Eileen Guo

RFK Jr. warned about giving the government your data. Now he wants it. The Health and Human Services secretary's pivot on wearables is a case study in how conspiracy extremists rebrand themselves once in positions of power.

RFK Jr. used to warn about a government takeover of our data. He said wearables and their tech were part of a plot to surveil us, enabled tyranny, caused cancer, and turned users into “permanent consumers” to Big Tech.

Now, he'd like your data, please.
www.msnbc.com/opinion/anal...

I feel like people tell a story in their head about who people in Gaza are- but some are bad ass women who ran a gym.

How Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine and DOGE Got Access to a Federal Payroll System That Serves the FBI Hundreds of pages of records reviewed by WIRED show just how quickly DOGE gained access to systems at the Small Business Administration—and through it, a USDA system that handles payroll for federal l...

SCOOP: We filed a Freedom of Information Act Request and received hundreds of pages of documents about the system access DOGE members Edward Coristine and Donald Park received at the Small Business Administration. But nested in there was something even bigger...

www.wired.com/story/edward...

wake up babe, a new modality of surveillance just dropped

Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die July 21, 2025 AFP has been working with 1 writer, 3 photographers and 6 videographers, all freelance, in the Gaza Strip since its staff journalists left in 2024. Along with a few others, they are now the only ones left to report what is happening in the Gaza Strip. The international press has been banned from entering the territory for nearly two years. We refuse to watch them die. One of them, Bashar, has been working with AFP since 2010, first as a fixer, then freelance photographer, and since 2024, as lead photographer. On July 19th he managed to post a message on Facebook: “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.” Bashar, 30, works & lives in the same conditions as all Gazans, moving from one refugee camp to another under Israeli bombings. For > a year he’s lived in utter destitution, working at extreme risk to his life. Hygiene is a major issue for him, with recurring bouts of severe intestinal illness. Since Feb, Bashar’s been living in the ruins of his home in Gaza City with his mother, 4 brothers & sisters and the family of one of his brothers. Their house is devoid of any furnishings, except a few cushions. On Sunday morning, he reported that one of his brothers had “fallen, due to hunger.” Even though these journalists receive a monthly salary from AFP, it’s no longer enough to buy food, or they have to pay completely exorbitant prices. The banking system has collapsed, and those who exchange money via online bank accounts charge a commission of up to 40%. AFP no longer has the ability to provide them with a vehicle and there is not enough fuel to allow these journalists to travel for their reporting. Driving a car means becoming a target for Israeli airstrikes. AFP reporters therefore travel on foot or by donkey cart. (alt txt continued in next post)

A horrifying statement published today by the Editorial Committee of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

"Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die"

Translation from French to English by @cnorristrent.bsky.social:

Iranians Targeted With Spyware in Lead-Up to War With Israel More than a dozen Iranians’ mobile phones were targeted with spyware in the months prior to the country’s war with Israel, according to new research.

More than a dozen Iranians’ mobile phones were targeted with spyware in the months prior to the country’s war with Israel. They received “high confidence” notifications from Apple saying they were targeted with sophisticated spyware similar to NSO Group’s Pegasus. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

Scoop from @eileenguo.bsky.social - huge amounts of personal information are embedded in a major data set used to train AI models www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

The bottom line, says @willie-agnew.bsky.social, a postdoctoral fellow in AI ethics at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the coauthors, is that “anything you put online can [be] and probably has been scraped.”

The paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17185

Another major AI privacy violation and, again, almost no way for injured individuals to get remedy—or even to know who stole or misused their sensitive personal data.

Thank you to @willie-agnew.bsky.social + Rachel Hong for sharing your research with me, and @abeba.bsky.social , @benwinters.bsky.social, @marietjeschaake.bsky.social, @tiffanycli.bsky.social for your insights.

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

As 1 of the researchers told me, "Anything you put online can [be] and probably has been scraped.”

And bc this dataset has been DLed 2million+ times to train various models, we effectively can't delete our PII once it's up.

More in @technologyreview.com: www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models.

It's a major privacy violation.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

My two fav spots don’t have cams, this is true… but I use a neighboring beach’s cam and surf report to judge conditions.

Pandas deserve their privacy too.

Very LA take of me I know.

The only kind of good cam is a surf cam

Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images 404 Media has seen user manuals for Mobile Fortify, ICE’s new facial recognition app which allows officers to instantly look up DHS, State Department, and state law enforcement databases by just point...

This is truly wild: @josephcox.bsky.social got the user manual for ICE's new facial recognition app, which appears to be one of the most powerful face rec systems ever because it is connected to tons of different government databases and surveillance systems

www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food Federal workers warned for months that the high-energy biscuits would go to waste.

"Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people who need it"
@hana-kiros.bsky.social, on spending $130,000 to burn food worth $800,000
www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

In dramatic reversal, Senate votes to kill AI-law moratorium A GOP-led bid to stop states from regulating AI collapsed after a deal to save it fell through.

In a stunning reversal, the Senate voted 99-1 this morning to strip from Trump's big bill a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulations.

Gift link to my story on how it happened and who's celebrating: wapo.st/3TOyiaG

Video shows federal agents blast their way into Huntington Park home Video appears to show an explosion set off by federal agents as they entered a Huntington Park home in an early morning law enforcement operation that startled a woman who was inside the house with he...

Federal agents used explosives to enter a U.S. citizen’s home and entered — guns drawn — on a baby, a 6-year-old, and their mother. She believes it’s because her boyfriend attended an ICE protest where he accidentally hit a cop car (and was released by cops).

www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/h...

This will go down as one of the most important AI Ethics piece.

‘They're Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls Records of hundreds of emergency calls from ICE detention centers obtained by WIRED—including audio recordings—show a system inundated by life-threatening incidents, delayed treatment, and overcrowdin...

Deeply disturbing, deeply urgent reporting by @dmehro.bsky.social @dell.bsky.social into how unprepared ICE detention centers are to handle growing #s of detainees and medical emergencies—and how little oversight exists, since Trump gutted the oversight offices. www.wired.com/story/ice-de...

LOL "Your [public records request] email was deleted without being read."

Love when public agencies are transparent. Nice job, SFPD.

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

1/

Wow. As the article con'ts, Pauline Kaurin, who had a yr left as James B. Stockdale Chair of Professional Military Ethics at the Naval War College, is 1 of 4 military ethics or history professors that have publicly resigned in the last few months.

Worth a read in full: www.msn.com/en-us/news/u...

A military ethics professor resigns in protest:

"Civilian faculty at America’s military schools...are told that academic freedom still exists, but that their institutions are following directives from Hegseth that...seem aimed at ending academic freedom."

www.msn.com/en-us/news/u...

'Who are these people?' Masked immigration agents challenge local police, sow fear in L.A. Local police have little or no insight into where the federal enforcement actions are taking place. In some cases, local cops have been mistaken for federal agents, eroding years of work to have immig...

“In Pasadena last week, a man stepped out of his unmarked vehicle at an intersection, unholstered his pistol and aimed it at a group of pedestrians before returning to his car… That incident left the police chief of Pasadena resigned to figure out whether it was a crime or part of a federal raid.”

This guy in Missouri saw the strike package as it headed out of Whiteman AFB and tweeted it 24 hrs ago

The Senate’s version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill would see the General Services Administration take possession of the nearly 7,200 new postal EVs and associated infrastructure and put the assets up for auction. The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold. “The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment,” Peter Pastre, the Postal Service’s vice president for government relations and public policy, wrote to senators this month.

👀 Scoop: Trump and Republicans want USPS to sell off its brand new EVs and chargers.

That would mean literally **ripping up post office parking lots** to auction off assets with no private-sector value.

It’s buried in the Senate’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...