Tomorrow - Episode 88: Twitter Has Broken Sarah Jeong's Heart

Episode Date: March 31, 2017

Josh is away this week, so special guest host and Outline senior editor Adrianne Jeffries has taken over the show. She talks to Motherboard contributing editor, lawyer, and very cool internet person Sarah Jeong about Twitter, internet privacy, and the US travel ban. Is there any hope? Does Sarah have the answers? Will Adrianne ever give the show back to Josh? Perhaps you'll find the answers in episode 88 of Tomorrow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm Adrienne Jeffries. You may have noticed, not Josh Dupulski. I'm filling in for him. He, uh, he had a thing. So I'm sorry to everyone, but today on the podcast, we are talking about canoes, airports, and why you should maybe think about moving to Germany. But first, a word from Josh and from our sponsors. USAAA is passionate about what they do, ensuring the financial security of the military community and their families. As an employer, USAAA creates conditions for employees to succeed.

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anytime you have a question. There's even a 45-day money-back guarantee. And right now, you can get 60% off by visiting hostgator.com slash tomorrow. That's hostgator.com slash tomorrow. Take a bite out of the internet. Also, that's not actually their tagline, I just made it up. So because today tomorrow is mine, and I wanted to talk about some things in the news that

I thought were interesting, I have tapped a very smart person to come talk to me about Twitter, which has drastically changed its product to be way more terrible. My guest today is Sarah Jong. She is a journalist, lawyer and contributing editor at Motherboard, Vice's excellent tech blog. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us from Portland. Does it rain there? It's actually the sun shining for once.

Oh, strange. It's strange. Twitter made some changes yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. This week. And you had some opinions about them. Yeah, so... First of all, I think we should establish your authority as a person who knows from Twitter. Yeah, I... I... I... I... I tweet too much. Uh-huh. Um, I'm, I'm, you're very popular on Twitter and very funny. For some reason, yes. For some reason, I am quote unquote a power user of Twitter, which, uh-huh. Is it correct? Quote encoding here. Uh, well, I like a social head, apparently. Um, uh, So, like, a social head apparently. And then I have, I don't know, it's for some reason people follow me on Twitter and a

lot of people follow me on Twitter. It's pretty strange. For the audience who doesn't know Sarah, she's an excellent Twitter and often tweets are came but very funny screenshots from weird copyright cases and also has been known to live tweet from trials such as Google versus Oracle, which you may think is boring but is actually edge of your seat fascinating stuff. I loved that trial so much and also for some reason it was like an oddly viral sensation. Like I think I have. I have like thousands of retweets on my final verdict tweet.

Which is like, oh my gosh. I know, it's like, but that was like, that was me breaking the news of the verdict and that was like a second after it was announced. So, which is, that's really, that's fun. It's beating something that happens. I feel like that trial should be a mini series, like the OJ mini series.

They should do something. I think so too. I really want it to be something like that because I think it's actually really exciting and really interesting in like a dorky little way. But yeah, I tweet a lot. I tweet for real quick on the Google Oracle things. I just realized some people may not know what the trial was about. Oh, yeah. It was about the Android operating system. And whether or not it was infringement of Sun Microsystem,

now Oracle America's copyright on the Java language APIs. Okay, so Twitter's changes this week, like just briefly summarize, explain to me what just happened to my life on Twitter. Yeah, so in replies, so not in the actual like originating tweet. In replies, the at handles of people no longer count towards the character limit, and the way that they do it is they disappear the at handles. So if you have like more than like three people in a canoe, you can't see everyone that's in the canoe unless you click to open up this dialogue, and then in your timeline, it's not entirely clear who's replying to whom. And also, you can add up to 50 handles.

So you can have giant canoes of people basically engaging in reply all disasters. Kind of like when there's like a reply all nightmare on email, whenever it's like please, please get me out of this and then, but then they just make it worse. It's like that except this one Twitter. Yeah, I feel like it's even spammyer on Twitter somehow.

Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah, it's super confusing and yesterday, like I saw someone said something to me that I didn't see it first and didn't see until I had clicked into some other thread And now I don't even know. I'm like I feel like Twitter's Problem consistently from the beginning has been Being too complicated for people to figure out what's going on and this seems like a step in the in the In the in the absolute wrong direction for making that stuff easier to get. Absolutely. I think it takes this horrible, it's the worst of all possible worlds.

First, it takes away all the nuance for power users, quote-unquote, people who know Twitter, and have invested time in understanding how it works. Like, they lose a lot of the functionality they could get with the previous system. But on top of that, because the system is like pretty clunky, what ends up happening is that people who don't understand Twitter are going to barge into these threads and reply all to people or like, explode other people's mentions. It's easier for people who don't understand Twitter

to mess up. And it becomes harder for people who do understand Twitter to sort of add nuance and play around with the features because those features are essentially disappeared. Also, it's really hard to read your timeline now. It's really hard to tell when people are talking to each other and who's talking to each other. And it's really like, to tell the difference

between when they're just tweeting out. And it's really like, and to tell the difference between when they're just tweeting out. And it's just very painful. It used to be that I could sort of see where all the conversations were and gather all of that information really quickly. Now I have to like sit and concentrate and sort of like figure everything out. And I think designers call this like the split attention problem or something or phenomenon. But I just get such a headache when I look at my timeline now. And everything takes like twice as long to parse and figure out.

Yeah. And what do you think they were thinking here? To make it more like Facebook, except that they failed, because the Facebook system... How is this like Facebook? Exactly. Exactly. It's not like Facebook at all. So, in on Facebook, when you reply to someone's post, you just hit the reply button, right? And there's no, like, at handle.

But what happens if happening is when you reply, the reply is smaller, so you know that it's a reply and what it's a reply to. And then if you reply to that reply, it nests it, so it indents it, so you know that it's a reply and what it's a reply to. And then if you reply to that reply, it nests it. So it indents it. So you know that that's a reply to the reply. But by the time you get to like the third tier or whatever, when you hit reply, it automatically fills in that person's link to name, which is like basically an at handle on Facebook. And so they haven't disappeared the at handles.

Like they haven't. They're still there. It's just automated for people who don't know how to use them. And when there aren't at handles visible, there's tears and things are smaller and bigger to indicate when something is or applied to something else. It's intuitive. Yeah, okay.

So they wanted to make it faster or easier to reply or like have more space for text and not take up extra space with people's usernames. I guess that makes sense. When would you ever have a situation where you would want to reply to 50 people at once? I know, right? There is absolutely. I don't. I don't know. I really don't know. It's also like why couldn't they just, instead of removing these her names entirely, why couldn't they just make it so these her names don't count towards the 140 characters? That seems reasonable.

They have link shortening already. So what's stopping them from at handles, it does strike me as a possibility that there's all of this technical debt in the API that makes it so they literally can't. Like that's like just they would have to do a significant overall of the API to just make that little tweak happen. Maybe that's what's going on. I don't know. But if that's the case, like why are you inflicting this on millions of users instead of just tackling your technical debt? This is a really bad, a really bad clutch.

So in your story that you're excellent take down for Motherboard, which everyone should read, what was the title of that? Twitter is giving me an ulcer. Twitter is giving me an ulcer. should read. What was the title of that? Twitter is giving me an ulcer. Twitter is giving me an ulcer. Twitter is giving me an ulcer. It's just like Twitter's new changes are giving me an ulcer, which was two levels less click baby than what it was before, but those were my tricks. Which was why it was, oh it was Twitter's new replies make me want to sit on a knife. Those are all my true feelings, but yeah, no, I was told to take it down a notch. I see.

So, in there, you said it seems like no one at Twitter uses Twitter or like does anyone at Twitter use Twitter? And I actually think that it might be true that no one at Twitter uses Twitter. I think it is true. I think it's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. There are no prominent Twitter users who work there like Jack doesn't really he doesn't really tweet I know that Delharvee tweets

But she's like she's on the street for her charge. I know they should put her in charge of the product so frustrating whenever I talk to Delharvee like she clearly understands what's going on and It's it's so frustrating because I don't think anyone else does. Like I've seen Twitter, like engineers give presentations of various Twitter products, and then they always sort of include their at handle and their PowerPoint presentations. Go and look up their at handle. They have like 30 tweets. They don't tweet. They don't like 30 tweets. They don't tweet.

They don't know how to tweet. It's the most painful thing. Yeah. I was looking yesterday at Jack's timeline at his tweets and replies and he had like five tweets in a row where he was explaining to people how to use a new feature. And he was like, just tap the names. Just tap the names. Tap the names. He was talking about how you expand to see the 50 people who were tagged in your tweet or whatever. Yeah. And when I looked at that, I thought, it's over for Twitter.

This is it. They closed it too hard. And there's no, and this could be, and we could have one less social network. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm like really I really want to be cautious about things stuff like that because like you know everyone's everyone says this over and over I know I'm a lot of them. But like I have heard this more than once from people who are Relatively techs Abby and have seen this cycle, right? That they think that this is the end. And really?

Yeah, I have heard it more than once. Like from people who like, you know, are not teens or whatever, or like, you've seen this over and over again. And it's just because it's so awesome. It just seems like a failure on so many different, very important levels. Like it seems like a misunderstanding of how people are using the service. It seems like a failure to test a thing in an effective way. And just a failure to listen, because the thing is like I wrote in my piece that they've tested

this on me three times. Like I was, I media group. I knew you said no. Yeah. I was in the beta group three times and I publicly complained about it. And I know that Twitter saw it because I had people who worked at Twitter and my DM's going, hey, so sorry, we put that out to you again. That was actually a mistake that third time.

And so they know, they know that I hate it. I, yeah, in screenshot, the power user. I explained repeatedly all of my problems hate it. I, I, yeah, in screenshots, I, the power user. I explained repeatedly all of my problems with it. And the problems are still there. I hate it so much. It drives me completely up the wall. It's the worst part is that there were,

it's spam and dumb. There were tweaks that they did that may have been in response to my complaints like little tweaks. So it used to be that there was a thing that they would do where if you replied to a tweet that had an article in it. So if there was an article from like the New York Times, it would automatically at the source and you wouldn't be able to see it until like after you did it because there's no way to opt out of it. Right.

And that made me so crazy. And they don't, they don't do that in this new rollout. So they did notice that people hated that. And the other thing that they did was it used to be that in the reply, little replies thing. They would put people's names instead of their at handles and they changed that to at handles instead of the names because it would then be too easy to like, you know. Right, it's fine too. Yeah, but it's this is still bad. It's still really really bad. Well, I hate it so much. It was like it was kind of fun yesterday.

It felt like a Friday on a Thursday because everybody on Twitter was just messing around with this new feature and like adding Jack and adding the Pope and like I was in the Twitter canoe with you. Thank you for that. And it was like, you know, it felt like everybody was having a food fight. It is really funny, but it's also like so. At the same time that this was happening and it was kind of fun and I did add you to that canoe for So that I could Surgery and yes, it was for journalism. I'm so sorry. I did that to everyone But it's still going I know and I haven't muted it because I'm the one who's responsible so I feel like you have to feel the pain to the end Yeah, I do and and I keep telling never

That's how I keep telling people one-on-one like you you should meet this conversation You should meet this conversation, but until everyone else has muted the conversation You'll obligated to stay looped in because I did this and it's my fault That seems like the ethical the ethical response but the like Now so while we were having fun with this, actually, like, I was sort of in the sidelines,

I was watching people like harass other people using the 50 person canoe, which is like that's, you know, the obvious outcome is like people who, you know, when you dog pile someone, what are the things you're like? Yeah, it's like, almost like you teach people how to mob direct, who had previously been doing that. Like previously, it was trolls who had kind of figured out

that special skill of targeting a person with people at a time and now it's like. This person had been mobbed basically for the last few days. Like I'd sort of been watching it happen. What was the, without, yeah. What was the basic situation? Oh, it's... Oh, God, I don't even...

Is this like a solid-ticks thing? Is it a video games thing? It's the same thing. Like, which of the three things that it always is? It's Stalinists online. And a roommate's one at the same time. I really don't want to delve into it, but let's say let's people are mad at each other because of a roommate thing, but also they're all

stallionists and so it's just like a whole thing. Like it's just I don't really, there's a lot of bad people involved and I don't really want to delve into it, but I basically, someone was getting targeted entirely. And like it's, I mean, possibly unfairly, I'm not entirely like, I don't really want to say one way or the other, just because the situation is like super complicated and there, everyone's doing some really bad things on every side. But yeah, I was watching the 50-person loop being used to her as this person. And I was just like, yeah, no, of course that's gonna happen. This is day one and this is happening.

Like, obviously it's just gonna get worse from here. And that really sucks. Like, that just, like,, this was going to happen. This is so predictable. Well, one time I did a podcast and Jack listened to it, so maybe he'll listen to this one again. Maybe. I am, it had another celebrity Twitter user,

which is the Rapper Talib quality. Oh, well, I'm not Talib Kuali. Unfortunately, I don't, you're basically, I feel like you're basically on his level. No, unfortunately, like I don't, I don't do anything good. So it's not. So, Jack is definitely not going to listen to what I have to say. But my hope is that I can reach out to other people that he might actually listen to. I really, really hope that Twitter rolls this back.

My sense is that they don't listen. And that I think that the worst thing, the most indicative thing about this being possibly the end of Twitter being a huge milestone in people just sort of leaving is that they're just not listening, right? Like the fact that they like tested this and they're like, oh yeah, this is fine. And all of the people who in my mentions are going to go, no, actually, I like this are people who don't really tweet. Like you look at their Twitter accounts and it's just

like, you don't really tweet. You do a lot of the thing where you reply to celebrity accounts that don't reply back. Right? Or you retweet things about politics, which is like, you know, that's perfectly fine use of Twitter, but you're not really adding. Like, right, like you're not really adding that much. You're there for other people.

You're not there, they're like contributing content. And maybe, like, you know, I know that Twitter really wants to grow its user base, but maybe alienating the people that other people all want to follow is like not the way you grow your user base. Right? So we'll see.

Well, I don't really know what this means for Twitter, but I do know that I want to tweet a lot less. Like every time I open up the app, I'm just filled with all of this rage. Yeah. And I know that I'm not going to get used to it because they've tested this on me three times before and every time they did this, I just want, well, I guess this version of Twitter is unusable now. And then I would switch to a different version because I knew that the

Version where it had all of the replies cops was gonna trip me up or make make it very difficult for me to read Twitter or It was like make it difficult for me to tweet. Well, I would just like to say that I agree with you on absolutely every point of this and that I hate it and It makes me sad because Twitter is fun of this and that I hate it. And it makes me sad because Twitter is fun. But you know, maybe it will die and be eaten in this like great cycle of life. Yeah, but Twitter is like so much fun. It makes me really sad, right? Yeah. Twitter is so much fun. Let's start a distributed open source micro blogging platform. It exists. I mean, I think a couple of things exist. Yeah, it's called a mask-done.

Oh. Yeah, no, I've actually, for general purposes, for journals and some of the sales books, I'm playing with it. I'm cool. No, a mask-done is because it's FOS. Like, it's basically running on like $600 a month right now. Like, the guy just has a Patreon, it's just like one developer,

and he's just like, hey, I want to get up to $800 a month to cover my living expenses and hosting, and I will just continue running the asset all the way to the free. I actually don't know where he lives. Does he actually live in Portland? No, I'm just guessing, because it's awesome. He has a low amount of money that he needs to survive in love. Yeah, something like that. But it's like, yeah, no, it's like mass it on is some very, very super indie shit right now. And they'll never have money and never have EC. All right, so that was a super deep dive on, on a service that not a lot of people use on the grand scheme

of things. Well, I mean, I'm going to do a really deep dive into Macedon and see what's up. It's so weird. Yeah. Yeah, to be clear, when I said a service that not a lot of people use that, Twitter. You mean Twitter? Anyway, yeah. I just feel very passionately about Twitter

and want to talk about all the time. I'm sorry to everyone else. I also wanted to ask you about another Newsy thing, which we don't need to go into the weeds on as much, but another thing that people in our circles talk about we're all in about this week was the fact that Congress voted to overturn an FCC rule that increased protections for consumers from their ISPs. Now, my understanding is ISPs can sell your data sort of without you being aware of it,

which is something that they could do until January, anyway. And then a new role came into effect and they couldn't do it for three months. Now they can do it again. And people are like, first of all, all of the alt-right internet communities that supported Donald Trump are like, how could he, which is really funny? But second, all the info-seg people, and I tweeted about this also, and Motherboard did a story about VPNs, are like, this is how you protect yourself, this is how you protect your data. Like, everybody get mobilized, like, some

people were doing little Twitter campaigns before the vote, we're trying to get people to call their congressman. And it wasn't clear to me that it was that big of a deal. What is your sense of how big a deal is? I mean, I think it's a huge problem. I like to think it's a huge problem. I mean, I know that it was the case before January. But there is a very nasty ecosystem of selling data online. And it's so nasty and really disturbing, frankly, and like you can find people's addresses really easily, you can find things out about their families, and this is like information that's bought and sold. And I think it's really problematic.

Is that coming from ISPs? I imagine some of it's coming from ISPs, the thing is like it's completely opaque. That's why the FCC rule was in place. It was to get some kind of transparency into what was happening. Like when people sell your data, they don't have to tell you. And so we don't know where all of this data is coming from. It's very, very difficult to track it down. I've never

seen a comprehensive piece on it. I really would like to. And it's just very, it's upsetting, it's disturbing. I don't think people understand how compromised they are until they become compromised. Once you become like a severe target, like, for instance, if you're Zoe Quinn, who's sort of at the center of gamer gate, like, then you find out a bunch of stuff and it's super terrible. But it's, yeah, I think it's bad. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't. Like, Europe isn't like this.

Right. That seems like a sort of a problem that needs to be solved on a different sort of level where data, the data market, personal data market is acknowledged and sort of policed by like something more, more comprehensive. Right. But also this role was doing with ISPs. It's a simple rule, right? It's something that makes it, it's not that onerous on ISPs, because you just have to notify

users, right? Like, that's not, that's not too much. It's not saying you can't do it. It's saying that you have to notify users, and then it's sort of what's the free market to side. By the way, there is no free market in ISPs. So this rule, in my opinion, wasn't enough, but it is what it is. It's like, it's not an onerous rule in ISPs.

It protects consumers. It's a perfectly fine regulation and Congress voted to get rid of it because Congress is compromised. And I mean, it says some deep things about Congress itself. But I think that the really concerning thing about ISPs is that ISPs have Access to you and your information on a level that services do not that a lot of right? Well, it's it is a deep level of access and

Because there's not a lot of choice in ISPs and Because of that deep access, this is a really concerning problem, a really, really consistent problem. That's a really good point, because people are saying, you know, this is stuff that Google and Facebook are already able to do, but those are... That's not true. Those are... Yeah.

Well, that they're able to resell consumer data without notifying them specifically. Oh, yes. But Google and Facebook don't have the level of ISP's do. ISP's have it at a root level, a really, really basic level where you kind of can't choose. You kind of just don't have a way out of there. Like, you can kind of, to some extent, obviously,

like I really want to hedge this one, because you kind of really have to know what you're doing. You can choose what you give to Google and what you give to Facebook. Of course, because those services are so prevalent in a way you can't choose because you're locked in. Sometimes there isn't good enough informed consent, but with an ISP, like there's kind of nothing. It's your, unless you use a VPN and we should definitely talk about why that's a problem too.

Well, first it's a problem because the only good ones are paid, which means that you need to be able to afford a V, I mean, they're not debilitatingly expensive. I think there would like $60 a year. It's, it's, but it's still a tax. It's a tax on here. And then the other thing is also that VPNs, you're basically replacing your ISP with the VPN, like the VPN now can see everything you're doing. And so you kind of just have to trust that the VPN isn't reselling your information. And a lot of them do promise, but like, you know, like you got to trust the VPN isn't reselling your information, and a lot of them do promise, but like, you know, like you gotta trust the VPN,

you have to basically be okay with the VPN having everything now. And, you know, I use a VPN actually, I don't use it at home. I am going to have to make some choices about my ISP soon, and whether I can trust them. But I use a VPN when I'm in hotels, I use it when I'm in a coffee shop or on public wifi. I think that that is sensible.

I think that that's something that people who can afford it should be doing. But it's still, you know, I don't, like I'm not gonna, not that I would, but if I were doing like internet crimes or whatever, VPN is not enough. Like if I'm Edward Snowden, like I should definitely not be using a VPN. Like it's, if you're an activist, a VPN is like not enough.

It's really, I really want people to be aware of thinking that a VPN is going to solve it. This is such an endemic problem that's rooted in the system itself. It has to do so much with consumer protection. That's obviously, obviously, obviously, there are like, you know, ought to be a rule or a regulation or a law about it. Like that's the best fix for this privacy issue. And Congress has decided to go in the wrong direction. Yeah, I think this is a symptom of Congress

not prioritizing data protection at all. Or people. Or people like the verge did. Let's keep real here. Like there's a lot more of a six year. Let's say we made a data privacy. Yeah. So the verge published a story that was like,

here's the donations that each congress member who voted to overturn this rule got from the telecoms industry. And they were like, ha ha, look, like this one member only got $300, like $300 for a vote. But of course, it's like, it's not $300. Here's how you vote. It's like, this is an issue they didn't really care about. Someone told them, like, this is important, you know, like traded a vote for something else. You know how it goes in house of cards.

Like, it was just not something that they thought was important to make an individual decision on, basically, is my read on it. Very politicized. Like, if you look at it, it was basically party lines. Yeah. So clearly, something about the Republicans, like, they were like, oh, hey, this thing that everyone hates,

this privacy killing thing. This is a Republican issue. This is a Republican issue. No, seriously, though, this privacy killing thing. This is a public issue. This is a public issue. This is a public issue. No, seriously though, that's really sick. And it says something really sick about the current state of affairs. Yeah. And it's also crazy to me that when companies lose your data or there's data breach or whatever, that the only reason that you

get notified is because this is a law in California. Correct me if that's if there's anywhere else that requires you to do that. So like there is no federal law that says kind of complicated because the FTC has some kind of like sort of jurisdiction around it. But this is the kind of thing that should be just straight up a rule for everybody. Like, hi, I'm T-Mobile. I collected your social security number for no reason

and left it in a data center that got something happened to it. And now it's on the dark web. Oh, yes. And then also for a dollar. Also, if they really messed up, there should be serious penalties for it. Right. Yeah. Like, absolutely. But no. Yeah, there isn't. Yeah. I'm moving to Germany. Fuck this place. But that doesn't help, right? Because all the companies are in the US. It doesn't actually help you that much. You can have these German-specific rules.

actually help you that much. Like you can have these German-specific rules, but it only, like, you know, there's like notification rules or like how they handle your data or whatever, but if you're like going through US companies and US companies are being, you know, sloppy because there's no regulations around it at here, like you're still in danger.

Like it is really, it's like, almost time for some game theory. It really is globalization. Yeah, no, but it's similar to climate change. It's like this big issue that you do sort of need this cooperation around. Right. You need government to step in in order to regulate it. Because otherwise, it's just your kind of

screwed. Okay, so we're going to take a break real quick. Tear some ads from Josh and we'll be right back. If you're running an e-commerce business, Whiplash is your virtual warehouse. You send your products to a Whiplash facility so that when orders come in, Whiplash packs and ships them just like you would. But faster, and of course cheaper, leave the logistical hassle of order fulfillment to them and save money on shipping costs while doing so. Holiday sales shouldn't be stressful. Next time, get Whip Lash.

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Amazon gift certificate, which is great because I don't know about you, but I spend a lot of time and money on Amazon. And even if you've taken the show's listener survey before, you can do it every month. The current one is new and different. And so any input you have to give, we're ready for it. We're open and waiting. So go to podsurvey.com slash Joshua. That's POD S U R V E Y dot com slash Joshua and Thank you for helping us and really helping yourself And we're back with Sarah John contributing editor at Motherboard So Sarah you have been writing a very illuminating newsletter

about the airport cases. Yeah, so the airport cases are, I mean, it's a collective name for all of the litigation that's going on around Trump's travel ban. So some of the litigation is by plaintiffs who got caught in the travel ban. So for instance like the ACLU suing the government essentially. And some of it is states like Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, and so forth suing the government on on behalf of themselves essentially for the travel ban. Why did you call it the airport cases?

Is that something other people have been calling it, or were you just like, some people were calling it the airport cases already? Other people were calling it like the travel ban litigation. Sometimes I refer to it as the travel ban litigation, the Muslim ban litigation. I like the airport cases. And like I just sort of like the feel of it.

It has to do with the fact that it originated out of the airports because that's sort of the flashpoint of the litigation to begin with. Obviously right now, it's not happening in airports. Airports are like not as huge of a part of it, but there were all of these people who were detained inside airports and there were protest airports and so on and so forth. And lawyers showed up and were writing out rits of habeas corpus like on scene. So I kind of wanted to remind people of where this all started. And I think it's also, it flows a little more smoothly than the travel band cases. Right.

How many of these cases are there right now by your account? Who, boy, there's a lot. There's a lot. I, some, some of them are closing down all the time. So it's like a little difficult for me to get in track of them all. Think by my last count, there were like 20, a little over 20. Yeah, something like that. And the big deal one was Hawaii, most recently.

Well, most recently, yes. I would argue that the one in Maryland is a bigger deal. Why is that? Well, because it's going through a different circuit. So it's going up on a peel and arguments are going to be heard in May. So it's happening faster. No, it's just a different circuit. So it's already the travel band to some extent has already gone to the ninth circuit on the west coast. And the fact that it's going to the fourth circuit on the east coast now, it just means it's a different circuit. So we're

going to see a different sort of a different vibe. Okay. So Hawaii is on the same circuit as Washington. Yes. And the ninth circuit already basically came out against Trump in general. Kind of, yeah. I mean, it's complicated because of the procedural stance, but like we've already seen the ninth circuit and what they have to say about it. And so now we're gonna see what the fourth circuit has to say about it. And if they disagree, then we have a circuit split and that's the fast track to the Supreme Court. If they agree, and I think they're gonna end up agreeing,

I kind of just think that it's a little too much, but we'll see, it's like legally speaking, the government is actually in a surprisingly strong position. It's just really. Yeah, no, it's with this changes. No, just even before the changes actually, like it sort of has to do with the fact that presidential power with respect to immigration

is very, very strong, extremely strong. And even though the executive order doesn't make any sense, and even though it seems to blatantly violate the First Amendment, it's not entirely clear that the president doesn't have the power to just go ahead and do something like this. It's actually really bizarre, and I think that it is more an indictment of our legal system than I think is sort of like, oh yeah, no, it's totally okay that the president can do this. No, I think it actually just means that the law was wrong before and needs to clearly change and that there needs to be a different outcome

in these cases. But like, yeah, no, it is like we're not entirely sure how it's going to turn out in the future. And I am really curious to see what the Fourth Circuit has to say. If the Fourth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit agree, then Trump is in a really, really bad position. And we'll see where it goes from there. It seems like the Department of Justice is fighting this every step of the way. If they just dropped this and dropped the executive order and all of that, it really might be better for them politically,

but there's a lot of mysterious things they've been doing that can't really be explained anyways, so I don't know why I'm even bothering questioning the wisdom. Yes. It seems like the Occam's razor answer would be they are disorganized and not on top of it. I think you wrote in one of your newsletters that they had, you know, the Justice Department had said they were going to appeal, but they only noticed some, in some cases that they were going to appeal. They only noticed some cases that there was a new executive order at all. Like it seemed like they weren't totally maybe on top of all

of the cases that are pending against them. Yeah, I do think that it's really messy. Like in the Ninth Circuit, in the oral argument, in the Ninth Circuit that everyone got to hear on CNN, the guy, the DOJ guy, who argued for Trump, everyone was sort of like, wow, he was really bad. Actually, he was really good because he only found out that he was going to argue this case, like a few hours before.

Like an hour before. Yeah. So he had to brief himself, and he didn't write the briefs either. So he was just like some random person who wasn't even on this case that they dragged in and had him do the argument. Like, that's, what was his name? August Flynn, flingy. Yeah, flintia or something. Flintia.

Yeah, poor guy. Like, he did a really great job considering. It's like a real, one of those nightmares where you like are on stage and then you're, it turns out you're naked. It's that. Yeah, I mean, it's, it was like they basically handed him a pile of hot garbage and they were like, here you go. Defend this.

Defend this. Defend this. And we're gonna, and it's gonna get streamed live on CNN. Yes. Yeah. So what do you think is gonna happen to the people who are affected by this executive order? I mean right now there's a temporary restraining order. That means it's not an effect. So some people have been letting. So some of the people have been letting. Like the Iraqi translator that the ACLU was really

quick to represent, like sort of the first guy, his name is like Darwish, he's been letting. They like got him out of detention and they're like, all right, my bad, this was a mistake, you rendered a great service to the United States military in Iraq and you're going to get let in. So in a lot of these cases, it's like moot. And in other cases, like sort of the harm is pending, like in the Hawaii case, that one of the people who's suing is suing because his mother-in-law is sort of in the process, and they're not sure whether she's going to

have her paperwork denied or whatever, because she's from one of the affective countries. And the affected countries. So the first travel ban was seven countries, the second one was six countries. And the affected countries, so the first travel ban was seven countries, the second one was six countries. Yeah, they removed Iraq because the military was really upset that they had included Iraq because it was functioning. Right, they, yeah, they basically had all these translators and fixers who were putting themselves in danger for the promise of the ticket to America. And, and they were being denied. Yeah, and they were being denied and like their service had been like many many years prior and like the reason why they were being denied now was because they had been going through

vetting over those years, which is that's really extreme vetting one might say. Yeah, it's really dark and really sad that it is happening. And the countries that are on the new executive order are... So, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, I believe Libya. So, what's happening to these other people, I think, sort of one of the great ironies of their purchases is that it doesn't matter whether or not this gets enforced. You've been seeing increased harassment at the border of all kinds of people, even like US citizens, people of countries that are not affected by the ban. And you see this

increased harassment because there's been this message sent to customs and border protection that if it's okay to harass Muslims, that the new administration wants them to harass Muslims, and once that message is out there, you can't take it back. No court can tell CPP that this is not okay. I mean, actually they could, but it would be really unusual. And who knows if that would affect them in any way whatsoever. And yeah, it's just like, in a way, it doesn't matter that the EOs are unconstitutional. It doesn't matter if the EOs get permanently enjoined forever.

This sort of thing, this climate that the executive orders have rendered in this country is going to remain. Hate crimes will stay up. For us men at the border is going to stay up. People are going to continue to live in fear. And it's almost as though this litigation is about sort of the bare minimum that the law can do because if they, if the courts end up ruling in the government's favor and finding that EO is constitutional, then it sort of dropped the floor, right?

It says even this little thing, even this ridiculous thing, ridiculous painful thing where all of these people came out on Fox News and said it was a Muslim ban over and over again. We can't say that it's unconstitutional. We can't even do this and everything is okay. And that would be I think really bad. I think that it would damage the legitimacy of the Constitution itself. Which is why I'm like I'm pulling, I'm clearly pulling for one side. Like I'm not, I'm not gonna try and pretend like my newsletter is unbiased or whatever.

I think that I'm accurately reporting the news and that I'm explaining things to people truthfully. But yeah, no, I'm, I'm pulling for the government to lose in this because I think that the alternative is very scary. Yeah, I would agree that except that I do feel like there is some value in the pushback that we've seen, like, whereas if there hadn't been an executive order and there had been sort of a softer, more subtle kind of persecution that didn't have such an obvious target to push back against. And I mean, it would just be like the bush years. It would be exactly like the bush years. And the ACLU lost over and over again in the bush years because it was so subtle.

So yeah, I think like in a way, at least like if you're a Muslim living in America, you can see the footage on CNN of lots of people coming out to JFK spontaneously to say that they disagree with this. Right. We're voting for the case, we're rooting for the government to lose this case. Right. Yeah. So I do think that that is, that there is value in that.

But yeah, I mean, I agree. It's definitely like, if I were someone thinking of traveling to the US. And this is affecting everybody pretty much. Like everyone who is an immigrant or has an immigrant in their family is thinking, like, at what point does this touch me? Like, my stepmother has a green card from Russia, which could easily end up on some kind of list jotted

down by Donald Trump at some point. I have a great card. I have a great card. That's one of the reasons why I'm doing this newsletter is because it touches me in a way that feels very personal, even though I'm not from one of the targeted countries. Because I don't have brown skin, I'm not that likely to be harassed at the border, but it, because of this travel ban, like I've canceled plans abroad. Like I wanted to go back to South Korea to see my grandmother this summer, and I've gone

ahead and canceled that trip because I don't want to go back to my country of origin right now in this climate. Like it just worries me too much. And yeah, that's like kind of paranoid, but it's a reasonable kind of paranoid because you kind of just every day you don't know what's going to happen is the problem. Like you can't quite predict what's next. And I think in a way, that's the meta, most scary thing about it

is that everything can change in the twinkling of an eye. You kind of really miss how the government was before where you could see things coming down the pipeline very, very slowly. And, right? Right? And, like, right now, because there's like so much secrecy and ad hoc and pulse of behavior, you have no idea what your life is going to be like the next day. Well, one thing you can do is educate yourself and people should sign up for a newsletter. How do they do that? I am on tinyletter. So it's tinyletter.com slash airports and from there you just put in your email and sign up for the newsletter. Cool. It's an excellent newsletter. It's a fun read. It has personality. It also,

Sarah, you have a lot of agree, so you actually know what you're talking about. Unlike some other people who write about this stuff, and it is very complicated, so it's good to get it from someone who is taking it seriously. Well, only kind of seriously, I think it's up around a lot. Yes, well, you got to have jokes in dark times. You need jokes. For sure.

Well, thank you so much for talking to us about these things. Yeah, thanks for having me on. For sure. Well thank you so much for talking to us about these things. Yeah thanks for having me on. For sure. And people can also follow you on Twitter for however long you will still be there at Sarah John. Yes. SA R H J E O N G. Awesome. Alright Sarah thank you so much. Bye Sarah. Bye, have a great day. You too. That's it for tomorrow. Joshua will be back soon with another episode. But until then, I wish you and your family the very best.

Except that Comcast has sold their information to the Trump administration, and it's only a matter of time.