President Donald Trump’s biographer, Michael Wolff, flagged one of the most important lawyers who isn’t working anywhere in government, but still seems to be in the meetings.

In a new Substack post, the author and researcher explained that he is appealing his First Amendment suit against the first lady. One new detail in the case, he added, is that he believes the suit is actually being overseen by his team at the White House.

“This should not, perhaps, come as a particular surprise. But it offers another insight into Trump law, and Trump justice, and litigation as another arm of Trump’s command-and-control tactics,” wrote Wolff on Wednesday.

He promised that one day someone would write a book that would detail all of the ways that Trump has scored so many legal wins as a result of “guerrilla lawfare.” One of those key ways he’s done it is with one of his legal loyalists.

“This strategy for his personal, business, and, in the last decade, political life, is often credited to Roy Cohn. But really, it is a reflection of Trump’s own sense of constant combat and his belief that there is always an advantage to gain, that delay is as nearly good as victory, and that you don’t need to worry about the future if you live another day,” Wolff continued.

The move is having lawyers dedicated to his every legal whim, whether or not it’s respectful of a court’s rules or norms. At the Justice Department today, Wolff said, the staff is made up of “lawyers who have decided to sacrifice their careers for Trump.”

His personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who has been nominated to be the attorney general, being the main one. But it extends to all assistant U.S. attorneys around the country as well as Trump-appointed judges, Wolff said.

Behind all of that, he said, is Boris Epshteyn, “a 43-year-old Russian émigré.” While he has run his own law practice for a few years, he’s been spending a lot of time at the White House lately, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Behind the scenes, some of those in Trump’s inner circle see Epshteyn “as odd and suspect, someone always trying to get around them to get to Trump.”

While he briefly worked for the White House, he didn’t last more than a few weeks, but he’s remained in Trump’s good graces, “albeit with his name spelled wrong on Trump’s phone.” He became part of those trying to adjust the Arizona election results in 2020 and ultimately joined with Rudy Giuliani, coordinating efforts with state electors.

As Trump’s legal problems grew after leaving office, Wolff said that Epshteyn became “his key legal confidant,” often on the phone with him ten times a day.

“[Epshteyn is] hated by Trump’s staff, under constant threat (and constant media rumors) of his own indictment, caught on a police cam sitting in a gutter in Scottsdale, Arizona having been arrested for allegedly drunkenly pawing girls at the Bottled Blonde Pizzeria and Beer Garden,” wrote Wolff, adding that chief of staff Susie Wiles is an Epshteyn foe.

Epshteyn works solely for Trump, said Wolff. “Yet, even outside the White House, Epshteyn arguably holds the single most influential legal portfolio in Trump world, including an effective partnership with Blanche, now Trump’s nominee for Attorney General. Indeed, there is little in the Justice Department, or among the various federal prosecutors around the country, or involving Trump’s own vendettas, threats, and grievances, in which Epshteyn is not closely engaged.”

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You expect to be safe when you go to work or when your kids play at the school playground. When you go to the doctor or get financial advice from the bank, you expect they’ll act in your interests.

In short, there are many places in our society where the people with more control or more power have a duty of care to the people using their spaces and services.

Digital platforms should be no different. They’re important places for accessing information and participating in our communities. They need to be safe and trustworthy.

This is why the Australian government is drafting legislation for a “digital duty of care”. It would require social media platforms and other online providers to establish risk management systems – to identify potential risks of harm from their services and take reasonable steps to prevent or mitigate serious harms.

Read more:
Australia will impose a ‘digital duty of care’ on tech companies to reduce online harm. It’s a good idea – if it can be enforced

However, we’ll only know if it’s working if digital platforms, governments and the public can meaningfully observe what’s going on.

This is known as platform observability. Our ongoing work and examples from overseas show that mechanisms for observability and transparency need to be, and can be, built into the regulatory framework.

Putting the responsibility on platforms

Australia already regulates online safety through three main mechanisms:

• the kids’ social media account ban
• complaints systems so people can report illegal or harmful content (like cyberbullying and harrassment) and request it be taken down
• codes of practice for limiting access to age-inappropriate content.

But these measures are inadequate when the algorithms that shape our online environment are promoting harmful content. Current product safety rules under the law don’t extend to online service providers, and it’s unclear at best whether or when general tort law would impose duties.

United Kingdom and the EU have already imposed duties of care on platforms. Australia plans to follow.

Australia’s digital duty of care should require platforms to take reasonable steps to mitigate harms from algorithms that hack our attention, promote scams, target us with ads for addictive products like gambling and alcohol, or show us harmful content about eating disorders or untested health products.

Platforms have more data and technical capacity than any single person or regulator to tackle these harms.

We also argue that a digital duty of care shouldn’t be just about reducing risks of harm. It should also entail reasonable steps to ensure information with public and community value – such as trusted public health information – isn’t buried or banished from our feeds.

How will we know it’s working?

Just as important as creating a duty of care is knowing if it’s working. Our feeds are highly personalised and content is often ephemeral, disappearing within hours. So we need to build in observability measures.

This can’t just be reporting, where platforms self-assess according to standards they largely define. Most transparency measures currently offered by platforms provide only partial information.

Our own research on digital advertising demonstrates this problem. Advertising libraries are incomplete, transparency reports aggregate away important detail, and user-facing explanations (“why am I seeing this ad?”) offer limited insight into the complex systems that shape targeting and recommendation.

Knowing why one person received a particular ad tells us very little about who didn’t receive it, or reveal patterns of exclusion, or unequal access to information.

To understand the broader scope of platform dynamics, we must observe systems at scale and over time.

A lack of independent access

Meanwhile, platforms have increasingly started to control who gets to research their content. And platform-approved researchers can often only see what platforms choose to make visible, in formats platforms define, using tools platforms control.

This challenge reflects a broader media transformation. In the 20th century, broadcasters distributed content, audiences consumed it, advertisers funded it, and independent ratings agencies measured what was happening.

This provided some independent verification. Advertisers could assess audiences, creators could understand reach, regulators could evaluate compliance, and the public could scrutinise claims because anyone could watch a broadcast.

But platforms now create the measurement systems, control access to the data, sell the advertising, curate the content, and report on their own performance.

Independent observability has become increasingly difficult.

A transparent ecosystem

A digital duty of care should be accompanied by an ecosystem of observability. Within it, researchers, journalists, regulators and civil society organisations could work together to understand how platforms operate, and hold them accountable to public values.

This would not replace regulation. It would make regulation possible, helping to identify emerging risks, evaluate whether mitigation measures are working, and provide evidence for policymakers. It would also give Australians greater visibility into the systems that shape their lives.

To achieve this, legislation should include three additional protections, based on our research experience to date.

First, researchers conducting legitimate public-interest work should be protected from platform retaliation.

Second, platforms should be required to provide meaningful access to data that enables independent research. This data should be available to be exported for research without limits on the publication of that research.

Third, Australians should have stronger rights to access, download and donate their own platform data for research purposes.

Together, these measures would create the foundations for ongoing accountability rather than one-off compliance exercises.

The digital duty of care is an important opportunity. But its success will depend both on scope of the duty, and on creating the ecosystem needed to observe, evaluate and challenge platform behaviour over time.

The post Australia wants a ‘digital duty of care’. But how will we check what big tech is doing? appeared first on MASSIVE News.

Meinoud Rost van Tonningen was one of the most committed Dutch supporters of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. While many Dutch citizens resisted the German occupation during the Second World War, Rost van Tonningen chose a very different path. A trained lawyer, former League of Nations official, and rising political figure, he became one of the leading advocates of closer cooperation with Nazi Germany and helped push the Dutch fascist movement toward increasingly radical positions. His career offers a revealing insight into collaboration, ideology, and political ambition in occupied Europe. Born in the Dutch East Indies in 1894, Rost van Tonningen first gained prominence through his work in international finance before entering politics in the 1930s. Influenced by authoritarian ideas and increasingly drawn to National Socialism, he joined the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) and quickly emerged as one of its most influential figures. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, he rose to positions of considerable authority, helping integrate the Dutch economy into the German war effort and supporting policies that strengthened Nazi control over the country. As the war progressed, Rost van Tonningen became one of the most outspoken advocates of a German-dominated Europe. His close connections with senior SS leaders and his unwavering loyalty to the Third Reich distinguished him even among many fellow collaborators. Yet as Germany’s military position deteriorated, the political project to which he had devoted himself began to collapse. This documentary examines the life of Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, from his early career and political transformation to his role during the occupation of the Netherlands and the controversy surrounding his death in 1945. It is a story of ideology, collaboration, and the choices individuals made during one of the most turbulent periods in modern European history.

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The post The “Black Widow’s” Husband Who Sold His Soul to the SS appeared first on MASSIVE News.