final tallies before the 2017 term.

Although rulings on the shadow docket are typically unsigned and do not include vote breakdowns, we were able to identify how a justice voted in some cases. The analysis is based on either the opinions issued by the justices, most of which are dissenting opinions, or if the justice indicated they would have granted or denied. In some decisions, the justices issued a statement not attached to either a grant or denial. We did not record these as votes.

Filed Under: emergency docket, merits, secrecy, secret law, shadow docket, supreme court, transparency

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was kind of tough. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: ‘Rerouting…”

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Go another way.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• CART, CANT, HENCE, COVE, TOON, CHEER, WIPE, WIPED, GIVE, CHANT, VOTE

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• TACK, TURN, VEER, PIVOT, SWERVE, ZIGZAG, DEVIATE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is CHANGECOURSE. To find it, start with the C that is four letters down on the far-left vertical row, and wind a twisty path to spell it out.

• Environmental groups seek broader review before massive satellite constellations receive approval
• More than one million proposed satellites face increased regulatory scrutiny
• FCC is reconsidering satellite environmental review rules

Environmental groups have petitioned federal regulators to pause approval of orbital data center satellite constellations pending a full environmental review process.

Earthjustice recently filed a petition on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, known as PEER.

ai and ml

Linux supremo says contributors opposed to AI use can ‘just walk away’

Chief penguinista Linus Torvalds has declared that Linux is not an “anti-AI” project, telling contributors who object they can either walk away or fork the kernel.

On lore.kernel.org, the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, reformed potty mouth Linus was responding to a discussion about some negative sentiments toward AI. 

It is one area where Torvalds said he was willing to “absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer … Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open-source thing and fork it.”

“Or just walk away.” 

Ever the pragmatist, Torvalds described AI as a tool, “just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that ‘clearly’ even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today. 

“Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.” 

In October 2024, the Linux kingpin branded 90 percent of AI as marketing hype, saying he hated the hoopla generated by the tech industry. He said at the time: “I really don’t want to go there, so my approach to AI right now is I will basically ignore it.” 

He predicted things would change in five years, though he has softened his stance in 21 months.

AI can be a “somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from an ‘it keeps finding embarrassing bugs’ standpoint,” Torvalds conceded this week. “But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing ‘La La La, I can’t hear you’ at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.” 

The solution, he said, is to make sure LLM tools help maintainers rather than cause them pain. “We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.” 

The kernel project continues to be about technology, Torvalds added, and while the social angle of developing open source software is an important aspect, it is a “side benefit, not the point of the project.” 

“In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.” 

The seeming shift in stance was evident when The Register’s SJVN spoke to senior Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman in March: he told us AI-assisted bug reports and code review had improved dramatically.

“Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports… All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they’re good, and they’re real.”

Torvalds in May said AI tools were only useful if they help “rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work.” 

Some maintainers in open source have complained of burnout – not helped by AI slop bug reports – and others worry about the quality of vibe-coding. 

Work still lies ahead before AI consistently proves it’s more help than hindrance.

“AI isn’t perfect,” said Torvalds in the mailing-list post on Tuesday. “But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI [sic] had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.” 

Quite right.  ®

from the the-censorship-industrial-complex? dept

Last year, the Marco Rubio-run State Department announced that it would start denying visas to people who worked in misinformation/disinformation research, content moderation, fact-checking, or other compliance and trust & safety roles. So, yeah, if you were an EU-based person who worked on preventing child sexual abuse material from appearing online, the US government decided you were not allowed in the country, bizarrely (and falsely) claiming you engaged in “censorship of protected expression.”

Except, as we’ve explained over and over again, that makes no sense. Only government officials or those working directly at the behest of the government can engage in censorship of protected expression. Otherwise it’s just private parties using their own rights of association to figure out what content they wish to associate with. And the actual reality (which MAGA culture warriors refuse to recognize) is that nearly all trust & safety work has fuck all to do with removing content. Much of it is literally about making platforms better and more trusted overall.

But, because the MAGA crew has been whipped up into a misinformation frenzy over the last decade that any research regarding mis- or disinformation is “censorship,” Trump and Rubio decided to throw the base some red meat and claim they were going to deny visas to people who worked in the field.

Thankfully, a federal court has pointed out that the only one engaging in censorship here is the Rubio State Department. By designating a group of people to be denied visas based on their own speech and association regarding disinformation research, the State Department engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

Judge Boasberg (who traditionally has been pretty conservative, but with Trump nonsense appearing before him quite frequently seems to now recognize that this administration is full of shit) notes how silly all of this is. After highlighting that most users of websites actually do want those sites to block scams and spam (what most content moderation is), though admitting that some people think of it as censorship, he points out that Rubio’s policy punishes researchers (the plaintiffs in this case) for trying to research and fact check disinformation.

The First Amendment reflects “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). That commitment is not confined to stump speeches, editorials, or familiar forms of political advocacy….

Those principles cover the activity chilled here. CITR’s work depends on researchers who study how platforms structure public debate, report on misinformation and disinformation, advocate for access to platform data, petition officials, speak to the press, and collaborate with one another to set standards and press for reform. Some of that work culminates in reports, interviews, comments, petitions, and testimony. Some of it occurs before publication, in the candid exchange among researchers and organizations that makes public-facing work possible. Those activities, at least as reflected in this record, fall within the Amendment’s protection for speech, publication, petitioning, and expressive association. They also sit directly within the contested public debate over how online platforms structure discourse and whether, when, and how they should moderate harmful or false content….

CITR’s asserted injury is therefore not merely derivative of what its noncitizen members might say or what CITR might hear. The policy allegedly impairs CITR’s own work: who will contribute to its reports, what those reports can say, who will attach their names to them, and whether researchers will participate in the convenings and candid exchanges from which CITR’s public work emerges. See supra Section III.A.2.a. That is itself a First Amendment burden, as the Amendment protects both an organization’s creation and dissemination of information, Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552, 570 (2011), and the associational activity that makes collective speech possible….

The judge points out that the visa policy is already having an impact on this kind of research:

The reaction here was not merely predictable; it was all but ordered. Announcing the enforcement actions against leaders of two CITR member organizations, Rubio warned others engaged in the same work to “reverse course” or face the same. … The record shows that the message landed. Member A has refrained from international travel, including to CITR’s 2025 summit in Berlin, because of fear of being denied reentry under the policy; has limited public advocacy with CITR to a behind-the-scenes role because of fear of detention and deportation; and says that he or she would be substantially more likely to resume public association with CITR were the policy no longer in place…. Dr. Emma L. Briant, a U.K. citizen and Visiting Associate Professor at Notre Dame, likewise avers that the policy has caused her to self-censor in her writing and public speaking, hesitate to travel internationally, and evaluate even domestic speaking invitations against the risk of detention or deportation.

The judge calls out how the State Department started combing through visa applications to block “ordinary work” done by researchers and fact checkers, not limited to anyone actually engaged in any “censorship.”

The December cable supplies part of the answer. It directed consular officers to “thoroughly explore” visa applicants’ work histories, resumes, social-media profiles, and media appearances for involvement in “combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety,” and, on locating it, to pursue a finding of ineligibility…. Those categories do not describe the exercise of foreign sovereign power. They describe the ordinary work of researchers, fact checkers, platform employees, compliance officers, and nonprofit advocates who study, criticize, participate in, or press for content moderation. A cable that treats that work as evidence of immigration ineligibility reaches far beyond the coercive acts described in the May Memo: threats of arrest, payment freezes, legal compulsion, detention, fines, and demands for private data directed at American platforms or persons in the United States.

While the Court declines to review specific visa denials, it notes that the State Department clearly seems to be denying visas to people by claiming “censorship” when they had nothing to do with censorship. Indeed, the denials usually were about the State Department punishing people for First Amendment protected speech that the US government didn’t like. None of the justifications appear to actually be censorial:

The actions matter because State held them out as examples of the policy at work. Its public rationales identify the activity it treats as “complicity” in “censorship”: a report on hate speech and disinformation, advocacy directed at advertisers and platforms, disinformation-risk ratings, a petition for researcher access to platform data, a broadcast interview, and nonprofit leadership in organizations that help targets of online abuse seek removal of content aimed at them… Some of those justifications are tied to familiar First Amendment activity: reporting, speaking, petitioning, advocating for platform regulation, and associating through nonprofit leadership. Id. At least as to the private researchers and nonprofit leaders in CITR’s field, the public explanations do not identify any exercise of foreign sovereign power akin to the coercive acts the May Memo enumerates.

As Judge Boasberg notes, if you call all of that “complicity in censorship” then the term “censorship” has no real meaning:

If disinformation-risk ratings, reports on hate speech, petitions for platform-data access, advocacy, or nonprofit work seeking to limit abusive content can count as “complicity” in “censorship,” the policy has no clear stopping point short of the field itself — a concern sharpened by the Department’s announcement that it “stands ready and willing to expand” the list…. A lawful permanent resident working on a platform’s trust-and-safety team, a noncitizen researcher urging stronger disinformation labels, a compliance employee helping apply moderation rules, or an advocacy leader pressing advertisers away from sites that spread falsehoods could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk — not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.

In its response, the DOJ pulled the usual MAGA nonsense of stomping its feet and just repeating “but content moderation is censorship” and making vague assertions about how these researchers aid foreign governments in censorship. The judge is not impressed.

The trouble is that the enforcement record does not honor that line. The Government has tied none of the private researchers and nonprofit leaders targeted in December to any exercise of foreign sovereign power. Pressed on that gap, counsel did not supply the missing connection. The Government stepped back from the five examples, explaining that it lacked “the full factual records or the reasons for those determinations” and that it would not be “fair to rely on those five” in gauging the policy’s scope…. But Defendants cannot publicly announce examples of the policy at work, warn that the Department stands ready to expand them, and then — when those examples prove inconvenient — deny that they reveal anything about the policy’s reach. A limiting principle that the Government cannot reconcile with its own enforcement record is no limit at all.

And thus, all this is classic, unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination:

The policy, at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms. It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify. The Government, in other words, has not set itself against everyone who speaks about platform governance. It has set itself against those whose work favors more moderation rather than less. A noncitizen calling for less moderation, after all, has no comparable reason for concern under the policy.

Such action lies at the core of viewpoint discrimination. “At its most basic, the test for viewpoint discrimination is whether — within the relevant subject category — the government has singled out a subset of messages for disfavor based on the views expressed.” ….

The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn

But that’s exactly what Rubio did here. If you worked on calling out disinformation, you could get your visa denied (or if you already had it, pulled). Judge Boasberg notes that if the policy were actually limited to foreign officials engaged in censorship, then the State Department might have an argument. But it’s not.

Even better, the court states that you can’t just call disinformation research “censorship” and pretend that’s a fact when reality says otherwise:

Protecting Americans from foreign officials who use sovereign power to suppress protected expression in the United States is in the Government’s interest. But the record does not show that the policy serves only that end. It instead brands a range of private expressive and platform-governance activity as “censorship,” without identifying any foreign-sovereign power that those actors exercised or helped exercise. The Government cannot make protected private expression a facially legitimate and bona fide basis for immigration consequences simply by placing it under the capacious and contested label of “censorship.”

He even notes that policy would violate the First Amendment under lower levels of scrutiny, meaning that even if the government could convince the court there was some justification for the policy, it still wouldn’t survive First Amendment scrutiny.

The judge doesn’t kill the policy entirely, noting that there may be cases where the State Department has a legitimate reason to deny a visa to someone actually engaged in efforts to silence Americans. It also hurts that when the Court sought evidence of visas being denied to actual censorship by sovereign officials, the State Department apparently came up empty:

The Department reportedly examined whether European regulators were using the Digital Services Act to censor American speech and found “no evidence that Member States of the European Union are overreaching the [Digital Services Act] to censor and criminalize online content.”

Oops! Sure, that goes against the narrative Rubio and MAGA folks have spun up about the EU being nothing but a bunch of censors, but when they can’t show the court any proof that they’re using this policy to go after actual government censors (while the plaintiffs can show where the policy was used to suppress or punish the speech of non-government censors) the end results are unlikely to make Rubio happy.

Measured against one another, the policy’s legitimate applications ultimately do not carry the day. The mismatch between Defendants’ asserted interest and the policy’s demonstrated operation is stark…. The defect identified above is not a feature of any one application; it is the policy’s selection criteria itself, and it travels wherever the policy does — into visa screening, exclusion, and removal alike. The policy’s legitimate applications, by contrast, remain episodic and largely undemonstrated. Whatever arithmetic might refine the comparison, the overbreadth inquiry asks whether a measure “prohibits a substantial amount of protected speech relative to its plainly legitimate sweep,” Hansen, 599 U.S. at 770, and a policy that selects its targets by an unconstitutional criteria, while its lawful uses remain occasional and largely unproven, answers that question.

Thus, the Court throws out this particular visa policy, though it doesn’t go quite as far as the researchers asked in requesting a protective order that would bar the government from using information related to this case in an immigration enforcement action. The judge recognizes that it’s still possible that the government could retaliate against these researchers, but hopes that this ruling will make them think twice about doing so. It also notes that if the government ramps up threats or actual retaliation against the researchers in this case, they can return to the courtroom to contest those actions.

For years, the loudest voices screaming about a “Biden censorship industrial complex” falsely insisted that pointing out disinformation was itself an attack on free speech. Now a federal court has found an actual, textbook case of unconstitutional censorship — carried out by the Secretary of State explicitly stripping visas from researchers based on their protected speech. I’m sure we’ll be hearing the same kind of outrage about Biden officials asking social media companies if they could be better in stopping health misinformation from spreading?

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, chilling effects, content moderation, disinformation, free speech, james boasberg, marco rubio, research, state department, trust & safety, viewpoint discrimination, visas

Companies: citr

BMS’s Tom Shortt discusses the early factors that influenced his career and led to his role as an engineering director.

An engineering director at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Tom Shortt has been with the organisation for more than nine years, but his passion for engineering began much earlier.

Shortt told SiliconRepublic.com, “While still in secondary school in Tipperary, I worked part‑time as a farm machinery mechanic, travelling across the county to diagnose faults, rebuild engines and restore agricultural equipment to service.” 

He explained that the experience cemented within him a technical curiosity and an appreciation for practical problem‑solving in real‑world conditions, making a future in mechanical engineering the clear choice.

He added, “That role taught me as much about people as it did about engineering. Our customers ranged from large agricultural contractors to elderly farmers working in isolation.

“Understanding their challenges, listening carefully and earning trust were just as important as fixing the machinery.”

Could you tell us more about your role today and what is involved?

I lead a multidisciplinary engineering organisation that underpins the compliant and sustainable delivery of medicines to patients worldwide. My leadership approach is grounded in technical experience, operational discipline and a strong belief in the value of empowered teams. At the BMS Cruiserath Campus in Dublin, I lead an engineering function with a broad and critical remit. The team is responsible for facilities management, utilities operations, manufacturing and laboratory maintenance, capital project delivery, site master planning and validation activities.

In addition, the Cruiserath Campus engineering organisation provides facilities management oversight for two other BMS sites in Ireland.

To ensure consistency and visibility across this complexity, the engineering organisation operates within a robust governance framework. Tiered management processes and service provider governance forums provide structured oversight, clear escalation pathways and data‑driven performance management.

Tools such as A3 problem‑solving enable disciplined root‑cause analysis and effective resolution of issues.

While the engineering team does not directly manufacture BMS’s products, its impact on patient outcomes is significant. Engineering provides stable, high‑quality inputs that enable the value stream to operate predictably and compliantly, from reliable utilities and high‑purity water systems to safe engineering controls and dependable manufacturing and laboratory equipment.

When engineering systems perform as designed, the value stream has a much higher probability of producing consistent outputs that ultimately become medicines for patients. Every day, I feel grateful to have such a strong engineering team, where many of the day‑to‑day scheduling, resourcing or technical decisions are resolved close to the work with empowered teams. The escalations that do make it to the engineering leadership for direction are generally resolved quickly and with input from the relevant subject matter experts.

As a member of the Cruiserath Campus senior leadership team (SLT), I also play an active role beyond engineering. The SLT holds shared accountability for site performance and patient delivery, requiring close integration across operations, quality, supply chain, finance and human resources. Stepping into an SLT role broadened my perspective significantly. It reinforced the importance of enterprise thinking and governance in ensuring the site delivers safely, compliantly and sustainably.

Do you have a typical day and, if so, how does it look?

I guess it’s a cliché, but no two days are the same. The BMS engineering team is responsible for delivery of a wide scope of services, from facilities management to utilities operations, manufacturing and lab maintenance, capital project management, site master planning, and validation.

With that very broad range in scope, a variety of issues can arise, from breakdowns in manufacturing to developing proactive reliability strategies or hosting regulatory auditors.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Among many proud moments at BMS, one stands out for me – the drug substance manufacturing shutdown in 2025. The programme involved critical first‑time maintenance, major project execution and an accelerated return to production. It was a significant technical and organisational challenge. Seeing it delivered so successfully reinforced the impact that a well‑coordinated, disciplined engineering effort can have across the entire site.

Another aspect of the role that brings me satisfaction is working to meet the challenge of decarbonisation. In collaboration with enterprise colleagues, the Cruiserath Campus has developed a comprehensive carbon-reduction roadmap, targeting approximately a 45pc reduction by 2033.

The Campus has already achieved zero waste to landfill and zero scope-2 emissions through renewable electricity procurement. Current engineering efforts therefore focus on scope-1 emissions, including decarbonising space heating and hot-water systems and eliminating inefficient steam usage. Looking further ahead, the demand for high-grade heat for clean steam and water for injection generation presents a more complex challenge. However, emerging technologies offer promising solutions.

I also find great fulfilment in supporting the evolution of the Cruiserath Campus. The site continues to evolve from its origins as an API facility to a drug substance biologics site and now toward becoming a fully end‑to‑end biologics campus, including sterile drug‑product filling and stability‑testing capabilities. This evolution positions the site to play a key role in launching new medicines for patients with unmet medical needs.

I am particularly excited about the potential of digital tools to accelerate data analysis, improve decision‑making and remove waste from engineering and operational processes. It feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what these tools will enable in the years ahead. The opportunity to combine strong engineering fundamentals with advanced data and analytics is incredibly exciting.

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There has always been a lot of information that could be gathered from Beta Pictoris, which is the best place to learn about the formation of planets in our galaxy. It’s located just 63 light years away from us, and it was formed some 23 million years ago. There is a lot of debris material around this star, along with two heavy impacting planets.

The James Webb Space Telescope was aimed at Beta Pictoris b, which is the innermost planet in this region. Scientists employed the NIRSpec integral field spectrograph for taking images of the sky region and the entire spectrum of it, hoping to study the gases around planet B. However, the results were not what they expected to see.

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As they were investigating one region of the disk where they expected to see a uniform light display, they saw a distinct pattern of absorption that shares a rather creepy similarity with carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of a planet, a uniform distribution of wavelengths, like some sort of clandestine message is being broadcast right under everyone’s nose, and was clearly more pronounced than the usual dust display. At a later date, they obtained spectra from the MIRI device on the Webb telescope, showing signs of water vapor and methane.

The team was then able to confirm the motion of the planet using the same data, by looking at how the lines were shifting, and that showed that the planet was orbiting around the sun in a plane similar to that of the two other bigger planets. This confirmation was achieved through the cooperation of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope with the NIRCam on board the Webb space telescope

This particular planet has been named Beta Pictoris d because it is the smallest of the three planets that have been found until now. Being twice the size of Jupiter in terms of mass, it is indeed small, but then again it is a planet, and being at a distance 30 times farther from the sun than the Earth, it is quite far from the two other bigger planets, yet still inside the dust disk. This all results in the conclusion that as expected, this particular planet turned out to be everything we were hoping for.

SAAS

Investment bank cites messy customer data and a product that ‘just isn’t there’; Salesforce counters by saying it the fastest-growing product in its history

Salesforce’s flagship AI agent platform is struggling to convince customers of its value, according to an investment bank.

The SaaS giant has bet the farm on AI agents, hoping they will fetch and carry data from its systems into a conversational UI, according to its vision of headless CRM.

The cornerstone of the strategy is Agentforce, which the vendor promises will help customers build, test, deploy, manage, and orchestrate AI agents in the enterprise.

However, a report from KeyBanc Capital Markets cites its recent CIO survey, which found customers did not view the CRM plan favorably.

“Our checks and customer conversations have not been strong, nor has the feedback been on Agentforce. What we can piece together in the disclosed numbers does not signal building momentum and, most recently, our CIO survey delivered another blow with Salesforce being a standout for the wrong reasons,” the report says.

The report, authored by Jackson Ader, the investment bank’s managing director for software equity research, and three other analysts, says KeyBanc Capital Markets view of Salesforce was not down to the negative perception of software companies generally — the so-called SaaS-pocalypse.

“We attend more Salesforce partner and customer events than any other company in our coverage, and feedback from those customers has been consistent in two ways: 1) customers’ data is not in order to do meaningful AI work; and 2) Agentforce, as a product, just isn’t there,” it claims.

“Partners we speak with are just now beginning to convert Agentforce proof of concepts into deals in the pipeline, and more CIOs in our survey expect to deprioritize Salesforce within their IT budget than the other way around over the coming 12 months.”

A Salesforce spokesperson told The Register: “Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, with customers like Engine, Falabella, and AAA going live in weeks, not months. We’re focused on helping customers move faster, including through forward-deployed engineers and out-of-the-box agents.”

The KeyBanc report says Salesforce is presiding over “aggressive price increases” while the majority of customers are “not willing to pay for AI capabilities through their CRM provider.” Salesforce, nonetheless, has retained a commanding position in the CRM market, the investment bank says.

Speaking of pricing, back in January, Gartner warned Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms may not be available when they come to renew these deals, potentially meaning customers could struggle to predict costs and understand value – although Salesforce strongly disputed this contention at the time. Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP, Corporate Strategy, told us at the time, “The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate.” 

Meanwhile, an earlier report from global equity research firm Bernstein said Agentforce was “still in early stage of adoption” and would not drive Salesforce’s growth in the short term.

“Consumption-driven monetization at AgentForce will take longer than most expect. We also believe that AgentForce will be most successful in the company’s core CRM market and not that well-used outside the core as there are other AI platforms and many SaaS vendors and the hyperscalers are offering their own AI functionality,” the report says.

Wall Street bettors seem to share this bearishness toward the company in general, sending its stock down over 36% this year. ®