Category: Technology

  • By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    People on Guam are “disappointed” and “heartbroken” that radiation exposure compensation is not being extended to them, says the president of the Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors (PARS), Robert Celestial.

    He said they were disappointed for many reasons.

    “Congress seems to not understand that we are no different than any state,” he told RNZ Pacific.

    “We are human beings, we are affected in the same way they are. We are suffering the same way, we are greatly disappointed, heartbroken,” Celestial said.

    The extension to the United States Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by Congress on Friday (Thursday, Washington time).

    Downwind compensation eligibility would extend to the entire states of Utah, Idaho and New Mexico, but Guam – which was included in an earlier version of the bill – was excluded.

    All claimants are eligible for US$100,000.

    Attempt at amendment
    Guam Republican congressman James Moylan attempted to make an amendment to include Guam before the bill reached the House floor earlier in the week.

    “Guam has become a forgotten casualty of the nuclear era,” Moylan told the House Rules Committee.

    “Federal agencies have confirmed that our island received measurable radiation exposure as a result of US nuclear testing in the Pacific and yet, despite this clear evidence, Guam remains excluded from RECA, a program that was designed specifically to address the harm caused by our nation’s own policies.

    “Guam is not asking for special treatment we are asking to be treated with dignity equal to the same recognition afforded to other downwind communities across our nation.”

    Moylan said his constituents are dying from cancers linked to radiation exposure.

    From 1946 to 1962, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands, just under 2000 kilometres from Guam.

    New Mexico Democratic congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández supported Moylan, who said it was “sad Guam and other communities were not included”.

    Colorado, Montana excluded
    The RECA extension also excluded Colorado and Montana; Idaho was also for a time but this was amended.

    Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors (PARS) members at a gathering. Founder/Atomic Veteran Robert Celestial(holding book)
    Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors (PARS) members at a gathering . . . “heartbroken” that radiation exposure compensation is not being extended to them. Image: RNZ Pacific/Eleisha Foon

    Celestial said he had heard different rumours about why Guam was not included but nothing concrete.

    “A lot of excuses were saying that it’s going to cost too much. You know, Guam is going to put a burden on finances.”

    But Celestial said the cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office for Guam to be included was US$560 million while Idaho was $1.4 billion.

    “[Money] can’t be the reason that Guam got kicked out because we’re the lowest on the totem pole for the amount of money it’s going to cost to get us through in the bill.”

    Certain zip codes
    The bill also extends to communities in certain zip codes in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alaska, who were exposed to nuclear waste.

    Celestial said it’s taken those states 30 years to be recognised and expects Guam to be eventually paid.

    He said Moylan would likely now submit a standalone bill with the other states that were not included.

    If that fails, he said Guam could be included in nuclear compensation through the National Defense Authorization Act in December, which is for military financial support.

    The RECA extension includes uranium workers employed from 1 January 1942 to 31 December 1990.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Teuila Fuatai, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

    A Tongan cybersecurity expert says the country’s health data hack is a “wake-up call” for the whole region.

    Siosaia Vaipuna, a former director of Tonga’s cybersecurity agency, spoke to RNZ Pacific in the wake of the June 15 cyberattack on the country’s Health Ministry.

    Vaipuna said Tonga and other Pacific nations were vulnerable to data breaches due to the lack of awareness and cybersecurity systems in the region.

    “There’s increasing digital connectivity in the region, and we’re sort of . . . the newcomers to the internet,” he said.

    “I think the connectivity is moving faster than the online safety awareness activity [and] that makes not just Tonga, but the Pacific more vulnerable and targeted.”

    Since the data breach, the Tongan government has said “a small amount” of information from the attack was published online. This included confidential information, it said in a statement.

    Reporting on the attack has also attributed the breach to the group Inc Ransomware.

    Vaipuna said the group was well-known and had previously focused on targeting organisations in Europe and the US.

    New Zealand attack
    However, earlier this month, it targeted the Waiwhetū health organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. That attack reportedly included the theft of patient consent forms and education and training data.

    “This type of criminal group usually employs a double-extortion tactic,” Vaipuna said.

    It could encrypt data and then demand money to decrypt, he said.

    “The other ransom is where they are demanding payment so that they don’t release the information that they hold to the public or sell it on to other cybercriminals.”

    In the current Tonga cyberattack, media reports say that Inc Ransomware wanted a ransom of US$1 million for the information it accessed. The Tongan government has said it has not paid anything.

    Vaipuna said more needed to be done to raise awareness in the region around cybersecurity and online safety systems, particularly among government departments.

    “I think this is a wake-up call. The cyberattacks are not just happening in movies or on the news or somewhere else, they are actually happening right on our doorstep and impacting on our people.

    Extra vigilance warning
    “And the right attention and resources should rightfully be allocated to the organisations and to teams that are tasked with dealing with cybersecurity matters.”

    The Tongan government has also warned people to be extra vigilant when online.

    It said more information accessed in the cyberattack may be published online, and that may include patient information and medical records.

    “Our biggest concern is for vulnerable groups of people who are most acutely impacted by information breaches of this kind,” the government said.

    It said that it would contact these people directly.

    The country’s ongoing response was also being aided by experts from Australia’s special cyberattack team.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New State Department guidance released this month instructs student visa applicants to “adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public,’” a task which will be difficult to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven’t been operational in years.

    The student visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for “each social media platform you have used within the last five years” from a list of 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.

    Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student visas under an “expanded screening and vetting” process. The expanded scrutiny applies to F (academic students), M (vocational students), and J (exchange visitor) visa applicants.

    Related

    Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself

    According to a State Department cable, obtained by the Free Press and Politico, the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”

    The DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect State’s recent guidance, as it doesn’t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made public.

    The social media section of the DS-160 visa application form. U.S. State Department

    “Government social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech, and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing security threats,” warned Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said that by requiring social media accounts be made public, “the U.S. government is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene.”

    The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with 20 social media accounts to choose from.

    • Ask.fm
    • Douban
    • Facebook
    • Flickr
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • Myspace
    • Pinterest
    • Qzone (QQ)
    • Reddit
    • Sina Weibo
    • Tencent Weibo
    • Tumblr
    • Twitter
    • Twoo
    • Vine
    • VKontakte (VK)
    • Youku
    • YouTube

    The list is mishmash of popular social media providers, regional services (predominantly those used in China), and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms, such as Myspace, which has been a digital ghost town for years.

    A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all, with some already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in 2019. That includes Ask.fm, a Latvian service where users could ask questions that closed last year, and Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service that shut down in 2020.

    “Those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    Among the included services are Douban, Qzone, Sina Weibo, and Youku — all active Chinese social network sites. Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites, the form leaves off Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.

    VKontakte is the only Russian social media service appearing on the list. No other popular regional social media sites are included.

    Other modern social media platforms, such as TikTok or Trump’s own Truth Social, are missing from the list as well, though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts.

    Asked for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled, or whether there are plans to update the online form, a State Department spokesperson provided a statement summarizing the new guidance and said that “the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”

    Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described the policy as “antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect,” pointing out that “not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the public, they’ll put countless students at risk. Now those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    The post State Department Wants to Know Student Visa Applicants’ Myspace Accounts appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • New State Department guidance released this month instructs student visa applicants to “adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public,’” a task which will be difficult to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven’t been operational in years.

    The student visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for “each social media platform you have used within the last five years” from a list of 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.

    Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student visas under an “expanded screening and vetting” process. The expanded scrutiny applies to F (academic students), M (vocational students), and J (exchange visitor) visa applicants.

    Related

    Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself

    According to a State Department cable, obtained by the Free Press and Politico, the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”

    The DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect State’s recent guidance, as it doesn’t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made public.

    The social media section of the DS-160 visa application form. U.S. State Department

    “Government social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech, and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing security threats,” warned Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said that by requiring social media accounts be made public, “the U.S. government is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene.”

    The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with 20 social media accounts to choose from.

    • Ask.fm
    • Douban
    • Facebook
    • Flickr
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • Myspace
    • Pinterest
    • Qzone (QQ)
    • Reddit
    • Sina Weibo
    • Tencent Weibo
    • Tumblr
    • Twitter
    • Twoo
    • Vine
    • VKontakte (VK)
    • Youku
    • YouTube

    The list is mishmash of popular social media providers, regional services (predominantly those used in China), and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms, such as Myspace, which has been a digital ghost town for years.

    A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all, with some already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in 2019. That includes Ask.fm, a Latvian service where users could ask questions that closed last year, and Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service that shut down in 2020.

    “Those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    Among the included services are Douban, Qzone, Sina Weibo, and Youku — all active Chinese social network sites. Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites, the form leaves off Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.

    VKontakte is the only Russian social media service appearing on the list. No other popular regional social media sites are included.

    Other modern social media platforms, such as TikTok or Trump’s own Truth Social, are missing from the list as well, though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts.

    Asked for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled, or whether there are plans to update the online form, a State Department spokesperson provided a statement summarizing the new guidance and said that “the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”

    Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described the policy as “antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect,” pointing out that “not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the public, they’ll put countless students at risk. Now those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    The post Want a Student Visa? The U.S. Government Needs Your Vine Account appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • New State Department guidance released this month instructs student visa applicants to “adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public,’” a task which will be difficult to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven’t been operational in years.

    The student visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for “each social media platform you have used within the last five years” from a list of 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.

    Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student visas under an “expanded screening and vetting” process. The expanded scrutiny applies to F (academic students), M (vocational students), and J (exchange visitor) visa applicants.

    Related

    Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself

    According to a State Department cable, obtained by the Free Press and Politico, the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”

    The DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect State’s recent guidance, as it doesn’t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made public.

    The social media section of the DS-160 visa application form. U.S. State Department

    “Government social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech, and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing security threats,” warned Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said that by requiring social media accounts be made public, “the U.S. government is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene.”

    The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with 20 social media accounts to choose from.

    • Ask.fm
    • Douban
    • Facebook
    • Flickr
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • Myspace
    • Pinterest
    • Qzone (QQ)
    • Reddit
    • Sina Weibo
    • Tencent Weibo
    • Tumblr
    • Twitter
    • Twoo
    • Vine
    • VKontakte (VK)
    • Youku
    • YouTube

    The list is mishmash of popular social media providers, regional services (predominantly those used in China), and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms, such as Myspace, which has been a digital ghost town for years.

    A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all, with some already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in 2019. That includes Ask.fm, a Latvian service where users could ask questions that closed last year, and Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service that shut down in 2020.

    “Those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    Among the included services are Douban, Qzone, Sina Weibo, and Youku — all active Chinese social network sites. Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites, the form leaves off Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.

    VKontakte is the only Russian social media service appearing on the list. No other popular regional social media sites are included.

    Other modern social media platforms, such as TikTok or Trump’s own Truth Social, are missing from the list as well, though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts.

    Asked for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled, or whether there are plans to update the online form, a State Department spokesperson provided a statement summarizing the new guidance and said that “the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”

    Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described the policy as “antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect,” pointing out that “not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the public, they’ll put countless students at risk. Now those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

    The post Want a Student Visa? The U.S. Government Needs Your Vine Account. appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The Internet Society (ISOC) and Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), on behalf of the Common Good Cyber secretariat, today announced on 23 June 2025 the launch of the Common Good Cyber Fund, an initiative to strengthen global cybersecurity by supporting nonprofits that deliver core cybersecurity services that protect civil society actors and the Internet as a whole.

    This first-of-its-kind effort to fund cybersecurity for the common good—for everyone, including those at the greatest risk—has the potential to fundamentally improve cybersecurity for billions of people around the world. The Common Good Cyber secretariat members working to address this challenge are: Global Cyber Alliance, Cyber Threat Alliance, CyberPeace Institute, Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, Institute for Security and Technology, and Shadowserver Foundation.

    In a Joint Statement Between the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the Prime Minister of Canada on 15 June, 2025, the Prime Ministers announced that they would both invest in the Joint Canada-UK Common Good Cyber Fund. On 17 June, during the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Alberta, Canada, all the G7 Leaders announced that they would support initiatives like the Canada-UK Common Good Cyber Fund to aid members of civil society who are actively working to counter the threat of transnational repression. See G7 Leaders’ Statement on Transnational Repression.

    The Fund is a milestone in advancing Common Good Cyber, a global initiative led by the Global Cyber Alliance, to create sustainable funding models for the organizations and individuals working to keep the Internet safe. 

    Despite serving as a critical frontline defense for the security of the Internet, cybersecurity nonprofits remain severely underfunded—exposing millions of users, including journalists, human rights defenders, and other civil society groups. This underfunding also leaves the wider public exposed to increasingly frequent and sophisticated cyber threats.

    Common Good Cyber represents a pivotal step toward a stronger, more inclusive cybersecurity ecosystem. By increasing the resilience and long-term sustainability of nonprofits working in cybersecurity, improving access to trusted services for civil society organizations and human rights defenders, and encouraging greater adoption of best practices and security-by-design principles, the Common Good Cyber Fund ultimately helps protect and empower all Internet users.”Philip Reitinger, President and CEO, Global Cyber Alliance

    The fund will support nonprofits that:

    • Maintain and secure core digital infrastructure, including DNS, routing, and threat intelligence systems for the public good;
    • Deliver cybersecurity assistance to high-risk actors through training, rapid incident response, and free-to-use tools

    These future beneficiaries support the Internet by enabling secure operations and supplying global threat intelligence. They shield civil society from cyber threats through direct, expert intervention and elevate the security baseline for the entire ecosystem by supporting the “invisible infrastructure” on which civil society depends.

    The Fund will operate through a collaborative structure. The Internet Society will manage the fund, and a representative and expert advisory board will provide strategic guidance.. Acting on behalf of the Common Good Cyber Secretariat, the Global Cyber Alliance will lead the Fund’s Strategic Advisory Committee and, with the other Secretariat members, engage in educational advocacy and outreach within the broader cybersecurity ecosystem.

    The Common Good Cyber Fund is a global commitment to safeguard the digital frontlines, enabling local resilience and long-term digital sustainability. By supporting nonprofits advancing cybersecurity through tools, solutions, and platforms, the Fund builds a safer Internet that works for everyone, everywhere.

    The Internet Society and the Global Cyber Alliance are finalizing the Fund’s legal and logistical framework. More information about the funding will be shared in the coming months.

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • As the second Trump administration is dispatching its minions to stalk US streets, smashing citizens’ First Amendment rights, in partnership with unregulated Big Tech, it also surveils online, helping itself to citizens’ personal identifiable information (PII).

    In the age of surveillance capitalism, information is a hot commodity for corporations and governments, precipitating a multi-billion-dollar industry that not only profits from the collection and commodification of citizens’ PII, but also puts individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments at risk for cyberattacks and data theft.

    Social security numbers, location details, health information, student loan and financial data, purchasing habits, library borrowing and internet browsing history, and political and religious affiliations are just some of the personal information that data brokers buy and sell to advertisers, banks, insurance companies, mortgage brokers, law enforcement and government agencies, foreign agents, and even spammers, scammers, and stalkers. Over time, that information often ends up changing hands again and again.

    As an example, and to the alarm of civil liberties experts, the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), “a shady data broker” owned by at least eight US-based commercial airlines, including Delta, American, and United, has been collecting US travelers’ domestic flight records and selling them to Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Homeland Security; and as part of the deal, government officials are forbidden to reveal how ARC sourced the flight data.

    Online users should know that many data brokers camp out on Facebook and at Google’s advertising exchange, drawing from such sources as credit card transactions, frequent shopper loyalty programs, bankruptcy filings, vehicle registration records, employment records, military service, and social media posting and web tracking data harvested from websites, apps, and mobile and wearable biometric devices to “craft customized lists of potential targets.” Even when gathered data is de-identified, privacy experts warn that this is not an irreversible process, and the risk of re-identifying individuals is both real and underestimated.

    Government’s misuse and abuse of citizens’ privacy

    Many Americans do not realize that the United States is one of the few advanced economies without a federal data protection agency. If the current administration continues on its path of eroding citizen privacy, the scant statutory protections the United States does have may prove meaningless.

    The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970 was enacted to protect consumers from government overreach into personal identifiable data, and has been promoted as the primary consumer privacy protection. However, in 2023, attorney and internet privacy advocate Lauren Harriman warned how data brokers circumvent the FCRA, for instance, “pay[ing] handsome sums to your utility company for your name and address.” Data brokers then repackage those names and addresses with other data, without conducting any type of accuracy analysis on the newly formed dataset, before then selling that new dataset to the highest third-party bidder.

    Invasion of the data snatchers

    Though the “gut-the-government bromance” between the president and Elon Musk appears to be on the rocks just six months into Trump 2.0, the Department of Government Efficiency’s unfettered access to data is concerning, especially after the June 6, 2025, Supreme Court ruling that gave the Musk-led DOGE complete access to confidential Social Security information irrespective of the privacy rights once upheld by the Social Security Act of 1935. The act prohibits the disclosure of any tax return in whole or in part by officers or employees of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Nevertheless, DOGE has commandeered the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Health and Human Services systems and those of at least fifteen other federal agencies containing Americans’ personal identifiable information without disclosing “what data has been accessed, who has that access, how it will be used or transferred, or what safeguards are in place for its use.”

    Since DOGE infiltrated the Social Security Administration, the agency’s website has crashed numerous times, creating interruptions for beneficiaries. In June, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden issued a letter to the SSA’s commissioner, detailing their concerns about DOGE’s use of PII. Warren told Wired that “DOGE staffers hacking away Social Security’s backend tech with no safeguards is a recipe for disaster…[and] risks people’s private data, creates security gaps, and could result in catastrophic cuts to all benefits.”

    Likewise, the Internal Revenue Code of 1939 (updated in 1986) was enacted to ensure data protection, prohibiting—with rare exceptions—the release of taxpayer information by Internal Revenue Service employees. According to the national legal organization Democracy Forward, “Changes to IRS data practices—at the behest of DOGE—throw into question those assurances and the confidentiality of data held by the government collected from hundreds of millions of Americans.”

    Equally troubling is that Opexus, a private equity-owned federal contractor, maintains the IRS database. Worse still is that two Opexus employees—twin brothers and skilled hackers with prison records for stealing and selling PII on the dark web—Suhaib and Muneeb Akhter, had access to the IRS data, as well as to that of the Department of Energy, Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

    In February 2025, approximately one year into their Opexus employment, the twins were summoned to a virtual meeting with human resources and fired. During that meeting, Muneeb Akhter, who still had clearance to use the servers, accessed an IRS database from his company-issued laptop and blocked others from connecting to it. While still in the meeting, Akhter deleted thirty-three other databases, and about an hour later, “inserted a USB drive into his laptop and removed 1,805 files of data related to a ‘custom project’ for a government agency,” causing service disruptions.

    That investigations by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are underway does little to quell concerns about the insecurity of personal identifiable information and sensitive national security data. And although the Privacy Act of 1974, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 were all established to protect PII, the June Supreme Court ruling granting DOGE carte blanche data access dashes all confidence that laws will be upheld.

    Americans don’t know what they don’t know

    Perhaps most disconcerting in this whole scenario is that too few citizens realize just how far their online footprints travel and how vulnerable their private information actually is. According to internet culture reporter Kate Lindsay, citizen ignorance comes not only from a lack of reporting on how tech elites pull government strings to their own advantage, but also from fewer corporate news outlets covering people living with the consequences of those power moves. Internet culture and tech, once intertwined topics for the establishment press, are now more separately focused on either AI or the Big Tech power players, but not on holding them to account.

    The Tech Policy Press argues that the government’s self-proclaimed need for expediency and efficiency cannot justify flouting data privacy policies and laws, and that the corporate media is largely failing their audiences by not publicizing the specifics of how the government and its corporate tech partners are obliterating citizens’ privacy rights. “To make matters worse, Congress has been asleep at the switch while the federal government has expanded the security state and private companies have run amok in storing and selling our data,” stated the senator from Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna.

    A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of Americans’ views on data privacy found that approximately six in ten Americans do not bother to read website and application policies. When online, most users click “agree” without reading the relevant terms and conditions they accept by doing so. According to the survey, Americans of all political stripes are equally distrustful of government and corporations when it comes to  how third parties use their PII. Respondents with some higher education reported taking more online privacy precautions than those who never attended college. The latter reported a stronger belief that government and corporations would “do the right thing” with their data. The least knowledgeable respondents were also the least skeptical, pointing to an urgent need for critical information literacy and digital hygiene skills.

    Exploitation of personal identifiable information

    After Musk’s call to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), approximately 1,400 staff members were fired in April, emptying out the agency that was once capable of policing Wall Street and Big Tech. Now, with the combined forces of government and Big Tech, and their sharing of database resources, the government can conduct intrusive surveillance on almost anyone, without court oversight or public debate. The Project on Government Oversight has argued that the US Constitution was meant to protect the population from authoritarian-style government monitoring, warning that these maneuvers are incompatible with a free society.

    On May 15, 2025, the CFPB, against the better judgment of the ​​Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and wider public, quietly withdrew a rule, proposed in 2024, that would have imposed limits on US-based data brokers who buy and sell Americans’ private information. Had the rule been enacted, it would have expanded the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) data protections for citizens. However, in February, Russell Vought, the self-professed White nationalist and Trump 2.0 acting director of the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB, demanded its withdrawal, alleging the ruling would have infringed on financial institutions’ capabilities to detect and prevent fraud. Vought also instructed employees to cease all public communications, pending investigations, and proposed or previously implemented rules, including the proposal titled “Protecting Americans from Harmful Data Broker Practices.”

    The now-gutted CFPB lacks both the resources and authority needed to police the widespread exploitation of consumers’ personal information, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the privacy rights advocacy agency.

    Double standards for data privacy

    Although the government’s collection of PII has always been a double-edged sword, with Big Tech on the side of Trump 2.0, data surveillance of law-abiding citizens has soared to worrying heights. Across every presidency since 9/11, government surveillance has become increasingly more extensive and elaborate. Moreover, Big Tech is all too willing to pledge allegiance to whichever party happens to be in power. According to investigative journalist Dell Cameron, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, and Customs and Border Protection are among the largest “federal agencies known to purchase Americans’ private data, including that which law enforcement agencies would normally require probable cause to obtain.”

    Meanwhile, it’s a Big Tech and data broker free-for-all. DOGE’s and the feds’ activities are shrouded in secrecy, often facilitated by the Big Tech lobbying money that seeks to replace legitimate privacy laws with “fake industry alternatives.” Banks, credit agencies, and tech companies must adhere to consumer privacy laws. “Yet DOGE has been granted sweeping access across federal agencies—with no equivalent restrictions,” said business reporter Susie Stulz.

    Know your risks

    Interpol has warned that scams known as “pig butchering” and “business email compromise” and those used for human trafficking are on the rise due to an increase in the use of new technologies, including apps, AI deepfakes, and cryptocurrencies. Hacking agents, humans, and bots are becoming more sophisticated, while any semblance of data privacy guardrails for citizens has been removed.

    Individual choices matter. At minimum, when using technology, consider if a website or app’s services are so badly needed or wanted that you are willing to give up your personal identifiable information. Standard advice to delete and block phishing and spam emails and texts remains apropos, but only scratches the surface of online protection.

    Privacy advocates assert that DOGE’s access to personal identifiable information escalates the risk of exposure to hackers and foreign adversaries as well as to widespread domestic surveillance. Trump’s latest contract with tech giant Palantir to create a national database of Americans’ private information raises a big red flag for civil rights organizations, “that this could be the precursor to surveillance of Americans on a mass scale.” Palantir’s involvement in government portends to be the last step “in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence,” wrote constitutional law and human rights attorney John W. Whitehead.

    A longtime J.D. Vance financial backer, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, the South African, White nationalist billionaire and right-wing donor, is credited with catapulting Vance’s political career. Unsurprisingly, the Free Thought Project reported that since Trump’s return to the White House, “Palantir has racked up over $100 million in government contracts, and is slated to strike a nearly $800 million deal with the Pentagon.” Palantir, incidentally, is also contracted with the Israeli government, as is Google.

    Know your rights

    The right to privacy is enshrined in Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” Article 17 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights asserts the same, and in 1992, the United States ratified the treaty, thereby consenting to its binding terms.

    But is privacy actually a protected civil right in the United States? According to legal scholars Anita Allen and Christopher Muhawe, the history of US civil rights law shows limited support for conceptualizing privacy and data protection as a civil right. Nonetheless, civil rights law is a dynamic moral, political, and legal concept, and if privacy is interpreted as a civil right, privacy protection becomes a fundamental requirement of justice and good government.

    Protection from surveillance needs to be top-down through legal and policy limits on data collection, and bottom-up by putting technological control of personal data into the hands of consumers, i.e., the targets of surveillance.

    As long as the public is uninformed and the corporate press remains all but silent, the more likely it is that these unconstitutional practices will not only continue but will become normalized. Until the United States is actually governed by and for the people, we the people can start practicing surveillance self-defense now. Although constitutional lawyers are typically considered the first responders to assaults on the Constitution and privacy rights, a constellation of efforts over time is required to, as much as possible, keep private data private.

    Ultimately, though, the safeguarding of data cannot be left to the government or corporations, or even the lawyers. For that reason, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s tips and tools for customizing individualized digital security plans are made available to everyone. By implementing such plans and possessing strong critical media and digital literacy skills, civil society will be better informed and more empowered in the defense of privacy rights.

    The post Insufficient Press Coverage of Big Data Surveillance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

    Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

    None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

    It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

    Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

    There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

    A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency. But given that the typical consumer doesn’t own crypto, many scams unfold with a victim tapping a traditional bank account to wire dollars to swindlers, who receive the funds in their own accounts, then convert them into crypto to move across borders. Later in the process, the scammers will typically transfer their crypto back into standard currency.

    Bank accounts are so crucial to this process that a thriving international black market has developed to rent accounts for fraud. That, it seems, is how a Chase account in the name of Middlesex ended up as a repository for the proceeds of pig-butchering.

    The huge demand for accounts used for misbehavior gives banks a crucial, and not always welcome, role as gatekeepers — a responsibility required by U.S. law — to prevent criminals from opening accounts or engaging in money laundering. Yet from the U.S. to Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong, banks have consistently failed at that responsibility, according to experts who have investigated money laundering, as well as reviews of fraudulent account details shared by victims and court cases reviewed by ProPublica. The list of financial institutions whose accounts pig-butchering scammers have made use of includes global behemoths like Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC and Wells Fargo and many other U.S. and foreign lenders.

    The banks said in statements to ProPublica that they make extensive efforts to fight fraud by investing in systems to detect suspicious activity and to report it to authorities (read the banks’ statements here). The American Bankers Association, which represents the industry, acknowledged that “with more than 140 million bank accounts opened every year bad actors can sometimes get through despite determined and ongoing efforts to stop them.” But the group said other industries like telecommunications providers and social media platforms need to do more to fight fraud because there’s only so much that financial institutions can do.

    Pig-butchering scams present some unique challenges for banks. Among other things, a customer in thrall to a fraudster will sometimes foil their own bank’s attempts to prevent them from sending money to a criminal. And foreign-based scammers have become adept at finding middlemen in the U.S. to exploit the banking system. “Cyber-enabled fraud operations in Southeast Asia have taken on industrial proportions,” according to an October report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. John Wojcik, one of the authors of the report, told ProPublica, “Banks have never been targeted at this scale, in these ways.”

    It doesn’t help that there are “no real standards as to what a bank has to do for detecting fraud or money laundering,” said Lester Joseph, a financial compliance consultant who used to oversee money laundering cases at the Department of Justice and later worked at Wells Fargo. The main law governing U.S. compliance regimes, the Bank Secrecy Act, requires financial institutions to maintain programs to know their customers and to detect and report suspicious activity to the government. That might mean noticing, say, that a newly opened account is suddenly receiving and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire payments each month.

    But it is up to banks to design those programs. The regulations don’t even require that the programs be effective. That gives banks wide flexibility on how much due diligence and monitoring to do — or not do. More scrutiny upfront means slowing down business and adding costs. Many banks don’t ask questions until it’s too late.

    If you’re a criminal looking to obtain a bank account with no pesky formalities, it’ll take you only minutes to find one on the messaging app Telegram. Chinese forums there feature ads for “cars” or “fleets” — bank accounts or other online payment platforms that can be used to collect stolen funds. (The vehicle metaphor stems from the fact that in Chinese slang, money laundering operations are known as “motorcades.”) One Telegram ad offered accounts at PNC, Chase, Citi and Bank of America and boasted of “firsthand” control of the accounts: “People can go to the bank to transfer money,” the ad said.

    An ad on Telegram, since taken down, offered bank accounts for “precision chat” — slang for pig-butchering — at Bank of America, Chase, Citibank and PNC. Under “advantages,” the ad listed “firsthand [control], people can go to the bank to transfer money … not a virtual account.” (Screenshot by Cezary Podkul)

    Another Telegram channel listed various flavors of pig-butchering scams for which it provided bank accounts. The group, named KG Pay, boasted of accepting wire transfers, making withdrawals from U.S. banks and converting deposits into crypto to transfer them to scammers. KG offered to handle deposits of up to $1 million in accounts that imitate “normal business transactions.” To avoid suspicion, KG said, it sliced big amounts into smaller batches. If banks grew suspicious and froze one of its accounts, KG said, it had agents ready to call customer service to persuade them to lift the freeze. For smaller transfers, a video tutorial inside the channel showed how easy it was to send cash using the Chase app. (Telegram deleted the KG Pay channel after ProPublica asked about it. In a statement, Telegram said it “expressly forbids money laundering, scams and fraud and such content is immediately removed whenever discovered. Every month, over 10 million accounts, groups and channels are removed for breaching Telegram’s terms of service — including rules that prohibit money laundering and fraud.”)

    Demand for money laundering is huge in Sihanoukville, a seedy gambling hub in Cambodia notorious for hosting massive scam operations. In some hotels above casinos there, blocks of guest rooms have been converted into offices where workers help fraudsters find motorcades to move illicit funds, according to a 2024 report by a doctoral anthropology student.

    A walled complex in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, known to have housed scamming operations (Cindy Liu for ProPublica)

    Inside those offices, the tap of keyboards and buzz of Telegram notifications suggested a trading floor at a stock exchange. But the work of the people interviewed by Yanyu Chen, the doctoral student, was very different. The workers, all Chinese and speaking on the condition of anonymity, were candid. They said they were tasked with matching cyberscam gangs with providers who could supply them with bank accounts to collect and move proceeds from fraud victims. In Telegram chat groups, the workers could see bank account suppliers and swindlers in need of accounts and would match the two and keep track of trades and commissions.

    The business has become so mainstream that even one of Cambodia’s most prominent financial services firms, Huione Group, runs an online marketplace that allegedly facilitates such transactions. Its Telegram channels, including the one that included the aforementioned ad offering “firsthand” control of U.S. bank accounts, have helped launder funds for pig-butchering scams as well as heists linked to North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. (Huione said in a statement that it is working to prevent abuse of its services and is “fully committed to collaborating with the U.S. Treasury Department to address expeditiously any and all concerns.”)

    The workers interviewed by Chen were unperturbed about enabling fraud. One described the work as boring, little more than copying and pasting bank account info between scammers and motorcades. Another worker told her that he viewed himself as “solving a very old problem of getting into the banking system people who have long been shut out of it.”

    The fraud that ensnared Middlesex Truck and Coach as a tangential victim covered thousands of miles via electronic byways. By all appearances, it emanated from Cambodia, then reached New Jersey, where a mark was persuaded to wire a total of $716,000 to accounts tied to purported businesses in Boston, New York, California, Hong Kong and elsewhere. All but a few appeared to have been incorporated by Chinese individuals, sometimes just days before their accounts started accepting large sums.

    The fleecing of Kevin, who ProPublica agreed to identify by first name only, was a textbook example of pig butchering. Kevin had reached the stage in life when he wanted to ease his workload after a varied career as a financial planner, small-business owner and fitness instructor. Just before Christmas 2022, someone purporting to be a San Diego woman named Viktoria Zara friended Kevin on Facebook. She soon introduced him to a sleek crypto trading website called 3A on which she claimed to have made $700,000 on bitcoin futures. (Facebook deactivated Zara’s profile after ProPublica inquired about it, and a spokesperson said the social media company has “detected and disrupted over seven million accounts associated with scam centers” in Asia and the Middle East since the start of 2024.)

    Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin accepted Zara’s offer to teach him how to trade and, within a few weeks, he was routinely wiring tens of thousands of dollars to various bank accounts to fund his trading.

    The accounts were not registered to 3A. They were listed under a variety of companies he’d never heard of, such as Guangda Logistics and Danco Global.

    Kevin found this odd. But Zara, his supposed friend, told him that was just how 3A operated, and Kevin felt safe wiring funds to accounts at Chase because of its size and reputation. Every time he did so, the sum showed up in his online 3A portal, making him think the transactions were real. Better yet, his investments had apparently soared; his account balance now read $1.4 million.

    An excerpt from Kevin’s chat log with the purported 3A trading site shows how the scammers, claiming to be customer service reps, directed him to wire funds to companies other than 3A with accounts at Chase. (Courtesy of Kevin. Redacted by ProPublica.)

    Like many a pig-butchering victim, Kevin realized something was off only when he went to withdraw his profits and 3A demanded that he first pay a “tax” of almost $134,000. Kevin knew from his financial planning days that wasn’t how things worked. But he set aside his doubts and went to his bank late one afternoon in April 2023 to wire the tax payment. He’d been given a fresh Chase account to send funds to and pressured to wire money within two hours.

    This time, his money was addressed to Middlesex Truck and Coach. Kevin was so under the sway of his scammers at that point that he did not question the money’s destination. Nor did the teller at the TD Bank branch he went to. (TD declined to comment on Kevin’s case but said it trains employees to challenge customers when transactions seem suspicious and to warn them never to wire funds to people they do not know.)

    As soon as Kevin got home, panic set in: 3A told him the Chase account to which he’d just wired $134,000 was frozen and that his tax payment would not go through. He would need to send another $134,000 to a different account. Confused, Kevin went back to TD first thing the next day and asked the teller to reverse the wire. Over the next two weeks, Kevin said, his bankers at TD called Chase three times but never got a response. (Chase did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Kevin’s efforts to recall his wire but said the wire recall process is challenging and rarely succeeds.)

    It is possible to reverse a wire transfer if customers inform their banks quickly, before the transaction has been completed, according to lawyers and experts. But banks have no obligation to reverse a transfer even when a customer reports potential fraud. “It’s really up to the receiving institution if they release the funds and how they go after the customer on their end,” said Saskia Parnell, a banking industry veteran who now volunteers for an anti-scam group called Operation Shamrock.

    As Kevin agonized, the 3A customer service reps dangled a solution: Just wire the funds again and unlock your $1.4 million. He feared TD wouldn’t let him send the wire again, so he switched to PNC Bank and sent a fresh $134,000 wire to another recipient at Cathay Bank in California. That yielded yet another tale about a purported government roadblock and the demand for yet another payment.

    Kevin wasn’t thinking clearly. His son, who had struggled with substance abuse, had suddenly died of a fentanyl overdose. Kevin was overwhelmed with grief. He agreed to make another payment.

    By June 2023, even a call from PNC’s fraud department declining his outgoing wire could not dissuade him. It was the only instance, out of the 11 times he attempted to wire money to scammers, that a bank stopped the transaction, according to Kevin, who did not have a history of making wire payments before. (PNC said in a statement that “we believe we took appropriate action.”)

    It made no difference. Kevin’s mind was so clouded that he instead opened a new account at Wells Fargo. The switch illustrated another challenge: Even if one bank succeeds in preventing fraud, criminals can still win if another bank isn’t as diligent. (Wells Fargo said it invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fight scams).

    After wiring $150,000 from Wells Fargo to two Chinese entities listed at a Singaporean bank, Kevin waited to receive his trading proceeds. But when all that resulted was another request that he wire money — $40,000 this time — Kevin finally grasped reality. He was now without a son, and his finances lay in ruins. “The whole world was coming to an end,” he recalled.

    Kevin had preserved enough savings to hire a private investigator, John Powers of Hudson Intelligence, to follow the financial trail. Powers found a litany of red flags among the entities that had gotten bank accounts and received Kevin’s funds. Some of the businesses gave phony addresses, such as a vacant home. Another was registered to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles that was also listed as the headquarters of a dozen other businesses set up since 2022 by different Chinese individuals. Contact info was scarce; official emails for two companies included the temporary email domain “netsmail.us,” which doesn’t connect to a functioning website. All of these ersatz businesses had accounts at Chase, Cathay or Singapore’s DBS Bank.

    Chase said that it has policies to identify and verify the identities of its customers, and that it continually evaluates and enhances them. Cathay said it also reviews its systems and policies to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. DBS did not respond to requests for comment.

    Another clue indicated that the banks had been doing business with a larger criminal enterprise. Two of the companies Kevin sent funds to, Guangda Logistics (which lists no contact information) and Danco Global (which did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment), showed up on a list of more than six dozen shell entities that had been used to defraud Americans of nearly $60 million. The information was uncovered in an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service into KG Pay, one of the money laundering groups that was on Telegram.

    Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin ultimately wired a total of $716,000 to scammers’ accounts at Chase and other banks. (Christopher López for ProPublica)

    The case of the man behind KG Pay sheds further light on how motorcades use U.S. banks. Daren Li, a Chinese national in his early 40s, went by the alias KG Perfect. Based in Cambodia, he directed the movement of large sums of pig-butchering proceeds from the U.S. to overseas. Li, who was arrested in April 2024 at the airport in Atlanta, pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit money laundering. He admitted that at least $73.6 million of victim funds were deposited into bank accounts he and his co-conspirators controlled. Li, who is in federal detention awaiting sentencing, could not be reached for comment through his lawyer. Seven other people have pleaded guilty to conspiring with Li.

    KG exploited a weakness in the U.S. banking system: Banks are reluctant to share account information, even after they’ve identified suspicious activity. A law enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave banks a reprieve from secrecy rules if they alert one another to potential terrorism or money laundering activities. But the information sharing is voluntary and “banks are not communicating with each other,” according to Matt O’Neill, who led many money laundering investigations for the U.S. Secret Service during his 25 years there. “Fraudsters know it and fraudsters are clearly making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars off of this glaring gap in the system,” said O’Neill, who now runs 5OH Consulting.

    One of the most prolific cogs in Li’s motorcade, according to civil and criminal cases, was a Chinese national named Hailong Zhu. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa around 2019 and then stayed, working odd jobs in construction and at a restaurant. In 2022, Zhu was recruited to help Li’s other operatives set up businesses and bank accounts near Los Angeles in exchange for $70,000.

    Zhu turned the assignment into a full-time job, eventually juggling seven accounts at Bank of America, Chase, East West Bank and Wells Fargo tied to two entities set up in his name: Sea Dragon Trading and Sea Dragon Remodel. When Bank of America restricted Zhu’s Sea Dragon Trading account due to suspected fraud on Oct. 19, 2022, Zhu got another account at Bank of America the next day using Sea Dragon Remodel. By Nov. 1, 2022, he had secured four more accounts at Chase, Wells Fargo and East West Bank. Except for varying his address and email, investigators found that Zhu provided largely the same info when opening accounts for the two shell entities.

    Zhu’s account opening spree happened just a few months after federal prosecutors blamed “the corruption of BofA bankers” for a scheme in which a handful of employees opened 754 accounts at Bank of America registered to 13 false addresses in the Los Angeles suburbs. In that case, shadowy middlemen dispensed bribes of $200 to $250 per account to Bank of America employees who overrode internal compliance systems to open accounts for overseas Chinese citizens who weren’t physically present at the branch to open the accounts, in violation of the bank’s rules. Even when the bankers registered 176 customers to one small home, the accounts were still opened. (Two of the bankers later pleaded guilty to making false entries in bank records; Bank of America said in a statement that it “uncovered illegal activity using its monitoring systems, terminated the employees, and cooperated with law enforcement, who successfully prosecuted those involved. This is how our anti-money laundering program is designed to work.”)

    With banks always one step behind, Zhu’s accounts kept receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims across the U.S. Zhu would bundle the proceeds and transfer them abroad. During one week in November 2022, for example, he received six wires totaling almost $52,000 into one of his accounts and wired out one lump sum of $53,000. The destination was a bank account in the Bahamas controlled by Li and others, who converted the funds into cryptocurrency for their journey to scam centers located overseas, including in Sihanoukville. Investigators discovered a crypto wallet address they believed Li controlled. Data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Intelligence shows the wallet address sent and received about $341 million of crypto across 16,800 transactions between April 2021 and April 2024.

    Zhu was arrested in March 2023 and charged with bank fraud. His lawyers acknowledged at trial that their client opened bank accounts and moved funds but said that Zhu did not know his bosses were using them for criminal purposes. Zhu was acquitted after the attorneys persuaded the trial judge that using false information to obtain a bank account does not constitute a scheme to defraud a bank. Only months after the acquittal, Zhu was charged again, this time with money laundering offenses, in an indictment filed in December 2023. Zhu, who couldn’t be reached for comment, did not enter a plea and was listed as a fugitive as of March 2025.

    In January 2024, Kevin, desperate to get his money back, sued the 10 companies to which he had wired money at the scammers’ behest, including Middlesex Truck and Coach. None replied to his lawsuit — most were shell entities, after all — until January 2025, when Kevin’s lawyer got an email from Brian Maloney Jr.

    Maloney confessed that his staff had ignored the lawsuit when it was initially served because it looked like a scam. He said he’d never banked with Chase and had no idea about any account that had been used to defraud Kevin. Maloney agreed to go to the local Chase branch to investigate and try to help Kevin get his money back.

    “I went to the bank and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Maloney told ProPublica. After spending nearly two hours with the local Chase branch manager, Maloney realized that he, too, was a victim of the bank’s lax procedures: He said the branch manager told him that Chase had allowed someone to obtain an account online in his company’s name in March 2023 with nothing more than a digital signature and an employer identification number, but no personal identification. That account had then accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire transfers. And now Maloney’s family business — not Chase — was the defendant in a lawsuit. “How is this legal?” he wondered. (Colin Schmitt, a retired FBI agent, said Chase could have mitigated the fraud by at least pausing incoming wire transfers to the fake Middlesex account and asking its owner to justify the transactions. “If you’re just using an account just for wires, that’s a big red flag,” Schmitt said.)

    Still, there was a silver lining: The funds remained in the account. Not only Kevin’s $134,000, but almost $100,000 more from several other victims sat frozen inside since spring 2023.

    Kevin was glad the money was still there, but he wondered why it took a lawsuit to unearth the info. “It does not seem like the system is tailored to give any deference to the victim,” he said. “That’s what frustrates me.” His lawyers advised him to seek an order from a federal judge to get his funds back and filed such a petition in March. After ProPublica asked Chase about Kevin’s funds in April, the bank agreed to return the money to him without a court order.

    The $134,000 landed back in Kevin’s bank account in mid-May. Finally, he felt a sense of relief. (He has now dropped the suit against Middlesex.) But Kevin also wondered what would happen to the other people whose money got siphoned up by the fake Middlesex account. Would Chase wait for them to file lawsuits too?

    Banks are starting to face lawsuits by pig-butchering victims who allege laxness in opening accounts. In December, a California man who was defrauded of nearly $1 million sued DBS and two other banks for alleged failures to comply with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering laws. A college professor from Iowa who lost $700,000 filed a lawsuit in January against Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong for failing to do proper due diligence on the people who opened accounts used to defraud him. Hang Seng reached an agreement with the Iowa professor to dismiss the suit and declined to comment further. DBS did not reply to requests for comment on the California case, but the bank asserted that the lawsuit contains “fatal flaws,” according to a filing in the suit.

    Such cases are long shots, according to Carla Sanchez-Adams, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. The suits typically fail because it’s hard to show that financial institutions knew or should have known about potential fraud.

    Still, banks are well aware that fraud is on the rise. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans say they have been the victim of online fraud or cybercrime, according to a 2023 poll commissioned by Wells Fargo. “The scale of fraud taking place every day is a massive burden for our country and for the millions of hard-working women and men whose lives are affected by it,” Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, said in an October speech.

    Nichols contends that “consumers credit the banking industry with doing more than other industries to protect them from fraud and keep their information safe.” He cited an initiative by the ABA to create a database of fraud contacts to help banks figure out who to call when there’s a problem. And he urged the Trump administration to develop a national fraud prevention strategy.

    Other countries are taking more aggressive steps. In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer. Australia recently enacted a law that will require banks to share suspect account info with one another. Thailand has gone even further, creating a Central Fraud Register intended to compel banks to identify and close accounts used for money laundering.

    The U.S. lacks such rules. O’Neill, the former Secret Service agent, thinks that updating the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law meant to encourage banks to share intel, would be a good place to start. But Congress has not moved in that direction and the Trump administration has shown no sign that it plans to prioritize this issue. (Asked what steps the administration is taking, a spokesperson told ProPublica to Google the administration’s sanctions related to pig-butchering scams.)

    For now, bank accounts remain easy for fraudsters to obtain. A sleek-looking brokerage akin to 3A has been online for months, soliciting deposits for what a researcher at the Global Anti-Scam Organization identified as a pig-butchering scheme. Anyone wishing to “invest,” the brokerage said, can wire money to a shifting array of banks, including Chase.

    Doris Burke contributed research.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • On 27 May 2025, the Oversight Board overturned Meta’s decision to leave up content targeting one of Peru’s leading human rights defenders:

    Summary

    The Oversight Board overturns Meta’s decision to leave up content targeting one of Peru’s leading human rights defenders. Restrictions on fundamental freedoms, such as the right to assembly and association, are increasing in Peru, with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) among those impacted. Containing an image of the defender that has been altered, likely with AI, to show blood dripping down her face, the post was shared by a member of La Resistencia. This group targets journalists, NGOs, human rights activists and institutions in Peru with disinformation, intimidation and violence. Taken in its whole context, this post qualifies as a “veiled threat” under the Violence and Incitement policy. As this case reveals potential underenforcement of veiled or coded threats on Meta’s platforms, the Board makes two related recommendations.

    ……

    The Oversight Board’s Decision

    The Oversight Board overturns Meta’s decision to leave up the content. The Board also recommends that Meta:

    • Clarify that “coded statements where the method of violence is not clearly articulated” are prohibited in written, visual and verbal form, under the Violence and Incitement Community Standard.
    • Produce an annual accuracy assessment on potential veiled threats, including a specific focus on content containing threats against human rights defenders that incorrectly remains up on the platform and instances of political speech incorrectly being taken down.

    Return to Case Decisions and Policy Advisory Opinions

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • ANALYSIS: By Joe Hendren

    Had Israel not launched its unprovoked attack on Iran on Friday night, in direct violation of the UN Charter, Iran would now be taking part in the sixth round of negotiations concerning the future of its nuclear programme, meeting with representatives from the United States in Muscat, the capital of Oman.

    Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed he acted to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, saying Iran had the capacity to build nine nuclear weapons. Israel provided no evidence to back up its claims.

    On 25 March 2025, Trump’s own National Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said: 

    “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003. The IC is monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorise its nuclear weapons programme”

    Even if Iran had the capability to build a bomb, it is quite another thing to have the will to do so.

    Any such bomb would need to be tested first, and any such test would be quickly detected by a series of satellites on the lookout for nuclear detonations anywhere on the planet.

    It is more likely that Israel launched its attack to stop US and Iranian negotiators from meeting on Sunday.

    Only a month ago, Iran’s lead negotiator in the nuclear talks, Ali Shamkhani, told US television that Iran was ready to do a deal. NBC journalist Richard Engel reports:

    “Shamkhani said Iran is willing to commit to never having a nuclear weapon, to get rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, to only enrich to a level needed for civilian use and to allow inspectors in to oversee it all, in exchange for lifting all sanctions immediately. He said Iran would accept that deal tonight.”


    Inside Iran as Trump presses for nuclear deal.   Video: NBC News

    Shamkhani died on Saturday, following injuries he suffered during Israel’s attack on Friday night. It appears that Israel not only opposed a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear impasse: Israel killed it directly.

    A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, told a news conference in Tehran the talks would be suspended until Israel halts its attacks:

    “It is obvious that in such circumstances and until the Zionist regime’s aggression against the Iranian nation stops, it would be meaningless to participate with the party that is the biggest supporter and accomplice of the aggressor.”

    On 1 April 2024, Israel launched an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing 16 people, including a woman and her son. The attack violated international norms regarding the protection of diplomatic premises under the Vienna Convention.

    Yet the UK, USA and France blocked a United Nations Security Council statement condemning Israel’s actions.

    It is worth noting how the The New York Times described the occupation of the US Embassy in November 1979:

    “But it is the Ayatollah himself who is doing the devil’s work by inciting and condoning the student invasion of the American and British Embassies in Tehran. This is not just a diplomatic affront; it is a declaration of war on diplomacy itself, on usages and traditions honoured by all nations, however old and new, whatever belief.

    “The immunities given a ruler’s emissaries were respected by the kings of Persia during wars with Greece and by the Ayatollah’s spiritual ancestors during the Crusades.”

    Now it is Israel conducting a “war on diplomacy itself”, first with the attack on the embassy, followed by Friday’s surprise attack on Iran. Scuppering a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue appears to be the aim. To make matters worse, Israel’s recklessness could yet cause a major war.

    Trump: Inconsistent and ineffective
    In an interview with Time magazine on 22 April 2025, Trump denied he had stopped Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites.

    “No, it’s not right. I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, because I think we can make a deal without the attack. I hope we can. It’s possible we’ll have to attack because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.

    “But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, but I didn’t say no. Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped.”

    — US President Donald Trump

    In the same interview Trump boasted “I think we’re going to make a deal with Iran. Nobody else could do that.” Except, someone else had already done that — only for Trump to abandon the deal in his first term as president.

    In July 2015 Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) alongside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the European Union. Iran pledged to curb its nuclear programme for 10-15 years in exchange for the removal of some economic sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also gained access and verification powers.

    Iran also agreed to limit uranium enrichment to 3.67 per cent U-235, allowing it to maintain its nuclear power reactors.

    Despite clear signs the nuclear deal was working, Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and reinstated sanctions on Iran in November 2018. Despite the unilateral American action, Iran kept to the deal for a time, but in January 2020 Iran declared it would no longer abide by the limitations included in JCPOA but would continue to work with the IAEA.

    By pulling out of the deal and reinstating sanctions, the US and Israel effectively created a strong incentive for Iran to resume enriching uranium to higher levels, not for the sake of making a bomb, but as the most obvious means of creating leverage to remove the sanctions.

    As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for civilian fuel programmes.

    Iran’s nuclear programme began in the 1960s with US assistance. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran was ruled by the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahavi.

    American corporations saw Iran as a potential market for expansion. During the 1970s the US suggested to the Shah he needed not one but several nuclear reactors to meet Iran’s future electricity needs. In June 1974, the Shah declared that Iran would have nuclear weapons, “without a doubt and sooner than one would think”.

    In 2007, I wrote an article for Peace Researcher where I examined US claims that Iran does not need nuclear power because it is sitting on one of the largest gas supplies in the world. One of the most interesting things I discovered while researching the article was the relevance of air pollution, a critical public health concern in Iran.

    In 2024, health officials estimated that air pollution is responsible for 40,000 deaths a year in Iran. Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi said the “majority of these deaths were due to cardiovascular diseases, strokes, respiratory issues, and cancers”.

    Sahimi describes levels of air pollution in Tehran and other major Iranian cities as “catastrophic”, with elementary schools having to close on some days as a result. There was little media coverage of the air pollution issue in relation to Iran’s energy mix then, and I have seen hardly any since.

    An energy research project, Advanced Energy Technologies provides a useful summary of electricity production in Iran as it stood in 2023.

    Iranian electricity production in 2023. Source: Advanced Energy Technologies

    With around 94.6 percent of electricity generation dependent on fossil fuels, there are serious environmental reasons why Iran should not be encouraged to depend on oil and gas for its electricity needs — not to mention the prospect of climate change.

    One could also question the safety of nuclear power in one of the most seismically active countries in the world, however it would be fair to ask the same question of countries like Japan, which aims to increase its use of nuclear power to about 20 percent of the country’s total electricity generation by 2040, despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme “must continue”, but the “scope and level may change”. Prior to the talks in Oman, Araghchi highlighted the “constant change” in US positions as a problem.

    Trump’s rhetoric on uranium enrichment has shifted repeatedly.

    He told Meet the Press on May 4 that “total dismantlement” of the nuclear program is “all I would accept.” He suggested that Iran does not need nuclear energy because of its oil reserves. But on May 7, when asked specifically about allowing Iran to retain a limited enrichment program, Trump said “we haven’t made that decision yet.”

    Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a May 14 interview with NBC that Iran is ready to sign a deal with the United States and reiterated that Iran is willing to limit uranium enrichment to low levels. He previously suggested in a May 7 post on X that any deal should include a “recognition of Iran’s right to industrial enrichment.”

    That recognition, plus the removal of U.S. and international sanctions, “can guarantee a deal,” Shamkhani said.

    So with Iran seemingly willing to accept reasonable conditions, why was a deal not reached last month? It appears the US changed its position, and demanded Iran cease all enrichment of uranium, including what Iran needs for its power stations.

    One wonders if Zionist lobby groups like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) influenced this decision. One could recall what happened during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first stint as Israel’s Prime Minister (1996-1999) to illustrate the point.

    In April 1995 AIPAC published a report titled ‘Comprehensive US Sanctions Against Iran: A Plan for Action’. In 1997 Mohammad Khatami was elected as President of Iran. The following year Khatami expressed regret for the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and denounced terrorism against Israelis, while noting that “supporting peoples who fight for their liberation of their land is not, in my opinion, supporting terrorism”.

    The threat of improved relations between Iran and the US sent the Israeli government led by Netanyahu into a panic. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that “Israel has expressed concern to Washington of an impending change of policy by the United States towards Iran” adding that Netanyahu “asked AIPAC . . . to act vigorously in Congress to prevent such a policy shift.”

    Twenty years ago the Israeli lobby were claiming an Iranian nuclear bomb was imminent. It didn’t happen.


    Netanyahu’s Iran nuclear warnings.   Video: Al Jazeera

    The misguided efforts of Israel and the United States to contain Iran’s use of nuclear technology are not only counterproductive — they risk being a catastrophic failure. If one was going to design a policy to convince Iran nuclear weapons may be needed for its own defence, it is hard to imagine a policy more effective than the one Israel has pursued for the past 30 years.My 2007 Peace Researcher article asked a simple question: ‘Why does Iran want nuclear weapons?’ My introduction could have been written yesterday.

    “With all the talk about Iran and the intentions of its nuclear programme it is a shame the West continues to undermine its own position with selective morality and obvious hypocrisy. It seems amazing there can be so much written about this issue, yet so little addresses the obvious question – ‘for what reasons could Iran want nuclear weapons?’.

    “As Simon Jenkins (2006) points out, the answer is as simple as looking at a map. ‘I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has no right’ to nuclear defence?’”

    This week the German Foreign Office reached new heights in hypocrisy with this absurd tweet.

    Image

    Iran has no nuclear weapons. Israel does. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Israel is not. Iran allows IAEA inspections. Israel does not.

    Starting another war will not make us forget, nor forgive what Israel is doing in Gaza.

    From the river to the sea, credibility requires consistency.

    I write about New Zealand and international politics, with particular interests in political economy, history, philosophy, transport, and workers’ rights. I don’t like war very much.

    Joe Hendren writes about New Zealand and international politics, with particular interests in political economy, history, philosophy, transport, and workers’ rights. Republished with his permission. Read this original article on his Substack account with full references.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.

    The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.

    X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive

    Another X user, @dpsingh1313, posted the same video, which was viewed over 160,000 times at the time this article was written. (Archive)

    The viral video was also shared by several other X users, including @Deb_livnletliv, @SanjeevCrime, @Ayesha786Majid, @armanofficial00 and @hammehaiindia62(Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Click to view slideshow.

    The same video was viral on Facebook with similar claims.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Fact Check

    A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.

     

    We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.

    Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.

    Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.

    To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.

    Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.

    The post Viral video of Israeli soldier pleading Iran for mercy is AI-generated appeared first on Alt News.

    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

  • With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.

    The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.

    X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive

    Another X user, @dpsingh1313, posted the same video, which was viewed over 160,000 times at the time this article was written. (Archive)

    The viral video was also shared by several other X users, including @Deb_livnletliv, @SanjeevCrime, @Ayesha786Majid, @armanofficial00 and @hammehaiindia62(Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Click to view slideshow.

    The same video was viral on Facebook with similar claims.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Fact Check

    A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.

     

    We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.

    Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.

    Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.

    To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.

    Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.

    The post Viral video of Israeli soldier pleading Iran for mercy is AI-generated appeared first on Alt News.

    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

  • With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.

    The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.

    X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive

    Another X user, @dpsingh1313, posted the same video, which was viewed over 160,000 times at the time this article was written. (Archive)

    The viral video was also shared by several other X users, including @Deb_livnletliv, @SanjeevCrime, @Ayesha786Majid, @armanofficial00 and @hammehaiindia62(Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Click to view slideshow.

    The same video was viral on Facebook with similar claims.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Fact Check

    A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.

     

    We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.

    Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.

    Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.

    To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.

    Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.

    The post Viral video of Israeli soldier pleading Iran for mercy is AI-generated appeared first on Alt News.

    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

  • By Laura Bergamo in Nice, France

    The UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) concluded today with significant progress made towards the ratification of the High Seas Treaty and a strong statement on a new plastics treaty signed by 95 governments.

    Once ratified, it will be the only legal tool that can create protected areas in international waters, making it fundamental to protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.

    Fifty countries, plus the European Union, have now ratified the Treaty.

    New Zealand has signed but is yet to ratify.

    Deep sea mining rose up the agenda in the conference debates, demonstrating the urgency of opposing this industry.

    The expectation from civil society and a large group of states, including both co-hosts of UNOC, was that governments would make progress towards stopping deep sea mining in Nice.

    UN Secretary-General Guterres said the deep sea should not become the “wild west“.

    Four new pledges
    French President Emmanuel Macron said a deep sea mining moratorium is an international necessity. Four new countries pledged their support for a moratorium at UNOC, bringing the total to 37.

    Attention now turns to what actions governments will take in July to stop this industry from starting.

    Megan Randles, Greenpeace head of delegation regarding the High Seas Treaty and progress towards stopping deep sea mining, said: “High Seas Treaty ratification is within touching distance, but the progress made here in Nice feels hollow as this UN Ocean Conference ends without more tangible commitments to stopping deep sea mining.

    “We’ve heard lots of fine words here in Nice, but these need to turn into tangible action.

    “Countries must be brave, stand up for global cooperation and make history by stopping deep sea mining this year.

    “They can do this by committing to a moratorium on deep sea mining at next month’s International Seabed Authority meeting.

    “We applaud those who have already taken a stand, and urge all others to be on the right side of history by stopping deep sea mining.”

    Attention on ISA meeting
    Following this UNOC, attention now turns to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) meetings in July. In the face of The Metals Company teaming up with US President Donald Trump to mine the global oceans, the upcoming ISA provides a space where governments can come together to defend the deep ocean by adopting a moratorium to stop this destructive industry.

    Negotiations on a Global Plastics Treaty resume in August.

    John Hocevar, oceans campaign director, Greenpeace USA said: “The majority of countries have spoken when they signed on to the Nice Call for an Ambitious Plastics Treaty that they want an agreement that will reduce plastic production. Now, as we end the UN Ocean Conference and head on to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Geneva this August, they must act.

    “The world cannot afford a weak treaty dictated by oil-soaked obstructionists.

    “The ambitious majority must rise to this moment, firmly hold the line and ensure that we will have a Global Plastic Treaty that cuts plastic production, protects human health, and delivers justice for Indigenous Peoples and communities on the frontlines.

    “Governments need to show that multilateralism still works for people and the planet, not the profits of a greedy few.”

    Driving ecological collapse
    Nichanan Thantanwit, project leader, Ocean Justice Project, said: “Coastal and Indigenous communities, including small-scale fishers, have protected the ocean for generations. Now they are being pushed aside by industries driving ecological collapse and human rights violations.

    “As the UN Ocean Conference ends, governments must recognise small-scale fishers and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders, secure their access and role in marine governance, and stop destructive practices such as bottom trawling and harmful aquaculture.

    “There is no ocean protection without the people who have protected it all along.”

    The anticipated Nice Ocean Action Plan, which consists of a political declaration and a series of voluntary commitments, will be announced later today at the end of the conference.

    None will be legally binding, so governments need to act strongly during the next ISA meeting in July and at plastic treaty negotiations in August.

    Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • If Mars Is the Answer, What Was the Question?

    Mars is 140 million miles away, but it has never been closer. Whether it’s Elon Musk’s relentless cheerleading, the competing plans of various nation states, or the unending cycle of popular culture, Mars is having a serious moment.

    Mars slowly taking over Earth imagery

    Composite image of Earth and Mars

    Earthlings have been projecting hopes and fears onto Mars for a very long time. For millennia, humans have observed and ascribed meanings to the unsettling, rust-colored, wandering light in the sky. More than a century of popular storytelling and literary speculation, along with decades of scientific exploration, have produced myriad representations of our alluring neighbor. The most explored planet in the solar system after Earth, a slew of landers, robotic rovers, and flyby missions have revealed neither Edgar Rice Burrough’s multi-limbed alien warriors nor a civilization based on irrigation canals. Instead, they have shown that our sibling planet is a freezing, irradiated, desolate desert world that has been in stasis for billions of years.

    Longtime science fiction about humans on Mars is striving to become science fact. A new generation of aspiring colonial explorers is hyping the 2030s as the decade of first human landings and even initial settlement. We are increasingly being bombarded with the message that humanity can and should become multiplanetary by expanding to Mars. As our home planet’s ecological crises intensify in frequency and severity, this extreme vision is marketed as necessary, desirable, and inevitable.

    For the first time since the Apollo program, which took the first humans to the Moon in 1969, momentum to get “boots on the ground” is underway. NASA, the European Space Agency, China, and the United Arab Emirates are all pouring money into Mars missions. Space is no longer just the realm of nation-state rivalries. Billionaires infatuated with dreams of corporate expansion beyond Earth’s atmosphere are pushing the fantasy that humanity’s future is in space, from tourism in low orbit luxury hotels and the untold riches of asteroid mining, to sustained human presence on the Moon and the grand prize: Mars itself. The “dawning of the new space age” is here.

    The view of Earth from space, captured by the Apollo 17 crew in the iconic “Blue Marble” photograph, helped inspire a modern environmental movement that framed humanity as sharing a common fate on this miraculous oasis. How are images of Mars being wielded in our consciousness today? The cultural lenses projected onto Mars as a destination are as much about how we view our history, ourselves, and the commitment to Planet A in the face of looming Planet B. Whose imaginations are we inhabiting?

    The age of astro-colonialism is upon us, but for all the fanfare and bravado, there is a lack of public discussion about the implications of what we might call our current interplanetary moment. Are the dreams of the Red Planet meant to divert and distract from the nightmares on the blue one?

    In a time of accelerating extraterrestrial ambition and terrestrial catastrophe, it is vital to question how human relationships with the Red Planet are being actively shaped and sold. When we take the time to unpack the dominant narrative frames shaping US discourse about Mars, we find familiar mythologies geared up in space suits.

    Frame #1 SPECIES SURVIVAL: PLANET B

    I believe that the long term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonising other planets.

    —physicist STEPHEN HAWKING

    A common slogan seen on signs at climate protests around the world is: “There Is No Planet B.” This may seem self-evident to the millions concerned about mounting ecological threats, but it is the exact opposite of the dominant Mars narrative. To many of its advocates, Mars’s biggest selling point is that it IS Planet B. For true believers, long-term, self-sustaining human settlement on Mars is not only possible within our lifetimes, it is an existential necessity for species survival.

    This frame is echoed by pro-Mars advocacy groups, space and planetary science circles, and by commercial interests with a stake in surveying Mars. The prevailing narrative is that colonizing Mars is imperative; that the best chance for guaranteeing human survival is to cease being a “single planetary civilization.” In this framing, Earth is an unstable, imminent death trap, a ticking time bomb that (select) members of our species must escape. As early science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein warned, “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”

    To be fair, the list of oft-cited extinction-level threats is long and terrifying. Obliteration by an asteroid, suffocating under the dust from a supervolcano eruption, and the usual panoply of human-engineered self-destruction: from runaway climate change to raging pandemics to that enduring 20th-century obsession, nuclear war.

    With all these gathering horsemen of the apocalypse, we must prioritize safeguarding the “light of consciousness” off-world. This frame is infused with urgency, anxiety, and an aura of inevitability. Not if but when.

    The most famous (and influential, thanks to his massive wealth) evangelist for the Planet B frame is, of course, Elon Musk. As he recently said on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, “I think this is really a race against time. Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road?” He described his “plans” for transporting a million humans and millions of tons of cargo to Mars over the coming decades. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow recently confessed, “Whenever I think about Musk, I feel some personal responsibility because there is a kind of cadre of tech billionaires who’ve read our dystopias and mistaken them for business plans.” Nevertheless, Musk’s capacity to manifest dystopian nonfiction is firmly established. Creative trolling examples abound, such as Activista’s Mars Sucks billboard outside of SpaceX for Earth Day, and a recent social media reply to Musk’s post declaring “Time to go to Mars” by Star Wars actor Mark Hamill: “You first.”

    Central to this vision of Mars as a replacement for Earth is the concept of terraforming. A sci-fi staple, terraforming refers to the spectacular acts of planetary engineering that would transform Mars’s severely inhospitable environment to support human needs. Mars boosters tend to pull heavily from science fiction when describing highly speculative ideas, such as heating the planet’s surface with giant orbital solar reflectors, genetically engineering microbes that will create an atmosphere by converting CO2 to O2, or, as Musk often suggests, nuking the ice caps.

    Needless to say, this confidence in the possibility of bending Mars to our will is not shared by many outside the proponents of Mars as Earth 2.0. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz has been an outspoken critic of the hubris of treating Mars as a backup planet. She points out that, “While we might debate the possibility of transforming the habitability of Mars, we have a demonstrated track record of unintentionally changing a planet to be less hospitable to humanity, and no practicable idea of how to do the reverse.”

    Frame #2 WILD WEST FRONTIER 

    I think it is every bit as vast and promising a frontier as the New World was some centuries ago.

    —Sen. TED CRUZ, at “Destination Mars—Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet” hearing of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness

    By now, the image is commonplace: a space industry billionaire advertising his company’s latest achievement while popping champagne in low Earth orbit. The billionaires in question—Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Elon Musk (SpaceX), and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin)—are somewhat interchangeable, particularly since they all wear the same cowboy hat. The choice of headgear by these “billionauts”—the term of art for billionaires with the personal wealth and ambition to publicly moonlight as astronauts—reinforces the core framing of Mars as the new Wild West horizon, a frontier that requires space cowboys to explore and conquer.

    Mars colonization pitches imagine this new home, or “spome” (space home, a term coined by prolific “Golden Age” sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov), as a prospector’s paradise in the making and recreation of nostalgic versions of American frontier life. Settler colonial tropes are projected onto the screen of Mars as a terra nullius. Untrammeled, uncorrupted, and untamed, a pristine virgin wilderness that invites rapacious extraction, a red blank slate to reboot civilization.

    The dominant scientific narrative in the United States space program parallels the American cultural narrative: what Linda Billings, NASA space communicator and space policy analyst, calls “frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism, and a right to life without limits.” Amnesiac praise functions as if westward expansion was an uncomplicated narrative, not marked by tremendous violence, subjugation, and dispossession.

    An enduring thread of space-settlement fantasy views Earth as needing the influence of a space frontier civilization to show us a tougher, freer, better way. Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society, declares in his manifesto, “The Significance of the Martian Frontier,” that humanity needs Mars because this new frontier will provide the next great stage of human development. A clean juxtaposition of alien Mars with the familiar frontier.

    The promises made by multi-billionaires for space outposts are steeped in centuries-old Eurocentric mythology, which envisions progress by moving to new lands and putting them to their proper use, celebrating expansion into a landscape allegedly devoid of humans, enabling a wildly creative frontier civilization, or providing huge economic advantages to whoever makes the first move.

    In his second inaugural speech, Trump vowed to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” The unselfconscious language of settler colonialism justified as divine expansion is infecting outer space.

    Asteroid mining has been touted for years as the “Gold Rush” of the millennium. Mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids for precious metals and minerals is the astro-capitalist fantasy of limitless, unregulated wealth to be earned in space.

    Arthur C. Clarke, sci fi author of 2001: A Space Odysseyasked of the drive to propel us up and out, “Will moral advances accompany the technologies that make spaceflight possible and allow us to escape our past, or will the future be characterized by the same opportunism and exploitation that defined European and American expansion?”

    Frame #3 SPACE RACE 

    The space race playing out among billionaires like Branson, Bezos and Musk has little to do with science—it’s a PR-driven spectacle designed to distract us from the disasters capitalism is causing here on Earth.

    —PARIS MARX, author and tech critic

    It is impossible to discuss humanity’s efforts to expand into space without the lens of national competition. With Sputnik serving as the permanent cultural reminder, dominating space has long been a proxy for geopolitical power. Our first robotic and human expeditions beyond Earth were ignited by Cold War rivalry, which unleashed a massive mobilization of government resources in the service of what was openly called “The Space Race.”

    Although the Soviet Union is long gone, the Space Race frame continues to shape both public understanding and national policies. Trump’s nominee to lead NASA, billionaire pilot Jared Isaacman, who was the first private citizen to complete a space walk, has made this context explicit. After his nomination hearing, Isaacman posted on X, “I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.”

    Meanwhile, China’s Mars plan, the Tianwen-3 mission, is a two-part Mars sample return mission scheduled for launch in late 2028, with return to Earth expected around 2031. Both NASA and China aim to build lunar bases with continuous human presence at the South Pole of the Moon in the 2030s. Tension over who will be first is intensifying.

    This latest iteration of the Space Race is not the simple binary tale of Cold War rivalry; in fact, it is the private space industry, the latest player to join the fray, which is best poised to take people to Mars. This “new” space race is largely led by venture capitalist entrepreneurs, private companies, and start-ups, catalyzing and controlling much of the mass momentum, with the oversized figures of Bezos, Musk, and Branson dominating the competition to fund and popularize space exploration and tourism.

    The second astronaut to walk on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, has urged the need to get past the “flags and footprints” blip. Touring the globe wearing a t-shirt saying “Get your ass to Mars”, he wants permanent habitation by 2039.

    Cosmologist Aparna Venkatesan has called this phenomenon the “manufactured urgency” of space colonization, where the actions of state and private global interests are “driven by a perpetual anxiety to not be the last to arrive.”

    Frame #4 EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY 

    Nothing seems to pique a spirit of wonder, curiosity, ambition and humility quite like space exploration and discovery. 

    —MATTHEW SHINDELL, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator

    Uncritical references to the New World, Age of Discovery, and Columbus thread through promotion of the social good of space exploration, of ships crossing the starry sea. The Mariner and Viking missions evoked historical voyages of discovery that brought Europeans to the shores of unknown worlds. As the long-awaited inaugural Mars landing takes place in the fictional For All Mankind TV series, an intercom voice announces, “In 1620, a ship called the Mayflower traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a new world. Some came to escape their past, others to follow their dreams.”

    NASA “Mars Explorers Wanted” poster series

    NASA “Mars Explorers Wanted” poster series

    Alongside a series of hip vintage style recruitment posters, NASA exclaims on its website: “Be A Martian! Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers . . . but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day. Be an explorer!”

    Fifty-five years after the legendary Apollo generation, named for the Greek god riding his chariot across the sun, NASA has branded its next “Moon to Mars” era as “The Artemis Generation,” the lunar goddess and twin sister to Apollo. Setting up the first long-term human presence on the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars promises the ability to find water and fuel, to expand the logistics supply chain to enable resupply and refueling of deep space outposts.

    In the promotional video “Why the Moon,” narrator Drew Barrymore (who not coincidentally had her screen debut in the 1982 movie E.T.) and NASA team members explain why returning to the Moon is the natural next step, and how the lessons learned from Artemis will pave the way to Mars and beyond, infused with a tone of upbeat certainty and excitement. “We are going.” “Science fiction turned reality.” “Our success will change the world.” “We are preparing for Mars.”

    At the root of much of the Mars narrative are assumptions that equate exploration with progress and unquestioned good. A belief that the fundamental urge to explore is a defining, inherent human trait and innate drive.

    Historically, the “Age of Discovery” inaugurated centuries of violent colonial exploitation of human life, labor, and the more-than-human world. Ferrying millions of tons of cargo may be an easier feat than reckoning with the weight of supremacist cultural baggage.

    Mars is the only planet we know that is entirely inhabited by robots. Scientific motivators for sending humans to Mars in the near future assert that researchers on the planet will be more adaptable and efficient than rovers, capable of accomplishing more in less time. The Martian surface is “all past” as its time stands still, without plate tectonics or large-scale recycling of rocks. Planetary science professor Sarah Stewart Johnson describes, “The place we are visiting with spacecraft is almost the same world as it was 3 billion years ago … Perhaps echoes of the beginning of life, entombed deep in the planet’s ancient rocks.”

    Mars has been an obsession for celestial cartographers for more than 150 years, starting as a tool to argue that Mars was inhabited. Famously, Percival Lowell’s maps bolstered a theory of intelligent life with a complex irrigation canal system and vegetation. Whereas the first maps assumed an existing populace, the newest generation of maps invite a populace. Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, in her study of “Mapping Mars in Silicon Valley,” notes, “The goal for today’s maps is not about alien habitation but to establish Mars as inviting to human explorers … to establish Mars as a destination, the ‘awaiting Red Planet.’”

    Frame #5 TRANSCENDENCE

    Not even the sky is a limit.

    —TikTok star KELLIE GERARDI on the Virgin livestream during the 2021 Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin space launches

    A 2015 Newsweek article posed the question, “Is Mars the escape hatch for the 1%?” A decade later, the fact that billonauts are among our loudest advocates for Mars suggests the answer is yes.

    The fourth planet from the Sun is represented as a destination of freedom: from regulations, societal and terrestrial constraints, and the biological limits of the Earth itself. For years, critics have voiced concerns that billionaires’ space investments enable an escape from the climate chaos that the economic system, which enriched them, continues to fuel here.

    Protest sign that says "Deport Broligarchs to Mars"

    Protest sign created by Lily Sloane for April 5th, 2025, “Hands Off” nationwide protest.

    Many of the most persistent voices for Mars colonization are philosophically libertarian. Earth is too bureaucratic, too rule-bound and oppressive, with its laws of gravity and government—an insult to the lofty evolutionary heights that necessitate pulling up anchor. There is nothing holding tech titans back on Mars, except for the issue that space is constantly trying to kill you, necessitating every type of technologically assisted tether to keep you alive.

    Space colonization, like its parallel ascension fantasy, the Christian Rapture, has long involved a tension between the liberation of a chosen vanguard and the imminent destruction of the Earth, viewed as undesirable or doomed. Journalist Naomi Klein draws attention to ways that the blaring space dreams of the wealthiest men on Earth function as secularized Bible stories: “The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”

    This framing of Mars aligns it with a broader cultural narrative of salvation through technology. Colonizing Mars fits neatly alongside transhumanist visions of transcending the limitations of human bodies, of “hacking death” through cryopreservation immortality, and “longtermist” views of a future when humans become digital intelligence that colonize the universe, thus preserving existence for billions of years. Journalist Gil Duran distilled this emergent Silicon Valley cult religion on a recent episode of his The Nerd Reich podcast as, “Replace the soul with code, heaven with Mars, and Jesus with billionaire saviors.”

    What Is Outside The Frame

    The old science-fiction dreams … are just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.

    —KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, author of the Mars trilogy

    Taking these five frames together, we see the overlapping collage of the Mars sales pitch. A multiplanetary future for humanity is presented as necessary not only for our survival but as the vision that will innovate our industries, rekindle our adventurous pioneer spirit, and ultimately liberate (some of) us from being Earth-bound.

    What is rendered obscure, marginal, or invisible by these visions? What inconvenient facts left outside the frame might subvert the overly convenient narrative contained within?

    Much of the framing outlined above has left out a very significant factor: reality.

    Dynamic duo Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, in their new popular science opus A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, delve into well-researched, sobering detail about every aspect of life in space, including what they describe as the profound “suckitude” of space for human physiology. There is no systematic, generational research on how space impacts medical conditions or the viability of reproduction. Just one example of the incompatibility of space for our Earth-evolved bodies is the stunning rate at which astronauts lose bone density. Dying in novel ways is also outside the frame.

    Outside the frame is the perennial question of funding these expeditions, from the time of Rev. Abernathy’s critiques of the Apollo moon landing expenditure, which found expression in Gil Scott-Heron’s iconic song, “Whitey on the Moon.” What is the moral calculus that justifies prioritizing a multi-trillion-dollar otherworldly project in the name of abstract “human progress,” in the face of immeasurable human suffering?

    Assume enough people do make it to Mars to begin the terraforming that Occupy Mars folks love to conjure. Among the wave of scientific revelations about Mars is the discovery that the Martian surface is covered with perchlorate, a poisonous, corrosive dust that is lethal to humans to breathe in the parts per billion range.

    No less a Mars zeitgeist-shaper than Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the seminal 1990s sci-fi Mars trilogy, which provided a foundational terraforming template, admits that the perchlorate discovery massively increases the difficulty of any hypothetical future. More fundamentally, Robinson raises the question of whether pursuing such unlikely outcomes as making Mars habitable is worth the effort when Earth civilization is currently destroying its own homeworld’s biosphere. Unlike the Planet B crowd, he strongly believes that Mars is “irrelevant” if Earth is doomed.

    Which brings us to, perhaps, the most all-encompassing absence from the Mars sales pitch: Earth itself. Outside the frame is our profound interdependence with our terrestrial home and the astounding wild diversity of life forms who, like us, have been born in the embrace of our gravitational field. Space colonies will not save the millions of species at risk of extinction. The threat to biodiversity is one of the ecocidal consequences of an economic system driven by limitless growth. This ideology is exactly what has given us the very billionaires who seek to expand this worldview, unaltered, into space. Why would we believe it is possible to build resource-intensive life support systems on Mars when we haven’t been able to stop the rapid decline of life support systems on Earth?

    As Carl Sagan poignantly expressed, “What shall we do with Mars? There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me.”

    Touch Grass

    Humanity needed a moon landing to realise that the much more exciting thing is the earth itself—but landing on it is not so easy.

    —BRUNO LATOUR, philosopher and anthropologist of science and technology

    Grass by the Home” is a 1980s song beloved by Russian cosmonauts, which became famous when it was performed by the band Zemlyane (translated to “Earthlings”). Elevated to the status of official anthem by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, the lyrics sing: “We dream not about the roar of the spaceport/Not about this icy blue space/We dream of grass, grass by the home/Green, green grass.” “Touch grass” as a current meme implies that someone needs to reconnect with reality, get offline, and venture into the world outside.

    The song’s sentiment was shared by some members of both Soviet and American crews, as Apollo astronaut Bill Anders reflected, “Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.” Similarly, exoplanet researchers, who have catalogued thousands of planets searching for those in the habitable “Goldilocks Zone,” express a common refrain that “home is the most interesting thing.” As author Jaime Green describes, “The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself.”

    Indeed, many who have traveled to space have had transformative experiences of awe, of looking back and being struck by the view of the Earth, a phenomenon known as the “Overview Effect.” Ninety-year-old William Shatner, known to millions as Captain Kirk from Star Trek, had an Overview Effect experience during his 2021 Blue Origin trip, gazing at Earth from the starry beyond. As he beheld the staggering biodiversity that took billions of years to evolve being destroyed, the fragility of our life-containing atmosphere, the nurturing warmth of our home in the “vicious coldness of space,” he was overcome with immense grief: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead it felt like a funeral.”

    Here is revealed the true sleight of hand of the Mars pitch at this moment in history. We are encouraged to believe that human ingenuity and industry can turn uninhabitable Mars into a habitable Earth. This fantasy serves as a distraction from the reality that Earth is being rapidly turned into Mars.

    This article originally appeared in https://www.projectcensored.org/marketing-mars/?doing_wp_cron=1749613476.6134579181671142578125.

    The post MARKETING MARS first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sometimes, the perfect evening isn’t found in busy streets and bustling bars. It’s about finding comfort in smaller moments, discovering new ways to relax that don’t involve waiting in long lines or shouting across a crowded room. Sometimes, the best entertainment is to be found at home.

    Entertainment for a night in: what are the choices?

    Home-based entertainment is becoming more popular across the UK, not just for convenience but for the chance to shape the night exactly how you want it. Movie nights with friends, local takeaway feasts, DIY cocktail making, or simply a quiet night with a good book are all enjoying a revival.

    Online entertainment has also carved out a new space, offering even more variety. Many residents are trying out casinos, which have become flexible choices for those seeking entertainment outside of traditional British restrictions. UK gambling without restrictions sites are based overseas and are fully regulated by the likes of the Malta Gaming Authority. They appeal to players who want fewer limitations while enjoying casual gaming or placing a few bets as part of a relaxed night in.

    Of course, no online activity can replace the warmth of the UK’s social scene. For those wanting a low-key evening, board game cafés have quietly become a local favourite. Places like Major Tom’s Social offer not only great pizza and drinks but a nostalgic range of classic board games. It’s a chance to have fun without screens, rekindling simple pleasures that sometimes get lost in the rush of daily life.

    Home cocktail-making is another idea gaining momentum. Local distilleries and shops are seeing a rise in customers picking up cocktail kits and quality spirits to recreate bar favourites from the comfort of their kitchens. It’s a creative and fun way to spend an evening, whether you’re trying to master the perfect Negroni or just seeing what happens when you mix all the tropical juices in the fridge.

    The live experience in your front room

    For those who want a taste of live entertainment without heading out, local musicians have started offering private gigs, streaming performances straight into living rooms. The UK’s talented music community has adapted beautifully, giving residents a front-row seat without the need to leave home. Some even pair these gigs with curated snack boxes or locally brewed beer, giving the night a real sense of occasion.

    If you’re someone who finds joy in food, the UK’s independent food scene is ready to deliver a night to remember. Charcuterie boards piled high with artisan cheeses and meats, gourmet burger deliveries, and handcrafted desserts mean you can put together a feast fit for any special occasion. It’s a great way to support local businesses while treating yourself to something a little out of the ordinary.

    Stargazing has also captured the imagination of more locals. With areas like the Stray and Valley Gardens offering open skies and minimal light pollution compared to bigger cities, heading out with a blanket and a flask of tea can turn into a surprisingly magical evening. Some people are even investing in small telescopes to catch glimpses of the moon’s craters or distant planets.

    Simple movie marathons are always a reliable classic. Streaming services now offer watch parties, letting friends and family enjoy a film together even when they’re apart. Whether it’s a Marvel action fest, a Studio Ghibli animation night, or just a nostalgic rewatch of eighties classics, something is comforting about sharing a good story with good company.

    Entertainment: the choices are endless

    Whether it’s a gaming session online, a lovingly crafted cocktail, or a starlit walk through town, entertainment here is about simple joys. A night in can be just as memorable as a night out when it’s filled with the right moments and the right people.

    Featured image via Unsplash

    By The Canary

  • The post Cellphone Correlates first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In a recycling facility in Covington, Georgia, workers grind up dead batteries into a fine, dark powder. In the past, the factory shipped that powder, known in the battery recycling industry as black mass, overseas to refineries that extracted valuable metals like cobalt and nickel. But now it keeps the black mass on site and processes it to produce lithium carbonate, a critical ingredient for making new batteries to power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid.

    From Nevada to Arkansas, companies are racing to dig more lithium out of the ground to meet the clean energy sector’s surging appetite. But this battery recycling facility, owned by Massachusetts-based Ascend Elements, is the first new lithium carbonate producer in the nation in years — and the only source of recycled lithium carbonate in North America. The company is finalizing upgrades to its Covington facility that will allow it to produce up to 3,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year beginning later this month. Right now, the only other domestic source of lithium carbonate is a small mine in Silver Peak, Nevada.

    Since January, President Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the Biden administration’s efforts to grow America’s clean energy industry. The Trump administration has frozen grants and loans, hollowed out key agencies, and used executive action to stall renewable energy projects and reverse climate policies — often in legally dubious ways. At the same time, citing economic and national security reasons, Trump has sought to advance efforts to produce more critical minerals like lithium in the United States. That is exactly what the emerging lithium-ion battery recycling industry seeks to do, which is why some industry insiders are optimistic about their future under Trump. 

    Nevertheless, U.S. battery recyclers face uncertainty due to fast-changing tariff policies, the prospect that Biden-era tax credits could be repealed by Congress as it seeks to slash federal spending, and signs that the clean energy manufacturing boom is fading.

    Battery recyclers are in “a limbo moment,” said Beatrice Browning, a recycling expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which conducts market research for companies in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. They’re “waiting to see what the next steps are.”


    To transition off fossil fuels, the world needs a lot more big batteries that can power EVs and store renewable energy for use when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. That need is already causing demand for the metals inside batteries to surge. Recycling end-of-life batteries — from electric cars, e-bikes, cell phones, and more — can provide metals to help meet this demand while reducing the need for destructive mining. It’s already happening on a large scale in China, where most of the world’s lithium-ion battery manufacturing takes place and where recyclers benefit from supportive government policies and a steady stream of manufacturing scrap. 

    A wide shot of an industrial space where red trucks are parked next to a pit containing huge piles of greenish-gray batteries
    Waste batteries are pooled for recycling at a technology park in Jieshou, China.
    Liu Junxi / Xinhua via Getty Images

    When the Biden administration attempted to onshore clean energy manufacturing, U.S. battery recyclers announced major expansion plans, propelled by government financing and other incentives. Under former president Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, launched research and development initiatives to support battery recycling and awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to firms seeking to expand operations. The DOE’s Loan Program’s Office also offered to lend nearly $2.5 billion to two battery recycling companies.

    The industry also benefited from tax credits established or enhanced by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the centerpiece of Biden’s climate agenda. In particular, the 45X advanced manufacturing production credit subsidizes domestic production of critical minerals, including those produced from recycled materials. For battery recyclers, the incentive “has a direct bottom-line impact,” according to Roger Lin, VP of government affairs at Ascend Elements.

    The DOE didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the status of Biden-era grants and loans for battery recycling. But recyclers report that at least some federal support is continuing under Trump. 

    In 2022, Ascend Elements was awarded a $316 million DOE grant to help it construct a second battery recycling plant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. That grant, which will go toward building capacity to make battery cathode precursor materials from recycled metals, “is still active and still being executed on,” Lin told Grist, with minimal impact from the change in administration. Ascend Elements expects the plant to come online in late 2026.

    American Battery Technology Company, a Reno, Nevada-based battery materials firm, told a similar story. In December, the company finalized a $144 million DOE contract to support the construction of its second battery recycling facility, which will extract and refine battery-grade metals from manufacturing scrap and end-of-life batteries. That grant remains active with “no changes” since Trump’s inauguration, CEO Ryan Melsert told Grist. 

    Yet another battery recycler, Cirba Solutions, recently learned that a $200 million DOE grant to help it construct a new battery recycling plant in Columbia, South Carolina, is moving forward. At full capacity, this facility is expected to produce enough battery-grade metals to supply half a million EVs a year. Cirba Solutions is also still spending funds from two earlier DOE grants, including a $75 million grant to expand a battery processing plant in Lancaster, Ohio. 

    An aerial view of a large industrial space containing neatly arranged barrels, boxes, and storage bins
    Barrels containing used batteries are stored in a Li-Cycle facility in Germany.
    Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert / picture alliance via Getty Images

    “I think that we aligned very much to the priorities of the administration,” Danielle Spalding, VP of communications and public affairs at Cirba Solutions, told Grist. 

    Those priorities include establishing the U.S. as “the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals,” and taking steps to “facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent,” according to executive orders signed by Trump in January and March. Because critical minerals are used in many high-tech devices, including military weapons, the Trump administration appears to believe America’s national security depends on controlling their supply chains. As battery recyclers were quick to note following Trump’s inauguration, their industry can help.

    “Critical minerals are central to creating a resilient energy economy in the U.S., and resource recovery and recycling companies will continue to play an important role in providing another domestic source of these materials,” Ajay Kochhar, CEO of the battery recycling firm Li-Cycle, wrote in a blog post reacting to one of Trump’s executive orders on energy. 

    Li-Cycle, which closed a $475 million loan with the DOE’s Loan Programs Office in November but is now facing possible bankruptcy, didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.


    While Biden’s approach to onshoring critical mineral production was rooted in various financial incentives, Trump has pursued the same goal using tariffs — and by attempting to fast-track new mines. Although economists have criticized Trump’s indiscriminate and unpredictable application of tariffs, some battery recyclers are cautiously optimistic they will benefit from increased trade restrictions. In particular, recyclers see the escalating trade war with China — including recent limits on exports of various critical minerals to the U.S. — as further evidence that new domestic sources of these resources are needed. (China is the world’s leading producer of most key battery metals.)

    “There is a chance that limiting the amount that is being imported from China … could really strengthen” mineral production in other regions, including the U.S., Browning said.

    Trade restrictions between the U.S. and key partners outside of China could be more harmful. Today, Browning says, U.S. recyclers often sell the black mass they produce to refiners in South Korea, which don’t produce enough domestically to meet their processing capacity and are paying a premium to secure material from abroad. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Korean imports in April, before placing them on a 90-day pause. If South Korea were to implement retaliatory tariffs in response, it could cut off a key revenue stream for the U.S. industry. However, recycling companies Grist spoke noted that there are currently no export bans or tariffs affecting their black mass, and emphasized their plans to build up local refining capacity. 

    Two hands wearing turquoise latex gloves hold a glass lab dish that contains a dark powder
    A scientific employee holds a glass dish that contains black mass from dead batteries.
    Robert Michael / picture alliance via Getty Images

    “The short answer is that we see the tariffs as an opportunity to focus on domestic manufacturing,” Spalding of Cirba Solutions said. 

    While battery recyclers seem to align with Trump on critical minerals policy, and to some extent on trade, their interests diverge when it comes to energy policy. Without a clean energy manufacturing boom in the U.S., there would be far less need for battery recycling.

    Today, nearly 40 percent of the material available to battery recyclers in the U.S. is production scrap from battery gigafactories, according to data from Benchmark. Another 15 percent consists of used EV batteries that have reached the end of their lives or been recalled, while grid storage and micromobility batteries (such as e-bike batteries) account for 14 percent. The remaining third of the material available for processing is portable batteries, like those in consumer electronics.

    In the future, as more EVs reach the end of their lives, an even greater fraction of battery scrap will come from the clean energy sector. If a large number of planned battery and EV manufacturing facilities are canceled in the coming years — due to a repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax incentives, a loss of federal funding, rising project costs, or perhaps all three — the recycling industry may have to scale back its ambitions, too. 

    The budget bill that passed the House in May would undo a number of key Inflation Reduction Act provisions. Some clean energy tax credits, like the consumer EV tax credit, would be eliminated at the end of this year. The legislation was kinder to the 45X manufacturing credit, scheduling it to end in 2031 rather than the current phase-out date of 2032. But the bill could face significant changes in the Senate before heading to Trump’s desk, possibly by July 4. 

    Despite uncertainty over the fate of IRA tax credits, Trump’s actions have already put a damper on U.S. manufacturing: Since January, firms have abandoned or delayed plans for $14 billion worth of U.S. clean energy projects, according to the clean tech advocacy group E2.

    While the battery recyclers Grist spoke with are putting on a brave face under Trump’s second term, some are also looking to hedge their bets. As Ascend Elements ramps up lithium production in Georgia, it has lined up at least one buyer outside the battery supply chain. The battery industry accounts for nearly 90 percent of lithium demand globally, but the metal is also used in various industrial applications, including ceramics and glass making.

    Integrating into the EV battery supply chain remains “the ultimate goal,” Lin told Grist. “But we are looking at other plans to ensure … the economic viability of the operation continues.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s second term is creating ‘a limbo moment’ for US battery recyclers on Jun 10, 2025.

  • One of the greatest tricks capitalism ever played on the global intelligentsia was convincing some of them that it no longer exists, that it is dead and gone, having vanished in plain sight from the face of the earth. And in the last few years, a branch of political economy has risen arguing exactly this, whereby capitalism has unraveled and devolved into techno-feudalism. That is, that capitalism has exited the stage of world history, or has started to do so, only to be replaced by techno-feudalism, i.e., a socio-economic formation, where markets have been usurped and/or abolished in favor of highly-organized and highly-controlled internet platforms, who are owned and operated by one-person, or a select few, that control every aspect of their digital fiefdoms. Techno-feudalism is the idea that capitalism has receded, along with profits and the profit-imperative, in favor of central-bank money, i.e., fiat money, now taking the place of all profit-making. For these theoreticians of techno-feudalism, capitalism is dead. And like an old battle weary baby boomer, gently easing him or herself into a warm tub, filled with Epsom salt, capitalism as well, has gently eased itself into the hot tub of techno-feudalism and dissolved itself into a new post-capitalist socio-economic regime, without kicking up a fuss.

    Ultimately, this is false. It is false, in the sense that: 1) the world economy is, on most counts, functioning and operating according to the logic of capitalism, namely, that 99.9999% of the world economy continues to be all about the maximization of profit, which also includes these internet fiefdoms. In the sense that the maximization of profit by any means necessary, for share-holders, continues to be the driving force of the system. Granted, in certain instances, profits may be derived from the central-banks through quantitative easing practices, i.e., the soaking up of easy money by giant corporations, who buy back their own shares, rather than by selling commodities to consumers. Notwithstanding, from the share-holders’ perspective, this is still profit, regardless where the capital surplus comes from. Subsequently, nowadays, profits can come from anywhere in all sorts of forms, whether it is from quantitative easing, accumulation by dispossession, rent, war, and/or from interest payments etc. Wherever it comes from, it is profit through and through, a surplus, which is then classified under the category of profit or revenue, regardless of its source. Hence, if it is a surplus, it is a profit, a revenue of some kind. In the sense that, in the age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, whatever an entity or entities can get away with in the marketplace and/or the sphere of production is ultimately valid, legitimate, and normal.

    Therefore, despite what some academics’ argue, profit is still the central-operating-code of all these so-called internet fiefdoms, whether they are conscious of this fact or not. True, these digital platforms are about the cultivation and harvesting of personal information, but all this information-gathering is fundamentally about amassing profit, namely, super-profits in an anonymous and indirect manner. These digital platforms convert personal data into profit, whether by selling these data-sets to advertisers, or by improving their own technology to better stimulate individual customer purchases and services on their own specific platforms. As always, the point is capitalist revenue, i.e., profit-making by any means necessary, at the lowest financial cost, as soon as possible.

    And finally, 2) whatever its make-up, the newly-risen, neo-feudal tech-aristocracy continues to subscribe heart and soul to the logic of capitalism. In the sense that its origins lie in the logic of capitalism, or more specifically, the logic of capitalism super-charged to its utmost neoliberal extremes. This new aristocracy is capitalist to the core. It seeks to capitalize on resources and people, by any means, in order to amass capital for itself at the expense of the workforce/population, as it always has throughout its history. And rent is a method of amassing capital. Consequently, this new aristocracy is not a technological aristocracy per se, it is a capitalist aristocracy, first and foremost. It is an aristocracy that uses the tools of machine-technology as a means to amass power, profit, and capital, for itself. That is, this aristocracy uses the tools of machine-technology to better align itself with the dictates of the logic of capitalism. For this aristocracy, technology is not an end-in-itself, but, a means to amass more power, profit, and capital, nothing more and nothing less. Thus, capital accumulation is still the end-game of all the financial maneuvers, all the algorithmic innovations, all the rent-extractions, and all the power-plays that these internet fiefdoms engage-in. The highest possible return on capital investment continues to be the bottom-line, regardless of where this return comes from, or what the theoreticians of techno-feudalism claim. Lest we forget that these internet fiefdoms do invest massively in research and development, more so than at any other time in history.

    Subsequently, the software of the system encoded upon everything and everyone is still the logic of capitalism, while the hardware of the system is continually changing and mutating into all sorts of monstrous forms. And, naturally, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism want you to solely focus on the constantly mutating hardware of the capitalist-system, forgoing the hidden immutable software of the system, namely, the software driving the whole system. In the sense that it is only in this manner that the techno-feudal argument holds any water. Forget the software, only concentrate on the hardware, and ye shall believe, believe as an enchanted zealot in the opulence of the techno-feudal sci-fi fantasy and hypothesis.

    Specifically, the economic theoreticians of techno-feudalism are those individuals who would look-upon the first generation terminator model, i.e., the T-800, from the first terminator film as the only authentic cyborg worthy of being called, a terminator. While, the second generation terminator model, i.e., the T-1000, from the second installment of the terminator films would not be a terminator in their eyes, but, something totally different, something that has completely transcended the definition of what a terminator is and what it constitutes. The T-1000 is not a terminator, if you follow the logic of techno-feudalism, because it does not behave, or look, as the original terminator does. The T-1000 is made of liquid metal, while the first generation T-800 is made of living tissue, covering its stainless steel skeleton. Thereby, they are two totally different incompatible entities. Indeed, the T-1000 is not a terminator, but an entity that is totally new and different, unrecognizable as a terminator in relation to the T-800.

    And, indeed, the whole set of arguments about the validity of techno-feudalism revolve around such theoretical tricks and sleights of hand. That capitalism is no longer capitalism because it does not function and operate as capitalism once did in its distant past. Capitalism has evolved into something completely different, as the initial terminator, i.e., the T-800, has evolved into something completely different, the T-1000. What the theoreticians of techno-feudalism do not notice, or simply fail to mention, is that all the multi-varied versions of capitalism, as well as the multi-varied versions of terminators, share the same immutable software. They share the same central-operating-code, which is their defining immutable characteristic. Due to the fact that the T-800 and the T-1000 were algorithmically programmed to achieve the same end, to kill John Conner by any means necessary. This is what defined these cyborg-machines as terminators, not their make-up, their radically different hardware. Just as the old form of capitalism and its newer model, i.e., techno-capitalist-feudalism, share the same end, the same code, i.e., the maximization of profit, by any means necessary, at the lowest financial cost, as soon as possible. Despite the fact that both function and operate in radically different manners and have radically different hardware.

    Ultimately, to achieve and maximize capital is the algorithmic thread that unites all prior forms of capitalism with all its newest model versions, since, surplus value from the central banks, or surplus value from the exploitation of laborers, or surplus value from rent, or wherever else, amounts to the same thing, profiteering at the expense of another, regardless how that profiteering is made, or where that profiteering comes from. As a matter of fact, the tired and antiquated feudal mechanism of rent extraction was appropriated by emerging capitalism, where it was upgraded, supercharged, and welded-tight to industrial capital, as its own.

    In short, capitalist rent is a type of profiteering; capitalist profit is a type of profiteering. Rent is stolen unpaid work, i.e., surplus value; profit is stolen unpaid work, i.e., surplus value. And both rent and profit are fundamental types of capitalist revenue, namely, they are two sides of the same capital coin. And both are the embodiment of magnitudes of force and influence, capable of bending existence to the will of a capitalist entity. Finally, rent and profit are methods by which to accumulate capital, in the sense that profit and rent are both capital, as well as specific modes of capital accumulation. And both have been present in and across the system since the dawn of capitalism and even before that.

    Notwithstanding, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism do not acknowledge this fact. For them, profit is profit only when 1) it is private, i.e., it is strictly made by private enterprises; and 2) it comes strictly from the sphere of commodity-production, i.e., the exploitation of workers in the production sphere. While, rent is rent when it is a fee commanded and paid for, pertaining to the use of a piece of private property, whatever that property is. Specifically, for these theoreticians, rent and profit do not intermingle and they do not embody the same substance, i.e., force and influence. For them, rent and profit are different because their modes of capital accumulation are different. As a result, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism skip over many fundamental economic facts, concerning the certainty that rent and profit are capital, and that rent and profit comprise their own individual methods of capital accumulation. That is, that the end-game of both profit and rent is the same, i.e., to accumulate as much capital as force and influence will allow. Like the T-800 and the T-1000, rent and profit have the same fundamental objective, the same central-operating-code, namely, to accrue the maximum amount of capital by any means necessary, as soon as possible! In the sense that both methods of capital accumulation have been subsumed and integrated into the accumulation processes of totalitarian-capitalism. Whereby, today, profit-making and rent-extraction function and operate in tandem at the behest of the logic of capitalism and the 1 percent.

    And more importantly, the whole techno-feudalist theoretical framework and argument hinges on profit and rent being radically dissimilar and distinctly separated; when, in reality, they are in principle the same. They are both surplus value, forms of power, and profiteering modes of capital accumulation, modes by which to absorb and extract value from another, gratis. Rent is paid out of newly created surplus value; and profit is paid out of newly-created surplus value. All the same, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism pass over these fundamental economic facts in silence, concealing their inherent similarities and their primary importance as capitalist gain.

    Above all, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism do not give credence to Mark Fisher’s notion that capitalism is “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact”, akin to the T-1000 terminator.1 The theoreticians of techno-feudalism do not acknowledge that capitalism can change its hardware in an infinity of forms, gothic, gruesome, and sadistic, whatever it needs to do; all the while still adhering to its immutable uncompromising software demanding endless capital accumulation. These techno-feudal theorists never mention the immutable software of capitalism, its central-operating-code, the same for the last 250 years. And just like the T-1000 terminator, capitalism will end and disappear only when its software, its central-operating-code, ends and disappears in the hellish crucible of molten metal, that is, the anarchist revolution.

    For example, under the old form of capitalism we had yachts, but now, under the new form of capitalism, i.e., totalitarian-capitalism, or more importantly, techno-capitalist-feudalism, we have super-yachts. Similarly, under the old form of capitalism we had privately-owned backyard air-fields, but now, under the new form of capitalism, we have privately-owned backyard space launch centers. Of course, the theoreticians of techno-feudalism would have you believe that super-yachts, or privately-owned backyard space launch centers, are the product of a wholly different system that has abandoned the logic of capitalism. However, one can clearly see and comprehend that super-yachts and backyard space launch centers are just a logical progression of the logic of capitalism, supercharged to the Nth degree. One develops out of the other, thanks to a new fanatical form of neoliberalism, neoliberalism on methamphetamine, manically driving backwards towards feudalism redux, that is, FEUDALISM 2.0.

    Indeed, even the billionaire caste is a grotesque abomination of the logic of capitalism, out of control and out of whack. In the sense that thousands must be rendered destitute and homeless in order to manufacture a single billionaire. And being Frankenstein monsters, these grotesque billionaire mutants of totalitarian-capitalism unhinged, will eventually have to be hunted down with pitchforks and blowtorches, if the multitude of peasant-workers are to overcome and abolish the horrors of techno-capitalist serfdom, once and for all.

    As a result, capitalism is not dead, but, has only amplified itself to its utmost logical extreme. It has become totalitarian and super-exploitative. In the sense that the logic of capitalism still powers all the newly-risen fiefdoms of the era of techno-capitalist-feudalism. And just like the old form of capitalism, the new form of capitalism has a ruling caste, which, in most instances, is still ironically the same ruling caste that was in power during the reign of the old form of capitalism. And just like the old form of capitalism, the members of this new form of capitalism, comprising its so-called new ruling caste, continue to be the sole owners of the means and forces of production, while, the workforce/population continues to be dominated by a capitalist wage-system, like in the old days, when the old antiquated form of powdered-wig capitalism ruled supreme.

    Today, just like in the past era of run-of-the-mill traditional-capitalism, peasant-workers only have their labor-power, or creative-power, to sell to the owner or owners of the means and forces of production. The only difference in-between the old form of capitalism and the new form of capitalism, i.e., the age of monopoly-capitalism and the age of super-monopoly, or techno-capitalist-feudalism,  is that today peasant-workers can be paid below subsistence levels, whereas before, they were not. In fact, workers now have to work multiple jobs and more hours to make ends meet, since they have no benefits and are paid largely below subsistence levels. Therefore, the logic or software of capitalism has not disappeared. And to say that it has is a gross exaggeration. In other words, the age of monopoly has simply given way to the age of super-monopoly, namely, the dark age of techno-capitalist-feudalism. Wherein, the logic of capitalism continues to thrive and multiply, ad nauseam. Because capitalism has always been dead, dead and congealed, namely, a congealed set of power-relations, which vampire-like live the more, the more creativity they suck, from all their unsuspecting, living peasant-workers.2

    In sum, the specter of capitalism haunts techno-feudalism as software, as its hidden code lodged deep within its radically incompatible ever-mutating hardware. Thereby, the specter of capitalism haunts all the theoretical machinations and the minutia of techno-feudalism, since, techno-feudalism, or more accurately, techno-capitalist-feudalism, is the result of the capital/labor relationship at its most lopsided, oppressive, and technologically dominating. The capital/labor relationship continues to hold; it continues to hold at the center of techno-feudalism, or more accurately, techno-capitalist-feudalism. In the sense that the logic of capitalism pervades, envelops, infects, and poisons, all aspects of society and techno-feudalism, since, the logic of capitalism continues to be the foundation and the fundamental under-girder of society and techno-feudalism, a foundation that techno-feudalism refuses to acknowledge or even address, adequately. (Let us not forget that, like its predecessors, techno-feudalism continues the long history of the critique of capitalism by talking once again about the central concept of capitalism, i.e., CAPITAL, whether this is monopoly-capital, rentier-capital, digital-capital, communicative-capital, surveillance-capital, and/or the new all-terrifying poltergeist of cloud-capital). In short, techno-feudalism distorts the aberrant monstrosity of techno-capitalist-feudalism, the horror-show that is the despotic age of totalitarian-capitalism, whereby, super-monopoly and super-profits are multi-varied, ruthless, and fundamentally undisciplined.

    As it happens, in the dark age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, super-exploitation is 24/7. Whereupon, there is no escape or chance of relief, as the newly-minted post-industrial serfs, i.e., the 99 percent, are forever bound in all sorts of insidious Malthusian traps, financial Catch-22s, crippling debt etc., which have them all going around in circles in and across a hopeless set of bureaucratic labyrinths, all designed to keep them stationary and subservient upon the lower-stratums of the system. As a result, the ruminations of techno-feudalism are scientifically disingenuous. They skew the facts and the true reality of the billions of peasant-workers, toiling under the jackboot of capitalist exploitation, capitalist debt, capitalist rent, and a capitalist wage-system of piecemeal slavery. Subsequently, techno-feudalism is a disservice to workers. To drop the term “capitalist” from techno-capitalist-feudalism, only muddies the clear blue waters of the terminal stage of capitalist development, namely, the new dawning epoch of totalitarian-capitalism, that is, the new dystopian age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, run-amok.

    Just because the old capitalist bourgeoisie has embraced digital algorithms and invasive surveillance technologies as its own, and has abstracted itself at a higher-level of socio-economic existence, away from the workforce/population, whereby, it now appears invisible and increasingly distant from the everyday lives of workers, does not mean the old capitalist bourgeoisie has melted away into thin air, or has been usurped by a new, strictly technological aristocracy. What has happened is that the old capitalist bourgeoisie has become a techno-capitalist-feudal-aristocracy, since, the logic of capitalism, capitalist profit, capitalist rent, and capitalist technological innovations, continue to inform and motivate this authoritarian feudo-capitalist aristocracy.

    In the end, economic supremacy resides with the capitalists, since, they control the repressive-state-apparatuses, while the tech-lords do not. Therefore, these feudo-capitalist lords only exist by virtue of and by the good grace of traditional capitalists, who control the repressive-state-apparatuses. The tech-lords do not have their own repressive-state-apparatus, thereby, they will always remain secondary, merely a small part of the overall feudo-capitalist aristocracy, forever at the mercy of those who control the military, namely, all those blood thirsty repressive-state-apparatuses of the state-finance-corporate-aristocracy, the 1%.

    In view of these damning facts, techno-feudalism is a bust, a wrong turn, a wrong-brained play on words, leading to a theoretical dead-end that only empowers capitalist supremacy at the expense of    workers’ liberation and self-management. It must be jettisoned. The fact of the matter is that the logic of capitalism continues to rule, because the peasant-workers, i.e., the anarcho-proletarians, the punks have yet to overthrow the capitalist mode of production, consumption, and distribution, from the active theater of world history. Thus, within the so-called evolutionary whimper of techno-feudalism, the logic of capitalism is thriving, laughing all the way to the bank. It will never go quietly and orderly into that good night. Capitalism will only go out with a bang, a loud resounding cataclysmic bang. As capitalism came into this world soaked in blood from head to toe; and it will only leave this world gushing blood, allover the globe.3 Because, devoid of the epic blast of rampant anarchist revolution, capitalism invariably marches-on as, and in the form of, techno-capitalist-feudalism. Ergo, in the dark age of TCF:

    Resistance is feudal and the guillotine is forever!

    ENDNOTES:

    1 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2009), p. 6.

    2 Karl Marx, Capital (Volume One), Trans. Ben Fowkes, (London, Eng.: Penguin, 1990), p. 342.

    3 Karl Marx, Capital (Volume One), p. 926.

    The post The Pragmatic-Demolition of  Techno-Feudalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency.

    President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

    This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

    According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

    This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

    What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

    The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways, with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

    Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

    Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata, cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

    This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening.

    Palantir’s Gotham platform, used by law enforcement and military agencies, has long been the backbone of real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Now, with Trump’s backing, it threatens to become the central nervous system of a digitally enforced authoritarianism.

    As Palantir itself admits, its mission is to “augment human decision-making.” In practice, that means replacing probable cause with probability scores, courtrooms with code, and due process with data pipelines.

    In this new regime, your innocence will be irrelevant. The algorithm will decide who you are.

    To understand the full danger of this moment, we must trace the long arc of government surveillance—from secret intelligence programs like COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act to today’s AI-driven digital dragnet embodied by data fusion centers.

    Building on this foundation of historical abuse, the government has evolved its tactics, replacing human informants with algorithms and wiretaps with metadata, ushering in an age where pre-crime prediction is treated as prosecution.

    Every smartphone ping, GPS coordinate, facial scan, online purchase, and social media like becomes part of your “digital exhaust”—a breadcrumb trail of metadata that the government now uses to build behavioral profiles. The FBI calls it “open-source intelligence.” But make no mistake: this is dragnet surveillance, and it is fundamentally unconstitutional.

    Already, government agencies are mining this data to generate “pattern of life” analyses, flag “radicalized” individuals, and preemptively investigate those who merely share anti-government views.

    This is not law enforcement. This is thought-policing by machine, the logical outcome of a system that criminalizes dissent and deputizes algorithms to do the targeting.

    Nor is this entirely new.

    For decades, the federal government has reportedly maintained a highly classified database known as Main Core, designed to collect and store information on Americans deemed potential threats to national security.

    As Tim Shorrock reported for Salon, “One former intelligence official described Main Core as ‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.”

    Trump’s embrace of Palantir, and its unparalleled ability to fuse surveillance feeds, social media metadata, public records, and AI-driven predictions, marks a dangerous evolution: a modern-day resurrection of Main Core, digitized, centralized, and fully automated.

    What was once covert contingency planning is now becoming active policy.

    What has emerged is a surveillance model more vast than anything dreamed up by past regimes—a digital panopticon in which every citizen is watched constantly, and every move is logged in a government database—not by humans, but by machines without conscience, without compassion, and without constitutional limits.

    This is not science fiction. This is America—now.

    As this technological tyranny expands, the foundational safeguards of the Constitution—those supposed bulwarks against arbitrary power—are quietly being nullified and its protections rendered meaningless.

    What does the Fourth Amendment mean in a world where your entire life can be searched, sorted, and scored without a warrant? What does the First Amendment mean when expressing dissent gets you flagged as an extremist? What does the presumption of innocence mean when algorithms determine guilt?

    The Constitution was written for humans, not for machine rule. It cannot compete with predictive analytics trained to bypass rights, sidestep accountability, and automate tyranny.

    And that is the endgame: the automation of authoritarianism. An unblinking, AI-powered surveillance regime that renders due process obsolete and dissent fatal.

    Still, it is not too late to resist—but doing so requires awareness, courage, and a willingness to confront the machinery of our own captivity.

    Make no mistake: the government is not your friend in this. Neither are the corporations building this digital prison. They thrive on your data, your fear, and your silence.

    To resist, we must first understand the weaponized AI tools being used against us.

    We must demand transparency, enforce limits on data collection, ban predictive profiling, and dismantle the fusion centers feeding this machine.

    We must treat AI surveillance with the same suspicion we once reserved for secret police. Because that is what AI-powered governance has become—secret police, only smarter, faster, and less accountable.

    We don’t have much time.

    Trump’s alliance with Palantir is a warning sign—not just of where we are, but of where we’re headed. A place where freedom is conditional, rights are revocable, and justice is decided by code.

    The question is no longer whether we’re being watched—that is now a given—but whether we will meekly accept it. Will we dismantle this electronic concentration camp, or will we continue building the infrastructure of our own enslavement?

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we trade liberty for convenience and privacy for security, we will find ourselves locked in a prison we helped build, and the bars won’t be made of steel. They will be made of data.

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  • OpenAI has always said it’s a different kind of Big Tech titan, founded not just to rack up a stratospheric valuation of $400 billion (and counting), but also to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” 

    The meteoric machine-learning firm announced itself to the world in a December 2015 press release that lays out a vision of technology to benefit all people as people, not citizens. There are neither good guys nor adversaries. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the announcement stated with confidence. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”

    Early rhetoric from the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, described advanced artificial intelligence as a harbinger of a globalist utopia, a technology that wouldn’t be walled off by national or corporate boundaries but enjoyed together by the species that birthed it. In an early interview with Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, Altman described a vision of artificial intelligence “freely owned by the world” in common. When Vanity Fair asked in a 2015 interview why the company hadn’t set out as a for-profit venture, Altman replied: “I think that the misaligned incentives there would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.”

    Times have changed. And OpenAI wants the White House to think it has too.

    In a March 13 white paper submitted directly to the Trump administration, OpenAI’s global affairs chief Chris Lehane pitched a near future of AI built for the explicit purpose of maintaining American hegemony and thwarting the interests of its geopolitical competitors — specifically China. The policy paper’s mentions of freedom abound, but the proposal’s true byword is national security.

    OpenAI never attempts to reconcile its full-throated support of American security with its claims to work for the whole planet, not a single country. After opening with a quotation from Trump’s own executive order on AI, the action plan proposes that the government create a direct line for the AI industry to reach the entire national security community, work with OpenAI “to develop custom models for national security,” and increase intelligence sharing between industry and spy agencies “to mitigate national security risks,” namely from China.

    In the place of techno-globalism, OpenAI outlines a Cold Warrior exhortation to divide the world into camps. OpenAI will ally with those “countries who prefer to build AI on democratic rails,” and get them to commit to “deploy AI in line with democratic principles set out by the US government.”

    The rhetoric seems pulled directly from the keyboard of an “America First” foreign policy hawk like Marco Rubio or Rep. Mike Gallagher, not a company whose website still endorses the goal of lifting up the whole world. The word “humanity,” in fact, never appears in the action plan.

    Rather, the plan asks Trump, to whom Altman donated $1 million for his inauguration ceremony, to “ensure that American-led AI prevails over CCP-led AI” — the Chinese Communist Party — “securing both American leadership on AI and a brighter future for all Americans.”

    It’s an inherently nationalist pitch: The concepts of “democratic values” and “democratic infrastructure” are both left largely undefined beyond their American-ness. What is democratic AI? American AI. What is American AI? The AI of freedom. And regulation of any kind, of course, “may hinder our economic competitiveness and undermine our national security,” Lehane writes, suggesting a total merging of corporate and national interests.

    Related

    Trump’s Big, Beautiful Handout to the AI Industry

    In an emailed statement, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois declined to explain the company’s nationalist pivot but defended its national security work.

    “We believe working closely with the U.S. government is critical to advancing our mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity,” Bourgeois wrote. “The U.S. is uniquely positioned to help shape global norms around safe, secure, and broadly beneficial AI development—rooted in democratic values and international collaboration.”

    The Intercept is currently suing OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT.

    OpenAI’s newfound patriotism is loud. But is it real? 

    In his 2015 interview with Musk, Altman spoke of artificial intelligence as a technology so special and so powerful that it ought to transcend national considerations. Pressed on OpenAI’s goal to share artificial intelligence technology globally rather than keeping it under domestic control, Altman provided an answer far more ambivalent than the company’s current day mega-patriotism: “If only one person gets to have it, how do you decide if that should be Google or the U.S. government or the Chinese government or ISIS or who?” 

    He also said, in the early days of OpenAI, that there may be limits to what his company might do for his country.

    “I unabashedly love this country, which is the greatest country in the world,” Altman told the New Yorker in 2016. “But some things we will never do with the Department of Defense.” In the profile, he expressed ambivalence about overtures to OpenAI from then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who envisioned using the company’s tools for targeting purposes. At the time, this would have run afoul of the company’s own ethical guidelines, which for years stated explicitly that customers could not use its services for “military and warfare” purposes, writing off any Pentagon contracting entirely. 

    Related

    OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

    In January 2024, The Intercept reported that OpenAI had deleted this military contracting ban from its policies without explanation or announcement. Asked about how the policy reversal might affect business with other countries in an interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI executive Anna Makanju said the company is “focused on United States national security agencies.” But insiders who spoke with The Intercept on conditions of anonymity suggested that the company’s turn to jingoism may come more from opportunism than patriotism. Though Altman has long been on the record as endorsing corporate support of the United States, under an administration where the personal favor of the president means far more than the will of lawmakers, parroting muscular foreign policy rhetoric is good for business.

    One OpenAI source who spoke with The Intercept recalled concerned discussions about the possibility that the U.S. government would nationalize the company. They said that at times, this was discussed with the company’s head of national security partnerships, Katrina Mulligan. Mulligan joined the company in February 2024 after a career in the U.S. intelligence and military establishment, including leading the media and public policy response to Edward Snowden’s leaks while on the Obama National Security Council staff, working for the director of national intelligence, serving as a senior civilian overseeing Special Operations forces in the Pentagon, and working as chief of staff to the secretary of the Army.

    This source speculated that fostering closeness with the government was one method of fending off the potential risk of nationalization.

    As an independent research organization with ostensibly noble, global goals, OpenAI may have been less equipped to beat back regulatory intervention, a second former OpenAI employee suggested. What we see now, they said, is the company “transitioning from presenting themselves as a nonprofit with very altruistic, pro-humanity aims, to presenting themselves as an economic and military powerhouse that the government needs to support, shelter, and cut red tape on behalf of.”

    The second source said they believed the national security rhetoric was indicative of OpenAI “sucking up to the administration,” not a genuinely held commitment by executives.

    “In terms of how decisions were actually made, what seemed to be the deciding factor was basically how can OpenAI win the race rather than anything to do with either humanity or national security,” they added. “In today’s political environment, it’s a winning move with the administration to talk about America winning and national security and stuff like that. But you should not confuse that for the actual thing that’s driving decision-making internally.”

    The person said that talk of preventing Chinese dominance over artificial intelligence likely reflects business, not political, anxieties. “I think that’s not their goal,” they said. “I think their goal is to maintain their own control over the most powerful stuff.” 

    “I also talked to some people who work at OpenAI who weren’t from the U.S. who were feeling like … ‘What’s going to happen to my country?’”

    But even if its motivations are cynical, company sources told The Intercept that national security considerations still pervaded OpenAI. The first source recalled a member of OpenAI’s corporate security team regularly engaging with the U.S. intelligence community to safeguard the company’s ultra-valuable machine-learning models. The second recalled concern about the extent of the government’s relationship — and potential control over — OpenAI’s technology. A common fear among AI safety researchers is a future scenario in which artificial intelligence models begin autonomously designing newer versions, ad infinitum, leading human engineers to lose control.

    “One reason why the military AI angle could be bad for safety is that you end up getting the same sort of thing with AIs designing successors designing successors, except that it’s happening in a military black project instead of in a somewhat more transparent corporation,” the second source said. 

    “Occasionally there’d be talk of, like, eventually the government will wake up, and there’ll be a nuclear power plant next to a data center next to a bunker, and we’ll all be moved into the bunker so that we can, like, beat China by managing an intelligence explosion,” they added. At a company that recruits top engineering talent internationally, the prospect of American dominance of a technology they believe could be cataclysmic was at times disquieting. “I remember I also talked to some people who work at OpenAI who weren’t from the U.S. who were feeling kind of sad about that and being like, ‘What’s going to happen to my country after the U.S. gets all the super intelligences?’”

    Sincerity aside, OpenAI has spent the past year training its corporate algorithm on flag-waving, defense lobbying, and a strident anticommunism that smacks more of the John Birch Society than the Whole Earth Catalog.

    In his white paper, Lehane, a former press secretary for Vice President Al Gore and special counsel to President Bill Clinton, advocates not for a globalist techno-utopia in which artificial intelligence jointly benefits the world, but a benevolent jingoism in which freedom and prosperity is underwritten by the guarantee of American dominance. While the document notes fleetingly, in its very last line, the idea of “work toward AI that benefits everyone,” the pitch is not one of true global benefit, but of American prosperity that trickles down to its allies.

    Related

    Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea

    The company proposes strict rules walling off parts of the world, namely China, from AI’s benefits, on the grounds that they are simply too dangerous to be trusted. OpenAI explicitly advocates for conceiving of the AI market not as an international one, but “the entire world less the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and its few allies,” a line that quietly excludes over 1 billion people from the humanity the company says it wishes to benefit and millions who live under U.S.-allied authoritarian rule. 

    In pursuit of “democratic values,” OpenAI proposes dividing the entire planet into three tiers. At the top: “Countries that commit to democratic AI principles by deploying AI systems in ways that promote more freedoms for their citizens could be considered Tier I countries.” Given the earlier mention of building “AI in line with democratic principles set out by the US government,” this group’s membership is clear: the United States, and its friends.

    In pursuit of “democratic values,” OpenAI proposes dividing the entire planet into three tiers.

    Beneath them are Tier 2 countries, a geopolitical purgatory defined only as those that have failed to sufficiently enforce American export control policies and protect American intellectual property from Tier 3: Communist China. “CCP-led China, along with a small cohort of countries aligned with the CCP, would represent its own category that is prohibited from accessing democratic AI systems,” the paper explains. To keep these barriers intact — while allowing for the chance that Tier 2 countries might someday graduate to the top — OpenAI suggests coordinating “global bans on CCP-aligned AI” and “prohibiting relationships” between other countries and China’s military or intelligence services.

    One of the former OpenAI employees said concern about China at times circulated throughout the company. “Definitely concerns about espionage came up,” this source said, “including ‘Are particular people who work at the company spies or agents?’” At one point, they said, a colleague worried about a specific co-worker they’d learned was the child of a Chinese government official. The sourced recalled “some people being very upset about the implication” that the company had been infiltrated by foreigners, while others wanted an actual answer: “‘Is anyone who works at the company a spy or foreign agent?’”

    The company’s public adoration of Western democracy is not without wrinkles. In early May, OpenAI announced an initiative to build data centers and customized ChatGPT bots with foreign governments, as part of its $500 billion “Project Stargate” AI infrastructure construction blitz.

    “This is a moment when we need to act to support countries around the world that would prefer to build on democratic AI rails, and provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power,” the announcement read.

    Unmentioned in that celebration of AI democracy is the fact that Project Stargate’s financial backers include the government of Abu Dhabi, an absolute monarchy. On May 23, Altman tweeted that it was “great to work with the UAE” on Stargate, describing co-investor and Emirati national security adviser Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan as a “great supporter of openai, a true believer in AGI, and a dear personal friend.” In 2019, Reuters revealed how a team of mercenary hackers working for Emirati intelligence under Tahnoun had illegally broken into the devices of targets around the world, including American citizens.

    Asked how a close partnership with an authoritarian Emirati autocracy fit into its broader mission of spreading democratic values, OpenAI pointed to a recent op-ed in The Hill in which Lehane discusses the partnership.

    “We’re working closely with American officials to ensure our international partnerships meet the highest standards of security and compliance,” Lehane writes, adding, “Authoritarian regimes would be excluded.”

    OpenAI’s new direction has been reflected in its hiring.

    Since hiring Mulligan, the company has continued to expand its D.C. operation. Mulligan works on national security policy with a team of former Department of Defense, NSA, CIA, and Special Operations personnel. Gabrielle Tarini joined the company after almost two years at the Defense Department, where she worked on “Indo-Pacific security affairs” and “China policy,” according to LinkedIn. Sasha Baker, who runs national security policy, joined after years at the National Security Council and Pentagon.

    OpenAI’s policy team includes former DoD, NSA, CIA, and Special Operations personnel.

    The list goes on: Other policy team hires at OpenAI include veterans of the NSA, a Pentagon former special operations and South China Sea expert, and a graduate of the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. OpenAI’s military and intelligence revolving door continues to turn: At the end of April, the company recruited Alexis Bonnell, the former chief information officer of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Recent job openings have included a “Relationship Manager” focusing on “strategic relationships with U.S. government customers.”

    Mulligan, the head of national security policy and partnerships, is both deeply connected to the defense and intelligence apparatus, and adept at the kind of ethically ambivalent thinking common to the tech sector.

    “Not everything that has happened at Guantanamo Bay is to be praised, that’s for sure, but [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitting to his crimes, even all these years later, is a big moment for many (including me),” she posted last year. In a March podcast appearance, Mulligan noted she worked on “Gitmo rendition, detention, and interrogation” during her time in government.

    Mulligan’s public rhetoric matches the ideological drift of a company that today seems more concerned with “competition” and “adversaries” than kumbaya globalism. 

    On LinkedIn, she seems to embody the contradiction between a global mission and full-throated alignment with American policy values. “I’m excited to be joining OpenAI to help them ensure that AI is safe and beneficial to all of humanity,” she wrote upon her hiring from the Pentagon.

    Since then, she has regularly represented OpenAI’s interests and American interests as one and the same, sharing national security truisms such as “In a competition with China, the pace of AI adoption matters,” or “The United States’ continued lead on AI is essential to our national security and economic competitiveness,” or “Congress needs to make some decisive investments to ensure the U.S. national security community has the resources to harness the advantage the U.S. has on this technology.” 

    Related

    Trump’s Pick for a Top Army Job Works at a Weapons Company — And Won’t Give Up His Stock

    This is to some extent conventional wisdom of the country’s past 100 years: A strong, powerful America is good for the whole world. But OpenAI has shifted from an organization that believed its tech would lift up the whole world, unbounded by national borders, to one that talks like Lockheed Martin. Part of OpenAI’s national security realignment has come in the form of occasional “disruption” reports detailing how the company detected and neutralized “malicious use” of its tools by foreign governments, coincidentally almost all of them considered adversaries of the United States. 

    As the provider of services like ChatGPT, OpenAI has near-total visibility into how the tools are used or misused by individuals, what the company describes in one report as its “unique vantage point.” The reports detail not only how these governments attempted to use ChatGPT, but also the steps OpenAI took to thwart them, described by the company as an “effort to support broader efforts by U.S. and allied governments.” Each report has focused almost entirely on malign AI uses by “state affiliated” actors from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia. A May 2024 report outed an Israeli propaganda effort using ChatGPT but stopped short of connecting it to that country’s government.

    Earlier this month, representatives of the intelligence agency and the contractors who serve them gathered at the America’s Center Convention Complex in St. Louis for the GEOINT Symposium, dedicated to geospatial intelligence, the form of tradecraft analyzing satellite and other imagery of the planet to achieve military and intelligence objectives. 

    On May 20, Mulligan took to the stage to demonstrate how OpenAI’s services could help U.S. spy agencies and the Pentagon better exploit the Earth’s surface. Though the government’s practice of GEOINT frequently ends in the act of killing, Mulligan used a gentler example, demonstrating the ability of ChatGPT to pinpoint the location where a photograph of a rabbit was taken. It was nothing if not a sales pitch, one predicated on the fear that some other country might leap at the opportunity before the United States.

    “Government often feels like using AI is too risky and that it’s better and safer to keep doing things the way that we’ve always done them, and I think this is the most dangerous mix of all,” Mulligan told her audience. “If we keep doing things the way that we always have, and our adversaries adapt to this technology before we do, they will have all of the advantages that I show you today, and we will not be safer.” 

    The post Whose National Security? OpenAI’s Vision for American Techno-Dominance appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • OpenAI has always said it’s a different kind of Big Tech titan, founded not just to rack up a stratospheric valuation of $400 billion (and counting), but also to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” 

    The meteoric machine-learning firm announced itself to the world in a December 2015 press release that lays out a vision of technology to benefit all people as people, not citizens. There are neither good guys nor adversaries. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the announcement stated with confidence. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”

    Early rhetoric from the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, described advanced artificial intelligence as a harbinger of a globalist utopia, a technology that wouldn’t be walled off by national or corporate boundaries but enjoyed together by the species that birthed it. In an early interview with Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, Altman described a vision of artificial intelligence “freely owned by the world” in common. When Vanity Fair asked in a 2015 interview why the company hadn’t set out as a for-profit venture, Altman replied: “I think that the misaligned incentives there would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.”

    Times have changed. And OpenAI wants the White House to think it has too.

    In a March 13 white paper submitted directly to the Trump administration, OpenAI’s global affairs chief Chris Lehane pitched a near future of AI built for the explicit purpose of maintaining American hegemony and thwarting the interests of its geopolitical competitors — specifically China. The policy paper’s mentions of freedom abound, but the proposal’s true byword is national security.

    OpenAI never attempts to reconcile its full-throated support of American security with its claims to work for the whole planet, not a single country. After opening with a quotation from Trump’s own executive order on AI, the action plan proposes that the government create a direct line for the AI industry to reach the entire national security community, work with OpenAI “to develop custom models for national security,” and increase intelligence sharing between industry and spy agencies “to mitigate national security risks,” namely from China.

    In the place of techno-globalism, OpenAI outlines a Cold Warrior exhortation to divide the world into camps. OpenAI will ally with those “countries who prefer to build AI on democratic rails,” and get them to commit to “deploy AI in line with democratic principles set out by the US government.”

    The rhetoric seems pulled directly from the keyboard of an “America First” foreign policy hawk like Marco Rubio or Rep. Mike Gallagher, not a company whose website still endorses the goal of lifting up the whole world. The word “humanity,” in fact, never appears in the action plan.

    Rather, the plan asks Trump, to whom Altman donated $1 million for his inauguration ceremony, to “ensure that American-led AI prevails over CCP-led AI” — the Chinese Communist Party — “securing both American leadership on AI and a brighter future for all Americans.”

    It’s an inherently nationalist pitch: The concepts of “democratic values” and “democratic infrastructure” are both left largely undefined beyond their American-ness. What is democratic AI? American AI. What is American AI? The AI of freedom. And regulation of any kind, of course, “may hinder our economic competitiveness and undermine our national security,” Lehane writes, suggesting a total merging of corporate and national interests.

    Related

    Trump’s Big, Beautiful Handout to the AI Industry

    In an emailed statement, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois declined to explain the company’s nationalist pivot but defended its national security work.

    “We believe working closely with the U.S. government is critical to advancing our mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity,” Bourgeois wrote. “The U.S. is uniquely positioned to help shape global norms around safe, secure, and broadly beneficial AI development—rooted in democratic values and international collaboration.”

    The Intercept is currently suing OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT.

    OpenAI’s newfound patriotism is loud. But is it real? 

    In his 2015 interview with Musk, Altman spoke of artificial intelligence as a technology so special and so powerful that it ought to transcend national considerations. Pressed on OpenAI’s goal to share artificial intelligence technology globally rather than keeping it under domestic control, Altman provided an answer far more ambivalent than the company’s current day mega-patriotism: “If only one person gets to have it, how do you decide if that should be Google or the U.S. government or the Chinese government or ISIS or who?” 

    He also said, in the early days of OpenAI, that there may be limits to what his company might do for his country.

    “I unabashedly love this country, which is the greatest country in the world,” Altman told the New Yorker in 2016. “But some things we will never do with the Department of Defense.” In the profile, he expressed ambivalence about overtures to OpenAI from then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who envisioned using the company’s tools for targeting purposes. At the time, this would have run afoul of the company’s own ethical guidelines, which for years stated explicitly that customers could not use its services for “military and warfare” purposes, writing off any Pentagon contracting entirely. 

    Related

    OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

    In January 2024, The Intercept reported that OpenAI had deleted this military contracting ban from its policies without explanation or announcement. Asked about how the policy reversal might affect business with other countries in an interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI executive Anna Makanju said the company is “focused on United States national security agencies.” But insiders who spoke with The Intercept on conditions of anonymity suggested that the company’s turn to jingoism may come more from opportunism than patriotism. Though Altman has long been on the record as endorsing corporate support of the United States, under an administration where the personal favor of the president means far more than the will of lawmakers, parroting muscular foreign policy rhetoric is good for business.

    One OpenAI source who spoke with The Intercept recalled concerned discussions about the possibility that the U.S. government would nationalize the company. They said that at times, this was discussed with the company’s head of national security partnerships, Katrina Mulligan. Mulligan joined the company in February 2024 after a career in the U.S. intelligence and military establishment, including leading the media and public policy response to Edward Snowden’s leaks while on the Obama National Security Council staff, working for the director of national intelligence, serving as a senior civilian overseeing Special Operations forces in the Pentagon, and working as chief of staff to the secretary of the Army.

    This source speculated that fostering closeness with the government was one method of fending off the potential risk of nationalization.

    As an independent research organization with ostensibly noble, global goals, OpenAI may have been less equipped to beat back regulatory intervention, a second former OpenAI employee suggested. What we see now, they said, is the company “transitioning from presenting themselves as a nonprofit with very altruistic, pro-humanity aims, to presenting themselves as an economic and military powerhouse that the government needs to support, shelter, and cut red tape on behalf of.”

    The second source said they believed the national security rhetoric was indicative of OpenAI “sucking up to the administration,” not a genuinely held commitment by executives.

    “In terms of how decisions were actually made, what seemed to be the deciding factor was basically how can OpenAI win the race rather than anything to do with either humanity or national security,” they added. “In today’s political environment, it’s a winning move with the administration to talk about America winning and national security and stuff like that. But you should not confuse that for the actual thing that’s driving decision-making internally.”

    The person said that talk of preventing Chinese dominance over artificial intelligence likely reflects business, not political, anxieties. “I think that’s not their goal,” they said. “I think their goal is to maintain their own control over the most powerful stuff.” 

    “I also talked to some people who work at OpenAI who weren’t from the U.S. who were feeling like … ‘What’s going to happen to my country?’”

    But even if its motivations are cynical, company sources told The Intercept that national security considerations still pervaded OpenAI. The first source recalled a member of OpenAI’s corporate security team regularly engaging with the U.S. intelligence community to safeguard the company’s ultra-valuable machine-learning models. The second recalled concern about the extent of the government’s relationship — and potential control over — OpenAI’s technology. A common fear among AI safety researchers is a future scenario in which artificial intelligence models begin autonomously designing newer versions, ad infinitum, leading human engineers to lose control.

    “One reason why the military AI angle could be bad for safety is that you end up getting the same sort of thing with AIs designing successors designing successors, except that it’s happening in a military black project instead of in a somewhat more transparent corporation,” the second source said. 

    “Occasionally there’d be talk of, like, eventually the government will wake up, and there’ll be a nuclear power plant next to a data center next to a bunker, and we’ll all be moved into the bunker so that we can, like, beat China by managing an intelligence explosion,” they added. At a company that recruits top engineering talent internationally, the prospect of American dominance of a technology they believe could be cataclysmic was at times disquieting. “I remember I also talked to some people who work at OpenAI who weren’t from the U.S. who were feeling kind of sad about that and being like, ‘What’s going to happen to my country after the U.S. gets all the super intelligences?’”

    Sincerity aside, OpenAI has spent the past year training its corporate algorithm on flag-waving, defense lobbying, and a strident anticommunism that smacks more of the John Birch Society than the Whole Earth Catalog.

    In his white paper, Lehane, a former press secretary for Vice President Al Gore and special counsel to President Bill Clinton, advocates not for a globalist techno-utopia in which artificial intelligence jointly benefits the world, but a benevolent jingoism in which freedom and prosperity is underwritten by the guarantee of American dominance. While the document notes fleetingly, in its very last line, the idea of “work toward AI that benefits everyone,” the pitch is not one of true global benefit, but of American prosperity that trickles down to its allies.

    Related

    Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea

    The company proposes strict rules walling off parts of the world, namely China, from AI’s benefits, on the grounds that they are simply too dangerous to be trusted. OpenAI explicitly advocates for conceiving of the AI market not as an international one, but “the entire world less the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and its few allies,” a line that quietly excludes over 1 billion people from the humanity the company says it wishes to benefit and millions who live under U.S.-allied authoritarian rule. 

    In pursuit of “democratic values,” OpenAI proposes dividing the entire planet into three tiers. At the top: “Countries that commit to democratic AI principles by deploying AI systems in ways that promote more freedoms for their citizens could be considered Tier I countries.” Given the earlier mention of building “AI in line with democratic principles set out by the US government,” this group’s membership is clear: the United States, and its friends.

    In pursuit of “democratic values,” OpenAI proposes dividing the entire planet into three tiers.

    Beneath them are Tier 2 countries, a geopolitical purgatory defined only as those that have failed to sufficiently enforce American export control policies and protect American intellectual property from Tier 3: Communist China. “CCP-led China, along with a small cohort of countries aligned with the CCP, would represent its own category that is prohibited from accessing democratic AI systems,” the paper explains. To keep these barriers intact — while allowing for the chance that Tier 2 countries might someday graduate to the top — OpenAI suggests coordinating “global bans on CCP-aligned AI” and “prohibiting relationships” between other countries and China’s military or intelligence services.

    One of the former OpenAI employees said concern about China at times circulated throughout the company. “Definitely concerns about espionage came up,” this source said, “including ‘Are particular people who work at the company spies or agents?’” At one point, they said, a colleague worried about a specific co-worker they’d learned was the child of a Chinese government official. The sourced recalled “some people being very upset about the implication” that the company had been infiltrated by foreigners, while others wanted an actual answer: “‘Is anyone who works at the company a spy or foreign agent?’”

    The company’s public adoration of Western democracy is not without wrinkles. In early May, OpenAI announced an initiative to build data centers and customized ChatGPT bots with foreign governments, as part of its $500 billion “Project Stargate” AI infrastructure construction blitz.

    “This is a moment when we need to act to support countries around the world that would prefer to build on democratic AI rails, and provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power,” the announcement read.

    Unmentioned in that celebration of AI democracy is the fact that Project Stargate’s financial backers include the government of Abu Dhabi, an absolute monarchy. On May 23, Altman tweeted that it was “great to work with the UAE” on Stargate, describing co-investor and Emirati national security adviser Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan as a “great supporter of openai, a true believer in AGI, and a dear personal friend.” In 2019, Reuters revealed how a team of mercenary hackers working for Emirati intelligence under Tahnoun had illegally broken into the devices of targets around the world, including American citizens.

    Asked how a close partnership with an authoritarian Emirati autocracy fit into its broader mission of spreading democratic values, OpenAI pointed to a recent op-ed in The Hill in which Lehane discusses the partnership.

    “We’re working closely with American officials to ensure our international partnerships meet the highest standards of security and compliance,” Lehane writes, adding, “Authoritarian regimes would be excluded.”

    OpenAI’s new direction has been reflected in its hiring.

    Since hiring Mulligan, the company has continued to expand its D.C. operation. Mulligan works on national security policy with a team of former Department of Defense, NSA, CIA, and Special Operations personnel. Gabrielle Tarini joined the company after almost two years at the Defense Department, where she worked on “Indo-Pacific security affairs” and “China policy,” according to LinkedIn. Sasha Baker, who runs national security policy, joined after years at the National Security Council and Pentagon.

    OpenAI’s policy team includes former DoD, NSA, CIA, and Special Operations personnel.

    The list goes on: Other policy team hires at OpenAI include veterans of the NSA, a Pentagon former special operations and South China Sea expert, and a graduate of the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. OpenAI’s military and intelligence revolving door continues to turn: At the end of April, the company recruited Alexis Bonnell, the former chief information officer of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Recent job openings have included a “Relationship Manager” focusing on “strategic relationships with U.S. government customers.”

    Mulligan, the head of national security policy and partnerships, is both deeply connected to the defense and intelligence apparatus, and adept at the kind of ethically ambivalent thinking common to the tech sector.

    “Not everything that has happened at Guantanamo Bay is to be praised, that’s for sure, but [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitting to his crimes, even all these years later, is a big moment for many (including me),” she posted last year. In a March podcast appearance, Mulligan noted she worked on “Gitmo rendition, detention, and interrogation” during her time in government.

    Mulligan’s public rhetoric matches the ideological drift of a company that today seems more concerned with “competition” and “adversaries” than kumbaya globalism. 

    On LinkedIn, she seems to embody the contradiction between a global mission and full-throated alignment with American policy values. “I’m excited to be joining OpenAI to help them ensure that AI is safe and beneficial to all of humanity,” she wrote upon her hiring from the Pentagon.

    Since then, she has regularly represented OpenAI’s interests and American interests as one and the same, sharing national security truisms such as “In a competition with China, the pace of AI adoption matters,” or “The United States’ continued lead on AI is essential to our national security and economic competitiveness,” or “Congress needs to make some decisive investments to ensure the U.S. national security community has the resources to harness the advantage the U.S. has on this technology.” 

    Related

    Trump’s Pick for a Top Army Job Works at a Weapons Company — And Won’t Give Up His Stock

    This is to some extent conventional wisdom of the country’s past 100 years: A strong, powerful America is good for the whole world. But OpenAI has shifted from an organization that believed its tech would lift up the whole world, unbounded by national borders, to one that talks like Lockheed Martin. Part of OpenAI’s national security realignment has come in the form of occasional “disruption” reports detailing how the company detected and neutralized “malicious use” of its tools by foreign governments, coincidentally almost all of them considered adversaries of the United States. 

    As the provider of services like ChatGPT, OpenAI has near-total visibility into how the tools are used or misused by individuals, what the company describes in one report as its “unique vantage point.” The reports detail not only how these governments attempted to use ChatGPT, but also the steps OpenAI took to thwart them, described by the company as an “effort to support broader efforts by U.S. and allied governments.” Each report has focused almost entirely on malign AI uses by “state affiliated” actors from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia. A May 2024 report outed an Israeli propaganda effort using ChatGPT but stopped short of connecting it to that country’s government.

    Earlier this month, representatives of the intelligence agency and the contractors who serve them gathered at the America’s Center Convention Complex in St. Louis for the GEOINT Symposium, dedicated to geospatial intelligence, the form of tradecraft analyzing satellite and other imagery of the planet to achieve military and intelligence objectives. 

    On May 20, Mulligan took to the stage to demonstrate how OpenAI’s services could help U.S. spy agencies and the Pentagon better exploit the Earth’s surface. Though the government’s practice of GEOINT frequently ends in the act of killing, Mulligan used a gentler example, demonstrating the ability of ChatGPT to pinpoint the location where a photograph of a rabbit was taken. It was nothing if not a sales pitch, one predicated on the fear that some other country might leap at the opportunity before the United States.

    “Government often feels like using AI is too risky and that it’s better and safer to keep doing things the way that we’ve always done them, and I think this is the most dangerous mix of all,” Mulligan told her audience. “If we keep doing things the way that we always have, and our adversaries adapt to this technology before we do, they will have all of the advantages that I show you today, and we will not be safer.” 

    The post OpenAI’s Pitch to Trump: Rank the World on U.S. Tech Interests appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it

    The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,” says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – “or its sequel, Eighteen Inches”, he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.

    Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don’t want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it’s a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it’s worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.


  • Dig down about a mile or two in parts of the United States and you’ll start to see the remains of an ancient ocean. The shells of long dead sea creatures are compressed into white limestone, surrounding brine aquifers with a higher salt content than the Atlantic Ocean. 

    Last summer, ExxonMobil sponsored week-long camps to teach grade school students from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi about the virtues of these aquifers, specifically their ability to serve as carbon capture and sequestration wells, where oil, gas, and heavy industry can bury harmful emissions deep underground. In one exercise, students were given 20 minutes to build a model reservoir out of vegetable oil, Play-Doh, pasta, and uncooked beans. Whoever could keep the most vegetable oil (meant to represent liquified carbon dioxide) in their aquifer, won. 

    This kind of down-home carbon capture boosterism is a relatively new development for the oil and gas giant. Over recent years, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have spent millions lobbying for government support of what they see as industry-friendly green technology, most prominently carbon capture and storage, which many scientists and environmental activists have argued is ineffective and distracts from eliminating fossil fuel operations in the first place. According to Exxon’s website, it’s evidence that they are leading “the biggest energy transition in history.” 

    Now that Congress has turned its attention to rolling back government spending on renewable energy, it appears that most of the climate “solutions” being left off the chopping block are the ones favored by carbon-intensive companies like Exxon. Corporate tax breaks for carbon capture and storage, for instance, were one of the few things left untouched when House Republicans passed a budget bill on May 22 that effectively gutted the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation. What remained of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits were incentives for nuclear, so-called clean fuels like ethanol, and carbon capture. When the IRA was passed in 2022, there was immediate backlash against the provisions for carbon capture. 

    “Essentially, we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing a private sewer system for oil and gas,” said Sandra Steingraber, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network.

    The tax credits for nuclear power plants, which produce energy without emitting greenhouse gases, are meant to spur what President Donald Trump hopes will be an “energy renaissance,” bolstered by a flurry of pro-nuclear executive orders he issued a day after the budget bill cleared the House. Projects will be able to use the tax credits if they begin construction by 2031; wind and solar companies, however, will lose access to tax credits unless they begin construction within 60 days of Trump signing the bill, and are fully up and running by 2028.

    That the carbon capture tax credit was never in danger of being revoked is a testament to its importance to the oil and gas industry, said Jim Walsh, the policy director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch. “The major beneficiaries of these tax credits are oil and gas companies and big agricultural interests.” 

    The carbon capture tax credit was first established in 2008, but the subsidies were more than doubled when it was tacked on to the IRA in order to get former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s vote. Companies now receive $60 for every ton of CO2 captured and used to drive oil out of the ground (a process known as “enhanced oil recovery”) and up to $85 for a ton of CO2 that is permanently stored. As roughly 60 percent of captured C02 in the United States is used for enhanced oil recovery, detractors see the tax credit as something of a devil’s bargain, a provision that props up an industry at taxpayer expense. 

    oil refinery emitting smoke in front of a beautiful pink sunset
    An oil refinery in Los Angeles Mario Tama/Getty Images

    How much carbon is actually captured by these projects is also a matter of debate. The tax credit requires companies that claim it to self-report how much CO2 they inject to the Internal Revenue Service. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is in charge of tracking leaks. There are tax penalties if captured carbon ends up leaking, but those penalties only apply if the leaks occur in the first 3 years after injection. Holding companies accountable is made more complicated by the fact that tax returns are confidential, and Walsh cautions that there is very little communication between the EPA and the IRS. Oversight is “very, very minimal,” added Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research firm.

    “You can keep some really played out oil fields going for a long time, and you can get the public to pay for it,” said Carolyn Raffensberger, the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, explaining the potential impact of the budget bill. “So the argument is, ‘This is a win for the climate, it’s a win for energy dominance.’ [But] it’s really a budget buster with no guardrails at all.” 

    Existing carbon-capture facilities have been plagued by technical and financial issues. The country’s first commercial carbon capture plant in Decatur, Illinois, sprung two leaks last year directly under Lake Decatur, which is the town’s main source of drinking water. When concentrated CO2 hits water it turns into carbonic acid, which then leaches heavy metals from rocks within the aquifer and poisons the water. Although a certain level of public health concerns come with many emerging technologies, critics point out that all of this risk is being taken for a technology that has not been proven to work at scale, and may actually increase emissions by incentivizing more oil and gas production. It could also strain the existing electrical grid — outfitting a natural gas or coal plant with carbon capture equipment can suck up about 15 to 25 percent of the plant’s power. 

    The tax credits exist “to pollute and confuse people,” said Mark Jacobsen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, who has argued that there is essentially no reasonable use for carbon capture. They “increase people’s [energy] costs and do nothing for the climate.”

    But the technology does have its defenders among scientists. The 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called an increase in carbon capture technology “unavoidable” if countries  want to reach net-zero emissions. Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an umbrella organization of fossil fuel companies, unions, and environmental groups, contends that arguments like Jacobsen’s unnecessarily set the technology against renewables. “We need all the solutions in the toolkit,” she said. “We’re not saying don’t deploy these other technologies. We see this very much as a complementary and supportive piece in the broader decarbonization toolkit.” 

    Stolark said that carbon capture didn’t make it out of the budget process entirely unscathed, as the bill specified that companies could no longer sell carbon capture tax credits. So-called “transferability” — the ability to sell these tax credits on the open market — has been invaluable to small energy startups that have struggled to secure financing in their early stages, according to Stolark. The Carbon Capture Coalition is urging lawmakers to restore transferability now that the bill has moved from the House to the Senate.

    Still, the kinds of companies likely to claim carbon capture tax credits — often major players in oil and gas, ammonia, steel, and other heavy industries — are less likely to rely on transferability than more modest companies (often providers of renewable energy), whose smaller tax bills makes it harder for them to realize the value of their respective tax credits. 

    “A lot of the factories, the power plants, the industrial facilities deploying within the next ten years or so, are expected to be these really big [facilities] with the big tax burdens,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at Energy Innovations, a clean energy think tank based in San Francisco. “They’re not the type of smaller producers — like small solar companies — that are reliant on transferability in order to monetize the tax credit.” 

    To some observers, keeping the carbon capture credit looks like a flagrant giveaway to the oil and gas industry. Juhn estimated that the credit could end up costing taxpayers more than $800 billion by 2040. Given the House bill’s aggressive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Juhn finds the carbon capture credit offensive. “When we look at these other programs, where we’re nickel and diming benefits to folks that could really use them, what does that mean? It’s gross.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s likely to survive from Biden’s climate law? The controversial stuff on May 30, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.

    —Elon Musk

    The Deep State is not going away. It’s just being replaced.

    Replaced not by a charismatic autocrat or even a shadowy bureaucracy, but by artificial intelligence (AI)—unfeeling, unaccountable, and immortal.

    As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the machinery of power is quietly shifting into the hands of algorithms.

    Under Donald Trump’s watch, that shift is being locked in for at least a generation.

    Trump’s latest legislative initiative—a 10-year ban on AI regulation buried within the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—strips state and local governments of the ability to impose any guardrails on artificial intelligence until 2035.

    Despite bipartisan warnings from 40 state attorneys general, the bill passed the House and awaits Senate approval. It is nothing less than a federal green light for AI to operate without oversight in every sphere of life, from law enforcement and employment to healthcare, education, and digital surveillance.

    This is not innovation.

    This is institutionalized automation of tyranny.

    This is how, within a state of algorithmic governance, code quickly replaces constitutional law as the mechanism for control.

    We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled by software.

    Algorithmic governance refers to the use of machine learning and automated decision-making systems to carry out functions once reserved for human beings: policing, welfare eligibility, immigration vetting, job recruitment, credit scoring, and judicial risk assessments.

    In this regime, the law is no longer interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. Without room for appeal, discretion, or human mercy.

    These AI systems rely on historical data—data riddled with systemic bias and human error—to make predictions and trigger decisions. Predictive policing algorithms tell officers where to patrol and whom to stop. Facial recognition technology flags “suspects” based on photos scraped from social media. Risk assessment software assigns threat scores to citizens with no explanation, no oversight, and no redress.

    These algorithms operate in black boxes, shielded by trade secrets and protected by national security exemptions. The public cannot inspect them. Courts cannot challenge them. Citizens cannot escape them.

    The result? A population sorted, scored, and surveilled by machinery.

    This is the practical result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda: AI systems given carte blanche to surveil, categorize, and criminalize the public without transparency or recourse.

    And these aren’t theoretical dangers—they’re already happening.

    Examples of unchecked AI and predictive policing show that precrime is already here.

    Once you are scored and flagged by a machine, the outcome can be life-altering—as it was for Michael Williams, a 65-year-old man who spent nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Williams was behind the wheel when a passing car fired at his vehicle, killing his 25-year-old passenger, who had hitched a ride.

    Despite no motive, no weapon, and no eyewitnesses, police charged Williams based on an AI-powered gunshot detection program called ShotSpotter. The system picked up a loud bang near the area and triangulated it to Williams’ vehicle. The charge was ultimately dropped for lack of evidence.

    This is precrime in action. A prediction, not proof. An algorithm, not an eyewitness.

    Programs like ShotSpotter are notorious for misclassifying noises like fireworks and construction as gunfire. Employees have even manually altered data to fit police narratives. And yet these systems are being combined with predictive policing software to generate risk maps, target individuals, and justify surveillance—all without transparency or accountability.

    It doesn’t stop there.

    AI is now flagging families for potential child neglect based on predictive models that pull data from Medicaid, mental health, jail, and housing records. These models disproportionately target poor and minority families. The algorithm assigns risk scores from 1 to 20. Families and their attorneys are never told what the scores are, or that they were used.

    Imagine losing your child to the foster system because a secret algorithm said you might be a risk.

    This is how AI redefines guilt.

    The Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation reveals a deeper plan to deregulate democracy itself.

    Rather than curbing these abuses, the Trump administration is accelerating them.

    An executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” signed by President Trump in early 2025, revoked prior AI safeguards, eliminated bias audits, and instructed agencies to prioritize “innovation” over ethics. The order encourages every federal agency to adopt AI quickly, especially in areas like policing and surveillance.

    Under the guise of “efficiency,” constitutional protections are being erased.

    Trump’s 10-year moratorium on AI regulation is the logical next step. It dismantles the last line of defense—state-level resistance—and ensures a uniform national policy of algorithmic dominance.

    The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

    The federal government’s AI expansion is building a surveillance state that no human authority can restrain.

    Welcome to Surveillance State 2.0, the Immortal Machine.

    Over 1700 uses of AI have already been reported across federal agencies, with hundreds directly impacting safety and rights. Many agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, are deploying AI for decision-making without public input or oversight.

    This is what the technocrats call an “algocracy”—rule by algorithm.

    In an algocracy, unelected developers and corporate contractors hold more power over your life than elected officials.

    Your health, freedom, mobility, and privacy are subject to automated scoring systems you can’t see and can’t appeal.

    And unlike even the most entrenched human dictators, these systems do not die. They do not forget. They are not swayed by mercy or reason. They do not stand for re-election.

    They persist.

    When AI governs by prediction, due process disappears in a haze of machine logic.

    The most chilling effect of this digital regime is the death of due process.

    What court can you appeal to when an algorithm has labeled you a danger? What lawyer can cross-examine a predictive model? What jury can weigh the reasoning of a neural net trained on flawed data?

    You are guilty because the machine says so. And the machine is never wrong.

    When due process dissolves into data processing, the burden of proof flips. The presumption of innocence evaporates. Citizens are forced to prove they are not threats, not risks, not enemies.

    And most of the time, they don’t even know they’ve been flagged.

    This erosion of due process is not just a legal failure—it is a philosophical one, reducing individuals to data points in systems that no longer recognize their humanity.

    Writer and visionary Rod Serling warned of this very outcome more than half a century ago: a world where technology, masquerading as progress under the guise of order and logic, becomes the instrument of tyranny.

    That future is no longer fiction. What Serling imagined is now reality.

    The time to resist is now, before freedom becomes obsolete.

    To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

    “We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

    In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

    The Obsolete Man,” a story arc about the erasure of individual worth by a mechanized state, underscores the danger of rendering humans irrelevant in a system of cold automation and speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete.

    As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.

    Like Serling’s totalitarian state, our future will be defined by whether we conform to a dehumanizing machine order—or fight back before the immortal dictator becomes absolute.

    We now face a fork in the road: resist the rise of the immortal dictator or submit to the reign of the machine.

    This is not a battle against technology, but a battle against the unchecked, unregulated, and undemocratic use of technology to control people.

    We must demand algorithmic transparency, data ownership rights, and legal recourse against automated decisions. We need a Digital Bill of Rights that guarantees:

    • The right to know how algorithms affect us.
    • The right to challenge and appeal automated decisions.
    • The right to privacy and data security.
    • The right to be free from automated surveillance and predictive policing.
    • The right to be forgotten.

    Otherwise, AI becomes the ultimate enforcer of a surveillance state from which there is no escape.

    As Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, warned: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about. Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.

    An immortal dictator, indeed.

    Let us be clear: the threat is not just to our privacy, but to democracy itself.

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the time to fight back is now—before the code becomes law, and freedom becomes a memory.

    The post How AI and the Deep State Are Digitizing Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Not long ago, artificial intelligence executives were asking Congress for more regulation. The House of Representatives budget bill passed last week demonstrates how quickly the industry has changed course.

    Inside the House bill is a moratorium on the sort of state-level AI regulations that have addressed political “deepfakes” and using AI to deny medical claims. At the same time the House bill cuts Medicare, it would funnel more money to tech companies to develop kamikaze drones.

    For proponents of AI regulation, the House bill is the culmination of a shift in the industry’s mindset. Rather than paying lip service to popular concerns about AI, the industry has decided to partner with the Trump administration on its goal of “global AI dominance.”

    “The message is clear. The House Republican proposal is stealing from poor people to give huge handouts to Big Tech to build technology that is going to perpetuate the president’s authoritarian plans and crackdowns against vulnerable people,” said Kevin De Liban, the founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit aimed at preventing tech from harming low-income people.

    Banning Regulation

    The splashiest measure in the House bill may also be one of the least likely provisions to make it into law. States would be banned from drafting their own AI regulations for the next 10 years.

    At a recent House hearing, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., said the provision was motivated in part by frustration over Congress’s failure to pass nationwide regulation. The growing patchwork of state regulations presents a challenge for small startups, he said at a recent House hearing.

    “The people who can’t deal with that are two innovators in a garage trying to start the next OpenAI, the next Google. Those are the people we’re trying to protect,” he said. “I would love this to be months, not years. But I think it’s important to send the message that everyone needs to be motivated to come to the table here.”

    The patchwork is hardly as daunting as Obernolte claims it is, argued Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a think tank that opposes commercial surveillance. The most sweeping state legislation that has actually passed — in California and Colorado — mostly addresses transparency about when AI is being used, she said. Laws in other states are designed to go after the worst-of-the-worst actors in the developing field, Kak said. Those laws target political “deepfakes,” AI “revenge porn,” and the use of AI by health insurance companies.

    “This is not a sprawling morass of industry-burdening regulation. It truly is the bare minimum,” Kak said.

    The regulation moratorium passed by the House has sparked pushback from a bipartisan group of 40 state attorneys general, who called it “irresponsible,” and from consumer protection groups including Consumer Reports.

    The biggest companies in the AI industry have largely sidestepped commenting directly on the moratorium, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave his broad thoughts on regulation at a Senate hearing earlier this month.

    Related

    Microsoft Pitched OpenAI’s DALL-E as Battlefield Tool for U.S. Military

    In 2023, Altman made waves by calling for regulation of the industry. This month, however, he gave Senate testimony saying that it would be “disastrous” if the U.S. adopted regulations along the lines of Europe’s, which is set to require registration for “high-risk” AI systems and imposes other requirements on their developers. More broadly, he called for limited regulations of the industry.

    “I think some policy is good. I think it is easy for it to go too far and as I’ve learned more about how the world works, I’m more afraid that it could go too far and have really bad consequences,” he said.

    Observers are skeptical that the House moratorium will make it through the Senate. Republicans are using a process known as reconciliation to push the bill through the Senate with 50 votes instead of 60, the barrier to overcome a filibuster. A reconciliation guideline known as the Byrd rule, however, requires every provision of a reconciliation bill to center on the budget.

    “I feel pretty damn confident that the moratorium is going to fall out,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, who previously worked for the Biden White House and as a Democratic staffer on the Senate Budget Committee. “Telling a state what laws it is going to make has nothing to do with getting federal dollars in or out the door.”

    Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has promised to fight against the moratorium, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a budget committee member, has expressed his skepticism that the measure abides by Senate rules.

    Whatever becomes of the House provision, AI watchdogs say it could herald the beginning of an era where state-level regulation faces more hurdles.

    “We are probably going to see the ramping up of industry lobbying,” said Kak. “If this is where we are headed, I think it really ups the stakes for any state legislative effort.”

    Finding “Fraud”

    House Republicans appear to be on firmer footing with a provision to spend $25 million on AI contracts to detect and recoup Medicare fraud.

    That provision worries AI skeptics, who point to the history of such programs thus far. In Arkansas, an algorithm that was used to determine Medicaid eligibility cut off people from in-home health assistance.

    “It resulted in horrific cuts to my clients’ care,” said De Liban, who worked as a Legal Aid lawyer in Arkansas at the time. “People who formerly had been getting eight hours of care, which isn’t enough but is the state’s maximum, were cut to four or five hours of care. … They were lying in waste for hours on end.”

    In Texas, hundreds of Medicaid patients were also allegedly booted out of the program or faced hurdles because of errors in a state algorithm. Doctors and patients should be worried about the the House fraud provision given the history of artificial intelligence and algorithms so far, De Liban said.

    “We are going to use faulty, unreliable technology to probably keep doctors from being able to provide care to patients,” he said.

    Weapons of War

    The money for fraud prevention pales in comparison to other spending on AI. The bill includes billions of dollars for the Pentagon and border security — a promising market for a wave of Silicon Valley-funded defense startups.

    This proposed wave of spending on AI defense and border projects lines up with a shift in attitudes toward guardrails on the technology, Kak said.

    “If anything, this regulatory sentiment that we are seeing in the moratorium ports over even more aggressively to the national security space, where we are hearing that this is a moment to roll back on protections,” she said.

    The provisions in the House bill include $500 million for “attritable autonomous military capabilities” — think low-cost drones such as the ones Ukraine has used to defend against Russia; $450 million for AI and autonomous capabilities in naval shipbuilding; $298 million for AI and autonomous projects at the Pentagon’s Test Management Resource Center; $250 million for artificial intelligence at Cyber Command; $188 million for “maritime robotic autonomous systems”; $120 million for aerial surveillance drones; $111 million for kamikaze attack drones; and $20 million for using artificial intelligence in the Defense Department’s auditing process.

    Related

    The Questionable Case of Kristi Noem’s $50 Million Luxury Jet

    The alphabet soup of agencies involved in Trump’s border security and deportation campaign also benefit from the bill. U.S. Customs and Border Protection receives $2.7 billion for border surveillance technologies, $1 billion for anti-narcotics projects including artificial intelligence. The Coast Guard would also receive $75 million for “autonomous maritime systems.”

    Separately, the Commerce Department would receive $500 million for federal government IT modernization.

    Though Kak is skeptical that the AI defense contractors’ products are as transformational as they promise, these technologies have won favor in the White House. Trump, who once called AI “dangerous,” has tapped industry boosters such as JD Vance and David Sacks for key roles in his administration. One of his first executive orders called on agencies to remove barriers to AI adoption imposed by the Biden administration.

    “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security,” Trump said.

    The post Trump’s Big, Beautiful Handout to the AI Industry appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • …Those who control the food, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    …Those who control the water, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    …Those who control the money, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    …Those who control the media, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    …Those who control outer space, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    …Those who control the data, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

    Throwing in that “Big data” fishnet just a decade ago was the big new addition to the scientific method: Try to find even the most vague or minimally-recognized studies, and then let the computer develop the patterns.

    Ahh, was it David Quammen or some of the other thousands of sources I have utilized over a 45 year period that exposed me to that rare but highly interesting factoid that a woman’s daily diary entrees while living in Costa Rica allowed science to research why the birthrate had fallen and the survival rate had plummented for the golden toad.

    She catalogued the changing cloud and mist and fog cover in her homeland, and over a thirty year period, she meticulously recorded all number of tidbits of observation, including that reduction in the clouds hitting the treeline.

    Do the Google AI search, and nothing pops up.

    It’s pure lies, these AI generated responses: Quoting below.

    While the story of a woman’s diary specifically detailing the golden toad’s decline and its link to reduced mist in Costa Rica might be fictional or anecdotal, the core issue of the golden toad’s extinction and its relation to changing cloud forest conditions is well-documented.

    Here’s a breakdown of how changes in mist and fog likely contributed to the golden toad’s disappearance:

    1. Golden Toads and Their Cloud Forest Habitat:

    • The golden toad was endemic to a small, high-altitude region within the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, an environment known for its constant mist, high humidity, and a rainy season.
    • These specific conditions were crucial for the golden toad’s breeding cycle and survival.

    2. Climate Change and Reduced Mist:

    • Climate change has altered weather patterns globally, and the Monteverde Cloud Forest was not spared.
    • Researchers have observed a decrease in mist and moisture levels in the cloud forest, potentially due to rising temperatures and shifting cloud patterns.
    • This reduction in mist could have made the environment drier, impacting the golden toad’s delicate skin and potentially leading to dehydration.

    3. Impact on Breeding:

    • Golden toads relied on rainwater pools for breeding.
    • Reduced mist and rainfall likely led to the drying up of these crucial breeding pools, hindering the toad’s ability to reproduce successfully.

    4. The Chytrid Fungus:

    • Changes in climate, including drier conditions, could have created a more favorable environment for the chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen that affects amphibians.
    • This fungus attacks the skin of frogs and toads, disrupting their ability to absorb water and electrolytes, ultimately leading to death.

    In Summary:

    While a diary account remains unsubstantiated, the scientific consensus points towards climate change, leading to a reduction in mist and rainfall, as a significant factor in the golden toad’s extinction. These altered environmental conditions likely impacted the toad’s ability to breed and may have increased its vulnerability to the deadly chytrid fungus.

    *****

    So, my own Substacks (I have three under pseudonyms) have varying levels of so-called rant and railing and deep deep disregard for most authorities. A few hundred subscribers, and very few are paid ones.

    Because I do these “news” headline “essays,” my own news feeds have been corrupted with many times the opposite sort of sources I would go to for reliable information — Israeli rags, USA mainstream, European mainstream, defense/offensive professional journals, Bloomberg and Fortune, et al.

    What happens, though, is a reverse osmosis sort of play on the hourly news that gets fed to me via Bing, Yahoo, AP, UPI, CNN, and the list goes on.

    It’s not exactly a deep and sophisticated exercise that might end up on Dissident Voice, but I’ll attempt one now:

    1. Forgone conclusions, and this is the techno-fascist world controlling the narrative and that narrative is controlled by the oligarchs and the virus of a shifting baseline disorder and rampant disregard for a precautionary principle and the value of looking at intended and unintended (rare) negative effects of these titans of capital and their Brave Banal Evil Doers, the scientists, engineers, fabricators, technologists, et al.

    Exhibit A (infinity is really that number):

    Looks and sounds like a geek, such a nice sweet looking banal sort of fellow?

    • Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says in the next 5-10 years, AI will disturb more jobs
    • He urged teens to become code ninjas to deal with the AI-driven world
    • He also said that the youngest generation, Gen Alpha, must start experimenting with AI as soon as possible

    As the world dashes into an AI-driven future, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has a clear message for teens: learn now or be left behind. Hassabis leads Google DeepMind, the advanced research lab behind the company’s most high-end AI developments, including the Gemini chatbot. The lab is also spearheading Google’s efforts toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a yet-unrealised form of AI capable of human-level reasoning. At the recent Google I/O developer conference, Hassabis said DeepMind is likely less than a decade away from building AGI. As he works in such an environment, he certainly knows what form AI will take in the near future. (India Today, of all rags I get in my feeds)

    There are many many paywalls now, so anything from the NYT, well, I have to do end-arounds sometimes to read the entire pieces, but headlines and sub-headlines do the trick:

    At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

    Pushed to use artificial intelligence, software developers at the e-commerce giant say they must work faster and have less time to think. Others welcome the shift.

    Go to Reddit on this one headline and you get all sorts of opinions and personal experiences with codes.

    I’ve written much about Amazon, and I even organized with SEIU against Amazon’s warehouse unsafe warehouse conditions and their anti-union stance.

    But the geeks and all those soccer moms and geek dads want their children not to marry cowboys but to marry coders and software engineers, or drone impresarios: A “17-year-old designed a cheaper, more efficient drone. The Department of Defense just awarded him $23,000 for it.”

    Dual Use, man, dual use which is always Capitalist Abuse and Military Murder Hardware: Cooper Taylor, 17, aims to revolutionize the drone industry with a new design.

    Taylor designed a motor-tilting mechanism to lower manufacturing cost and increase efficiency.

    Taylor has spent the last year optimizing a type of drone that’s being used more and more in agriculture, disaster relief, wildlife conservation, search-and-rescue efforts, and medical deliveries.

    All drone technology is for murdering, in the end.

    And what fuels these death machines, these genocide facilitators? Geeks in high school robotics Olympics.

    A breathtaking flyover of nearly every United States Air Force fighter and bomber jet soared during a Florida air show Saturday, stunning footage of the historic aerial display showed.

    Seven of the top military aircraft, called the “Freedom Flyover,” united as “one unstoppable force” for thousands of people to take in over Memorial Day weekend at the Hyundai Air and Sea Show in Miami Beach.

    *****

    Somehow it ALWAYS comes down for me from these feeds back to the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Starving Polluting Poisoning Occupied Palestine:

    As thousands of Israeli nationalists and religious Jews on Monday marked Jerusalem Day, which celebrates Israel’s 1967 capture of east Jerusalem, some chanted “Death to Arabs” while marching through Muslim neighborhoods. Protesters, including an Israeli member of parliament, also reportedly stormed a compound belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

    [Oh, you can call these Jews in Israel Right-wing Nationalists, or pro-settler extermists, but they are in the Jewish State of Israel, and they are Jewish. Calling them Jewish is not anti-semitic, and leaving out the term “zionist” is not an error of omission.]

    Last year’s procession, which came during the first year of the war in Gaza, saw ultranationalist Israelis attack a Palestinian journalist in the Old City and call for violence against Palestinians. Four years ago, the march helped set off an 11-day war in Gaza.

    Tour buses carrying young ultranationalist Jews lined up near entrances to the Old City, bringing hundreds from outside Jerusalem, including settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

    Police said they had detained a number of individuals, without specifying, and “acted swiftly to prevent violence, confrontations, and provocations.”

    *****

    And, the IOF, Israeli Occupation Forces, well, they do teach many US police departments on “crowd suppression,” pressure point holds, subbing peaceful protestors, and strong-arming old ladies and teens.

    And, as always, NBC, or whichever mainstream and corporate media outfit, will always suppress the reality — Some fear excessive use of force will rise as the DOJ drops oversight of police departments.

    George Floyd, Michael Brown?

    No photo description available.

    “It is important to not overstate what consent decrees do,” said Jin Hee Lee with the Legal Defense Fund, referring to the power of federal courts to enforce orders. “They are very important and oftentimes necessary to force police departments to change their policies, to change their practices,” she added. “But consent decrees were never the end all, be all.”

    *****

    Then you get this Jewish Fervor, and who the hell wants to defend the Poison Ivy School, but you have to under the Rapist in Chief Trump and his henchman, Stephen Miller:

    At the Harvard Kennedy School, the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to enroll international students — temporarily blocked in court — could eliminate nearly 60 percent of the student body.

    *****

    Until the last half-decade, the majestic lesser flamingo had four African breeding sites: two salt pans in Botswana and Namibia, a soda lake in Tanzania, and an artificial dam outside South Africa’s historic diamond-mining town of Kimberley.

    Now it only has three.

    And then, I get tons of wildlife and climate news: “Lesser flamingos lose one of their only four African breeding sites to sewage.” Emblematic at how messed up the polluting Homo consumopethicus is. Sewage. Shit.

    This sort of stuff, all these headlines, all these stories, seemingly disconnected, unrelated in theme, well, the common theme is clear — Capitalism is a Cancer Supported by Economic Wars and Genocide and a Mafia that is Global in Its Reach. Is that a good enough connecting headline?

    *****

    Thank goodness that I have writers for Substack who put it all into perspective, how this world is up shit creek illustrated by the War on People in Palestine.

    The Poem “Nine,” from Palestine Will Be Free Substack:

    I tended my garden with great care —
    Olives, thyme, dates, sage, and rosemary there.
    Well before fajr and long after isha’s call,
    No effort was spared in looking after them all.

    From tiny seeds to flowers in full bloom,
    I watched them glow in sun’s majestic light.
    And as the first buds of the olives came to life,
    Every glance, every day was an endless delight.

    Wearied days would vanish at their sight
    Each bloom I touched made my mornings bright
    I would count my blessings: one, two, three, four…
    Up to ten — then countless more.

    Then came the fire that scorched it all —
    Thyme, dates, sage, and rosemary gone.
    One gnarly olive barely hangs by a thread;
    My waking moments are soaked in tears, eyes red.

    Now with every breath, a prayer escapes:
    Protect my olive — please keep it safe.
    It’s the last remnant of a heart so full, a life well lived,
    In service of my garden, my people, and God the Esteemed.

    You blessed Yaqub with a garden vast,
    Only to separate him from Yusuf, the rose of his heart.
    Yaqub complained, yearned, and wept till blindness veiled his eyes
    You, the Merciful, answered his prayers and restored old ties.

    So bless me, as You did Yaqub in the end —
    Restore the coolness of my eyes, O Ibrahim’s Friend.
    “For I too have the gift of song which gives me courage to complain,
    But ah! ‘tis none but God Himself whom I, in sorrow, must arraign!”

    Your infinite wisdom is beyond my grasp,
    So, to Your rope of hope I must clasp.
    “The lessons of patience I teach my heart,
    As though to night’s separation I show a false part.”

    *****

    Thank goodness for International 360, with a whole lot of stories aggregated-curated: Only Total Collapse Will Rouse Humanity from Its Suicidal Sleepwalk

    From BettMedia:

    Only Total Collapse Will Rouse Humanity from Its Suicidal Sleepwalk

    Editorial Comment:

    I have been issuing warnings since the genocide began and every nation and institution failed to stop it. Not one invoked the appropriate legal mechanisms designed for such a crisis that would have ended abuse of veto, ousted Israel from the United Nations and imposed sanctions on the genocidal entity. I am pleased to see more activists understanding the extent of manipulation and deception we have all been subjected to.

    Previously I said,

    • There is no hope for the world to be found in any government, institution or movement that can normalize ties with or fail to stop a genocidal oppressor.
    • There can be no faith in leaders that place interests above moral principles.
    • There is no salvation to be found standing with those too cowardly to act in the face of murderous criminality.
    • The hope of humanity rests solely on the shoulders of each awakening individual and on movements in the grassroots bases who have never lost touch with reality and are willing to defend life at all costs.

    Karim has brilliantly and succinctly presented the many facets of our present dilemma in the article below.

    Once we abandon fantasy and begin with these truths, realistic solutions and avenues of dissent, resistance and revolution can constellate and finally manifest.

    A.V.


    BettBeat Media

    As Gaza’s children burn while the world watches, it becomes clear: only climate catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, or World War III may force humanity to abandon Western capitalism’s suicidal path.

    The brutal death march of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations. It grinds forward with mechanistic certainty, reducing human bodies to raw material and human aspirations to market commodities. We stand now at the precipice of a darkness so profound that our collective imagination fails to grasp its dimensions.

    Gaza Exposed the Multipolar Fantasy

    Let us dispense with comforting illusions. The mythologies we have constructed about saviors – whether BRICS nations, ‘multipolar world orders’, institutions of international law, or benevolent statesmen – have disintegrated before our eyes.

    As Gaza burns and its children scream under collapsing concrete, we witness Russia making backroom deals with the architects of genocide. As Palestinian bodies pile in makeshift morgues, China issues empty declarations at the United Nations while its trade with the genocidal regime continues uninterrupted.

    These are not the actions of counterweights to empire. They are the maneuvers of players within the same global system, differing perhaps in position but not in fundamental nature. They have shown themselves to be integral components of the very machinery we hoped they would dismantle.

    We have watched, with desperate hope, the Palestinians stand against overwhelming military force, the Lebanese resisting occupation, Ibrahim Traore challenging neocolonial structures, Syrians and Yemenis enduring apocalyptic bombardment.

    We projected onto them our desperate yearning for liberation from the imperialist hellscape spreading like wildfire across our planet. But they cannot do it alone, and our delegation of hope to others is itself a form of moral abdication.

    The Frightening Truth is: It Really Comes Down to Us

    The terrible truth we must confront is this: the responsibility is ours. The revolution required is not national but global, because the capitalist system has metastasized globally.

    It has burrowed deep into the institutional structures of every society, captured the regulatory mechanisms that might constrain it, corrupted the informational systems that might expose it, and weaponized the technological systems that might liberate us.

    Consider the grotesque spectacle of our current moment: we watch genocide in real-time on social media platforms owned by billionaires who fund that same genocide, we march in permitted protests that change nothing, we sign petitions that disappear into administrative voids. Meanwhile, the machinery of death continues unabated, and the architects of suffering retire to coastal mansions and mountain retreats after receiving fifty standing ovations for speeches that are nothing more than celebrations of mass murder.

    The ruling classes have constructed a system of control so comprehensive, so technologically sophisticated, and so psychologically insidious that most cannot even perceive the depth of their enslavement. The surveillance apparatus tracks our movements and predicts our thoughts. The military-industrial complex develops weapons of terrifying precision to eliminate those who resist too effectively. The propaganda system manufactures consent with algorithmic efficiency.

    All Wish to Sit at the Blood-Soaked Table of Imperialism

    As vanessa beeley and Fiorella Isabel so meticulously lay out for us, Putin, for all his anti-Western rhetoric, demonstrates through his actions that he seeks merely better terms within the imperial arrangement, not its dissolution. His government works in tacit coordination with Israel while claiming to stand against Western hegemony. This is not resistance; it is negotiation for a better position at the blood-soaked table of imperialism.

    And what of China? Does it dream of global equality? Let’s rephrase, do ruling elites anywhere envision a future where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the peasants in the villages they dominate? History speaks to us with terrible clarity. The powerful do not relinquish power voluntarily. Systems of exploitation do not reform themselves out of existence. The capitalist machine — whether neoliberal or state capitalism — will not decommission itself out of ethical awakening.

    We have already weathered global catastrophes that should have taught us these lessons. World War I reduced a generation of young men to shredded flesh in muddy trenches, yet we learned nothing. World War II revealed the industrial-scale horror humans could inflict upon one another, yet we learned nothing. The grinding machinery reassembled itself, adapted, and continued its relentless accumulation.

    “Humanity appears incapable of changing direction without first experiencing the catastrophic consequences of its current trajectory. We seem determined to learn only through suffering, to change only when continuation becomes impossible”

    World War III

    The terrifying conclusion becomes unavoidable: only the total breakdown of global society will create the conditions for fundamental transformation. This is not a wish but a recognition of historical pattern. The entrenchment is too deep, the control too complete, the psychological captivity too thorough for anything less than systemic collapse to break the spell.

    What form will this breakdown take? Perhaps nuclear winter that eliminates most of humanity. Perhaps the collapse of ecological systems that sustain human life. Perhaps the return of fascistic brutality in World War III as soldiers march through our streets, rounding up our women and children to violate their dignity and take away their innocence while the men disappear into torture camps. The specific manifestation matters less than the certainty of its arrival if our course remains unchanged.

    This is the darkness we must stare into without flinching. Humanity appears incapable of changing direction without first experiencing the catastrophic consequences of its current trajectory. Even high-definition genocide—burning children and prisoner rapes streamed directly to our iPhones—fails to move us to effective action. We seem determined to learn only through even more extreme suffering, to change only when our current path becomes literally impossible to continue.

    Resistance

    Yet within this terrible recognition lies a seed of possibility. If we understand the machinery of our destruction with unflinching clarity, if we abandon the comfortable myths that absolve us of responsibility, if we recognize that no external force will save us from ourselves – perhaps then we might begin the work of genuine resistance.

    Not the performative — flag-waving, song-singing, tweet-sharing — resistance that leaves power structures intact, but the fundamental reimagining of human society. Not the delegation of hope to distant leaders, but the reclamation of our collective agency. Not the comfortable protest that returns home for dinner, but the sustained commitment to dismantling systems of death.

    The machinery of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations, but neither is it invulnerable to our determined opposition. The question remains whether we will summon the courage to oppose it before the breakdown comes, or whether we will continue sleepwalking until we awaken amid the ruins.

    – Karim

    The post Follow the Money? The Algorithm Follows Us to Make the Money first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

    Papua New Guinea’s state broadcaster NBC wants shortwave radio reintroduced to achieve the government’s goal of 100 percent broadcast coverage by 2030.

    Last week, the broadcaster hosted a workshop on the reintroduction of shortwave radio transmission, bringing together key government agencies and other stakeholders.

    NBC had previously a shortwave signal, but due to poor maintenance and other factors, the system failed.

    The NBC's 50-year logo to coincide with Papua New Guinea's half century independence anniversary
    The NBC’s 50-year logo to coincide with Papua New Guinea’s half century independence anniversary celebrations. Image: NBC

    Its managing director Kora Nou spoke with RNZ Pacific about the merits of a return to shortwave.

    Kora Nou: We had shortwave at NBC about 20 or so years ago, and it reached almost the length and breadth of the country.

    So fast forward 20, we are going to celebrate our 50th anniversary. Our network has a lot more room for improvement at the moment, that’s why there’s the thinking to revisit shortwave again after all this time.

    Don Wiseman: It’s a pretty cheap medium, as we here at RNZ Pacific know, but not too many people are involved with shortwave anymore. In terms of the anniversary in September, you’re not going to have things up and running by then, are you?

    KN: It’s still early days. We haven’t fully committed, but we are actively pursuing it to see the viability of it.

    We’ve visited one or two manufacturers that are still doing it. We’ve seen some that are still on, still been manufactured, and also issues surrounding receivers. So there’s still hard thinking behind it.

    We still have to do our homework as well. So still early days and we’ve got the minister who’s asked us to explore this and then give him the pros and cons of it.

    DW: Who would you get backing from? You’d need backing from international donors, wouldn’t you?

    KN: We will put a business case into it, and then see where we go from there, including where the funding comes from — from government or we talk to our development partners.

    There’s a lot of thinking and work still involved before we get there, but we’ve been asked to fast track the advice that we can give to government.

    DW: How important do you think it is for everyone in the country to be able to hear the national broadcaster?

    KN: It’s important, not only being the national broadcaster, but [with] the service it provides to our people.

    We’ve got FM, which is good with good quality sound. But the question is, how many does it reach? It’s pretty critical in terms of broadcasting services to our people, and 50 years on, where are we? It’s that kind of consideration.

    I think the bigger contention is to reintroduce software transmission. But how does it compare or how can we enhance it through the improved technology that we have nowadays as well? That’s where we are right now.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Following multiple employee-led protests against the company’s contracts with the Israeli military, Microsoft workers discovered that any emails they send containing the word “Palestine” inexplicably disappear.

    According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept, employees on Wednesday began noticing that email messages sent from their company account containing a handful of keywords related to Palestine and Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza were not transmitted as expected. In some cases, employees say the emails arrived following a delay of upwards of 45 minutes. Other emails never even made it to the intended recipient’s inbox at all.

    Keywords subject to the disruption, according to employee test messages shared with The Intercept, include “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “apartheid,” and “genocide.” The word “Palestinian” does not appear affected, nor did emails containing deliberate misspellings of the word “Palestine.” Emails mentioning Israel appear to have gone through immediately.

    The outage was first reported by The Verge.

    In an email to The Intercept, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw confirmed and defended the blockage. “Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have a established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues. Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”

    The heavy-handed approach, however, is not just deterring messages sent to large numbers of recipients, but also blocking all emails mentioning Palestine.

    Following an April 7 protest at an event celebrating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, two employees “sent separate emails to thousands of coworkers, calling on Microsoft to cut its contracts with the Israeli government,” The Verge reported.

    Related

    The Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure Cloud

    The email disruption comes after multiple demonstrations at the four-day Microsoft Build developer conference this week. The protests were organized by current and former Microsoft employees with No Azure for Apartheid, an advocacy group demanding the suspension of the company’s work with the Israeli government.

    In February, The Associated Press reported usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services by the Israeli military “skyrocketed” at the start of its ongoing bombardment of Gaza, which has now killed over 53,000 Palestinians. Earlier this month, the company absolved itself of wrongdoing in Gaza following an unspecified internal and external review. While Microsoft claimed “we have found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people,” the company also noted, “It is important to acknowledge that Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.”

    The post Microsoft Says It’s Censoring Employee Emails Containing the Word “Palestine” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The ever-growing market for personal data has been a boon for American spy agencies. The U.S. intelligence community is now buying up vast volumes of sensitive information that would have previously required a court order, essentially bypassing the Fourth Amendment. But the surveillance state has encountered a problem: There’s simply too much data on sale from too many corporations and brokers.

    So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The documents state spy agencies will use the web portal not just to search through reams of private data, but also run them through artificial intelligence tools for further analysis.

    Rather than each agency purchasing CAI individually, as has been the case until now, the “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before, according to the documents. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

    “In practice, the Data Consortium would provide a one-stop shop for agencies to cheaply purchase access to vast amounts of Americans’ sensitive information from commercial entities, sidestepping constitutional and statutory privacy protections,” said Emile Ayoub, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program.

    “ODNI is working to streamline a number of inefficient processes, including duplicative contracts to access existing data, and ensuring Americans civil liberties and Fourth Amendment rights are upheld,” ODNI spokesperson Olivia Coleman said in a statement to The Intercept. Coleman did not answer when asked if the new platform would sell access to data on U.S. citizens, or how it would make use of artificial intelligence.

    Related

    IRS, Department of Homeland Security Contracted Firm That Sells Location Data Harvested From Dating Apps

    Spy agencies and military intelligence offices have for years freely purchased sensitive personal information rather than obtain it by dint of a judge’s sign-off. Thanks largely to unscrupulous advertisers and app-makers working in a regulatory vacuum, it’s trivial to procure extremely sensitive information about virtually anyone with an online presence. Smartphones in particular leave behind immense plumes of data, including detailed records of your movement that can be bought and sold by anyone with an interest. The ODNI has previously defined “sensitive” CAI as information “not widely known about an individual that could be used to cause harm to the person’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.” Procurement documents reviewed by The Intercept make clear the project is designed to provide access to this highest “sensitive” tier of CAI.

    The documents provide a glimpse at some of the many types of CAI available, including “information addressing economic security, supply chain, critical infrastructure protection, great power competition, agricultural data, industrial data, sentiment analysis, and video analytic services.”

    While the proliferation of data that can reveal intimate details about virtually anyone has alarmed civil libertarians, privacy advocates, and certain members of Congress, the intelligence community sees another problem: There’s too much data to keep organized, and the disorganized process of buying it is wasting money. To address this overabundance, the ODNI is seeking private sector vendors to build and manage a new “commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place,” according to one procurement document obtained by The Intercept.

    The ODNI says the platform, the “Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC),” will help correct the currently “fragmented and decentralized” purchase of commercial data like smartphone location pings, real estate records, biometric data, and social media content. The document laments how often various spy agencies are buying the same data without realizing it. The ODNI says this new platform, which will live at www.icdata.gov, will “help streamline access to CAI for the entire IC and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner by avoiding duplicative purchases, preventing sunk costs from unused licenses, and reducing overall data storage and compute costs,” while also incorporating “civil liberties and privacy best practices.”

    “The IC is still adhering to the ‘just grab all of it, we’ll find something to do with it’ mentality.”

    While the project’s nod to civil liberties might come as some relief to privacy advocates, the project also represents the extent to which the use of this inherently controversial form of surveillance is here to stay. “Clearly the IC is still adhering to the ‘just grab all of it, we’ll find something to do with it’ mentality rather than being remotely thoughtful about only collecting data it needs or has a specific envisioned use for,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Project.

    Once the website is up and running, the procurement materials say the portal will eventually allow users to analyze the data using large language models, AI-based text tools prone to major factual errors and fabrications. The portal will also facilitate “sentiment analysis,” an often pseudoscientific endeavor purporting to discern one’s opinion about a given topic using implicit signals in their behavior, movement, or speech.

    Such analysis is a “huge cause for concern” according to Schroeder. “It means the intelligence community is still, to at least some degree, buying into the false promise of a constantly and continuously debunked practice,” she said. “Let me be clear: Sentiment analysis not only does not work, it cannot work. Its only consistent success has been in perpetuating harmful discrimination (of gender, culture, race, and neurodivergence, among others).”

    Whether for sentiment analysis or some other goal, using CAI data sets to query an AI crystal ball poses serious risks, said Ayoub. If such analysis worked as billed, “AI tools make it easier to extract, re-identify, and infer sensitive information about people’s identities, locations, ideologies, and habits — amplifying risks to Americans’ privacy and freedoms of speech and association,” he said. On top of that, “These tools are a black box with little insight into training data, metric, or reliability of outcomes. The IC’s use of these tools typically comes with high risk, questionable track records, and little accountability, especially now that AI policy safeguards were rescinded early in this administration.”

    In 2023, the ODNI declassified a 37-page report detailing the vastly expanding use of such CAI data by the U.S. intelligence community, and the threat this poses to the millions of Americans whose lives are cataloged, packaged, and sold by a galaxy of unregulated data brokers. The report, drafted for then-director of national intelligence Avril Haines, included a dire warning to the public: “Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection, and that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.”

    Related

    American Phone-Tracking Firm Demo’d Surveillance Powers by Spying on CIA and NSA

    The extent to which CAI has commodified spy powers previously attainable only by well-resourced governments cannot be overstated: In 2021, for instance, The Intercept reported the existence of Anomaly Six, a startup that buys geolocational data leaked from smartphones apps. During an Anomaly Six presentation, the company demonstrated its ability to track not only the Chinese navy through the phones of its sailors, but also follow CIA and NSA employees as they commuted to and from work.

    The ICDC project reflects a fundamental dissonance within the intelligence community, which acknowledges that CAI is a major threat to the public while refusing to cease buying it. “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits,” the ODNI wrote in its 2022 report. While conceding “unfettered access to CAI increases its power in ways that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other societal expectations,” the report says, “the IC cannot willingly blind itself to this information.”

    In 2024, following the declassified report and the alarm it generated, the ODNI put forth a set of CAI usage rules purporting to establish guardrails against privacy violations and other abuses. The framework earned praise from some corners for requiring the intelligence community to assess the origin and sensitivity of CAI before using it, and for placing more rigorous requirements on agencies that wish to use the most intimate forms of private data. But critics were quick to point out that the ODNI’s rules, which enshrined the intelligence community’s “flexibility to experiment” with CAI, amounted to more self-regulation from a part of the government with a poor track record of self-regulating.

    While sensitive CAI comes with more rules — like keeping records of its use, protecting its storage, and some disclosure requirements — these guidelines offer great deal latitude to the intelligence community. The rule about creating a paper trail pertaining to sensitive CAI use, for example, is mandated only “to the extent practicable and consistent with the need to protect intelligence sources and methods,” and can be ignored entirely in “exigent circumstances.” In other words, it’s not really a requirement at all.

    Ayoub told The Intercept he worries the ICDC plan will only entrench this self-policing approach. The documents note that vendors would be tasked to some extent with determining whether the data they sell is indeed sensitive, and therefore subject to stricter privacy safeguards, rather than a third party. “Relying on private vendors to determine whether CAI is considered sensitive may increase the risk that the IC purchases known categories of sensitive information without sufficient safeguards for privacy and civil liberties or the warrant, court order, or subpoena they would otherwise need to obtain,” he said.

    The portal idea appears to have started under the Biden administration, when it was known as the “Data Co-Op.” It now looks like it will go live during a Trump administration. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is already working on building and streamlining access to other large repositories of perilously sensitive information. In March, the Washington Post reported that DOGE workers intent on breaking down “information silos” across the federal government were trying to “unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants.” The documents note that the portal will also be accessible to so-called “non-Title 50” agencies outside of the national defense and intelligence apparatus.

    Ayoub argued the intelligence community can’t provide access to its upcoming CAI portal without “raising the risk that agencies like DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) would access the CAI database to identify and target noncitizens such as student protestors based on their search or browsing histories and location information.”

    While the ODNI has acknowledged the importance of transparency, usernames for the portal will not include the name of the analyst’s agency, “thus obscuring any specific participation from individual participants,” according to the project documents.

    “The irony is not lost on me that they are making efforts to protect individuals within the IC from being identified regarding their participation in this project but have no qualms about vacuuming up the personal data of Americans against their wishes and knowledge,” said Schroeder.

    Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a longtime critic of the Fourth Amendment end run posed by CAI, expressed concern to The Intercept over how the portal will ultimately be used. “Policies are one thing, but I’m concerned about what the government is actually doing with data about Americans that it buys from data brokers,” he said in a statement. “All indications from news reports and Trump administration officials are that Americans should be extremely worried about how this administration may be using commercial data.”

    The post U.S. Spy Agencies Are Getting a One-Stop Shop to Buy Your Most Sensitive Personal Data appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.