Kevin Bankston

If Americans can’t figure out why we’re starting a war with Iran, then frankly they don’t deserve to know.

by Karoline Leavitt

Just thinking about how lots of people in the White House are making money off of this

Sam Altman picked a hell of a day to basically urge the world to trust the morality and legal restraint of the Department of Defense

Either the DOD is taking a softer stance with OpenAI (which seems hard to believe) or OpenAI is prepared to make more concessions here than it is acknowledging

I think the bigger security risk is the gestapo she runs that murders people for standing in the street and kidnaps children to put them in concentration camps. But sure, if the shoe thing gets her shitcanned, do what you gotta do.

Multiple CBS News staffers who were not authorized to speak to the media resorted to curse words after reading the news. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," said one producer at the network. "Well, fuck," said another CBS News staffer.

mood

Silicon Valley Rallies Behind Anthropic in A.I. Clash With Trump

Our story on how the Pentagon misread the situation with Anthropic. They thought they would fold under the strong-arm tactic. Instead, Anthropic is seeing a boom of support from other AI companies and their own employees.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/t...

FTC Issues COPPA Policy Statement to Incentivize the Use of Age Verification Technologies to Protect Children Online The Federal Trade Commission issued a policy statement today announcing that the Commission will not bring an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) aga

The FTC pinky promises not to use COPPA against tech companies that collect the personal information of minors to perform age verification.

We have completely and utterly lost the plot folks. www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

"The president had DOJ illegally cover up documents about allegations he sexually assaulted a child after Congress specifically passed a law requiring they be disclosed" is, in and of itself, enough to merit rapid removal from office regardless of how true or credible the underlying allegation is.

Every agent who participated in this should spend the rest of their life in prison.

DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.

The DHS is moving to consolidate its face recognition and other biometric technologies into a single system capable of comparing faces, fingerprints, iris scans, and other identifiers collected across its enforcement agencies, according to records reviewed by WIRED.

‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word. Nine months after it aired its finale, the 'Star Wars' series feels scarily prescient.

“We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end.” www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...

How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we’ve collected experts’ tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group—even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people writing to me to ask about encrypted/secure/private tools for comms, collaboration, and organizing. So @lhn.bsky.social and I talked to experts and assembled this: the Wired guide to organizing in an age of surveillance. www.wired.com/story/how-to...

What Are Heterodox Free Speech Warriors Doing About Trump's Censorship-Industrial Complex? Nada Trump is issuing subpoenas demanding social media platforms hand over data about ICE protesters but the 'Twitter Files' agitators couldn't care less

In the midst of the most aggressive and alarming federal assault on the First Amendment since the Palmer raids, the Biden-era free speech warriors have focused their outrage on . . . the injustice of releasing the Epstein files.

The Constitution says "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." Presidents who violate the Constitution should be impeached and removed from office.

Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped. The decisions amount to a huge legal rebuke, one the administration has ignored.

Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans From Voting The “show your papers” requirement is an attack on the freedom to vote.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. bit.ly/4rA2p4R

You earned it @sayash.bsky.social

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

I think Lauren is correct that this piece does ignore or elide the valid leftist critiques, but there is a dismissiveness around the users of AI that is a big part of why those critiques are largely failing. The stakes are too high to keep repeating unsuccessful tactics, or to keep scolding users.

Papers don’t quote ANYONE like this. Normal human speech is LOUSY with ums, uhs, and doubling short words (a, I, the). You clean that up as a matter of course.

Colbert Doesn’t Give an FCC About Calling Out CBS

Stephen Colbert said that the FCC and CBS - which is in no way a compromised or complicit organization - wouldn’t allow him to broadcast an interview with Democratic State Rep James Talarico. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/a...

Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen and paper instead Parents are forming a loose network teaching one another how to get their children off school-issued Chromebooks and iPads.

Parents are increasingly opting out of mandatory school laptops for kids. Surprised this article didn’t mention the privacy and security risks that should also make parents concerned. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

Once again, it is bizarre how the media seems to think that only Democrats have agency.

Both Democrats and Republicans helped create the infrastructure for ideological surveillance at the US border—but the Trump administration is deploying it in the service of a radically partisan and censorial agenda. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.

The government keeps doing it nonetheless.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

The ACLU (including my team) has filed multiple actions to block subpoenas sent by DHS to identify people speaking out against its abuses.

Today's NYT story shows that those cases are the tip of the iceberg: DHS has sent HUNDREDS of subpoenas to tech companies. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

How did this one random sub-agency of DHS become America’s secret police force, with a larger budget than many entire states?

We’re so stuck on this absurd theoretical debate over “do we need immigration enforcement” that we missed Trump building himself a vast paramilitary army