Cryptocurrency legislation once seemed to be the rare issue that could draw bipartisan support in Donald Trump’s Washington, thanks to the industry’s prolific donations on both sides of the aisle.
Then Trump and his family attempted to monetize the presidency through a meme coin and a $2 billion crypto deal involving an Abu Dhabi-backed venture firm.
Democrats were, suddenly, outraged. Some centrist party members who had treated cryptocurrency with deference even began to walk away.
Nine Senate Democrats pulled their support for so-called “stablecoin” legislation over the weekend, imperiling the industry’s most likely legislative win this year. Meanwhile, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., blocked a House hearing on a broader, more ambitious crypto “framework” on Tuesday, leading several Democrats in a walkout.
“Trump may just cause enough polarization to make crypto skepticism mainstream within the Democratic Party.”
The industry is still pushing for a vote on the legislation in the Senate, where Democrats continue to work on a potential compromise. Yet for skeptics who have had their warnings about crypto’s threat to the economy ignored for years, Democrats’ sudden conversion was heartening. They just wished it hadn’t taken Trump to wake the party up.
“Crypto has been able to buy so many Democrats because there was no organized opposition and thus little downside to politicians selling their vote,” said Jeff Hauser, a longtime critic of the industry and executive director of the Revolving Door Project. “Trump may just cause enough polarization to make crypto skepticism mainstream within the Democratic Party.”
Sporadic Opposition
The industry’s bipartisan alliances were on display last May, as the House debated its favorite legislation: the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act.
Out of 213 Democrats, 71 joined with Republicans to give overwhelming support to FIT21, as it is known, though the bill did not proceed to a vote in a Senate. The legislation is aimed creating a framework that would largely shield the industry from oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is viewed as having the sharpest regulatory bite.
The industry seemed even better positioned this year, thanks to Trump’s election and a record-breaking $197 million spending spree on the 2024 campaigns. All the cash helped knocked hostile Democrats out of primaries and propel industry-friendly candidates in the general election.
The White House has said that the Trump family’s crypto deals raise no ethical concerns because Trump’s business interests are held in a trust that his sons run.
Trump’s Schemes
In September, Trump’s sons helped launch a crypto marketplace called World Liberty Financial.
Hours before his inauguration, the Trump Organization launched a Trump meme coin that has now generated more than $320 million in transaction fees, according to a recent analysis.
Then, last week, World Liberty Financial announced the massive deal with the Emirati firm, which planned to use the company’s tokens to make a transaction with the crypto exchange Binance, according to a report in the New York Times.
By that point, the bipartisan mood on Capitol Hill was already beginning to sour.
Waters expressed openness to legislation dealing with stablecoin last year. In March, however, the Trumps announced that they would be issuing a stablecoin of their own. Waters on April 2 tried to amend a stablecoin bill in the House Financial Services Committee, where she serves as ranking member, to prohibit the Trump family from issuing one that benefits the president.
Republicans rejected her bid, and the bill passed out of committee with support from several Democrats, including some who have drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the industry.
Then, as news of World Liberty Financial’s Abu Dhabi deal circulated, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., led eight other Democrats in announcing Saturday that they were backing off their support for a similar stablecoin bill in their chamber, imperiling its chances of overcoming a filibuster.
Though Gallego and several of his colleagues had just voted for the bill in committee, they now said it “has numerous issues that must be addressed, including adding stronger provisions on anti-money laundering, foreign issuers, national security, preserving the safety and soundness of our financial system, and accountability for those who don’t meet the act’s requirements.”
Gallego’s statement may have had a special sting for the industry, which spent $10 million in super PAC funds helping him win his Senate race last year.
In a joint statement Monday, three leading crypto trade organizations said they still hoped the Senate would advance the legislation.
“A comprehensive regulatory framework will enable widespread and increased stablecoin adoption,” the groups said, “which is essential to cementing U.S. dollar dominance in the digital economy.”
According to Axios, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is still planning to hold a vote on the stablecoin bill on Thursday, and the measure’s sponsors are hoping to strike a deal to revive the legislation.
Waters Walks Out
On Tuesday, Waters ratcheted up pressure on the industry by objecting to a joint House Financial Services and Agriculture committee meeting on the newest iteration of the FIT21 bill.
“I object to this joint hearing, because of the corruption of the president of the United States and his ownership of crypto and his oversight of all the agencies. I object,” Waters said.
Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., the chair of the Financial Services Committee, said the hearing had been negotiated with Democrats for weeks.
“Through her actions today, the ranking member has thrown partisanship into what has historically been a strong, good bipartisan relationship,” Hill said.
Republicans and some of the committees’ Democrats continued holding a more informal roundtable, as Waters marched over to a different building for a hearing of her own.
At Waters’s breakaway hearing, one witness said Congress shouldn’t just take a hard line on the Trumps, since some of World Liberty Financial’s most problematic practices are mirrored by other leading companies.
“In many ways, the Trump family is simply copying common crypto business practices.”
World Liberty Financial markets itself as the future of decentralized finance. On its website, the company says that its governance system, based on a special token that can be bought but not traded, “ensures that every $WLFI owner has an equal voice. From submitting proposals to casting votes, your participation is key to shaping our decentralized platform.”
Yet it is controlled by a small set of insiders who stand to profit at the expense of retail customers, according to Mark Hays, associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress.
“While it is entirely right for members of Congress to raise concerns about how actions of the Trump presidency distort good policymaking and threaten the public interest, none of us here should lose sight of the fact that, in many ways, the Trump family is simply copying common crypto business practices,” Hays said. “In other words, many of the potential issues we see with the Trump family’s crypto practices are a feature — not a bug — of the crypto industry.”
Neither the Trump Organization nor World Liberty Financial immediately responded to a request for comment on the company’s governance structure.
Waters’s effort to disrupt the House hearing pointed to a continuing divide among Democrats. While six other Democrats joined her, several remained at the main hearing featuring industry witnesses, including Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the House Agriculture Committee ranking member.
“I think that, with more publicity around the corruption, they’re going to pay more attention.”
Democrats who stayed drew supportive statements from one of the industry’s biggest players, Coinbase.
Craig and the other Democrats who stayed did, however, criticize the Trump family’s deals.
“It is corrupt, it is wrong, and it makes this process of coming together to regulate crypto more partisan than it needs to be,” Craig said.
In the Senate, Gallego and his colleagues’ statement focused on the substance of the stablecoin bill rather than on the Trumps’ attempts to enrich themselves.
In an interview with The Intercept, Waters predicted that Democrats’ focus will soon shift to Trump. “It’s coming,” she said. “I think that, yes, they had some real issues, but I think that with more publicity around the corruption, they’re going to pay more attention.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for President Trump’s pick for Under Secretary of the Army to sell his stock in a defense contractor that experts say would pose a clear conflict of interest.
In a federal ethics agreement first reported by The Intercept, Michael Obadal, Trump’s pick for the second most powerful post at the Army, acknowledged held equity in Anduril Industries, where he has worked for two years as an executive. Obadal said that contrary to ethics norms, he will not divest his stock, which he valued at between $250,000 and $500,000.
In a letter shared with The Intercept in advance of Obadal’s confirmation hearing Thursday, Warren, D-Mass., says Obadal must divest from Anduril, calling the current arrangement a “textbook conflict of interest.”
“By attempting to serve in this role with conflicts of interest, you risk spending taxpayer dollars on wasteful DoD contracts that enrich wealthy contractors but fail to enhance Americans’ national security.”
Warren, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, writes that Obadal’s stock holdings “will compromise your ability to serve with integrity, raising a cloud of suspicion over your contracting and operational decision.”
“By attempting to serve in this role with conflicts of interest, you risk spending taxpayer dollars on wasteful DoD contracts that enrich wealthy contractors but fail to enhance Americans’ national security,” Warren writes.
A more detailed financial disclosure form obtained by The Intercept shows Anduril is not the full extent of Obadal’s military investments. According to this document, a retirement investment account belonging to Obadal holds stock in both General Dynamics, which does billions of dollars of business with the Army, and Howmet Aerospace, a smaller firm. While nominees are not required to list the precise value of such investments, Obadal says his holdings in General Dynamics and Howmet are worth between $2,000 and $30,000.
Don Fox, former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, told The Intercept that neither stock should be exempt from conflict of interest considerations under federal law. “The fact that they are within either a traditional or Roth IRA doesn’t impact the conflict of interest analysis,” he said. “Not sure why he would be allowed to keep those.”
“A DoD contractor is a DoD contractor,” said Fox. “The degree of their business with DoD or what they do isn’t material. A lot of people were surprised for example that Disney was/is a DoD contractor. For a Senate confirmation position they would have had to divest.”
In addition to these defense contractors, Obadal holds stock in other corporations that do business with the Pentagon, including Microsoft, Amazon, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Cummins, which manufactures diesel engines for the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. None of these companies are mentioned in Obadal’s ethics letter detailing which assets he will and won’t dispose of if confirmed. In his more detailed disclosure document, known as a Form 278, Obadal explicitly notes he will be able to exercise his shares in Anduril “if there is an equity event such as the sale of the company, or the company becoming a publicly-traded entity,” potentially netting him a large payout. Anduril was most recently reported to be valued by private investors at over $28 billion.
In addition to divesting from Anduril, Warren’s letter asks Obadal to get rid of the stocks in these other firms, commit to recusing himself entirely from any Anduril-related matters at the Army, and pledge to avoid working for or lobbying on behalf of the defense sector for a period of four years after leaving the Department of Defense. “By making these commitments, you would increase Americans’ trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at the Army,” Warren writes, “rather than the special interests of large DoD contractors.”
We all know that excessive carbon dioxide isn’t good for the planet. In fact, it’s one of the biggest drivers of climate change. As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. In small amounts, that’s normal—even necessary. But today, there’s far too much of it, and that excess is heating the planet at an unsustainable rate. The result? More extreme weather events, including storms, droughts, and wildfires—threatening both wildlife and human life.
From emissions to innovation
So, how do we keep carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere in the first place? The obvious solution is to cut emissions. But another exciting option? Recycling carbon into something new. Right now, a handful of pioneering companies are doing just that.
In 2021, for example, New York-based Air Company launched a vodka made with carbon dioxide. Yes, you read that right. The brand uses captured carbon—sourced from the air or industrial sites—along with hydrogen created via electrolysis to produce ethanol. Combine that with water, and you get vodka.
Air Company
It’s not alone. Finnish startup Solar Foods captures carbon dioxide and combines it with hydrogen—generated using renewable energy like solar power—to produce a novel protein called Solein. This nutrient-dense powder can be used in everything from meat alternatives to egg-free foods.
And then there’s Savor, a California-based company transforming captured carbon into versatile, sustainable fats. Most recently, it unveiled its first-ever butter made using this technology. Already, Michelin-starred chefs are taking notice, and you may soon see it on menus at acclaimed restaurants like SingleThread and One65. Beyond butter, Savor’s carbon-based fats could one day replace animal fats, palm oil, and more.
But how does this science actually work? What does carbon-based butter taste like? And does it function like traditional fats in our bodies? We sat down with Savor CEO Kathleen Alexander to find out.
Turning carbon into butter with Savor CEO Kathleen Alexander
VegNews: Let’s start with the basics—how exactly do you turn carbon into butter?
Kathleen Alexander: Savor has developed a pioneering process that creates real fats without relying on traditional animal or plant agriculture. Our technology begins with the most fundamental building blocks of life—carbon gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
VN: And what do you do with those gases?
KA: Through a carefully controlled process involving heat and pressure, we transform these simple carbon gases directly into carbon chains. These chains are then converted into fatty acids—the essential building blocks of fats and oils—and ultimately into complete fat molecules.
VN: That skips a lot of the usual steps in how we get fat today, right?
KA: Exactly. This direct approach bypasses the lengthy traditional agricultural cycle where plants capture carbon, animals consume those plants, and humans then harvest, process, and refine those resources into usable fats. By eliminating this conventional pathway, our process dramatically reduces land use, water consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Savor
VN: And the final product—does it work the same way in our bodies?
KA: The fats we produce are chemically identical to those you consume daily, meaning they provide the same nutritional fuel for your body.
VN: Are there any nutritional advantages?
KA: What makes our fats distinctive is their composition—we produce higher concentrations of both medium-chain and odd-chain fatty acids compared to most agricultural fats. These particular fatty acid profiles have been associated with positive health outcomes, and we are currently conducting nutritional studies to better understand their potential benefits.
VN: That sounds incredibly versatile. Can you adjust the fat depending on what it’s needed for?
KA: Our technological platform offers unparalleled versatility. We can match the performance characteristics of virtually any type of fat—from animal fats and dairy fats to vegetable oils, tropical fats, and even specialty oils used in cosmetics—all using the same core technology. This flexibility, combined with our position in the broader energy ecosystem and our adaptability regarding feedstock, makes Savor uniquely positioned to meet diverse industry needs with sustainable fat solutions.
VN: Let’s talk about scale. A lot of alternative fat producers struggle to expand—how does Savor plan to grow sustainably?
KA: A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Sustainability—authored by myself, my co-founder Ian McKay, and others before we established the company—describes how we can achieve emissions intensities that are dramatically lower than traditional agriculture—much lower than 0.8 gCO2e/kcal at commercial scale.
VN: Are you verifying that independently?
KA: We are currently working with a third party to complete a lifecycle assessment (LCA) for our first commercial facility, which is in the design phase. As we continue to scale production capacity at our pilot plant, we may perform a formal LCA there as well, but our current efforts are focused on lifecycle assessment for commercial production.
VN: Beyond sustainability, what else sets Savor apart in terms of industry potential?
KA: Scalability and flexibility make Savor’s fat solutions uniquely positioned to meet industry needs. Our ability to match the performance of animal fats, dairy fats, vegetable oils, tropical fats, as well as specialty oils used in the cosmetics industry—all with the same technological platform—sets us apart.
VN: Are food companies already taking an interest?
KA: Our proprietary technology has already attracted multinational consumer packaged goods companies, whose R&D teams are working on ingredient innovation projects that can leverage Savor’s unique ability to create customizable fats and oils. The company is actively negotiating joint development agreements with some of these partners, who have been particularly impressed by the versatility and tunability of fatty acid profiles that Savor’s platform can produce—capabilities that extend well beyond the company’s initial dairy-fat mimicking formulation.
Savor
VN: All that science is impressive—but let’s get to the real test: taste. How does your butter compare?
KA: Our products are made to be direct substitutes in some of the most common applications and recipes. This is true whether our products replace existing fats, or are customized to meet a specific purpose, or if they are integrated into more complex products like butter.
VN: So can it pass the croissant test?
KA: Our initial butter formulation has properties that are amazingly close to dairy butter. Impressively, it can “croissant” and can be a 1:1 replacement in most baking applications, plus many other popular culinary uses for butter.
VN: And finally, what’s the feedback been like?
KA: Even the most discerning guests at our launch dinners couldn’t tell the difference between our butter and conventional butter.
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
A leading Cook Islands environmental lobby group is hoping that the Cook Islands government will speak out against the recent executive order from US President Donald Trump aimed at fast-tracking seabed mining.
Te Ipukarea Society (TIS) says the arrogance of US president Trump to think that he could break international law by authorising deep seabed mining in international waters was “astounding”, and an action of a “bully”.
The order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”
NOAA has been directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act.”
It directs the US science and environmental agency to expedite permits for companies to mine the ocean floor in the US and international waters.
In addition, a Canadian mining company — The Metals Company — has indicated that they have applied for a permit from Trump’s administration to start commercially mining in international waters.
The mining company had been unsuccessful in gaining a commercial mining licence through the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
‘Arrogance of Trump’
Te Ipukarea Society’s technical director Kelvin Passfield told Cook Islands News: “The arrogance of Donald Trump to think that he can break international law by authorising deep seabed mining in international waters is astounding.
“The United States cannot pick and choose which aspects of the United Nations Law of the Sea it will follow, and which ones it will ignore. This is the action of a bully,” he said.
“It is reckless and completely dismissive of the international rule of law. At the moment we have 169 countries, plus the European Union, all recognising international law under the International Seabed Authority.
“For one country to start making new international rules for themselves is a dangerous notion, especially if it leads to other States thinking they too can also breach international law with no consequences,” he said.
TIS president June Hosking said the fact that a part of the Pacific (CCZ) was carved up and shared between nations all over the world was yet another example of “blatantly disregarding or overriding indigenous rights”.
“I can understand why something had to be done to protect the high seas from rogues having a ‘free for all’, but it should have been Pacific indigenous and first nations groups, within and bordering the Pacific, who decided what happened to the high seas.
“That’s the first nations groups, not for example, the USA as it is today.”
South American countries worried
Hosking highlighted that at the March International Seabed Authority (ISA) assembly she attended it was obvious that South American countries were worried.
“Many have called for a moratorium. Portugal rightly pointed out that we were all there, at great cost, just for a commercial activity. The delegate said, ‘We must ask ourselves how does this really benefit all of humankind?’
Looking at The Metals Company’s interests to commercially mine in international waters, Hosking said, “I couldn’t help being annoyed that all this talk assumes mining will happen.
“ISA was formed at a time when things were assumed about the deep sea e.g. it’s just a desert down there, nothing was known for sure, we didn’t speak of climate crisis, waste crisis and other crises now evident.
“The ISA mandate is ‘to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment from the harmful effects that may arise from deep seabed related activities.
“We know much more (but still not enough) to consider that effective protection of the marine environment may require it to be declared a ‘no go zone’, to be left untouched for the good of humankind,” she added.
Meanwhile, technical director Passfield also added, “The audacity of The Metals Company (TMC) to think they can flaunt international law in order to get an illegal mining licence from the United States to start seabed mining in international waters is a sad reflection of the morality of Gerard Barron and others in charge of TMC.
‘What stops other countries?’
“If the USA is allowed to authorise mining in international waters under a domestic US law, what is stopping any other country in the world from enacting legislation and doing the same?”
He said that while the Metals Company may be frustrated at the amount of time that the International Seabed Authority is taking to finalise mining rules for deep seabed mining, “we are sure they fully understand that this is for good reason. The potentially disastrous impacts of mining our deep ocean seabed need to be better understood, and this takes time.”
He said that technology and infrastructure to mine is not in place yet.
“We need to take as much time as we need to ensure that if mining proceeds, it does not cause serious damage to our ocean. Their attempts to rush the process are selfish, greedy, and driven purely by a desire to profit at any cost to the environment.
“We hope that the Cook Islands Government speaks out against this abuse of international law by the United States.” Cook Islands News has reached out to the Office of the Prime Minister and Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA) for comment.
Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.
Technology will soon be able to do everything we do – only better. How should we respond?
Right now, most big AI labs have a team figuring out ways that rogue AIs might escape supervision, or secretly collude with each other against humans. But there’s a more mundane way we could lose control of civilisation: we might simply become obsolete. This wouldn’t require any hidden plots – if AI and robotics keep improving, it’s what happens by default.
How so? Well, AI developers are firmly on track to build better replacements for humans in almost every role we play: not just economically as workers and decision-makers, but culturally as artists and creators, and even socially as friends and romantic companions. What place will humans have when AI can do everything we do, only better?
Donald Trump’s latest adjustment to automobile tariffs were billed as relief for the Big Three carmakers, but a leading analyst said Wednesday that Elon Musk’s Tesla will benefit most while others will be stuck “in quicksand” — potentially creating a slight advantage for a company whose CEO donated nearly $300 million to Trump and other Republican causes during last year’s election.
Trump’s first round of massive tariffs fueled widespread attention to the fact that, of the major carmakers, Tesla seemed to be the best protected from the direct impact of tariffs.
“Helps Tesla a lot, Detroit Big 3 still in quicksand.”
Trump issued a new executive order Tuesday scaling back some auto tariffs, a move sought for weeks by domestic automakers who had been whacked with massive duties on imported car parts. While Trump’s latest tariff seesaw could provide temporary relief to some of the Big Three, however, analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said Tesla still has an edge.
“Helps Tesla a lot, Detroit Big 3 still in quicksand,” Wedbush said in an email.
Wedbush was responding to the complicated impact of two executive orders Trump issued Tuesday, one meant to eliminate “cumulative” tariffs on imported cars and parts, and another providing temporary relief on imported auto parts for cars primarily made in the U.S.
Wedbush said that overall, the latest changes should help Tesla more than the other carmakers, who have greeted the latest Trump announcement with cautious praise.
“While not completely unscathed, Tesla is in the best position to weather this storm vs. the Big 3 and other foreign automakers as it localized 85% to 90% of its supply chain in the US and will be exempt from many of these tariffs,” Wedbush said.
Neither the White House nor Tesla immediately responded to requests for comment.
Tesla models dominate the top of the chart for the percentage of domestic content in their vehicles, with other ostensibly American auto manufacturers falling far behind. According to the “2024 Made in America Auto Index,” produced by American University’s Kogod School of Business, Tesla occupied the top five spots by percentage of their car parts manufactured in the U.S. or Canada.
“Their Model 3 Performance Model took the no. 1 spot, followed by the Model Y at no. 2 and the new Cybertruck at no. 3. Tesla’s Models S and X tied for the no. 4 spot,” said a webpage on the index. The Ford Mustang is tied for the fourth slot with two Tesla models.
The new Trump orders offer relief from earlier tariffs by effectively removing penalties for cars that are made up of 85 percent or more domestic content.
According to the Kogod chart, only two cars have 85 percent or greater U.S. and Canadian content: the Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y. The Tesla Cybertruck is not far behind at 82.5 percent.
Despite having a relative edge over other automakers, analysts have still warned that Trump’s initial round of massive tariffs posed a threat for Musk because they could lead to lower economic growth overall. Musk has been one of the loudest voices calling on Trump to scale back his tariffs on cars and other items. In a Tesla earnings call last week, he said that he would continue to advocate for lower tariffs.
Trump’s tariff tweaks were not enough to dissuade Wedbush from sounding a pessimistic note about the future of the auto industry. He said the sticker price of an average car could go up $5,000 to $10,000.
“This continues to be a Twilight Zone situation for the entire automaker industry which continues to be paralyzed further cost increases and uncertainties that will change the paradigm for the US auto industry for years to come in this stays into effect,” Wedbush said. “We believe the auto tariffs in their current form adds up to $100 billion of costs annually to the auto industry and will essentially get passed directly onto the consumer and clearly erode demand on Day 1 of tariffs.”
Musk has long been a beneficiary of government largess — a position he has looked to solidify with Trump’s ascendancy.
When an incipient protest movement caused Tesla to take a major financial hit following Musk’s heavy involvement in Trump’s far-right government, the two men staged what amounted to an unprecedented live ad on the White House lawn for the electric cars. Trump declared at the event that vandalism tied to the protest movement against Tesla was domestic terrorism.
Rita Murad, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and student at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2023 after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October 7. The images included a picture of a bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza and a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison.
In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories.
When the New York Times covered Murad’s saga last year, the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that, in the U.S., “There is certainlyno way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack. In Israel, the situation is completely different.”
Soon, that may no longer be the case.
Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. There is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. There is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed student protesters’ demands. And there is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia philosophy student arrested by ICE agents outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview.
In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech.
In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.”The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.
Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative emerges from long-standing collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares. The AI industry’s business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of data, which makes less-then-democratic contexts, where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial, legislative, or public oversight, particularly lucrative proving grounds for new products. The effects of these technologies have been most punitive on the borders of the U.S. or the European Union, like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece. But now the inevitable is happening: They are becoming popular domestic policing tools.
Israel was one early test site. As Israeli authorities expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism in the early 2010s, U.S. technology firms flocked to the region. In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems, Israel’s security apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information economy’s most prized commodity: data. IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings. Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces. Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems. The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats. Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint.
With time and in partnership with many of the same companies, the U.S. security state built its own surveillance capacities to scale.
Not long ago, Silicon Valley preached a mantra of globalization and integration. It was antithetical to the far-right’s nationalistic agenda, but it was good for business in an economy that hinged on the skilled and unskilled labor of foreigners. So when Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from five Muslim countries and subjecting those approved for visas to extra screening in January 2017, tech executives and their employees dissented.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, joined demonstrations at the San Francisco airport to protest Trump’s travel ban. Mark Zuckerberg cited his grandparents, Jewish refugees from Poland, as grounds for his opposition to the policy. Sam Altman also called on industry leaders to take a stand. “The precedent of invalidating already-issued visas and green cards should be extremely troubling for immigrants of any country,” he wrote on his personal blog. “We must object, or our inaction will send a message that the administration can continue to take away our rights.”
Many tech workers spent the first Trump presidency protesting these more sinister entailments of a data-driven economy. Over the following year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon employees would stage walkouts and circulate petitions demanding an end to contracts with the national security state. The pressure yielded image restoration campaigns. Google dropped a bid for a $10 million Defense Department contract. Microsoft promised their software and services would not be used to separate families at the border.
But the so-called tech resistance belied an inconvenient truth. Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information.
Even as some firms pledged to steer clear of contracts with the U.S. security state, they continued working abroad, and especially in Israel and Palestine. Investigative reporting over the last year has brought more recent exchanges to light. Deals between U.S. companies and the Israeli military ramped up after October 7, according to leaked documents from Google and Microsoft. Intelligence agencies relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to host surveillance data and used Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to cull through and operationalize much of it, often playing direct roles in operations — from arrest raids to airstrikes — across the region.
These contracts gave U.S. technology conglomerates the chance to refine military and homeland security systems abroad until Trump’s reelection signaled they could do so with little pushback at home. OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow militaries and security forces to deploy their systems for “national security purposes.” Google did the same this February, removing language saying it wouldn’t use its AI for weapons and surveillance from its “public ethos policy.” Meta also announced U.S. contractors could use its AI models for “national security” purposes.
Technology firms are committed to churning out high-risk products at a rapid pace. Which is why privacy experts say their products can turbocharge the U.S. surveillance state at a time when constitutional protections are eroding.
“It’s going to give the government the impression that certain forms of surveillance are now worth deploying when before they would have been too resource intensive,” Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, offered over the phone last week. “Now that you have large language models, you know, the government may say why not store thousands of hours of conversations just to run an AI tool through them and decide who you don’t want in your country.”
The parts are all in place. According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an “immigrationOS” that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain “antisemites” and “terrorists,” according to a recent announcement by the State Department. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
It is important to remember that many of the propriety technologies private companies are offering the U.S. surveillance state are flawed. Content moderation algorithms deployed by Meta often flag innocuous content as incendiary, especially Arabic language posts. OpenAI’s large language model are notorious for generating hallucinatory statements and mistranslating phrases from foreign languages into English. Stories of error abound in recent raids and arrests, from ICE officials mistaking Mahmoud Khalil for a student visa holder to citizens, lawful residents, and tourists with no criminal record being rounded up and deported.
Where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically.
But where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. We see this in Israel and Palestine, as well as other contexts marked by relatively unchecked government surveillance. The algorithms embraced by Israel’s security forces remain rudimentary. But officials have used them to justify increasingly draconian policies. The Haifa-based human rights organization Adalah says there are hundreds of Palestinians with no criminal record or affiliation with militant groups held behind bars because right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to search their phones and social media pages and label what they said, shared, or liked online as “incitement to terrorism” or “support of terrorism.”
Now we hear similar stories in American cities, where First Amendment protections and due process are disintegrating. The effects were nicely distilled by Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student at Columbia who self-deported after ICE officials showed up at her door and cancelled her legal status. From refuge in Canada, she told the New York Times she was fearful of the U.S. expanded algorithmic arsenal. “I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare,” Srinivasan said, “where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety.”
It is frightening to think that all this happened in Trump’s first 100 days in office. But corporate CEOs have been working with militaries and security agencies to sediment this status quo for years now. The visible human cost of these exchanges may spawn the opposition needed to head off more repression. But for now, the groundwork is laid for the U.S. surveillance state to finally operate at scale.
Rita Murad, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and student at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2023 after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October 7. The images included a picture of a bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza and a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison.
In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories.
When the New York Times covered Murad’s saga last year, the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that, in the U.S., “There is certainlyno way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack. In Israel, the situation is completely different.”
Soon, that may no longer be the case.
Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. There is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. There is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed student protesters’ demands. And there is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia philosophy student arrested by ICE agents outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview.
In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech.
In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.”The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.
Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative emerges from long-standing collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares. The AI industry’s business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of data, which makes less-then-democratic contexts, where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial, legislative, or public oversight, particularly lucrative proving grounds for new products. The effects of these technologies have been most punitive on the borders of the U.S. or the European Union, like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece. But now the inevitable is happening: They are becoming popular domestic policing tools.
Israel was one early test site. As Israeli authorities expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism in the early 2010s, U.S. technology firms flocked to the region. In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems, Israel’s security apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information economy’s most prized commodity: data. IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings. Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces. Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems. The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats. Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint.
With time and in partnership with many of the same companies, the U.S. security state built its own surveillance capacities to scale.
Not long ago, Silicon Valley preached a mantra of globalization and integration. It was antithetical to the far-right’s nationalistic agenda, but it was good for business in an economy that hinged on the skilled and unskilled labor of foreigners. So when Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from five Muslim countries and subjecting those approved for visas to extra screening in January 2017, tech executives and their employees dissented.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, joined demonstrations at the San Francisco airport to protest Trump’s travel ban. Mark Zuckerberg cited his grandparents, Jewish refugees from Poland, as grounds for his opposition to the policy. Sam Altman also called on industry leaders to take a stand. “The precedent of invalidating already-issued visas and green cards should be extremely troubling for immigrants of any country,” he wrote on his personal blog. “We must object, or our inaction will send a message that the administration can continue to take away our rights.”
Many tech workers spent the first Trump presidency protesting these more sinister entailments of a data-driven economy. Over the following year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon employees would stage walkouts and circulate petitions demanding an end to contracts with the national security state. The pressure yielded image restoration campaigns. Google dropped a bid for a $10 million Defense Department contract. Microsoft promised their software and services would not be used to separate families at the border.
But the so-called tech resistance belied an inconvenient truth. Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information.
Even as some firms pledged to steer clear of contracts with the U.S. security state, they continued working abroad, and especially in Israel and Palestine. Investigative reporting over the last year has brought more recent exchanges to light. Deals between U.S. companies and the Israeli military ramped up after October 7, according to leaked documents from Google and Microsoft. Intelligence agencies relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to host surveillance data and used Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to cull through and operationalize much of it, often playing direct roles in operations — from arrest raids to airstrikes — across the region.
These contracts gave U.S. technology conglomerates the chance to refine military and homeland security systems abroad until Trump’s reelection signaled they could do so with little pushback at home. OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow militaries and security forces to deploy their systems for “national security purposes.” Google did the same this February, removing language saying it wouldn’t use its AI for weapons and surveillance from its “public ethos policy.” Meta also announced U.S. contractors could use its AI models for “national security” purposes.
Technology firms are committed to churning out high-risk products at a rapid pace. Which is why privacy experts say their products can turbocharge the U.S. surveillance state at a time when constitutional protections are eroding.
“It’s going to give the government the impression that certain forms of surveillance are now worth deploying when before they would have been too resource intensive,” Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, offered over the phone last week. “Now that you have large language models, you know, the government may say why not store thousands of hours of conversations just to run an AI tool through them and decide who you don’t want in your country.”
The parts are all in place. According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an “immigrationOS” that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain “antisemites” and “terrorists,” according to a recent announcement by the State Department. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
It is important to remember that many of the propriety technologies private companies are offering the U.S. surveillance state are flawed. Content moderation algorithms deployed by Meta often flag innocuous content as incendiary, especially Arabic language posts. OpenAI’s large language model are notorious for generating hallucinatory statements and mistranslating phrases from foreign languages into English. Stories of error abound in recent raids and arrests, from ICE officials mistaking Mahmoud Khalil for a student visa holder to citizens, lawful residents, and tourists with no criminal record being rounded up and deported.
Where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically.
But where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. We see this in Israel and Palestine, as well as other contexts marked by relatively unchecked government surveillance. The algorithms embraced by Israel’s security forces remain rudimentary. But officials have used them to justify increasingly draconian policies. The Haifa-based human rights organization Adalah says there are hundreds of Palestinians with no criminal record or affiliation with militant groups held behind bars because right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to search their phones and social media pages and label what they said, shared, or liked online as “incitement to terrorism” or “support of terrorism.”
Now we hear similar stories in American cities, where First Amendment protections and due process are disintegrating. The effects were nicely distilled by Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student at Columbia who self-deported after ICE officials showed up at her door and cancelled her legal status. From refuge in Canada, she told the New York Times she was fearful of the U.S. expanded algorithmic arsenal. “I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare,” Srinivasan said, “where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety.”
It is frightening to think that all this happened in Trump’s first 100 days in office. But corporate CEOs have been working with militaries and security agencies to sediment this status quo for years now. The visible human cost of these exchanges may spawn the opposition needed to head off more repression. But for now, the groundwork is laid for the U.S. surveillance state to finally operate at scale.
30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.
After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.
It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.
Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.
As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.
By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.
Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough U.S. goods! Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!
As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.
Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.
Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.
The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.
Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.
The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.
This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.
You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.
More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.
Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.
They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies. Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.
Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).
After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA. GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.
An unequal society Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.
Corruption is also an issue in the country.
Press controls and political repression As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”. In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.
Vietnam is forging its own destiny What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.
It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.
Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.
In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.
Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:
“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.
“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”
And, my god, they did.
To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:
“After the rain, good weather.
“In the wink of an eye,
the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania cite rising threats from Russia to justify once again using one of world’s most indiscriminate weapons
Rights groups have expressed alarm and warned of a “slippery slope” of again embracing one of the world’s most treacherous weapons, after five European countries said they intend to withdraw from the international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines.
In announcing their plans earlier this year, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all pointed to the escalating military threat from Russia. In mid-April, Latvia’s parliament became the first to formally back the idea, after lawmakers voted to pull out of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which bans the use, production and stockpiling of landmines designed for use against humans.
An ocean conservation non-profit has condemned the United States President’s latest executive order aimed at boosting the deep sea mining industry.
President Donald Trump issued the “Unleashing America’s offshore critical minerals and resources” order on Thursday, directing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to allow deep sea mining.
The order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”
NOAA has been directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act.”
Ocean Conservancy said the executive order is a result of deep sea mining frontrunner, The Metals Company, requesting US approval for mining in international waters, bypassing the authority of the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
US not ISA member
The ISA is the United Nations agency responsible for coming up with a set of regulations for deep sea mining across the world. The US is not a member of the ISA because it has not ratified UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“This executive order flies in the face of NOAA’s mission,” Ocean Conservancy’s vice-president for external affairs Jeff Watters said.
“NOAA is charged with protecting, not imperiling, the ocean and its economic benefits, including fishing and tourism; and scientists agree that deep-sea mining is a deeply dangerous endeavor for our ocean and all of us who depend on it,” he said.
He said areas of the US seafloor where test mining took place more than 50 years ago still had not fully recovered.
“The harm caused by deep sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
An obscure nonprofit group that gave $100,000 to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee was bankrolled by an artificial intelligence company whose CEO was an unindicted co-conspirator in Trump’s election interference case in Georgia, the company’s president confirmed to The Intercept.
Unlike more established megadonors such as Boeing or the Heritage Foundation, however, the Institute for Criminal Justice Fairness was created only months ago and has little public profile beyond a barebones website.
The institute was funded by the startup Tranquility AI, according to company co-founder David Harvilicz, who has pitched Trump administration officials on using its software to speed up deportations of “illegals.”
The purpose of the institute’s donation to the inaugural fund, Harvilicz said, was “to meet people that were there who might be policymakers who would want to eventually attend some of our events. It was mostly to meet people.”
The company’s other co-founder is CEO James Penrose, a former National Security Agency leader who has drawn scrutiny — and a grand jury subpoena — for his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
The donation from the Institute for Criminal Justice Fairness was among a slew of gifts to the Trump inaugural committee disclosed over the weekend. The inaugural committee pulled in a record $239 million haul.
“Inaugural funds present an ideal, problematic opportunity for wealthy special interests.”
The contribution highlights the loose rules that allowed nonprofits and corporations to make unlimited donations to the Trump inaugural committee, a situation that critics say creates the perception that donations can be used to curry favor with the administration.
“Because inaugural funds are very loosely regulated, they present an ideal, problematic opportunity for wealthy special interests to ingratiate themselves with an incoming presidential administration,” said Saurav Ghosh, the director for federal campaign finance reform of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “This is particularly true for Trump, who has made clear that he views his office and government in general as largely transactional; donations and support will be rewarded.”
Following the Money
There are no signs on the Institute for Criminal Justice Fairness’s sparse website of its relationship to Tranquility AI, a startup company backed by a trio of venture capital funds.
The institute was created at the end of September, according to incorporation records in Virginia, and says that it is “dedicated to educating the public and advocating to policymakers on the benefits of utilizing artificial intelligence solutions in law enforcement, the military, and government.”
One clue linking the Institute for Criminal Justice Fairness and Tranquility AI, however, came in the Trump inaugural committee’s Sunday filing with the Federal Election Commission. The address given for the group’s December 18 donation was the same as Harvilicz’s California home, which burned down weeks later in the Palisades Fire.
Harvilicz confirmed in a Monday phone call that the company funded the Institute for Criminal Justice Fairness.
“The nonprofit was designed to help people understand how AI can be used in a positive way to help bring about more fair and equitable criminal justice outcomes,” Harvilicz said.
Harvilicz said he was unaware that his home address had been used in the FEC filing.
There appears to be no federal statute banning companies from using so-called straw donors to contribute to inaugural committees, although at least one member of the House of Representatives has introduced legislation seeking to ban the practice.
“That disclosure is meaningless if the true, original donors aren’t disclosed.”
Ghosh, the campaign finance watchdog, urged Congress to force “meaningful” transparency.
“Inaugural funds are required to report their donors, but that disclosure is meaningless if the true, original donors aren’t disclosed,” Ghosh said. “Congress and the FEC should ensure meaningful transparency around these inaugural fund donations, to ensure that special interests aren’t able to secretly curry favor with an incoming president, further marginalizing the voices of everyday Americans in our democracy.”
“War Zones to Courtrooms”
Although a relatively new company, Tranquility AI has big ambitions in the world of government contracting, both at the state and federal levels.
The company markets its signature software product as a time-saving device for local law enforcement agencies, and has expressed interest in national security and immigration work. On its website, Tranquility AI says that it wants to aid decision-makers working from “war zones to courtrooms.”
Harvilicz, in a series of X posts in early December, pitched Trump’s soon-to-be border czar Tom Homan and Attorney General Pam Bondi on using the company’s software to accelerate deportations.
“In combination with CBP One App and other OSINT, @TranquilityAi’s TimePilot platform will facilitate location, apprehension, and adjudication of millions of illegals in months instead of years,” Harvilicz said, referring to the since-discontinued app used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to track immigrants.
Harvilicz said the company was founded by alumni of the first Trump administration. He served as the acting assistant secretary for cybersecurity, energy security, and emergency response in the Department of Energy, according to his biography.
Penrose, meanwhile, had a 17-year career at the NSA that included several high-level cybersecurity postings. After moving to the private sector, he held a role at the successful startup Darktrace, which was staffed with former intelligence officials from the U.K. and U.S.
After the 2020 election, however, he found himself under a microscope for his role in Trump and his allies’ attempts to overturn the election results.
Penrose worked with Trump attorney Sidney Powell when she led an effort to breach voting machines in Georgia, according to multiple media reports. He was one of the unnamed unindicted co-conspirators in the Fulton County case that eventually led to Powell’s guilty plea, according to the Washington Post. Penrose was also a “suspect” in a Michigan probe of a voting tabulator breach, according to the outlet Votebeat.
Penrose was not charged with any crime in either state. His supporting role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election has drawn scrutiny in places like New Orleans, however, where Tranquility AI worked with the city’s Democratic district attorney.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on Penrose’s role in the donation to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Facebook and Instagram owner criticised for leaving up posts inciting violence during UK riots
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced sweeping content moderation changes “hastily” and with no indication it had considered the human rights impact, according to the social media company’s oversight board.
The assessment of the changes came as the Facebook and Instagram owner was criticised for leaving up three posts containing anti-Muslim and anti-migrant content during riots in the UK last summer.
Several years ago, Louis Blessing’s wife asked for his help replacing the battery in her laptop. An electrical engineer by training, Blessing figured it would be a quick fix. But after swapping out the old battery for a new one and plugging the laptop in, he discovered it wouldn’t charge.
It quickly dawned on Blessing that the laptop recognized he had installed a battery made by a third party, and rejected it. It’s a classic example of a practice known as parts pairing, where manufacturers use software to control how — and with whose parts — their devices are fixed.
“To me, that is a garbage business practice,” Blessing told Grist. “Yes, it’s legal for them to do it, but that is truly trash.” After the failed battery swap, Blessing’s wife wound up getting a new computer.
The business practice that led her to do so may not be legal for much longer. Blessing is a Republican state senator representing Ohio’s 8th Senate district, which includes much of the area surrounding Cincinnati. In April, Blessing introduced a “right-to-repair” bill that grants consumers legal access to the parts, tools, and documents they need to fix a wide range of devices while banning restrictive practices like parts pairing. If Blessing’s bill succeeds, the Buckeye State will become the latest to enshrine the right to repair into law, after similar legislative victories in Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, and New York.
That would mark an important political inflection point for the right-to-repair movement. While most of the states that have passed repair laws so far are Democratic strongholds, bills have been introduced in all 50 as of February. The adoption of a right-to-repair law in deep red Ohio — where Republicans control the state House, Senate, and the governor’s office, and Donald Trump won the last presidential election by more than 10 percentage points — would further underscore the broad, bipartisan popularity of being allowed to fix the stuff you own.
“If something breaks that you can’t fix, that’s just as big of a pain if you live in New York as it is in Nebraska,” Nathan Proctor, who heads the right-to-repair campaign at the U.S. Public Research Interest Group, told Grist.
Expanded access to repair has the potential to reduce carbon emissions and pollution. A significant fraction of the emissions and air and water pollutants associated with electronic devices occur during manufacturing. Extending the lifespan of those gadgets can have major environmental benefits: The U.S. Public Research Interest Group has calculated that if Americans’ computers lasted just one year longer on average, it would have the same climate benefit as taking over a quarter million cars off the roads for a year. By reducing the pressure to buy replacement devices, repair also helps alleviate demand for the world’s finite stores of critical minerals, which are used not only in consumer electronics but also in clean energy technologies.
Expanded access to repair has the potential to reduce carbon emissions and pollution.
Christian Charisius / picture alliance via Getty Images
Blessing gladly acknowledges the environmental benefits of expanded repair access, but it isn’t the main reason the issue matters to him. He describes himself as “a very free-market guy” who doesn’t like the idea of big businesses being allowed to monopolize markets. He’s concerned that’s exactly what has happened in the electronics repair space, where it is common for manufacturers to restrict access to spare parts and repair manuals, steering consumers back to them to get their gadgets fixed — or, if the manufacturer doesn’t offer a particular repair, replaced.
“It’s good for a business to be able to monopolize repair,” Blessing said. “But it is most certainly not pro-free market. It’s not pro-competition.”
Blessing is now sponsoring a right-to-repair bill, called the Digital Fair Repair Act, for the third legislative session in a row. While earlier iterations of the bill never made it out of committee, he feels optimistic about the legislation’s prospects this year, in light of growing support for the right to repair across civil society and the business community. In the past, manufacturers like Apple and Microsoft have vehemently lobbied against right-to-repair bills, but these and other corporations are changingtheir tune as the movement gains steam.
“I think there’s an appetite to get something done,” Blessing told Grist, adding that more and more device manufacturers “want to see something that puts this to rest.”
Repair monopolies don’t just restrict market competition. They also limit a person’s freedom to do what they want with their property. That’s the reason Brian Seitz, a Republican state congressman representing Taney County in southwestern Missouri, is sponsoring a motorcycle right-to-repair bill for the third time this year.
Seitz first grew interested in the right to repair about four years ago, when a group of motorcyclists in his district told him they weren’t able to fix their bikes because they were unable to access necessary diagnostic codes. A spokesperson for the American Motorcyclist Association confirmed to Grist that lack of access to repair-relevant data is “a concern for our membership.” Some manufacturers are moving away from on-board diagnostic ports where owners can plug in and access the information they need to make fixes, the spokesperson said.
Missouri state Representative Brian Seitz, a Republican, speaks at the state Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri.
AP Photo / David A. Lieb
“The person who drives a motorcycle is a certain type of individual,” Seitz said. “They’re free spirits. They love the open road. And they brought to my attention that they weren’t allowed to repair their vehicles. And I couldn’t believe it.”
It’s still early days for Seitz’s bill, which has been referred to the Missouri House Economic Development Committee but does not have a hearing scheduled yet. But a version of the bill passed the House during the last legislative session, and Seitz expects it will pass again.
“Whether or not there’s time to get it done in the Senate, that’s yet to be determined,” he said. The bill died in the Missouri Senate during the last legislative session.
A spokesperson for Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe declined to comment on Seitz’s bill. But if it were to pass both chambers and receive Kehoe’s signature this year, it would be the first motorcycle-specific right-to-repair law in the country. (A 2014 agreement establishing a nationwide right-to-repair in the auto industry explicitly excluded motorcycles.) Seitz believes many of his fellow conservatives would be “very much in favor” of that outcome.
“This is a freedom and liberty issue,” Seitz added.
Personal liberty is also at the heart of a recent white paper on the right to repair by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF, an influential conservative think tank. The paper lays out the legal case for Texas to adopt a comprehensive right-to-repair law “to restore control, agency, and property rights for Texans.” Since publishing the paper, TPPF staffers have advocated for the right to repair in op-eds and closed-door meetings with state policymakers.
“Our interest in the right to repair is rooted in a concrete fundamental belief in the absolute nature of property rights and how property rights are somewhat skirted by corporations who restrict the right to repair,” Greyson Gee, a technology policy analyst with the TPPF who co-authored the white paper, told Grist.
In February, Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives and the chairman of the state legislature’s Innovation and Technology Caucus, introduced an electronics right-to-repair bill that the TPPF provided input on. In March, Senator Bob Hall introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
A bill introduced in Missouri would be the first motorcycle-specific right-to-repair law in the country.
Jonas Walzberg / picture alliance via Getty Images
Early drafts of these bills include some carve-outs that repair advocates have criticized elsewhere, including an exemption for electronics used exclusively by businesses or the government, and a stipulation that manufacturers do not need to release circuit boards on the theory that they could be used to counterfeit devices. The Texas bills also contain an “alternative relief” provision that allows manufacturers to reimburse consumers, or offer them a replacement device, instead of providing repair materials. (Ohio’s bill, by contrast, mandates that manufacturers provide board-level components necessary to effect repairs, and it does not allow them to offer refunds instead of complying.)
Gee says the TPPF has been working with repair advocacy organizations and the bill sponsor to strengthen the bill’s language and is “encouraged by the real possibility of establishing a statutory right to repair in Texas.”
“Chairman Capriglione is one of the strongest pro-consumer advocates in the Texas House, and we will continue to work with his office as this bill advances [to] ensure there is a codified right to repair in the state,” Gee added. Capriglione, who represents part of the Fort Worth area, didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Elsewhere around the country, lawmakers across the political spectrum are advancing other right-to-repair bills this year. In Washington state, a bill covering consumer electronics and household appliances passed the state House in March by a near-unanimous vote of 94 to 1, underscoring the breadth of bipartisan support for independent repair. In April, the Senate passed its version of the bill 48-1. The House must now vote to concur with changes that were made in the Senate, after which the bill heads to the governor’s desk.
“This legislation has always been bipartisan,” Democratic state representative Mia Gregerson, who sponsored the bill, told Grist. “The ability to fix our devices that have already been paid for is something we can all get behind.” In her five years working on right-to-repair bills in the state, Gregerson said, she has negotiated with Microsoft, Google, and environmental groups to attempt to address consumer and business needs while reducing electronic waste.
Conservative politicians and pundits also acknowledge the environmental benefits of the right to repair, despite focusing on personal liberty and the economy in their messaging. In its white paper arguing for a right-to-repair law in Texas, the TPPF highlights the potential for such legislation to eliminate e-waste, citing United Nations research that ties the rapid growth of this trash stream to limited repair and recycling options.
“Ultimately, the bill itself has to be constitutional. It has to be up to snuff legally,” Gee said. “But it’s certainly an advantage, the environmental impact that this bill would have.”
Blessing, from Ohio, agreed. Right to repair will “absolutely mean less electronics in our landfills, among other things,” he told Grist. “I don’t want to diminish that at all.”
So, I slip me a work out in on a local trailway and then decide to drop off a deposit at my bank. I spot a branch of my bank just down the way and think, cool, I’ll just pop in the drive-through.
But there is no drive-through.
I park and walk inside. There are few twenty-somethings sitting around in offices, but no tellers. Just an automated ATM, who one of the twenty-somethings tells me can take my deposit. But a maintenance worker has the ATM door swung open, working on it. So, I don’t get to make a deposit.
I resolve to make the deposit the next day, instead.
Then, my roomie rings me and tells me to pick up a few things at the grocery. I’m no fan of Wally World, but it’s the most convenient stop. I park, run in, and grab a few groceries. I go to the check out, and it’s a lot like the bank I stopped at. It’s not tellerless—it’s checkerless. It’s all automated.
This doesn’t amuse me.
The more I think about it, the worse it gets. And, worse still, I do some research.
Talk about a bill of goods.
A decade or two back, “outsourcing” was all the rage. Our jobs were being sent overseas and we were livid. Now, blaming immigrants is in vogue.
But the numbers are funny and don’t really add up. And you don’t have to look real hard to figure it out. According to the internet machine, 4.5% of American jobs are outsourced each year. Also, according to the internet machine, immigrants make up 19% of the American workforce (one in five jobs).
Neither percentage is anything to dismiss—they just miss the point.
Our politicians and political pundits use figures like these to obscure the real issue … it’s all sleight of hand nonsense. And it’s a bummer, really, for so many of us, because we’re Pavlovian about terms like “outsourcing” and “immigrants”—as if we live for ill-informed finger-pointing. These economic bogeymen have been drummed into us for decades. Half of you are probably slobbering, now. But, please, dab your taco hole with your shirtsleeve and bear with me.
Outsourcing and immigrants really only infringe on an already diminished share of the scraps. According to the internet machine, automation has replaced 70% of Middle-Class jobs in the United States since 1980—and a related economic corollary is worse. Also, according to the internet machine, automation has driven down Middle-Class wages 70% since 1980. AND THESE AREN’T OBSCURE FACTS. They’re proffered front and center by a search engine’s AI shortcut!?
Put that in your mouse and scroll it.
It’s not just mouth-breathers that need to unite. It’s all of us. It’s anyone that may need a breather. It’s anyone that needs to breathe at all. Because what’s replacing most of us doesn’t.
President Dildo J. Trump’s claims about immigrants and bringing manufacturing jobs back to America are bald-faced lies, because most of those jobs were lost to robotics, computer processing, etc., and they’re never coming back. Immigrants and outsourcing are obviously easier targets than automation or AI, but still. This should scare you, reader. This should terrify you.
Immigrants and outsourcing are perfect red herrings, for sure, but neither—as proto-punk, rock-and-rolling band The Trashmen once sublimely put it—“bird is the word.”
“Purge” is the word.
Obsolescence is the word.
Human obsolescence.
And it’s coming to a universal wage station near you.
This is what technology hath wrought.
Vocationally speaking, human jobs have been being tossed in the trash for decades. It probably started innocently enough with something like gas station attendants. But don’t kid yourselves.
We are no longer surfing the web—the web is surfing us.
Heat pumps are essential for ditching fossil fuels. The appliances are many times more efficient than even the best gas furnaces, and they run on electricity, so they can draw power from renewables like wind and solar.
But the very thing that makes them such an amazing climate solution is also their biggest challenge. A common refrigerant called R-410A pumps through their innards so they can warm and cool homes and offices and anything else.But that refrigerant is also liquid irony, as it can escape as a greenhouse gas over 2,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. (This is known as its “global warming potential,” or how much energy a ton of the gas absorbs over a given amount of time compared to the same amount of CO2.) Leaks can happen during the installation, operation, and disposal of heat pumps.
But this year the industry is rolling out alternative refrigerant formulations like R-454B and R-32, which have around 75 percent less global warming potential. That’s in response to Environmental Protection Agency rules mandating that, starting this year, heat pump refrigerants have a global warming potential of no more than 700. Manufacturers are looking even farther ahead at the possibility of using propane, or even CO2, as the next generation of more atmospherically friendly refrigerants.
“The whole industry is going to be transitioning away from R-410A, so that’s good,” said Jeff Stewart, the refrigeration chief engineer for residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning at Trane Technologies, which makes heat pumps and gas furnaces. “We’re getting lower global warming potential. The problem is, it still has some, right? So there’s concern about ‘OK, is that low enough to really help the environment?’”
To be clear, heat pumps do not release greenhouse gases at anywhere near the scale of burning natural gas to heat homes, so their environmental impact is way smaller. “Even if we lost all the refrigerant, it still actually has a much smaller effect just having a heat pump and not burning gas,” said Matthew Knoll, co-founder and chief technology officer at California-based Quilt, which builds heat pump systems for homes. “I would actually want to make sure that doesn’t hamper the rapid adoption of heat pumps.”
But why does a heat pump need refrigerant? Well, to transfer heat. By changing the state of the liquid to a gas, then compressing it, the appliance absorbs heat from even very cold outdoor air and moves it indoors. Then in the summer, the process reverses to work like a traditional air conditioner.
The potential for refrigerant leaks is much smaller if the heat pump is properly manufactured, installed, and maintained. When a manufacturer switches refrigerants, the basic operation of the heat pump stays the same. But some formulations operate at different pressures, meaning they’ll need slightly different sized components and perhaps stronger materials. “It’s all the same fundamental principles,” said Vince Romanin, CEO of San Francisco-based Gradient, which makes heat pumps that slip over window sills. “But it does take a re-engineering and a recertification of all of these components.”
While Trane has transitioned to R-454B, Gradient and other companies are adopting R-32, which has a global warming potential of 675 and brings it in line with the new regulations. Gradient says that with engineering improvements, like hermetic sealing that makes it harder for refrigerants to escape, and by properly recycling its appliances, it can reduce the climate footprint of heat pumps by 95 percent. “Our math shows R-32, plus good refrigerant management, those two things combined solve almost all of the refrigerant problem,” said Romanin. “Because of that data, Gradient believes the industry should stay on R-32 until we’re ready for natural refrigerants.”
Those include CO2, butane, and propane. CO2 has a global warming potential of just 1, but it works at much higher pressures, which requires thicker tubes and compressors. It’s also less efficient in hot weather, meaning it’s not the best option for a heat pump in cooling mode in the summer.
Propane, on the other hand, excels in different conditions and operates at a lower pressure than the refrigerants it would replace. It also has a global warming potential of just 3. Propane is flammable, of course, but heat pumps can run it safely by separating sources of ignition, like electrical components, from the refrigerant compartments. “It is kind of perfect for heat pumps,” said Richard Gerbe, board member and technical advisor at Italy-based Aermec, another maker of heat pumps.
That’s why Europe is already switching to propane, and why the U.S. may soon follow, Gerbe said. A typical heat pump will run about 10 pounds of propane, less than what’s found in a barbeque tank. Gas furnaces and stoves, by contrast, are constantly fed with flammable natural gas that can leak, potentially leading to explosions or carbon monoxide poisoning. “If you’ve got a comfort level with a gas stove in your house,” Gerbe said, “this is significantly less of a source.”
Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.
The work is focused on older towers purchased from Israeli military defense contractor Elbit. In all, the document notes “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector” will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities.
IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, a tool the company generally markets for industrial quality control inspections — not tracking humans. Equitus is offering its Video Sentinel, a more traditional video surveillance analytics program explicitly marketed for border surveillance that, according to a promotional YouTube video, recently taken offline, featuring a company executive, can detect “people walking caravan style … some of them are carrying backpacks and being identified as mules.”
“Within 60 days from the start of the project, real life video from the southern border is available to train and create AI/ML models to be used by the Equitus Video Sentinel.”
Tying together these machine learning surveillance tools is Google, which the document reveals is supplying CBP with a cloud computing platform known as MAGE: the ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment. Based on the document, Google is providing a hub for video surveillance data and will directly host the Equitus AI analysis tool. It appears every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers: “This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing,” the document reads, and “the resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud.”
The diagram also notes that one of Google’s chief rivals, Amazon Web Services, provides CBP with unspecified cloud computing services.
During President Trump’s first term, border surveillance and immigration enforcement work carried a stigma in the tech sector it has in part shed today.
In 2020, The Intercept revealed a document produced by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT, that stated Google Cloud services would be used in conjunction with AI-augmented surveillance towers manufactured by defense contractor Anduril: “Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will be utilized for doing innovation projects for C1’s INVNT team like next generation IoT, NLP (Natural Language Processing), Language Translation and Andril [sic] image camera and any other future looking project for CBP. The GCP has unique product features which will help to execute on the mission needs.” (A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that “Andril” was a misspelling of Anduril.)
After the Anduril work came to light, Google’s cloud computing chief Thomas quickly attempted damage control, directly contradicting the Department of Homeland Security and telling concerned employees that the company was not involved in immigration enforcement on the Mexican border, CNBC reported at the time. “We have spoken directly with Customs and Border Patrol and they have confirmed that they are not testing our products for those purposes,” Kurian added.
If this was true then, it’s certainly not now; references to Google services appear repeatedly throughout the tower modernization project document. A technical diagram showing how video data flows between various CBP servers shows Google’s MAGE literally in the middle.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment about its use of Google Cloud.
Google did not respond to specific questions about the project, nor address Kurian’s prior denial.
In a statement provided to The Intercept, Google Public Sector executive Jim Kelly attempted to distance the company slightly from the border surveillance work. “CBP has been public about how it has a multicloud strategy and has used Google Cloud for work like translation,” Kelly wrote. “In this case, Google Cloud is not on the contract. That said, customers or partners can purchase Google Cloud’s off-the-shelf compute, storage, and networking products for their own use, much like they might use a mobile network or run their own computer hardware.”
Kelly’s statement indicates the government is acquiring Google Cloud services through a reseller, as is common in federal procurement. But Kelly’s comparison of Google Cloud technology to buying off-the-shelf computer hardware is misleading. Even if it’s supplied through a subcontractor or reseller, CBP’s use of Google’s service still requires a constant and ongoing connection to the company’s cloud infrastructure. Were Google still serious about “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” as Kurian claimed in 2020, it would be trivial to prevent CBP from using Google Cloud.
“Border communities end up paying the price with their privacy.”
Industry advocates and immigration hard-liners have long touted the “virtual wall” initiative, which substitutes iron and concrete barriers and Border Patrol agents for a 2,000 mile array of sensors, cameras, and computers. But critics say advanced technology is no substitute for policy reforms.
“On top of the wasted tax dollars, border communities end up paying the price with their privacy, as demonstrated by the recent findings by the Government Accountability Office that CBP had failed to implement six out of six key privacy policy requirements,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept, referring to the tower program’s dismal privacy protections record. “For more than two decades, surveillance towers at the border have proven to be a boondoggle, and adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle.”
Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.
The work is focused on older towers purchased from Israeli military defense contractor Elbit. In all, the document notes “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector” will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities.
IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, a tool the company generally markets for industrial quality control inspections — not tracking humans. Equitus is offering its Video Sentinel, a more traditional video surveillance analytics program explicitly marketed for border surveillance that, according to a promotional YouTube video, recently taken offline, featuring a company executive, can detect “people walking caravan style … some of them are carrying backpacks and being identified as mules.”
“Within 60 days from the start of the project, real life video from the southern border is available to train and create AI/ML models to be used by the Equitus Video Sentinel.”
Tying together these machine learning surveillance tools is Google, which the document reveals is supplying CBP with a cloud computing platform known as MAGE: the ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment. Based on the document, Google is providing a hub for video surveillance data and will directly host the Equitus AI analysis tool. It appears every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers: “This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing,” the document reads, and “the resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud.”
The diagram also notes that one of Google’s chief rivals, Amazon Web Services, provides CBP with unspecified cloud computing services.
During President Trump’s first term, border surveillance and immigration enforcement work carried a stigma in the tech sector it has in part shed today.
In 2020, The Intercept revealed a document produced by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT, that stated Google Cloud services would be used in conjunction with AI-augmented surveillance towers manufactured by defense contractor Anduril: “Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will be utilized for doing innovation projects for C1’s INVNT team like next generation IoT, NLP (Natural Language Processing), Language Translation and Andril [sic] image camera and any other future looking project for CBP. The GCP has unique product features which will help to execute on the mission needs.” (A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that “Andril” was a misspelling of Anduril.)
After the Anduril work came to light, Google’s cloud computing chief Thomas quickly attempted damage control, directly contradicting the Department of Homeland Security and telling concerned employees that the company was not involved in immigration enforcement on the Mexican border, CNBC reported at the time. “We have spoken directly with Customs and Border Patrol and they have confirmed that they are not testing our products for those purposes,” Kurian added.
If this was true then, it’s certainly not now; references to Google services appear repeatedly throughout the tower modernization project document. A technical diagram showing how video data flows between various CBP servers shows Google’s MAGE literally in the middle.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment about its use of Google Cloud.
Google did not respond to specific questions about the project, nor address Kurian’s prior denial.
In a statement provided to The Intercept, Google Public Sector executive Jim Kelly attempted to distance the company slightly from the border surveillance work. “CBP has been public about how it has a multicloud strategy and has used Google Cloud for work like translation,” Kelly wrote. “In this case, Google Cloud is not on the contract. That said, customers or partners can purchase Google Cloud’s off-the-shelf compute, storage, and networking products for their own use, much like they might use a mobile network or run their own computer hardware.”
Kelly’s statement indicates the government is acquiring Google Cloud services through a reseller, as is common in federal procurement. But Kelly’s comparison of Google Cloud technology to buying off-the-shelf computer hardware is misleading. Even if it’s supplied through a subcontractor or reseller, CBP’s use of Google’s service still requires a constant and ongoing connection to the company’s cloud infrastructure. Were Google still serious about “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” as Kurian claimed in 2020, it would be trivial to prevent CBP from using Google Cloud.
“Border communities end up paying the price with their privacy.”
Industry advocates and immigration hard-liners have long touted the “virtual wall” initiative, which substitutes iron and concrete barriers and Border Patrol agents for a 2,000 mile array of sensors, cameras, and computers. But critics say advanced technology is no substitute for policy reforms.
“On top of the wasted tax dollars, border communities end up paying the price with their privacy, as demonstrated by the recent findings by the Government Accountability Office that CBP had failed to implement six out of six key privacy policy requirements,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept, referring to the tower program’s dismal privacy protections record. “For more than two decades, surveillance towers at the border have proven to be a boondoggle, and adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle.”
Found in everything from chewy candies and marshmallows to pharmaceutical capsules and even biodegradable packaging, gelatin is a multi-functional protein derived from animal collagen. But for those seeking more sustainable options that don’t come from animal products, finding a viable substitute that replicates gelatin’s gelling power, clarity, and elasticity has remained one of food science’s more stubborn challenges.
Now, researchers at the University of Ottawa believe they may be getting closer.
Plant-based gelatin
In a study published in Physics of Fluids by AIP Publishing, the research team explored the use of gum tragacanth, a plant-derived polysaccharide, as a potential substitute for gelatin in edible films. Though far from the first attempt at creating vegan gelatin, this latest study takes a more precise approach: replicating gelatin’s behavior at the microstructural level.
Canva
“Gelatin has unique properties and its use is versatile,” said Ezgi Pulatsu, co-author of the study. “To fully replace gelatin, we must replicate its microstructure and understand its function in different applications.”
Gum tragacanth is harvested from the sap of specific legumes and is already used in some food and pharmaceutical applications. Pulatsu and her colleagues experimented with films constructed from mixtures of gelatin and gum tragacanth in varying concentrations. Some films were made by layering the two, while others involved a more integrated blend. These prototypes were then tested for durability in water and saline solutions.
The team found that using three parts gum tragacanth to one part gelatin created a mixture that held on to many of gelatin’s best-known traits, like that signature bouncy texture found in your favorite gummy candy.
Dmitry Dreyer | Unsplash
But while the plant-based gum helped mimic that feel, it also made the films more porous—meaning they were easier for moisture to seep into and break down. That’s a drawback when it comes to long-lasting candies or protective capsules, but researchers see the work as a meaningful stride forward in reducing how much animal-based gelatin is used across food and medicine.
“Partial replacement of gelatin will reduce animal-based product use,” Pulatsu said. “Our efforts in the full replacement of gelatin are ongoing.”
The gelatin alternatives market
Plant-based alternatives to gelatin have long existed, though none have been able to fully mimic its complex functionality. Agar-agar, made from red algae, is a popular vegan substitute and sets more firmly than gelatin, though it lacks the same elasticity. Carrageenan, another seaweed extract, has been used in dairy alternatives and desserts but can create a different texture that doesn’t always translate well to candy or capsules. Pectin, extracted from fruit peels, is a staple in jams and jellies but requires specific conditions to gel properly.
Geltor, a San Francisco-based biotechnology firm, has developed a proprietary protein production platform that utilizes bacteria and yeast to produce gelatin through precision fermentation.This process involves inserting the genetic blueprint for collagen into microbes, which then ferment to produce a protein identical to animal-derived gelatin.Geltor’s ‘biodesigned’ vegan collagen is being tailored for applications in the food, nutrition, hair care, and skin care markets.
Geltor
But Geltor isn’t the only company working on a gelatin alternative. Agricultural giant Cargill has introduced Lygomme PM 600, an ingredient solution combining pectin and pea protein designed to fully replace gelatin in products like vegan jellies and marshmallows.This innovation addresses the textural challenges associated with creating plant-based confectionery that mimics the mouthfeel of traditional gelatin-based treats.
Other companies including Alland & Robert, VeCollal, and Evonik have also developed vegan gelatin and collagen replacements that mimic the key properties in gelatin but with a smaller environmental footprint.
According to Grand View Research, the global gelatin market reached $6.51 billion in 2023 and is expected to more than double to $13.14 billion by 2030. That growth is largely driven by demand in functional foods and pharmaceutical applications, both of which increasingly intersect with consumer preferences for cleaner, plant-based formulations.
The implications of this work stretch beyond food. As the market for plastic-free packaging grows, edible films are gaining attention as sustainable alternatives. Here too, gelatin has played a starring role. A viable vegan gelatin could unlock new frontiers in biodegradable packaging, pharmaceutical coatings, and beyond.
Still, technical hurdles remain. Gum tragacanth has promise, but its structural limitations must be overcome for it to become a one-to-one gelatin replacement. Pulatsu said the next phase of their work will explore chemical and structural modifications to improve its mechanical and barrier properties.
“We are very excited to see the outcomes and share them with the community,” she said.
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
For a non-programmer, tell me about how you go about using a programming language to make generative art.
This will touch on something that is unusual about how I use programming languages in general. The common practice in the industry is one that involves very slow feedback loops, these things we call compile-test cycles: edit, compile, test. I tend to use programming languages that are much more interactive. This is the family of programming languages that come down to us from the communities of LISP and SmallTalk, primarily. In these languages, you’re engaged in a conversation with the computer — your program is running the whole time, you’re modifying it while it’s running, and you can inspect the state within the program to see what’s happening.
This is particularly good for exploratory programming, but also for art making. I can have a sketch running that is using a generative system I’ve created to produce some kind of visual effect. I could think, “What if this parameter were slightly different?” and instead of building a bespoke control panel to do that, I can execute a tiny snippet of code inside my editor that changes what’s happening in the program, so I’m still working in the same medium and I don’t need to switch to a different tool.
I might start with a blank canvas with a loop running that is redrawing something, but it doesn’t know what it’s redrawing yet. Then I will gradually add elements, and those elements may have some innate structure. They may be drawn from nature in some way. Often, in my work, I will start with some natural system I found intriguing, and I’ll think, “What would have to happen geometrically to create a thing that has a form like that?” Then I’ll try to build a system where I’m planting the seed, but the growth happens within the simulation.
I also do a lot of work that is inspired by different periods of art. Maybe there will be something Bauhaus-inspired; I’ll look at a pattern Kandinsky drew by hand and think, “What if I wanted an infinite number of those that were all as good as the one he did by hand? What would I need to tell the computer for it to know [how to do that]?” In that sense, my artwork is often at that meta level. I’m less interested in the single-object output than I am interested in the underlying system that makes things of that nature possible.
Golden Aizawa Attractor, 2021
Your background is traditionally technical. How has that influenced your identity or your sense of aesthetics as an artist?
I don’t regard scientists and artists as fundamentally different kinds of people. In fact, I regard them as more alike than they are different.
The sort of division you see among people in modern American culture is, to me, a cultural artifact; it’s just an accident of education. I would say the same thing about athletics. The jocks versus geeks division is an entirely synthetic thing that arose in post-1950s America and spread in a diseased way to other parts of the world. There’s nothing about being good at using your nervous system to move your body through space that would make you bad at using your nervous system to reason about geometry.
Based on some early tests that show an aptitude or a proficiency, we’ve narrowly focused people into what we think is going to be the box in which they will perform, when we should be spending more time cultivating what people are innately and immediately good at but also filling in the rest of the profile. So if you’re somebody who finds mathematics easy but is intimidated by the idea of drawing classes, then you should be doing that. These things are all aspects of humanity, and it’s a mistake to leave any of them behind.
In your 2019 ClojuTRE talk on computational creativity, you gave a brief survey of historical definitions of creativity. After absorbing all of those, where do you net out? What grand unified theory of creativity do you subscribe to?
I think it’s the fundamental aspect that makes us human beings. Creative problem-solving is the thing that we do better [than any other species]. Communication is the other thing that we do better, which allows us to do creative problem-solving in groups. If you want to know why we’ve spread over the entire world and lived in every kind of ecosystem successfully, it’s because we’ve been able to creatively solve problems along the way. Without that, I don’t think we’re really people. Leaving aside your creative drives as an individual is a mistake, because it’s leaving aside your birthright as a human.
A question in the AI discourse right now is whether AI will ever be able to create the way a human does. Large language models can create reasonable facsimiles of mediocre writing and drawing, but that sort of path-breaking creative synthesis still seems to be uniquely human. As someone who has been in this field for a long time, what do you think is coming in terms of the influence of AI?
To touch on the first part of what you said, about mediocrity: when you have a big statistical model that is essentially taking the sum and then the average of the internet, whether it’s in words or pictures, then you can expect the output to be [average] by definition. Now, you can steer these models to get you somewhat surprising outputs, and that’s cool. I have some friends who train their own models and build complex workflows to come up with things that are very nice in terms of the outputs they achieve. For me, mostly, if I’m using a prompt to an LLM to generate an image, I can get an output that looks okay to good, because I word good and I have enough taste to pick the images that I think are okay. But after I’ve done that, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything, because I don’t feel like there’s any of me in the output.
I think a lot of where our good stuff comes from is actually from how the act of making the art changes us as individuals. Ages ago, I went to art school at night while I was doing a startup in Silicon Valley. I’d been a lifelong musician, and playing music my whole life meant that I heard everything differently. When I hear the leaves rustling, I hear the rhythm of the leaves rolling along the ground. When I hear the whistle on my kettle, I know what pitch it is. So I thought, “I’ll go to art school, and maybe it will change the way I see.” And of course it did. There’s no way you can learn to draw in charcoal and capture light and shadow without it changing the way you see everything for the rest of your life.
What if we take away the need to do any of those things to produce those outputs? Then we get an entire generation of people who do not transform themselves into having a higher level of perception. What does that do for our ability to discriminate between what is just AI slop and what is actually something amazing and beautiful? It’s leaving behind part of our birthright as humans, to outsource some of the best stuff we have going to the machines, even if the machines can do it.
Also, the more stuff there is, the more sifting has to be done to find the good stuff. Making a machine for the unlimited production of mediocre junk means that the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse all the time, and I dislike this vigorously.
On the other hand, I think these technologies can become the components of amazing engineering solutions later on. An example of this, not in the artistic context, is that I took some LLMs and I attached them to a query apparatus for WikiData, the database version of Wikipedia. I was able to use the LLM to get the data into the system from natural language. Then I do a query against this fact database, and then I take the series of dry facts that it returns and have it reformatted as nice, flowing prose. So I get something that you can get into and out of with human language that doesn’t hallucinate any details, and this is actually immediately useful.
I think many things of that nature are coming. Artistic tools where the trained model is more like a paintbrush and less like an outsourced cheap artist are going to be extremely powerful. In cinema, I think we’ll see the cost of making movies drop to one-one-hundredth of the time and one-one-hundredth of the cost using these kinds of tools, because CGI is such an important part of film production already. In this sense, when the good tools come out of it, you will see actual artists be able to do more and better.
Asemic Writing, 2020
Have you been able to find a balance between the things you do to pay the bills and the things you do to satisfy an artistic impulse? Do you find the same amount of creativity and joy in your work at Applied Sciences as you do in the art you make?
Here, I have to start by saying that I’m in a position of ridiculous privilege. I came of age at a time when the things I liked to do for fun were among the most lucrative things you could do for a living.
Throughout my career, I have been able to work on only things I’m interested in and be paid very well for them, both on the science and programming side and also on the art side. Obviously, I make more money from the tech stuff than the art stuff. But in years when I’m more active, like in 2020, I made enough that I could have made a living in Berlin just from the art side. This is possible. It’s difficult and it requires a lot of luck, but it is possible. So I’m in the weird position where I don’t have to choose between the things I love and the things that pay the bills because everything I get paid for is also something I love. And I recognize the tremendous privilege of that statement.
What do you think it takes to do that, beyond luck? Are there things a person can do to be more likely to have that kind of outcome?
Having a very active daily practice, and never letting it get away from you, is incredibly important.Björk has a fantastic quote about not letting yourself get gummed up and only releasing something every seven years because it puts you out of the flow of creating: “Don’t hold your breath for five or seven years and not release anything, and then you’ve just got clogged up with way too much stuff… You lose contact to the part of you, your subconscious, that’s writing songs all the time, and the part of you that’s showing it to the world… That’s more important, to sustain that flow, than to wait until things are perfect.”
Whatever it is that you do, you have to really do it. If you have a choice between doing it for three hours on Sunday or doing it for 15 minutes a day for the rest of the week, do it 15 minutes a day, because what you do every day is what your brain is working on when you’re not paying attention. Your subconscious is making progress on the things you do constantly. There’s a bowdlerization of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that gets quoted a lot, which is that excellence is just a function of habit. It’s what you do repeatedly. Lean into it. Do the work.
And — this is the bad news, because many programmers or artists are not necessarily interested in standing up on a chair and shouting about themselves in public—if you do beautiful work and nobody sees it, you’re not going to have a good career. You have to find a way to surface what you’re doing.
If it were five to 10 years ago, I would say to get a Twitter account, communicate with the kinds of people who are interested in the kind of thing you do, post all of this work that you’re doing as your daily practice, and you will be noticed. Today, it’s a more complicated situation. Some arsonists have set fire to Twitter and it’s now full of smoke and dead bodies, so very few people you would want to find your work will go to that place. I think we’re in an interregnum where there isn’t a good public space to demonstrate excellence for most arts. But it is important that you find a way to do that, or you will likely go unnoticed.
Taijiquan Performance Converted to Picasso-esque Plotter Doodles, 2019
I also wanted to ask you about your time AT&T Research, formerly Bell Labs. Bell Labs has a mythical place in tech lore. It was a hotbed of innovation and a Schelling point for practically every computer science pioneer you’ve ever heard of. Did that still penetrate the company’s DNA when you were there?
It was definitely a unique environment. First, as in any such situation, it was the people. You had a large concentration of brilliant people all in one place. That’s always a good thing.
The facility where I worked, the Claude Shannon Lab, was in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. We would go down to eat in the cafeteria, and there were floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and we would see deer outside. In my wing, the people in the other offices were Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, and David Korn, who created KornShell. I used to ride in his minivan from downtown Manhattan, because there were a bunch of us who preferred to live in the city. So the vibe had mostly to do with the people, and then the facility itself being the perfect leafy campus environment, but tuned for grown-ups — well, eternally Peter Pan grown-ups.
We did some great work there, even though when I worked there it was after the heyday. Unix was invented around the time I was born, so I missed out on all those great things. But I know most of those people because I was very young when I got started in the industry, and they weren’t dead yet. Some of them are still walking around. So I have all the stories, I’m happy to report. The vibe, I think, was still similar, but obviously the level of work, while good, wasn’t as world-shaking as it was earlier in the 20th century.
Why do you think that was? Was it a function of something changing in the way the work was supported?
There were a couple of things. One is that the way research was supported changed. Here we come back to that idea of patronage. Both artists and scientists have in common that they do their best work when they are left alone and allowed to chase their own curiosity and their own aesthetics and their own feelings. The appetite and the surplus to allow that has decreased year on year since the middle of the 20th century.
There was a period where this was really celebrated, and it was considered a good use of funds to have people do things that may pay you back nothing but also may give you a whole different world. You would fund it with some faith in the fact that if the people are talented enough, something good will come out of it.
After the Reagan–Thatcher revolution, that became less of a thing. Ideologically, everything shifted to this idea that you should have a return-on-investment angle on what happens. And because you can’t predict the outcome of research, it is effectively impossible to have a return on investment attitude towards it.
A great example of this is the iPhone. The capacitive touch display was invented 25 years before that at Bell Labs by somebody who was just chasing their own interest. If that person hadn’t had the opportunity to plant those seeds, then Apple could not have reaped the benefits later. Right now, I feel like we’ve really shifted towards reaping, and left sowing to be somebody else’s problem. This will continue to harm us in the future, because if we keep doing basically the same things over and over again, we won’t have any new seed corn.
There are certainly little pockets where that focus on something other than ROI still exists. But I agree. It feels like everyone recognizes the value of something like Bell Labs, yet very few people have the risk appetite or long-term thinking to fund that anymore.
It’s not just the absence of a Bell Labs sort of thing. There are other social opportunities available that are not followed. For example, I was talking to some people who will remain nameless but who are very high in an organization that makes a popular search engine and browser. I wanted them to fund some improvements to a text editor called Emacs that I’ve been using for nearly 40 years. With a good team working on it and with some actual financial support, a lot could be improved. Around half of their employees use Emacs, so it seemed like it would even pay them back, in some sense. But they told me that the most their enormous, many-billions-a-year company could possibly [contribute] was funding for some student [project].
This kind of thing is insane. These are public goods that they consume, but they don’t see it as their responsibility to help support that commons. This is a problem with open-source software in general — it is insufficiently supported. It’s shared infrastructure, and shared infrastructure requires shared support.
Isolation 3, 2020
If you could reshape the way the internet has evolved, where would you start?
I would try to prioritize [changing] some of the infantilizing drives of current products. It is very fashionable at the moment to believe that if a person can’t use something immediately on first seeing it, then it should be thrown away, because people are stupid and have no patience. This is a prevalent way of thinking about user interfaces. But if you look at the user interface of the violin, it’s terrible for quite a while. You have to put in some effort before you can do anything useful with the violin. But then you can do something that you simply cannot do with a tiny children’s xylophone. There are effects you can achieve if you’re willing to put in the work.
I feel like there’s a large area to explore of slightly more difficult things that have a higher ceiling. I believe you should raise the floor as much as you can, but you shouldn’t do it by lowering the ceiling.
I would like to make it more possible for people to, for example, automate things on their own; end user programming is the technical term for this. In a system like HyperCard, this was very effective. People could build systems to run their entire business inside of this very cool piece of software that you ran on a Macintosh. I don’t see a modern thing that is as good. There’s more we can do to democratize the programmatic aspects of owning a computer so that people have more power as individuals.
There have to be these open-box systems where you can play with the parts. Otherwise, you’re strictly a consumer. On Instagram, that’s exactly how I feel. I post my artwork there, but that’s the limit of what I can do. Someone else has decided the limits of my world. And I resent that.
At the end of your talk on creative computation, you give some recommendations for programmers who want to get in touch with their creative side: take an art course, meditate, take psychedelic mushrooms. I assume those recommendations still hold, but what else would you recommend to anybody who wants to connect with their creativity?
The important thing, and I tried to stress it in that talk, is that you can approach things as a reasoning and reasonable agent who is putting one fact in front of another and trying to be very orderly and systematic. That is an important way of being. But there’s another way of approaching things, which is to open yourself up to your own intuition and to feel your way through things. That’s no less important a way of being. You have to have both to be a complete human being. So whether a person is a programmer who isn’t as in touch with their intuition, or they’re an artist who is not as in touch with their ability to be analytical, I feel that whichever side you’re coming from, you should be trying to fill in the part at which you are the weakest so that you can be a more complete person.
For a lot of people, getting in touch with the intuitive side also has to do with the body itself, because many people are very disembodied. So, going to a yoga class, taking up meditation, doing things that allow you to realize that you are an embodied creature, and then starting to listen to how your body is feeling. Having a daily practice of checking in with yourself can automatically and immediately start to open you up to being able to do creative things. If you combine that with the daily practice of journaling or drawing or something else that allows you to focus those feelings and externalize them in some way, very quickly you’ll discover you have an artistic side you never knew was there.
I’ve known many people to fail at taking up meditation until they try an app like Headspace. For that reason, I’d like to recommend the free and open-source meditation app Medito.
In the search for embodiment, it’s important to develop some kind of personal daily habit. Everyone has different cultural and aesthetic preferences regarding which kind of exercise seems more or less for them. If you like the idea of lifting weights and being strong, you might consider finding someone to coach you through Starting Strength. If you’d prefer to be in a more meditative and feminine-coded space, you might consider ashtanga yoga. Maybe you grew up dancing and you’re already quite flexible, but you’re starting to have weird aches and pains—consider pilates! These are all roads to the same place—choose the one that speaks to you or find another that does (rock climbing! Brazilian jiujitsu! circus training!).
Likewise, several traditions offer more or less the same concrete advice on how to get a grip on your mind, but present the advice differently. Buddhism, Stoic philosophy, and cognitive behavioral therapy all take you to the same place, with the main choice being whether you prefer to receive mysticism, philosophy, or a medical prescription. I recommend you investigate at least one of them.
The crackdown is already happening. First, Mahmoud Khalil was snatched from his home in New York. Then, immigrants in the U.S. were targeted for their political views, and foreigners reported being denied entry at the border after having their devices searched.
Even before Donald Trump was sworn in, border searches of electronics were steadily rising. With fears mounting about the Trump administration’s attack on dissent, citizens and noncitizens alike are wondering how to protect their privacy.
Experts say it is important to have a plan before you cross the border, to know the law, and to do what you can to minimize your digital footprint. The plans can vary widely based on a person’s immigration status and other factors.
Here are some tips on the law — and how to prevent the U.S. government from using your own data against you.
Know the Law
If you think you will simply be able to decline when a border agent asks you to hand over your phone or computer, think again.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection claims broad authority to rifle through the electronic devices of traveling into and out of the country, regardless of their citizenship status. American citizens can decline to hand over their password or PIN code — but that could result in travel delays and in device confiscation, experts warn.
CBP claims to place some limits on its own searches of devices, and courts have issued conflicting rulings about the extent of the government’s authority to search electronic devices collected at the border.
One of CBP’s policies states that border agents are not supposed to search information that has only been stored remotely. As a practical matter, that often means that border agents put a phone into airplane mode before searching it.
Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was useful to know CBP policies.
“We know federal officers often don’t follow the law and their own policy,” said Cope, whose organization has published its own guide for travelers. “If you know they’re supposed to put the phone in airplane mode, for example, you can ask them about that.”
CBP says that its officers can conduct “basic” searches — where an officer scrolls through a device’s contents on the spot — at their discretion. “Advanced,” forensic searches where devices are connected to outside devices for review are only supposed to occur upon “reasonable” suspicion of legal violations or a national security concern.
Have a Plan
It is important to think about what you will do if a border agent asks for your personal devices well before you head to the airport. The last thing you want to do is to be caught flat-footed, Cope said.
Her organization has recommended that travelers conduct a risk analysis based on their personal profile, including whether they are a citizen, lawful permanent resident, or visa holder, as well as what kind of data is stored on their device.
Citizens have the right to reenter the U.S., but they can still have their devices seized. The ACLU says the same “should” be true for lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders. However, the group also recommends that noncitizens concerned about having their devices searched “should consult with an immigration lawyer about your particular circumstances before traveling.”
Visa holders, meanwhile, could be outright refused entry.
“It really just depends on what the person’s unique situation is, and what their tolerance level is for confrontation and delay and short-term detention and missing their flights and — in more extreme cases — having their immigration status questioned,” Cope said.
Consider Leaving Your Usual Devices at Home
The best way to protect your personal and work devices from search and seizure is simply to leave them at home. Get separate devices that you only use when traveling, and reset them before each trip.
Cheaper and refurbished devices may suffice for many trips. If you absolutely need your usual devices on your trip, consider mailing them to your destination, although this could raise its own risks.
Log Out and Power Down
Before you get to a security checkpoint, and ideally before you’re even at your port of entry or exit, fully power off all of your devices. This is important because some devices are in a more secure state before you log in to it for the first time after you’ve previously shut it down. For instance, forensics firms distinguish between iPhones in “before first unlock” versus “after first unlock” states, with the former coyly described as “less helpful” for data extraction.
Part of practicing strong digital security is making sure you’re exercising what’s known as “defense in depth”: Making sure that should one level of security fail, another layer of protection is in place, just in case. For this reason, be sure to log out of all of your accounts before you power down. You could go as far as deleting the apps you’ve logged out from altogether, and reinstalling them after you’re safely beyond the security checkpoint.
If you are worried about remembering a long list of passwords, that is a good sign you should use password manager software instead. Recommended by many experts, a password manager allows you to use one password to unlock all of your passwords. If your password manager has a travel mode that lets you restrict which specific accounts to display for the duration of your travel, enable it.
Disable Biometrics
Make sure that you’re using an alphanumeric password to access your phone and other devices. Turn off all biometrics like fingerprint access and facial recognition (branded Touch ID and Face ID, respectively, on iPhones). Otherwise, authorities could put your phone up in front of your face to gain access.
Protect Your Data
Aside from making sure you’re not logged into sensitive accounts, you should also make sure you’re not storing sensitive data on your phone. One option is to download data from your phone onto an encrypted device you’re not traveling with and leave it at home. Another option, if you need access to some data on the road, is to encrypt it using a tool like Cryptomator, store it on a cloud storage provider, and then download it when you’ve reached your destination.
If you’re using an iPhone, you could back up your phone data using iCloud — just make sure you have Apple’s end-to-end encryption solution, Advanced Data Protection, enabled. (If you’re in certain regions, such as the U.K., you’ll need to switch your region location before you can use this feature.)
Protect Your Contacts
Don’t forget to make sure you also protect any sensitive contacts. Go through your contacts lists and remove any persons whose affiliation with you may potentially cause issues; for instance, if you have the names of activists, human rights defenders, or other sensitive sources. You could even export and then delete your entire contacts list and restore it later.
At High Risk?
If you believe you are at especially high risk when crossing the border, there are more advanced steps you can take.
One option goes beyond leaving your phone at home. You could also leave your SIM card and phone number behind too. Let your contacts know that you’ll have a temporary number while traveling. You can purchase a temporary SIM once you’re in the country, or beforehand. The reason to leave behind your number is the same as leaving behind your phone — you don’t want the authorities or anyone else to take control of your phone number. For instance, if the authorities take your SIM card and place it into their own device, they may be able to receive messages and calls meant for you.
Keep in mind that if you’re using SMS verification as a form of two-factor authentication for any accounts, you’ll need to temporarily update it to your current number, or have someone with access to your phone at home be able to log you in.
Ideally, however, you shouldn’t be using SMS for two-factor authentication in the first place, as it’s vulnerable to attackers taking control of your phone number. If there is no other form of two-factor authentication, SMS authentication is still better than nothing at all.
If you’re apprehensive that having a phone with minimal information on it may in itself cause you to stand out during an intrusive security check — which experts say is a legitimate concern — keep in mind that it may be preferable to revealing sensitive information.
Another, more elaborate protection option, is what the intelligence community calls persona development: Creating alternate accounts which don’t contain any sensitive information. In other words, you can snap innocuous photos and upload them to separate social media accounts for traveling. If your phone is searched, only these accounts will then be visible to the authorities.
The crackdown is already happening. First, Mahmoud Khalil was snatched from his home in New York. Then, immigrants in the U.S. were targeted for their political views, and foreigners reported being denied entry at the border after having their devices searched.
Even before Donald Trump was sworn in, border searches of electronics were steadily rising. With fears mounting about the Trump administration’s attack on dissent, citizens and noncitizens alike are wondering how to protect their privacy.
Experts say it is important to have a plan before you cross the border, to know the law, and to do what you can to minimize your digital footprint. The plans can vary widely based on a person’s immigration status and other factors.
Here are some tips on the law — and how to prevent the U.S. government from using your own data against you.
Know the Law
If you think you will simply be able to decline when a border agent asks you to hand over your phone or computer, think again.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection claims broad authority to rifle through the electronic devices of traveling into and out of the country, regardless of their citizenship status. American citizens can decline to hand over their password or PIN code — but that could result in travel delays and in device confiscation, experts warn.
CBP claims to place some limits on its own searches of devices, and courts have issued conflicting rulings about the extent of the government’s authority to search electronic devices collected at the border.
One of CBP’s policies states that border agents are not supposed to search information that has only been stored remotely. As a practical matter, that often means that border agents put a phone into airplane mode before searching it.
Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was useful to know CBP policies.
“We know federal officers often don’t follow the law and their own policy,” said Cope, whose organization has published its own guide for travelers. “If you know they’re supposed to put the phone in airplane mode, for example, you can ask them about that.”
CBP says that its officers can conduct “basic” searches — where an officer scrolls through a device’s contents on the spot — at their discretion. “Advanced,” forensic searches where devices are connected to outside devices for review are only supposed to occur upon “reasonable” suspicion of legal violations or a national security concern.
Have a Plan
It is important to think about what you will do if a border agent asks for your personal devices well before you head to the airport. The last thing you want to do is to be caught flat-footed, Cope said.
Her organization has recommended that travelers conduct a risk analysis based on their personal profile, including whether they are a citizen, lawful permanent resident, or visa holder, as well as what kind of data is stored on their device.
Citizens have the right to reenter the U.S., but they can still have their devices seized. The ACLU says the same “should” be true for lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders. However, the group also recommends that noncitizens concerned about having their devices searched “should consult with an immigration lawyer about your particular circumstances before traveling.”
Visa holders, meanwhile, could be outright refused entry.
“It really just depends on what the person’s unique situation is, and what their tolerance level is for confrontation and delay and short-term detention and missing their flights and — in more extreme cases — having their immigration status questioned,” Cope said.
Consider Leaving Your Usual Devices at Home
The best way to protect your personal and work devices from search and seizure is simply to leave them at home. Get separate devices that you only use when traveling, and reset them before each trip.
Cheaper and refurbished devices may suffice for many trips. If you absolutely need your usual devices on your trip, consider mailing them to your destination, although this could raise its own risks.
Log Out and Power Down
Before you get to a security checkpoint, and ideally before you’re even at your port of entry or exit, fully power off all of your devices. This is important because some devices are in a more secure state before you log in to it for the first time after you’ve previously shut it down. For instance, forensics firms distinguish between iPhones in “before first unlock” versus “after first unlock” states, with the former coyly described as “less helpful” for data extraction.
Part of practicing strong digital security is making sure you’re exercising what’s known as “defense in depth”: Making sure that, should one level of security fail, another layer of protection is in place, just in case. For this reason, be sure to log out of all of your accounts before you power down. You could go as far as deleting the apps you’ve logged out from altogether, and reinstalling them after you’re safely beyond the security checkpoint.
If you are worried about remembering a long list of passwords, that is a good sign you should use password manager software instead. Recommended by many experts, a password manager allows you to use one password to unlock all of your passwords. If your password manager has a travel mode that lets you restrict which specific accounts to display for the duration of your travel, enable it.
Disable Biometrics
Make sure that you’re using an alphanumeric password to access your phone and other devices. Turn off all biometrics like fingerprint access and facial recognition (branded Touch ID and Face ID, respectively, on iPhones). Otherwise, authorities could put your phone up in front of your face to gain access.
Protect Your Data
Aside from making sure you’re not logged into sensitive accounts, you should also make sure you’re not storing sensitive data on your phone. One option is to download data from your phone onto an encrypted device you’re not traveling with and leave it at home. Another option, if you need access to some data on the road, is to encrypt it using a tool like Cryptomator, store it on a cloud storage provider, and then download it when you’ve reached your destination.
If you’re using an iPhone, you could back up your phone data using iCloud — just make sure you have Apple’s end-to-end encryption solution, Advanced Data Protection, enabled. (If you’re in certain regions, such as the U.K., you’ll need to switch your region location before you can use this feature.)
Protect Your Contacts
Don’t forget to make sure you also protect any sensitive contacts. Go through your contacts lists and remove any persons whose affiliation with you may potentially cause issues; for instance, if you have the names of activists, human rights defenders, or other sensitive sources. You could even export and then delete your entire contacts list and restore it later.
At High Risk?
If you believe you are at especially high risk when crossing the border, there are more advanced steps you can take.
One option goes beyond leaving your phone at home. You could also leave your SIM card and phone number behind too. Let your contacts know that you’ll have a temporary number while traveling. You can purchase a temporary SIM once you’re in the country, or beforehand. The reason to leave behind your number is the same as leaving behind your phone — you don’t want the authorities or anyone else to take control of your phone number. For instance, if the authorities take your SIM card and place it into their own device, they may be able to receive messages and calls meant for you.
Keep in mind that if you’re using SMS verification as a form of two-factor authentication for any accounts, you’ll need to temporarily update it to your current number, or have someone with access to your phone at home be able to log you in.
Ideally, however, you shouldn’t be using SMS for two-factor authentication in the first place, as it’s vulnerable to attackers taking control of your phone number. If there is no other form of two-factor authentication, SMS authentication is still better than nothing at all.
If you’re apprehensive that having a phone with minimal information on it may in itself cause you to stand out during an intrusive security check — which experts say is a legitimate concern — keep in mind that it may be preferable to revealing sensitive information.
Another, more elaborate protection option, is what the intelligence community calls persona development: Creating alternate accounts which don’t contain any sensitive information. In other words, you can snap innocuous photos and upload them to separate social media accounts for traveling. If your phone is searched, only these accounts will then be visible to the authorities.
Tell me about HERVISIONS, a femme-focused curatorial agency.
I really like hacking the system, making space where there isn’t space for marginalized voices. I’ve noticed how we have to exist [in multitudes], and the digital space allows that. It’s [where] more femme, or queer, and even neurodivergent perspectives intersect.
Something that I’ve been trying to encapsulate through HERVISIONS is the outsider, the underdog. People that are undermined. I feel like I am constantly undermined in my ability because I’m a woman of color from a low socioeconomic background. My lived experience informs my practice. I want to be able to help other people like me. I’ve been doing HERVISIONS for nearly 10 years now.
Wow, congratulations.
Thank you. [*laughs*] Yeah, it’s still not sustainable. I really want to become more…
Self-sufficient? Would that mean that you’re bringing in another voice?
I guess it’s more about the infrastructure. I’ve been working project to project.
A lot of creatives, in order to carve out space for themselves in an inaccessible industry, start up their own platforms, and they start with a lot of vim and energy. But then you realize that monetary support is few and far between.
Exactly.
It runs you down. It’s one of those things where, when you don’t have the building blocks, you start getting insular. But it’s still a living archive of the process that you went through to get where you are now.
You’re right. You start to become insular, and you start to equate success with your own value, and that becomes really problematic… It’s not conducive to any sustainability, personally or as a business model. So I don’t want to keep doing HERVISIONS the way that I have been. I’ve been thinking, “What can I do that’s manageable and that I enjoy?”
Fluid Imaginarium Instagram x Saatchi Gallery courtesy of HERVISIONS
You don’t do this full time, right?
I’m teaching now, associate lecturing at Camberwell University of The Arts, for their Computational Arts MA.
What is it like passing that knowledge down?
You always surprise yourself on what comes out. What if a student comes to me and I don’t know what to say?
I think it’s okay to say you don’t know.
Exactly. There’s always something you can connect to. There’s different styles of teaching. Sometimes it is critique-based, other times it’s workshopping… I’m still finding my teaching practice. Alternative education is really, really important.
Alt Ed is the most important, to be honest. You have to be adaptable and elastic. Do you teach anything practical in that class?
Good question. Because I’m coming from a more curatorial background—even though I’ve worked with digital tools for world-building with live-action, post-animation, or post-internet aesthetic effects—tools move so quickly. My curatorial practice has been one of collaboration, and intersecting with artistic mediums and practices that are still being developed. In Computational Arts there’s a lot of gaming engines, creative coding…
What’s creative coding?
Using Python or JavaScript, or p5.js. Anything digital is going to have some sort of code. If you can get into the backend and hack it, you can adapt [and] be creative with how you’re coding it. Now you can also use AI tools like ChatGPT to tell you the code. But you get into this really tricky area of ethics versus creativity versus accessibility versus resources… I feel like I’m constantly ping-ponging between that.
Are you talking about AI when you’re talking about ethics?
Well, all of it. If you’re using things like Spark AR, which is now closed and which was owned by Meta—Meta are just trying to capitalize on the way that we use the tool, our data, the artworks, the work that’s produced. The production of that work is still owned by them. They want to be able to have access to the collective consciousness, ultimately, and then teach AI how to replicate.
There is a lot of anxiety about phasing out anything organic. I definitely want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, but I wanted to go back to the queering of tech, and neurodivergence. How can tech can be made ready for people with learning disabilities, given that they are pushed to the peripheries in a lot of standard education contexts?
My theory is that the tech actually feeds into neurodivergence through the attention economy. So, how do we move away from that? You have to foster these tools to be able to create offline environments for people to connect in real time, in real life. Legacy Russell talks in Glitch Feminism about AFK: Away From Keyboard reality. There is this hybridity of having to exist offline… Artists Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab are doing a residency at the Delfina Foundation about mental health and how we can create digital interfaces to be more supportive of different needs and abilities.
Wild Wired! Rewilding Encounters of Langthorne Park – Image courtesy of William Morris Gallery and HERVISIONS
For me, I have dyslexia and I get very anxious when I see something and the interface doesn’t match how my brain can read it.
Exactly. You’re like, “Oh my god. Where do I even look?”
When I was at university and I did the dyslexic test, at the end they tested filters to see what color I read best in. I read best in pink, actually.
[*laughs*] That is cool!
I think most people respond to color, but hyper-capitalist cities just pull all the color out of everything, and when you go to somewhere like Mexico, or Cuba, and there’s color everywhere, you are automatically more jubilant and excited… A lot of coding spaces are black background and white text, or yellow text, or whatever.
That’s why the integration of NLP, Natural Language Programs, [are important]. Technology is developing now beyond just the formulas of binary codes. Romy Gad, the psychologist and artist, works with people that have addictions to technology. People can know the standard thing—”It’s bad for your mental health because you’re going to get addicted to dopamine”—but we don’t know the actual ins and outs of that, in [our] buzzword culture.
We simplify down to, “A + B = bad.” But we don’t actually know how to tackle or move past it. So artists, social thinkers, and psychologists are important to collaborate with. What have you learned about collaborating? What makes for a harmonious environment for positive collaboration?
Collaboration is a practice in itself. You have to play to your strengths. And by practice, I mean there needs to be an understanding that it has to be a mutual benefit for everyone involved. Also, being realistic of the outcomes is so important.
I think being realistic is [about] making manageable phases and not seeing everything as a finite outcome. You can try to have more bite-sized approaches to things. You can say, “We’re just going to prototype this, and then if it works, then we can develop it further.”
Is there anything that you would avoid when collaborating? Something you’ve maybe learned that’s gone wrong?
My expectations. It’s what you impose on yourself, and the people that you’re working with. Also I think the parameters, or the frameworks of what the collaborations are, or what everyone’s role is should be, should be clear from the beginning.
Things can just run away with themselves. I really try to impose some sort of structure of what’s important, or the expectations within roles, and making sure that everyone understands their roles. But also openness around how those roles can shift; allowing for a little bit of that is also part of the magic. It’s like creative contingency, knowing that that’s what happens. Things don’t go the way you started. So being able to foresee that contingency, but seeing it as a positive.
Underground Resistance, Living Memories, Josepha Ntjam, The Photographers Gallery, image courtesy of HERVISIONS
I’ve definitely learned that when I’m under pressure, I’m not always the nicest person. I try to face that in myself and be honest with other people.
I think it’s hard when you’re coming from a place of having to drive these things. When you’re like, “But if I don’t do this, no one else is going to do it. It’s my responsibility to do this, to get this done, and I have to pull people in.” If you’re the project lead, it comes from wanting everything to be perfect. But what I’ve learned is expecting a “no,” or expecting things to not be as you want, is a practice as well. Having that discipline to be able to step back. That is really learning about yourself.
Do you have a favorite digital work or physical piece of yours?
The project I did with the William Morris Gallery, “Wild Wired!,” felt very much like, “Ah, everything makes sense.” It was a site-specific digital intervention about rethinking the future of Langthorne Park in Leytonstone. It was a way to activate the local communities and introduce some sort of artwork connected to the William Morris Gallery’s Radical Landscapes exhibition. It was a project that combined community engagement, artist-led workshops, and digital technologies. We produced a site-specific, mobile-friendly game that you could access right in the park. It was accessible through scanning banners in the park. We were thinking about the park as a body—which was inspired by Taoism—and thinking about the medicinal properties of the plants in the park, and how they would impact our speculative future organs. We had different workshops where we asked artists, the community, and local residents to think about speculative organs. They did collages and we did writing and photography exercises.
These methods of world-building were then intertwined into a narrative, which then was produced into a body of work—which was the game, a 3D-printed artwork, an interactive website, and a moving image piece. That was really a huge amount of work.
It felt like everything clicked together for me. There were a lot of milestones within that project and there were a lot of production difficulties in terms of things not working the way we wanted, and that’s always what happens in technology. So it was just constantly problem solving.
That’s also a good skill you have to be able to hone whenever you’re doing these types of things: being a problem solver. My last point is about the environment. I think and hope that more people are coppin’ onto the environmental cost of tech, in terms of how much water usage there is to cool all these database storage centers down… Basically, without water, there wouldn’t be any tech. But how can we care more for the environment? What are your feelings about that?
I think this idea of reclaiming space and rewilding is an interesting way to think about it. The thing is, technical devices use a lot of mined minerals and components from the earth that we need for our smartphones. There’s a lot of reliance on nature, and how do we manage that? Gosh, I wish I had the answer.
AI is really, really, really environmentally unfriendly, but then also crypto, blockchain… There was a lot of fuss about NFTs not being ethical or environmentally friendly—which, yes, there is a massive usage of energy that blockchain takes. But the proportion of that which the creative industries use, in relation to other industries that use blockchain, is also a very small amount. I feel like there needs to be more transparency [from larger] capitalist companies.
I feel like artists, or creatives are just such little cogs in the system.
I think, though, that 10,000 small cogs make up a ton. We do have a part to play.
By Julie Decrand-Lardière and Clarissa Chan In an era where digital information is proliferating rapidly, the ability to effectively and ethically investigate potential human rights violations has never been more critical. The Digital Verification Unit (DVU) at the University of Essex, plays a vital role in equipping the next generation of human rights researchers with the skills […]
Rows of dead batteries stretch across some 30 acres of high desert, organized in piles and boxes that are covered to shield them from the western Nevada sun. This vast field is where Redwood Materials stores the batteries it harvests from electric vehicles, laptops, toothbrushes, and the litany of other gadgets powered by lithium-ion technology. They now await recycling at what is the largest such facility in the country.
Redwood was founded in 2017 by former Tesla executive JB Straubel and says it processes about three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries recycled in the United States. It is among a growing number of operations that shred the packs that power modern life into what is called “black mass,” then recoup upwards of 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other minerals they contain. Every ounce they recover is an ounce that doesn’t need to be dug from the ground.
Redwood’s Tahoe Campus in northern Nevada Redwood Materials
Recycling could significantly reduce the need to extract virgin material, a process that is riddled with human rights and environmental concerns, such as the reliance on open pit mines in developing countries. Even beyond those worries, the Earth contains a finite source of minerals, and skyrocketing demand will squeeze supplies. The world currently extracts about 180,000 metric tons of lithium each year — and demand is expected to hit nearly 10 times that by 2050, as adoption of electric vehicles, battery storage, and other technology needed for a green transition surges. At those levels, there are only enough known reserves to last about 15 years. The projected runway for cobalt is even shorter.
Before hitting these theoretical limits, though, demand for the metals is likely to outstrip the world’s ability to economically and ethically mine them, said Beatrice Browning, an expert on battery recycling at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which tracks the industry. “Recycling is going to plug that gap,” she told Grist.
Given these trends, the most remarkable thing about Redwood isn’t that it exists, but that it didn’t exist sooner. As the United States belatedly embraces the economic, national security, and environmental benefits that domestic battery recycling offers, it is trying to claw back market share from counties like South Korea, Japan, and especially China, which has a decades-long head start. “There is this race in terms of EV recycling that people are trying to capitalize on,” said Brian Cunningham, program manager for battery research and development at the Department of Energy. “Everybody understands that, in the long term, developing these robust supply chains is going to be incredibly reliant on battery recycling.”
Straubel’s recycling journey began while he was still the chief technology officer at Tesla, which he co-founded with Elon Musk, and three others, in 2003. One of his roles was establishing the company’s first domestic battery manufacturing facility, Gigafactory Nevada. Material for Tesla’s batteries came from mines around the world, and Straubel understood that the trend would accelerate alongside demand for EVs, which has quintupled in number in the U.S. since 2020. He also knew that, in the years ahead, a growing number of electric vehicles would reach the end of their lives. According to consulting firm Circular Energy Storage, the world’s supply of retired batteries is expected to grow tenfold by 2030.
“[We] need to be planning ahead and really keeping an eye toward what that future looks like, to be ready to recycle every one of those batteries,” Straubel said in 2023. “The worst thing we could do is go to all this destruction and trouble to mine it, refine it, build the product and then throw it away.”
JB Straubel, then-Tesla Motors chief technical officer, speaks during a ribbon cutting for a new Supercharger station outside of the Tesla Factory on August 16, 2013 in Fremont, California.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Last year, Redwood says it recycled 20 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries, or the equivalent of about a quarter-million EVs, generating $200 million in revenue. In addition to its headquarters in Carson City, Nevada, Redwood is building a campus in South Carolina. It isn’t alone in looking to expand. Ascend Elements, Cirba Solutions, Blue Whale Materials, and Li-Cycle are among a number of recyclers operating, or planning to operate, facilities in at least nine states across the country. More than 50 startups worldwide have attracted billions in investment in recent years. (Much of this outlay was driven by Biden-era legislation that Republicans are considering repealing, though it remains unclear just what such action might mean for spending already planned or underway.)
Despite the boom, the reuse revolution won’t come quickly.
Benchmark projects that recycled lithium and cobalt will account for a bit more than one-quarter of the global supply of those metals by 2040. A closed system in which battery manufacturers use only recycled material is considerably further off, because any increase in the number of old packs available to recycle will be outstripped by the need for new ones.
Global demand for EV batteries, for example, is growing by about 24 percent per year and won’t level off until sometime after 2040 — the point at which Benchmark’s forecast ends and growth is still forecast at 6 percent per year. The battery powering an EV can last well over a decade or more, so there will be a lag before the supply of recycled material catches up to demand.
Even today, the world’s recycling capacity outpaces the supply of batteries available to recycle, leaving everyone clambering to find more. That has meant waiting for EV batteries to reach the end of their lives, and attempting to recycle the small batteries in everyday gadgets that are often trashed. The dearth of material available for recycling is often attributed to the idea that only 5 percent of lithium batteries make it to companies like Redwood Materials. But the provenance of that number, cited everywhere from the Department of Energy and Ames National Laboratory to The New York Times and Grist, is murky.
“If you ever ask, ‘Where did that 5 percent number come from?’ no one can really track back to the data,” said Bryant Polzin, a process engineer at Argonne National Laboratory. Like other Department of Energy employees or affiliates quoted in this story, he spoke to Grist before President Trump was inaugurated. “I think it was just kind of a game of telephone.”
Argonne’s research pegs the recycling rate for all lithium-ion batteries originating in the U.S. at 54 percent — 10 percent domestically and 44 percent in China — though it notes that data reliability remains an issue. Even that number, though, falls considerably short of what’s possible: 99 percent of lead acid batteries, like those used to start cars, in the United States are recycled, according to the Battery Council International trade association.
Technicians operate automated recycling equipment at an electric vehicle power lithium battery recycling workshop in Hefei, Anhui province, China, in 2023.
CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images
Redwood works with many automakers, including Toyota, BMW and Volkswagen, to gather EV batteries, and goes into the field to collect others from automotive repair shops, salvage yards, and the like. Policy tweaks could help recyclers acquire more. In California, for example, a state working group recommended more clearly delineating when various entities in the supply chain — from the battery supplier and auto manufacturer to a dismantler or refurbisher — are responsible for ensuring a battery is recovered, reused, or recycled. This, the report said, could reduce the risk of “stranded” resources.
So far, though, this seems to be a rare occurance. The much bigger hindrance to EV recycling in the U.S. is simply that there aren’t enough old batteries to meet the demand for new ones. As that waiting game unfolds, recycling those often discarded as household waste could help bridge the gap.
Small lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric toothbrushes to toys. By Benchmark’s estimate, about 5 percent of virgin lithium is used in consumer devices, but when they die, many of them are squirreled away in a drawer or trashed.
“A lot of household stuff does get chucked in the waste, and they’re not getting recycled,” said Andy Latham, the founder of Salvage Wire, a consulting firm focused on automotive battery recycling. Beyond being wasteful, dropping old batteries in the trash can be dangerous; scores of garbage trucks in cities from New York to Oregon have caught fire in recent years due to improperly disposed e-waste.
Data on just how much lithium is simply thrown away or hoarded remains elusive. But Latham says, in the short-term, batteries in portable electronics are “probably just as much, if not more of a factor” as those in EVs when it comes to advancing recycling. Redwood Materials, for one, is hoovering up as many as it can. It works with nonprofits and others to funnel them to its Nevada campus and hopes to establish drop-off locations at big-box retailers, similar to can and bottle collection in some states.
“Collection is definitely the biggest challenge,” said Alexis Georgeson, Redwood Materials’ vice president of government relations and policy. “It’s really a problem of how you get consumers to clean out their junk drawers.”
How to get rid of your e-waste
Lithium-ion batteries can be found in laptops, phones, toothbrushes, Bluetooth speakers, and power tools, just to name a few things. But many people aren’t sure what to do with these gadgets once they die. Instead of tossing them in the trash, which can be dangerous, experts say to recycle them. Here’s how.
The nonprofit Call2Recycle operates some 16,000 sites nationwide where people can drop off their devices at no cost — at libraries, garbage dumps, and big box stores like Staples. The organization collected 5.4 million pounds of rechargeable batteries in 2023, and provides an online map to find a recycling location near you. Earth 911, Green Gadgets, and GreenCitizen also have locators.
Some cities offer curbside pickup, making recycling even easier. Call2Recycle, Electronic Recycling International, and others will take them by mail, usually for a fee. “Batteries sitting in a junk drawer or a box in the basement can accidentally cause a fire,”said Mia Roethlein, an environmental analyst at the Department of Environmental Conservation in Vermont, a national recycling leader. “Bring them to one of the free battery collection locations as soon as they are no longer usable.”
Until more people do that, recyclers count on a somewhat ironic source of material: Scraps from factories that make new batteries. One of Redwood’s primary feedstocks are the bits and pieces left over during the manufacturing process in places like Tesla’s Gigafactory, Georgeson said. Benchmark estimates that such leftovers represent about 84 percent of the material all battery recyclers use today.
The authors of the Argonne paper underscored how vital this material is: “If no scrap was available,” they wrote, “the development of the U.S. recycling industry might be significantly delayed.”
As more EVs hit the end of the road, consumer electronics are collected in greater numbers, and battery manufacturing yields less scrap as it grows more efficient, the composition of the material will adjust. New battery technologies could also have an impact, with emerging solid-state batteries, for example, expected to create more production waste in the short term but less in the long term. But few doubt recycling will be a thriving business that could help the country cut carbon emissions and decrease its dependency on places like China, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for increasingly vital minerals. It’s a future that American policymakers are trying to shape, hasten, and prepare for.
Although under threat from President Donald Trump’s administration, both the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, explicitly aim to bring battery manufacturing to the United States. They provided billions of dollars in grants and tax credits to incentivize building out domestic capacity (often in Republican congressional districts). The consumer-facing EV tax credit also requires that manufacturers source a minimum amount of both minerals and components locally. The government has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in battery recycling as well, including Department of Energy support for everything from collection systems for small electronics to research into improving recycling technology.
“The work that we are funding is to really make those processes more efficient and economical,” said Jake Herb, technology development manager at the agency’s Vehicle Technologies Office. One success story is Ascend Elements, which Department of Energy funding helped grow from a Worcester Polytechnic Institute startup into a major player in the domestic industry. The department offered to loan Redwood Materials $2 billion to expand its factory, though the company declined the additional investment and says it has not accepted any federal funding. A robust domestic industry ensures that“we’re able to reclaim more materials [and] keep more of those materials domestic in the U.S,” Herb said.
Several challenges remain as the country sprints toward that goal.
One hurdle is figuring out when recycling is the best option. Argonne National Laboratory’s “battery material use hierarchy” puts recycling near the bottom of its list of possible outcomes. It’s better to find alternate uses for batteries, especially those from EVs, like refurbishing them for use in another car or directing them to less intensive applications, such as for energy storage.
“It would provide a much more economical solution to consumers,” said Vince Edivan, executive director of the Automotive Recyclers Association.
Still, this so-called “second life” market remains nascent in the U.S. Edivan says automakers could boost it by making it easier for salvage yards to assess a battery’s condition to determine whether it can be reused or should be recycled. They often consider that information proprietary, he said. “We’re shredding perfectly good batteries because we don’t know the state of health.”
It’s somewhat hazy who is supposed to regulate this rapidly growing industry. The Environmental Protection Agency considers lithium-ion batteries hazardous waste, which dictates how they should and shouldn’t be disposed of, but doesn’t directly address recycling. In 2021, Argonne signed on to help develop lithium recycling standards, though the status of that effort remains unclear. The task will likely fall to a patchwork of federal, state, and local authorities, which must keep the public both safe and confident in a process that will be critical to the country’s — and the climate’s — future.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to creating a full-cycle loop in the United States is that before any reclaimed material can be used in a battery, it must be refined into an intermediary product, such as cathode, which makes up approximately 40 percent of a battery’s value. “You can’t send lithium to a Gigafactory,” said Georgeson. “It is like sending sand to a computer factory.”
At the moment, no one is making cathode in the U.S. at scale — manufacturers are buying it from Asia. Redwood, Ascend Elements, and others are ramping up cathode facilities that should be online in the coming years (Panasonic plans to use Redwood cathode at its new battery plant in Kansas). But, for now, they are frequently selling their raw material abroad.
Georgeson sees federal policy as key to helping, or hindering, efforts to plug the cathode hole in the supply chain. One impediment has been a Treasury Department ruling that allows cathode sourced from allied countries to also qualify for the EV tax credit. That, she said, has pushed billions in business and investments to countries like South Korea instead of the United States.
It remains unclear exactly how the new administration will impact the industry, but President Trump could certainly upend it. If Congress rolls back the IRA’s investment and production tax credits, it could significantly handicap America’s burgeoning recycling buildout. On the other hand, tariffs, particularly aimed at China, could tip the economic scales toward American producers and recyclers by making imported batteries and their components more expensive.
Redwood, for one, is optimistic that its goal of onshoring both battery recycling and cathode production aligns with Trump’s goals of putting “America first.” Straubel has said that the Trump administration could do a lot to encourage a more robust domestic supply chain, including making the battery origin requirements of the EV tax credit more stringent — rather than scrapping the incentive entirely.
Getting the policy wrong, the company argues, will put the U.S. at the mercy of others in a future where battery recycling will only become more critical.
Blanca Begert contributed reporting to this story.
Scattered across the United States, hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines scar the earth, posing a safety hazard to passing hikers and a health risk to nearby communities. But cached inside piles of refuse and ponds of toxic waste, there are also elements as critical for the 21st-century economy as coal was for the industrial revolution. Now, an obscure federal government program known as the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI, is identifying the high-tech minerals concealed in these mines — as well as those hidden beneath the Earth’s surface.
Developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, during the first Trump administration, Earth MRI aims to comprehensively map the nation’s underground deposits of “critical minerals” — an ever-growing list of elements and compounds considered vital for national security and the economy. In 2021, Earth MRI received a massive funding boost through the bipartisan infrastructure law, accelerating federal scientists’ efforts to figure out which parts of the country are rich in minerals used in clean energy technologies, semiconductors, and high-tech weaponry. While the Trump administration has moved aggressively to reverse most of former President Joe Biden’s climate policies, it appears to agree with the prior administration’s desire to locate — and, eventually, mine — more of these resources.
“This is a program that has survived both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Peter Cook, a critical minerals policy expert at The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental solutions research organization, told Grist. “They’re both definitely interested in critical minerals.”
An Earth MRI map showing data collected by the program. USGS
Minerals like lithium, graphite, and the group of 17 metallic elements known as rare earths are essential for a wide range of technologies, including those at the heart of the clean energy transition. The lithium-ion batteries that store renewable energy and power EVs can contain lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and more. Electric vehicle motors and some wind turbine generators contain magnets that require the rare earth element neodymium, and often smaller amounts of dysprosium and terbium. Certain solar panels require gallium, germanium, indium, and tellurium. The clean energy sector’s appetite for these metals is expected to surge as the energy transition accelerates: A recent report by The Breakthrough Institute found that EVs alone may account for two-thirds of future national demand of many key minerals. At the same time, critical minerals are vital for high-tech military technologies, advanced semiconductors, and more.
Despite these diverse needs, U.S. output of many minerals is limited. A 2020 report by the Commerce Department found that of an initial list of 35 critical minerals, America’s supply of 31 of them came mostly or entirely from foreign sources. Production of many critical minerals is dominated by China, which is engaged in a trade war with the United States that has involved tariffs and export restrictions on several metals. For some particularly scarce metals like gallium, used in advanced semiconductors, the U.S. has no domestic production at all.
While Biden saw domestic mineral supply chains as a key pillar of a U.S. clean energy manufacturing economy, Donald Trump’s interest in critical minerals appears more related to their military uses and national security implications. That interest can be seen in everything from a foreign policy focused on mining deals to a domestic agenda that includes cutting bureaucratic red tape to fuel additional mineral extraction. While Earth MRI hasn’t garnered the same level of attention as, say, Trump’s desire to buy Greenland for its rare earth resources or bargain with Ukraine for its minerals in exchange for military aid, the existence of the program reflects a long-standing focus on shoring up U.S. mineral supplies.
The USGS established Earth MRI in 2019, following a Trump executive order that called on federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical mineral supply chains. Initially, the program had a modest annual budget of about $11 million, which USGS scientists, in partnership with state geological surveys around the country, used to launch a national critical minerals mapping campaign that included a mix of airborne surveys and on-the-ground fieldwork. But the bipartisan infrastructure law, or BIL, allowed Earth MRI to kick into overdrive, with a $320 million funding boost spread over five years. In 2022, the program’s yearly budget jumped to $75 million, a level at which it will remain through 2026.
“We’re transforming the data landscape, and we’re transforming it in a big and consistent way through the sustained funding,” Earth MRI science coordinator Jamey Jones told Grist in an interview.
Earth MRI’s recent list of achievements is impressive.
When the BIL passed into law in late 2021, scientists had collected high-quality geophysical data across only about 10 percent of the United States; by late 2024, that figure had jumped to nearly 25 percent. In the past two years alone, Jones said, Earth MRI scientists have conducted airborne magnetic surveys — which measure variations in Earth’s magnetic field to detect different subsurface rock types and identify features like faults — across an area twice the size of Montana. Late last year, Earth MRI and NASA completed the world’s largest high-quality hyperspectral survey over California, Nevada, and Arizona. Hyperspectral surveys, which measure reflected sunlight outside the range of human vision, can be used in arid regions to produce detailed mineral maps of the Earth’s surface. This year and next, NASA and Earth MRI will expand the survey to include parts of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon.
In addition to mapping minerals still in the ground, Earth MRI is taking a closer look at ones that have already been extracted. In 2023, the program’s scientists accelerated their efforts to explore the critical mineral content of mine waste located in tailings ponds and rock piles around the country. Mine waste is considered a potentially valuable source of many important metals and minerals, but they have never been systematically studied. Thanks to BIL funding, Jones says that the USGS recently completed the first-ever comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine lands, which it anticipates publishing later this year. In partnership with state geological surveys, Earth MRI is now in the process of dispatching researchers to abandoned mine sites to collect samples of waste rock that can be analyzed in the lab to assess their critical mineral content. “Eventually, we hope to produce a national assessment of critical mineral resources in mine waste,” Jones said.
A helicopter carries an airborne electromagnetic induction sensor over parts of northeastern Wisconsin for a USGS study in January 2021. USGS / Wisconsin Dept. of Agricultural, Trade, and Consumer Protection; Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources / Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey
The data Earth MRI is collecting does not indicate which exact spots in the ground are the most attractive to mine. Rather, it supplies just enough information “to attract the private sector into an area” to conduct more detailed exploratory work, said Simon Jowitt, who directs the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and is Earth MRI’s primary point of contact for the state. The effort involved in collecting this preliminary, or “pre-competitive,” data often has an outsized economic benefit, Jowitt says. Research in other countries shows that for every dollar governments spend on it, tens to hundreds of dollars are returned to the economy through private investment in exploration and mining.
“If we want to have more mineral exploration, more secure domestic supply chains of metals and minerals, then we need to have these data,” Jowitt added.
Mining proposals often attract intensepublicopposition, due to fears about damage to ecosystems and water supplies. But both Trump and Biden — as well as members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — appear to support more of it. While it’s still too early to say how much of an impact Earth MRI will have on domestic mining — it often takes a decade or more to permit or build a mine even after all the exploratory work is complete — there are signs that private industry is taking a keen interest in its data. For instance, Jones said an exploration company in Nevada told the agency that it has discovered new lithium deposits based on geochemical data Earth MRI released.
Even as Trump has sought to kneecap other federal agencies and projects, funding for Earth MRI never appeared to be in serious jeopardy. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that called for “terminating the Green New Deal” by pausing the disbursement of all funds appropriated through the BIL and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — a move that multiple judges have found to be illegal. But the same order directed the interior secretary to “prioritize efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States, with a focus on locating previously unknown deposits of critical minerals.”
“I think it was pretty quickly recognized that the priorities [of the order] would outweigh the freeze,” Jones said. After a four-week pause, the Trump administration restored Earth MRI’s funding on February 18. And this month, Trump issued another executive order calling for agency heads to identify “as many sites as possible” on federal land that may be suitable for critical minerals mining and invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate mineral development.
Slabs of lithium boron found beneath Esmeralda County, Nevada. Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
While the mapping program is moving full steam ahead for now, it remains to be seen what will become of it once BIL funding sunsets after 2026. Barring an additional infusion of cash from Congress, Jones says the most likely scenario is that the program’s budget will return to its pre-2022 baseline of about $11 million a year — a roughly 75 percent cut.
Jowitt, the Nevada state geologist, says he’d “like to be optimistic” that Congress will authorize additional funds for Earth MRI so that scientists can continue to fill in the gaps in the nation’s geologic maps. But considering the Trump administration’s recent efforts to dramatically shrink federal spending, he isn’t sure what will happen.
One thing is clear: There will be more work left to do after the BIL coffers are emptied. By 2027, “we can tell you exactly how much [geological data] coverage will have increased in the country for all of our different techniques,” Jones said. “And none of those numbers add up to 100 percent. Our job will not be complete.”
For years, U.S. officials villainized end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Signal as the domain of criminals and terrorists and a threat to national security.
As fallout over a Signal group chat about Yemen war plans ricocheted through Washington, however, CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday that the app is approved for official communication and even comes installed on agency computers.
One longtime critic of government attacks on secure messaging said it was a sign that everybody else should follow suit.
“For everyday Americans, this seems like an inadvertent but strong endorsement of the cybersecurity and privacy value that Signal represents — assuming you actually know who you’re adding to the given chats,” said Sean Vitka, executive director of the progressive group Demand Progress.
“Going Dark”
The highly sensitive discussion over whether and when to attack Houthis in Yemen included FBI Director Kash Patel, according to a blockbuster report Monday from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
There was particular irony to an FBI director’s presence on the thread. For years, Patel’s predecessors Chris Wray and James Comey had lambasted end-to-end encryption. The FBI popularized the idea that terrorists and drug cartels were “going dark” on law enforcement, and that the government needed to step in to do something about it.
The FBI’s favored solution was to create a back door in the apps that would allow the government to snoop on conversations — but only with proper authority, the FBI said.
In a 2014 speech, then-FBI Director Comey said that the “post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far” in favor of privacy. Without creating a back door, he added, “homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk free, and child exploitation victims might not be identified or recovered.”
The FBI never made much progress in Congress toward securing a back door. Across the pond, attacks on end-to-end encryption are ongoing, with the United Kingdom reportedly ordering Apple in secret to create one. France’s National Assembly last week voted down a backdoor mandate sought by the country’s Interior Ministry.
The CIA Seal of Approval
The FBI’s official position became increasingly tenuous last year when revelations about “Salt Typhoon” hackers made clear that unencrypted communications were highly vulnerable to foreign adversaries.
The hackers, who were allegedly affiliated with the Chinese government, targeted phones used by Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the Kamala Harris campaign, according to reports, and in some cases were able to scoop up the content of text conversations.
By December, the FBI was still promoting back doors under the banner of what it calls “responsibly managed” encryption. At the same time, however, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was advising end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal as a defense against Chinese hackers.
Signal, which is based on an open-source protocol and operated by a nonprofit foundation, is designed to reduce to a minimum the amount of information that the app can access. Only the users involved in a conversation have decryption keys, making it impossible for the Signal Foundation to view unencrypted conversations. The foundation also cannot see metadata such as a user’s contacts.
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe revealed that the government has adopted Signal at the highest echelons.
“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA.”
“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said.
The practice began during President Joe Biden’s administration and had the official approval of CIA records management officials, Ratcliffe said, as long as “any decisions that are made are also recorded through formal channels.”
Critics of government secrecy were immediately alarmed that government officials might be trying to evade leaving records subject to the Freedom of Information Act or the Presidential Records Act by using private devices with disappearing messages.
Despite the high level of protection that end-to-end encryption provides in transit, however, the group chat also raised serious security issues. Even secure messaging apps cannot solve the problem of hackers who have compromised the device running them. Nor can they keep information secret in the event of human error — say, inadvertently adding a journalist to a sensitive discussion of military strikes.
Under questioning from Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard refused to say whether she used a personal or government-issued phone for her part of the conversation.
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., also asked Ratcliffe whether he was aware that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, another member of the group chat, was on a trip in Moscow during the conversation, raising more concerns.
Signal offers users the ability to sync messages across multiple devices. Vitka, the advocate with Demand Progress, said that if government officials were syncing messages to vulnerable private devices, that would raise a host of questions.
“That personal device could be the liability. And as soon as any of these devices are compromised, then the entire chat, the entire thread — then all of the information in it is compromised,” he said.
Senate Republicans largely attempted to sidestep questions about the Yemen group chat during the committee hearing, but Democrats were united in their criticism.
“This is an embarrassment. This is utterly unprofessional. There has been no apology. There has been no recognition of the gravity of this error,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
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platform will facilitate location, apprehension, and adjudication of millions of illegals in months instead of years,” Harvilicz said, referring to the since-discontinued app used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to track immigrants.
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