This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am […]
For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically […]
I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness. Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the […]
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If you’ve been paying attention to surveillance and civil liberties issues over the past fifteen years, you’ve likely learned to recognize a particular pattern. Senator Ron Wyden will occasionally send a public letter that essentially says “hey, I can’t tell you what’s happening because it’s classified, but something really bad is going on and you […]
We’ve been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It’s part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what’s […]
It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak […]
The Baton Rouge Police Department announced recently that it will begin using a drone designed by military equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin and Edge Autonomy, making it one of the first local police departments to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a history of primary use in foreign war zones. Baton Rouge is now one of the […]
It is no secret that large language models (LLMs) are being used routinely to modify and even write scientific papers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: LLMs can help produce clearer texts with stronger logic, not least when researchers are writing in a language that is not their mother tongue. More generally, a recent analysis […]
Jeff Bezos this week continued to dismantle what’s left of the Washington Post via another massive round of layoffs that left remaining staff stunned. Among the latest cuts is the elimination of the paper’s popular sports desk, scaling back of international and local news, the firing of an untold swath of journalists, and the ending of […]
Over the past week, two federal judges have issued rulings on immigration cases that aren’t just legally significant—they’re genuinely extraordinary documents. One includes a photo of a five-year-old in a Spiderman backpack, biblical citations, and closes with Ben Franklin’s warning about keeping the republic. The other spends 83 pages methodically dismantling a cabinet secretary’s decision, […]
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The two murders by immigration officers during Trump’s vengeful “surge” in Minneapolis, Minnesota have grabbed most of the headlines recently. And deservedly so. The violent rhetoric used by nearly every administration official — combined with a lack of training and the explicit understanding no one will be punished by Trump for whatever’s done in Trump’s […]
So we’ve been noting how the Trump administration has been helping Larry Ellison wage war on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust (that’s always been a lie), but because they want Larry Ellison to be able to dominate media and create a safe space for unpopular right wing ideology. […]
Kash Patel, FBI Director, is not very good at his job. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate that notion, from him apparently completely misunderstanding the purpose and protections of the 2nd Amendment and Minnesota gun laws (whatever your thoughts on gun rights might generally be), to his gathering of barely trained castoffs to serve […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a “paramilitary force.” Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE “a personal paramilitary unit of […]
Support us on Patreon » On a recent episode of our other podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike was joined by guest host Konstantinos Komaitis for a far-reaching discussion about online speech. One point that was briefly raised in that discussion was the question of whether AI tools are good or bad for user agency, and since Mike and […]
The administration’s racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump’s return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable. The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process […]
For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about “values” and “belonging” and “bringing your whole self to work.” If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats. Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone […]
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