Mike Lissner

Mike Lissner

@michaeljaylissner.com

Executive director and co-founder of @free.law. Occasional long distance athlete. Woodworker. Adroitful dodger of questions. Signal: mlissner.06

1K followers198 following2.2K posts

We need more video content. One of these days...

Law students: Learn how to use CourtListener, the RECAP extension and archive, and searchable oral argument transcripts and recordings with Jessica Frank, our Director of Justice Initiatives. Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqqs...

We’re preparing a worm and preparing to shut down all services at a moment’s notice.

kottke.org@kottke.org

Matt Webb is bunkering down, bracing for more LLM-driven security exploits. “Realistically, let’s say the internet gets infested with AI worms and we need to turn it off and on again, could we do it?” I had not heard of the air-gapped LLM communication 😳 [interconnected.org]

Everybody wants to pack the court. These reforms are muuuuch better and don’t lead to an arms race. +1 from me.

Daphna Renan@daphnarenan.bsky.social

This is an important legislative agenda: -term limits -regularizing appointments -ethics reform -shadow docket reform & -a supermajority rule before the Court can invalidate acts of Congress. These are all basic measures to rebuild a more democratic constitutionalism and a more legitimate Court.

This is a fun one for SF folks!

We're proud to be partnering with @archive.org , @eff.org, @freedom.press and others on the Aaron Swartz Hackathon November 8. The event will support multiple projects that improve public access to knowledge. Learn more and register today. www.aaronswartzday.org

PACER fees going up instead of down. If you’re planning a bulk data project, now is the time.

The Open Courts Act of 2026 would modernize PACER and tear down the paywall between the public and court records. And we need it now more than ever: PACER is set to increase per-page fees by 20%. free.law/2026/10/21/p...

Mike Lissner reposted

Since 2004, this community has helped make Firefox and the open internet possible. Our “Come Back to Firefox” campaign reunites a few early internet icons to remind people what made the internet special, and why it’s worth protecting.

This is a hugely important role. If you know any fundraisers that want huge impact, please send this along!

Join our fully-remote team at Free Law Project and help us bring accountability to the court system. free.law/2026/10/07/f...

The thing about this is, maybe too many people have gone apathetic to their own health?

Eric Lipton NYT@ericlipton.nytimes.com

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

More rumors today about how a certain company continues to take the data we make freely available according to our non-profit mission, gives us nothing, and then attempts to win away our partners. Lame stuff, folks!

Sentry has given Free Law Project non-profit support for years and makes a marvelous product that we love. If you build tech stuff, it's probably something you'll want.

While I'm recommending things, I must dis-recommend U.S. Bank. They literally just made banking errors with our ledger, and it's not even the first time. Last time they didn't even tell us until we flagged it for them. What happens when a bank gets the ledger wrong? Bad things!

Woo hoo!

Nate Raymond@nateraymond.bsky.social

A 68-year-old federal law that bans the manufacturing of switchblades ​for sale or distribution across state lines violates the Second Amendment, the 5th Circuit ruled last night. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

The time between vulnerability patches and web-scale exploit has reduced to zero. The only solution is taking systems offline until they're fixed. I just asked @free.law's infra team to get good at rapidly taking all our systems offline. What a world.

Mike Lissner reposted

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

nightshade →eth0:2026@nightshade.technology

oh it's bad. oh it's BAD bad. oh this is CATASTROPHIC, drop-whatever-you're-doing-and-patch-NOW levels of bad cert.europa.eu/publications...

Mike Lissner reposted

New: A committee of judicial investigators is imploring a federal judge in Texas suspected of suffering from a mental condition to cooperate and explain ‌why she emailed confidential and sealed court documents to about 140 judges, lawyers and members of the press. - www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

reuters.comTexas federal judge with suspected mental condition urged to reengage with inquiryA committee of judicial investigators on ​Tuesday implored a federal judge in Texas suspected of suffering from a mental condition to cooperate and explain ‌why she emailed confidential and sealed cou...

Sentry has given Free Law Project non-profit support for years and makes a marvelous product that we love. If you build tech stuff, it's probably something you'll want.

This is outrageous and will fly under the radar. SCOTUS is so conflicted they literally can't do their job. Why? Because they insist on making money selling books. If they need more money, let's give them a raise. If they want to publish books, they can do a PDF. They're Justices, not authors.

This is big. The Supreme Court is unable to hear a crucial copyright case because of financial conflicts. As @jtlg.bsky.social explains, this means they won't be overruling "one of the worst copyright decisions in recent memory" bsky.app/profile/jtlg...

Side projects that prevent justices from doing their job — that nobody else in the entire world can do — should be banned. No stock ownership, no for-profit book authorship, etc.

Honestly, the best people aren't motivated by money anyway, and I bet many of the justices would do it for a song, but if it makes them happy to give a little more while we ban things, sure, fine, whatever.

It’s true! In 2010 or so, funders told us it would be too hard to make an open case law archive. In a few weeks, it’ll be done. Their funding would have helped accelerate this!

When we started in 2010, funders turned us down. They said publishing every court record would be impossible. Today, our databases are some of the largest in the world and used millions of times daily. Help us fund the next chapter of equitable, accessible courts. donate.free.law/forms/suppor...

Mike Lissner reposted

This has happening for the past year+ globally with RTI/FOIA/public records systems. Very existential problem I haven't seen much serious government policy response to yet.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

A consequential choice will be made soon by government and companies as they are increasingly flooded with agentic AI inquiries that overcome the frictions that gated access (see the graphs - it has already started!) Two options: do you make services worse or better as a result?

Mike Lissner reposted

Join us Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 1 p.m. ET for a training on carceral book bans with @themarshallproject.org, @prisonpolicy.org and Moira Marquis of Prison Banned Books Week. Join us next week by RSVPing 👇

MuckRock@muckrock.com

Join The Data Liberation Project volunteers, The Marshall Project, Prison Policy Initiative and Moira Marquis of Prison Banned Books Week for a training on carceral book bans on Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 1 p.m. ET. RSVP here: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Mike Lissner reposted

Yesterday, the CSSWG accepted my proposal for mesh gradients and diffusion curve gradients! Want to make gradients like this natively in CSS? Well, we've started the work on it. It's coming! Here's the Explainer: github.com/w3c/csswg-dr...

Mike Lissner reposted

"Anthropic told investors on Wednesday distillation accounted for 5 per cent to 7 per cent of revenue" If true, and Q2 revenue was $11.5B, then that's more than half a billion dollars spent by other labs to distill Anthropic's models! www.ft.com/content/1163...

I’ve decided to only watch this show after getting a new TV that has darker blacks. As a little prize for myself.

kottke.org@kottke.org

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising. [youtube.com]

Mike Lissner reposted

A shocking thing to do to a sitting congresswoman.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social

WSJ: 'The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe'

Mike Lissner reposted

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "I didn't go to Congress. Remember Sleepy Joe? 'Oh, if they would give me approval in Congress!' You're not gonna get approval. You just do it. You're the president."

Mike Lissner reposted

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "I didn't go to Congress. Remember Sleepy Joe? 'Oh, if they would give me approval in Congress!' You're not gonna get approval. You just do it. You're the president."