The Puzzling Thing About Tucker Carlson

Nobody so far has taken over Rush Limbaugh's mantle as the most influential voice of the American right. At his best, although I think he'd been declining since the late Obama years, he had a combination of perceptiveness and wit that matched William Buckley. The problem is that so far, we haven't seen an equivalent figure step in -- as in fact Limbaugh stepped in to replace Buckley during Buckley's own extended decline.

One possibility was Tucker Carlson, although I was always skeptical due to Carlson's wannabe upper-class background, opportunism, and careerism. His best moment, as far as I can see, came when he debunked Sidney Powell's threat to "release the kraken" in the controversy following the 2020 election. But since then, he's been a leader of the inexplicable anti-Ukraine campaign on the US right, and now he's alleging a coverup of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Louis Joylon West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail. According to West’s written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was “technically insane” and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. Those are conclusions that puzzlingly no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously had reached. Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him.

Well, he was an unsuccessful business owner, a small-time pimp and major attention-seeker who traded on the assumption he was tied in with the mob. Perfectly sane. Carlson goes on,

Except that he Louis Jolyon West pronounced him crazy. But what West did not say was that he was working for the CIA at the time. Louis Jolyon West was a contract psychiatrist for the spy agency. He was also an expert on mind control and a prominent player in the now infamous MKUltra program in which the CIA gave powerful psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge. So of all the psychiatrists in the world, what in the world was this guy doing in Jack Ruby’s prison cell? The media did not seem interested in finding out. In fact, the New York Times, in an extensive 1999 obituary of West, never mentioned the fact that he had worked for the CIA, much less his time in Jack Ruby’s cell, which seems relevant.

However, the detailed research into Jack Ruby up to now has stressed only his low-level mafia ties and his possible role in gun-running to Castro, not CIA connections. Allegations from the time of Ruby's incarceration that he was insane appear to have been driven by a campaign to make hin ineligible for the death penalty, not to discredit him as some sort of knowledgeable witness. A news story at the time quotes Dr West in his capacity as a professior and chair of the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology that Ruby was developing a paranoid state, and "The law says he has to be sane to be executed." In any case, Ruby's conviction for murder was overturned pending a new trial, but Ruby died of cancer before it could take place. On his deathbed, Ruby issued a statement that he alone had been responsible for the murder of Oswald.

Carlson uses this random and somewhat questionable data item to pivot to a completely different question, files on the Kennedy assassination that continue to be unreleased:

We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?["] And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a “conspiracy theorist” that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that they suspected it all along. But no matter how you feel about it or what you thought about the Kennedy assassination, pause to consider what this means. It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president.

All Carlson can do is assure us that this anonymous guy is "not a 'conspiracy theorist'", but we can't learn his name. Isn't this actually pretty close to Sidney Powell's kraken? Just asking. For whatever reason, at what seems to be the peak of his media career, he seems to be coming apart. It's a sad thing to watch, but it's also worth noting that even while terminally ill, Limbaugh kept things together.

If something new and solid comes of all this, I'll reassess, but so far, I think this is trading on the continuing loss of FBI credibility from the Twitter files, and there's nothing new to learn about the Kennedy assassination.

More On The Twitter Whistleblower

On Thursday, I posted on the wide-ranging allegations by a Twitter whistleblower, its former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, that alleged numerous risks to the company's business continuity, as well as that CEO Parag Agrawal concealed these issues from the company's board, when current standards of corporate governance clearly establish that the board should have been notified of them. Via Instapundit, here's an update:

According to the whistleblower report, one consequence of these and many other poor practices was a nearly constant stream of security breaches, with serious incidents occurring almost weekly throughout 2020. One such breach made headlines when a group of teenagers hijacked several major accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama, future Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple, and Uber, and used them to solicit transfers of bitcoin. The teen hackers’ level of access was “enough to achieve 'God Mode,' where the teenagers could imposter-tweet from any account they wanted,” the report explains. “Twitter's solution was to impose a system-wide shutdown of system access to all of its employees, lasting days. For about a month, hiring was paused and the company essentially shut down many basic operations to diagnose the symptoms, not the causes, of the hack.”

Elsewhere,

As one report to Twitter’s Board of Directors put it: “Every new employee has access to data they do not need to have access to.” Presumably that included employees known by Twitter to be agents of the Indian and Chinese governments, of which there were several.

. . . Mudge recalled one Twitter executive’s reaction to the discovery of a foreign agent: “Well since we have one, what does it matter if we have more?”

In my own experience, raising data security issues with managers can certainly result in grumbling and resistance, but eventually common sense wins out, even if the messenger isn't necessarily popular. The impression I have here is that the lunatics were running the asylum, and the issue isn't so much Schadenfreude as it is how this could have happened. And this in turn applies to two regimes, the one pre-Musk and the current one, in which Musk was forced to buy the company when he pretty clearly hadn't done due diligence.

As for Twitter pre-Musk, there's an intriguing reference in a mea culpa that Jack Dorsey released this past Monday:

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe. . . . The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

So it sounds like Jack Dorsey himself knew he was in the wrong job for maybe 18 months, but he did little or nothing to leave it until Musk broke in with a deal that was so insanely generous to Twitter shareholders that they had absolutely no choice but to accept it. Who was the "activist" who "entered our stock in 2020" and somehow changed everything? Sounds like there's a story here, huh? But whoever was running things on the board after that, and it wasn't Dorsey, clearly set up an environment where he or she didn't want any bad news, and the managers, including Dorsey himself, obliged. The takeover by Musk was clearly the best of a whole range of horrible outcomes, good for the board but bad for Musk.

Here's the sort of problem that Musk inherited:

[A] series of cascading datacenter problems did put Twitter at risk of “permanent irreparable failure,” and was only prevented by the herculean efforts of a team of Twitter engineers. Every account, every bit of code, every tweet, like, retweet, quote-tweet, DM—everything that constitutes the company, platform, and community known as Twitter—was nearly lost forever during this incident. A key piece of the global information system, poof, gone, and with no way to bring it back. A multibillion-dollar company obliterated in an instant, the biggest 404 error in history, caused not by hackers, but by incredible negligence.

. . . After Agrawal took over as CEO in November 2021, Mudge alleges that prior to his first Board meeting as company chief, Agrawal planned to mislead the Board on a number of security and compliance issues, and required convincing not to do so. And in advance of a meeting with the Board’s Risk Committee, Agrawal announced his plans to present misleading data yet again. This time neither Mudge nor other concerned employees were able to stop him, but after Mudge noted that the events of the meeting could constitute fraud, Twitter’s Audit Committee investigated and ultimately agreed. Mudge began working on a report to correct the record with the Board, but Agrawal fired him the next day.

In other words, although Musk, having neglected due diligence at the time of his April offer to buy Twitter, tried to backtrack on it throughout the spring and summer over ostensible concerns about which accounts were bots, there were in fact clear instances of fraud in the company's operation already recognized by the board's audit committee. It appears that not only had Mudge written a whistleblower report that should have been avilable to Musk's staff, but he'd publicly testified about these issues before Congress. Where were Musk's legal and financial advisers? Not much smarter than the Twits, it would seem.

One big problem with the whole Musk-Twitter story is that he conventional wisdom is focusing on a censorship-free speech issue, when the reality is that it looks like Musk walked into a corporate problem much closer to FTX, which he isn't competent to fix. Indeed, he's struggling with just the free speech problem:

The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 16, 2022

I think Bari Weiss gets to the heart of it: Musk is a creature of his own whims, and with Twitter, he's hit a major set of corporate problems he isn't remotely equipped to handle. Among other things, he might want to consider rehiring Mudge -- but of course, only after actually reviewing the circumstances and thinking things through.

A Couple Of I-Told-You-Sos

My wife and I have a soft spot for Dan Abrams. Although he appears to be quite wealthy and fully tied in to the Democrat-media establishment, he also hosted Live PD and appears to have invested a great deal of his credibility in restoring a clone of that show to the air after Live PD was canceled following the George Floyd riots. He also hosts the new show, On Patrol Live, where his persona is down-to-earth, sympathetic to the day-to-day jobs of uniformed police, and committed to maintaining public understanding of law enforcement.

Thus it wasn't a surprise to us that in a segment of another of his shows, Dan Abrams Live, he raises a question I've raised here, the potential liability of Sam Bankman-Fried's parents in the FTX scandal. Whether due to obtuseness or a wish to cover up for culpability within David Brooks's New American Upper Class, other media hasn't mentioned this issue, but now Abrams has. He notes that Sam himself is now in custody in the Bahamas,

but -- what about his parents?

I'm surprised so few are asking whether either of them could be in legal jeapordy. Fried's father, Joseph Bankman, works as a tax law professor at Stanford, though he's announced he won't be teaching at the university next year. The father Bankman worked for FTX for almost a year, deeply involved in the business in its early days, he helped the company recruit its first lawyers, last year he joined the FTX staff in meetings on Capitol Hill, he consulted FTX employees on tax matters, and he also had a large focus on FTX's charitable operations.

His mom, Barbara Fried, retired from teaching at Stanford, was head of a political advocacy network called Mind the Gap, which she helped start, to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Her son was among the donors for the network. Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried and his parents bought real estate together in the Bahamas worth $121 million.

Dan Abrams is neither QAnon nor Tucker Carlson. I think it's commendable that he's picking up this story when so many on all parts of the spectrum seem to think it's either too sensitive or too much work to cover.

But 0n the subject of Prof Bankman and his efforts on behalf of FTX, there was an intriguing data item in this week's House hearings on the case:

[Republican Representative] Huizenga turned then towards family involvement in the case, enquiring whether SBF’s father, Mr. Bankman received payment from FTX. Ray confirmed that “the family did receive payments.”

Huizenga met with SBF on Dec. 8, 2021, accompanied by his father, Mr. Bankman. Noting that SBF was 15 minutes late to that meeting, Huizenga said: “I asked and focused on what types of regulation he was under his engagemnet with regulators and how that affected FTX but it seems that there’s a lot more to uncover here.”

As we saw in the photo I ran here of Prof Bankman escorting Sam in a meeting with Congresswoman Waters, it appears that on matters of importance, like meetings with politicians, Prof Bankman seems to have been the prime mover and major negotiator; Sam was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy.

On a separate issue, days after I first raised the matter, a story appears in right-wing media, Questions Arise About How Disgraced ‘Non-Binary’ Biden Official Received Top Clearance.

Following the firing of Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear official Sam Brinton, critics have begun questioning as to how someone with a dodgy past and criminal tendencies managed to receive the highest level of security clearance in the federal government.

The whole question of security clearance has never been adequately investigated. The 1970s Falcon and the Snowman scandal involved a "connected" and privileged kid who got together with a drug-addled pal to pass US secrets to the Soviet Union. The whole plot was facilitated by the complacency and negligence of the corporate and government security system, within which I worked for much of my tech career. Problems in that story like someone lying dead drunk on the floor of a top-secret vault were the sort of thing I saw myself with some regularity.

Whatever comes of the Brinton fiasco, it will be nothing new, and it will result in no real reforms.

Twitter vs FTX

A past allegation against Twitter has resurfaced, and if it's correct, it raises questions about whether Twitter has been nearly as big a swindle as FTX. The questions involve areas that I worked on in my tech career, so they're particularly interesting to me, and based on my own experience, they at least appear credible.

This past September, during the period when Elon Musk was attempting to get out of his obligaation to buy Twitter, Musk

accused Twitter of fraud by concealing serious flaws in the social media company’s data security, which the entrepreneur said should allow him to end his $44 billion deal for the company, according to a Thursday court filing.

. . . Musk said the claims by the whistleblower, former head of Twitter security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, amounted to fraud and breach of contract by Twitter.

I don't believe the maneuvers between Musk and Twitter following Musk's September allegations and his late October decision to proceed with the purchase have been made public, or if they have, I haven't seen them. In any case, his September allegation of fraud due to data security shortcomings wasn't sufficient to stop the deal. However, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's claims have resurfaced in the wake of Musk's Twitter Files revelations.

The whistleblower report has emerged independently of Musk’s “Twitter Files” but was likely inspired by the exposés.

A Twitter user who published the report said: “The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the ‘Twitter files’ but it’s much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention.

. . . “Twitter didn’t monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices.

“Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments.

“At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.

“In 2020, Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.

The difference between "test" and "production" environments is particularly important, as is the related question of how many employees had privileged access to "production systems". In a programming environment, mistakes will inevitably be made in writing programs, especially given the tricky logical issues programmers have to deal with -- what you actually told the machine to do may not be quite what you meant for it to do; that's just how logic is. If I tell the driver of a car to "go ahead and back up", he'll know what I mean. A computer instead will either give me an error message or maybe move forward, not reverse.

As a result, programs must be tested exhaustively before they're approved and moved to "production" status, at which point they are basically the company product, and they can't be changed without a repeat of the testing and approval process. This means that it's important to get things right the first time, because fixing things afterward is expensive and time-consuming.

A key reason for the corporate data security function is to maintain these controls between "test" and "production" ("Mudge's" use of the term "staging" sounds more company-specific; the distinction between "test" and "production" is the important one).

If there is no enforceable distinction between the two, then there are two posssibilities. The most likely is that software with bugs will become in effect the company product, which at best will make the users angry, but if it results in incorrect account balances, it could be a major problem for the company. The less likely but more serious possibility is that a programmer will deliberately write a program that steals money from the company or its customers (for instance, by incorrectly rounding and putting a tiny percentage of the rounding into the programmer's own account). The absence of a rigorous testing and approval process for "production", or the ability to bypass the process, will make these possibilities much more likely.

That "Mudge" claims that 5,000 employees (in other words, half of Twitter pre-Musk) had privileged access to "production" indicates that there were no serious company controls over its tech environment -- this in a major tech company. This is equivalent to the alleged "back door" between FTX and Alameda that allowed the company to raid customer deposits to make up for investment losses, except that instead of a few FTX executives who could do this, half of Twitter could do that there.

Farther down in the same story,

Mudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter’s data.

He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.

. . . After Agrawal became CEO, he wanted to present materially misleading information to the Board, overriding Mudge’s objections.

The question of data center failure is another basic task of data security. If, as relatively recent history demonstrates, corporate data centers can be rendered inoperable by fire, flood, hurricane, sabotage, terrorist act, earthquake, power failure, or any other of a wide range of interruptions, the company must have contingency plans to accommodate this. Clearly if a bank's data center burns down, there are repercussions; the ATMs won't work, payrolls won't be deposited, checks will bounce, and so forth. Banks have elaborate plans to recover operations within hours with full current data in such an event, but banks are just the most visible instance of an overall problem.

"Mudge's" point seems to be that Twitter had no viable plan in place to deal with, say, an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault near its data center. If such an event took place, the implication is that Twitter would simply go down and never come up again; the company would no longer have a product to sell and no way to recover it. The effect would be the same as an FTX bankruptcy. This in fact is board-of-directors-level material; if Parag Agrawal concealed it from the board, which is "Mudge's" allegation, he should have been fired, and of course, he was. The story continues; when he learned of this,

Musk responded saying: “Wow.”

“Live & learn,” he added.

My view continues to be that Musk makes things up as he goes along, and he appears to work from instinct. He isn't a rationalist, policy-driven CEO along the lines of John Ray, instead, it's "Live & learn". Nevertheless, at this point, I think it's clear that in firing half or more of Twitter and starting over from scratch, he made the only possible move. In fact, if Twitter had continued under prior management, there would likely have been either a software failure or a data center disaster that would have put the company out of business and, if anything, thrown even more people out of work.

I certainly agree with the guy who said this is "much less politically/tribally salient", but it's actually more important. Musk has said he intends to hire a CEO for Twitter, but this needs to be a rationalist John Ray type, not a Steve Jobs style figurehead.

The Pedophile Problem Won't Go Away

Back in the day -- and that was actually pretty recently -- we were told that same-sex attraction and pedophilia were two different things. As of 2010, for instance, there was finger-wagging at the Vatican Secretary of State:

The sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church took yet another turn this week when statements by the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, second only to Pope Benedict, linked pedophilia to homosexuality.

Bertone said: "Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have demonstrated that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia."

. . . Other church and lay leaders similarly have called the remarks outrageous and ill-informed. While en route to the United States in 2008, Pope Benedict said he considered homosexuality and pedophilia to be separate matters. So why would Cardinal Bertone make his statements? And what is the real truth behind any association of pedophilia and homosexuality?

The piece concludes,

To link homosexuality and pedophilia (or ephebophilia) is obviously erroneous, uninformed and irresponsible. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation. Pedophilia and ephebophilia are sexual disorders that afflict both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and mostly heterosexuals.

Much more recently, I nevertheless read remarks by a Catholic bishop who pointed out that, first, all Catholic priests are male, and second, of child victims of abuse by priests, the overwhelming majority have been boys. (I've been looking for this, but haven't been able to find the exact quote. If anyone knows where it is, please let me know!) Nevertheless, even without a citation, this at least appears to match the anecdotal record.

The issue, thought to have been fully resolved at least within respectable opinion, has reemerged in the context of drag queen story hours, other prominent gays posting on Twiter, and Elon Musk. Alex Berenson on Substack, up to now a high-profile Musk supporter, has had to do a quick 180 in the wake of l'affaire Yoel Roth:

Musk has targeted Roth in a very dangerous way. For the last several days, Musk has repeatedly said that old Twitter didn’t do enough to end child pornography and sexual exploitation.

. . . [I]n the last 48 hours, he has helped cheerlead a campaign against Yoel Roth. The campaign has highlighted old and off-color tweets Roth made, as well as Roth’s University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis about Grindr, a gay sex and dating app.

. . . Musk’s fit this weekend has endangered Yoel Roth. If he has evidence that Roth or other Twitter employees supported child sexual abuse on Twitter, he should take it to an agency qualified to investigate. If not, he needs to leave Roth alone and stop inflaming passions around this issue before someone gets seriously hurt.

If blood flows, it will be on Elon Musk’s hands.

Berenson's argument here, as best I can parse it out, relies on premises he doesn't directly state. The first is the currently respectable view that same-sex attraction and pedophilia are two different things. However, unreconstructed opinion in places like the Vatican continues to link them, without foundation. This in turn encourages deplorables to commit violent acts against people who are same-sex attracted, or something like that. Thus, Elon Musk is inciting violence against Yoel Roth in particular and gays in general. When the next mass shooting at a gay club takes place, the blood will be on his hands, even though the motivation of such shooters has so far always turned out to be deeply ambivalent, and they haven't come out as conventionally deplorable.

But this is now the line:

Former Twitter “Truth and Safety” honcho, Yoel Roth, has allegedly fled his home in fear for his safety.

The problem continues to be that the public statements of figures like Roth, who is now portrayed as unfairly demonized and completely misunderstood, nevertheless indicate a sympathy for pedophilia, and even a leaning in that direction. On Monday, for instance, I linked a Tweet where he said, "I'm persistently freaked out by the youth-centric direction my research interests are headed in, given I, you know, hate children." Or the tweet he approvingly quoted, "Musclebear with beard: hot. Musclebear with beard holding a child: inexplicably hotter."

In another tweet, he said, "I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling 'gay bareback porn' is considered academic work." This strongly suggests that "research interests" in the tweet above is an arch reference to porn. But that's a problem in itself.

Berenson's complaint is basically that nobody's caught Roth in flagrante with a 12-year-old, or if they have, they should report it, not make idle accusations. But nobody needs to be caught in flagrante with a 12-year-old to go to federal prison.

Section 2256 of Title 18, United States Code, defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). . . . Additionally, federal jurisdiction almost always applies when the Internet is used to commit a child pornography violation.

Just the tweets from Roth above, although these aren't unique, indicate at minimum a deep sympathy with people who view child pornography, as well as a definite leaning in that direction on his part. That he should ever have been "Trust & Safety Head" at Twitter is clearly problematic, and a decision, however hasty or poorly thought through, to fire the guy or accept his resignation should not have been controversial. In addition,

I haven’t been able to find any examples of evidence of direct communications with Roth that included threats, but such messages are never appropriate. Plenty of people have been complaining about Roth online (ironically on Twitter), but that’s hardly the same thing as death threats or bomb threats.

And this leaves aside an even more recent linking of same-sex attraction with pedophilia, the drag queens who went to the White House for the signing of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act:

Among those who attended the White House's ceremony for the signing of the legislation codifying same-sex marriage were two drag queens, one of whom once tweeted: 'The kids are out to sing and suck d!'

Another performed for a group of kids in a church in New York in August where 'social pressure' was put on students of Grace School to enjoy the show.

What do drag queens have to do with marriage, gay or straight? They weren't there to promote any form of marriage; they were there as "non-binary" people to normalize pedophilia. The same-sex pedophilia problem isn't going away.

FTX Updates

There's been a small but steady trickle of news since my last post on this subject, punctuated by this morning's notice of Sam Bankman-Fried's arrest in the Bahamas at the request of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Charges are to be unsealed later today.

"Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY," Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Souther District of New York said in a statement. "We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time."

There is actually little new here. It appears Sam was under some sort of house detention in the Bahamas pending this development, and the only surprise is how quickly the actual US arrest was made -- as I've pointed out, the single recent equivalent has been the Madoff indictment, which took place so quickly because Madoff himself precipitated the case when he spontaneously confessed to the scheme. Sam hasn't confessed, and equivalent Ponzis, like Enron and Theranos, resulted in indictments years after the bankruptcies of their associated companies.

It's intriguing how quickly the Bahamas have moved to distance themselves from FTX, where they'd had their headquarters:

Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement, "The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law."

The statement added that while U.S. authorities pursue criminal charges, the Bahamas is continuing a regulatory and criminal investigation into the company's collapse.

Other developments, while less publicized, are even more intriguing. Although initial reports had been that after Paul, Weiss dropped Sam as a client, he was being represented by one of his father's colleagues at Stanford Law (which struck me as a clear conflict of interest), as of December 6,

Sam Bankman-Fried has retained high-profile defense attorney Mark Cohen, reported Reuters on Tuesday, citing confirmation from Bankman-Fried's spokesperson Mark Botnick.

A partner at Cohen & Gresser, Mark Cohen is a former federal prosecutor and recently represented Ghislaine Maxwell in her sex trafficking trial.

For whatever it's worth, Sam apparently did not change his policy of making lengthy statements to the press even with his new counsel.

A week ago, I reported that Caroline Ellison had been spotted in New York under circumstances that suggested she was working with an attorney. The New York Post provides an update, saying she

has hired Stephanie Avakian, a partner at white-shoe law firm Wilmer Hale who is the former enforcement division chief at the Securities and Exchange Commission[.]

Elsewhere, though, it's reported that neither Mark Cohen nor Wilmer Hale has made any public comment on representing either Sam or Caroline Ellison.

My own view continues to be that although the only question for either Sam or Caroline is how much time they'll spend in federal prison, a much better question is who else will go there with them. Some people are worried about how far the scandal extends. Dylan Mattews writing at Vox yesterday on the scandal revealed, well down in the story:

First, a disclosure: This August, Future Perfect — the section of Vox you’re currently reading — was awarded a $200,000 grant from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation. The grant was for a reporting project in 2023, which is now on pause. (I should be clear that, under the terms of the grant from SBF’s foundation, Future Perfect has ownership of its content and retains editorial independence, as is standard practice for all of our grants.)

. . . Obviously, knowing what we know now, I wish we hadn’t taken the money. It proved the worst of both worlds: It didn’t actually help our reporting at all, and it put our reputation at risk.

What I noticed here was that the money didn't come from FTX, or even from Sam himself, it came from "Bankman-Fried’s family foundation". And Mattews himself elsewhere in the piece stressed that

SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment when that hedge fund grew into something enormous[.]

But naive and inexperiecned 25-year-old SBF who played video games and popped prescription pep pills had a family foundation? This is what Fords and Rockefellers do. And Clintons. Not 25-year-old naifs. Somebody else was behind the scenes managing this sudden wealth like a Lay or a Madoff. If it was a family foundation, might that not be a clue?

Bankman-Fried’s parents have reportedly been (figuratively) struck by the collateral damage of their son’s reckless exploits. Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, has canceled the one law class he was scheduled to teach at Stanford early next year, according to the Stanford Daily. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, also isn’t teaching any classes next quarter.

. . . Bankman hasn’t commented on why he’s not teaching any courses next year; Fried told the Stanford Daily that her absence was simply due to a “long-planned” decision to retire and has “nothing to do with anything else going on,” presumably referencing the downfall of her son’s fake crypto empire. She added that she would like to make a return to teaching in the future, which somewhat refutes her earlier statement. If she does teach again someday, it’ll certainly make for an interesting first lecture.

I might surmise that Stanford has suggested to the pair that given the circumstances, it might be best for them to maintain a very low profile vis-a-vis the institution, but I would also think that if both are law professors, they may well be anticipating that their time and energy will no doubt be directed to their own defense. (In any case, a felony conviction, if not an arrest, would end their tenured professorships. Stanford is thinking toward the future here as well.)

Sam ran FTX like the guy in the Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland runs Disney.

Elon Musk vs Yoel Roth

Forget Sam Brinton, the big news Saturday night was Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust & Safety head, who is shown at left above with his husband after their San Francisco wedding in August 2019. Roth was initially kept on at Twitter by its new owner Elon Musk despite presenting himself as the public face of its controversial censorship and banning policies, but as of November 10, he had resigned.

I have yet to endorse Musk as some sort of cultural caudillo, but I can grant that as of late Saturday, he'd at least done homework he should have been doing over a month ago:

Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

A Bloomberg story that covered this tweet commented with the standard line:

Far-right and extremist voices have long pushed a false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are “grooming” children to abuse them. In September, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism said that “the result of this widespread hateful rhetoric has been a spike in harassment, threats and violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”

But the problem isn't that people on the far right falsely claim that LGBTQ+ people are all groomers, the problem is that Roth as Twitter's Trust & Safety head himself had a creepy fascination with porn that's reflected, of all things, in his own tweets:

I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling “gay bareback porn” is considered academic work.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) September 25, 2012

or

I'm persistently freaked out by the youth-centric direction my research interests are headed in, given I, you know, hate children.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) August 24, 2011

or indeed, a secret dirty Twitter account of his own:

Apparently former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter had a “secret dirty twitter account” which has since been scrubbed.

Read this tweet that was tweeted from @yoyoel’s secret dirty account:

Everything is starting to make sense. pic.twitter.com/YpJiX8ckIW

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 12, 2022

One problem with social media is indeed that there's porn all over. I'm not on Twitter at all, but I'm on Facebook primarily for railroad hobby interests that ought to be entirely G-rated. But even there, you can't avoid clickbait porn, including gay images. OK, if you're someone who likes to join railfan groups on Facebook and download incidental porn off them, well, OK, but how is it that the guy on Twitter who was supposed to be controlling this is into gay porn himself and thinks this is all copacetic?

Isn't there a basic problem with public discourse here? Remember that the intent of the 1960s MPAA movie ratings was to replace overall censorship with the idea that people could choose the sexuality of their environment. G was family entertainment, X was under 16 not allowed, and so forth. It's increasingly plain that on social media, this has been replaced, and there's effectively no censorship on highly controversial sexual matters, but there's up to now been heavy-handed censorship of fairly uncontroversial political views.

I'm skeptical that Musk is the guy to fix this -- I'm not sure if even a month ago he had an inkling that it needed fixing. And indeed, maybe all that needed to be done was to fire Roth and hire the right guy to replace him. (How, by the way, did Roth rise to that position in the first place? Should we be asking Mr Dorsey, who is sometimes thought to be gay but claims he isn't?)

But at least, if inadvertently, Musk is raising important questions.