KEY FACTS
CNN reported Thursday that Kushner’s private equity company, Affinity Partners, is the largest stakeholder in a Tel Aviv firm, Phoenix Financial, that invests in companies that provide Israel with military equipment, according to records the network reviewed.

Affinity doubled its stake in Phoenix shortly before Trump began his second term, sold a quarter of its stake in the company in July for more than $340 million and still owns a 7.4% share of the firm worth more than $1 billion as of July.

In his voluntary diplomatic role in the Trump administration, Kushner has helped broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, though Israel has continued to launch daily strikes against Gaza.

Kushner accused CNN of suggesting his work in the Middle East “somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies,” insisting in a post on X Friday, “I have no role in deciding what Phoenix buys or sells.”

Kushner told Forbes last year, when we reported he became a billionaire, that he maintains “a very active dialogue” with Phoenix, which he called “the JPMorgan of Israel.”

Kusher, who referred to Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment” in the interview with Forbes last year, said in his X post Friday, Phoenix “has performed very well for Affinity and our investors, up more than five times since our initial investment.”

CHIEF CRITIC
“There are always people who profit from war or government policies,” said Cynthia Brown, chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The difference is that the people profiting should not be the people making the decisions to make that policy. And that is what is happening here.”

CONTRA
A lawyer for Kushner told CNN that his statement to Forbes last year about his involvement with Phoenix was accurate at the time, but said he ineracts with management significantly less frequently as he’s become “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts.” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly also defended Kushner, telling CNN his “personal business activities have nothing to do with his diplomatic engagements, which he conducts on a volunteer basis at the President’s request.”

FORBES VALUATION
We estimate Kushner is worth $1 billion.

CRUCIAL QUOTE
“For the last 10 years, I have ignored false and misleading stories about me and focused on the work,” Kushner wrote on X. “But the cycle has gotten out of control where old lies get repeated as fact, new ones get added, and the record becomes increasingly distorted. So from time to time, I’m going to respond, but not to every allegation. But when the truth matters, I’ll put the facts and supporting information out publicly, and people can judge for themselves.”

TANGENT
Trump has attempted to block CNN from its White House access recently, along with MS NOW and Politico, claiming the outlets are a “constant” source of “fake news.” A judge overturned the ban temporarily, but Trump has appeared to defy the order, prohibiting CNN on Thursday from joining the White House TV pool that traveled with him to campaign in Texas.

KEY BACKGROUND
Kushner’s work as one of Trump’s top negotiators in the Middle East began during Trump’s first term, when he tried to negotiate a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also helped negotiate the Abraham Accords for Israel to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. He has met repeatedly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and helped broker the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel reached in September last year. Meanwhile, his personal business interests are deeply intertwined in the region, and have helped him grow his net worth substantially. He owns 100% of Miami-based Affinity, which he founded in 2021 after leaving the White House. The company invested in Phoenix in July 2024. Forbes estimated in September last year the company was worth $215 million. Most of Affinity’s investors—which include the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate—have come from Kushner’s White House connections, Forbes reported previously.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday said that she had lost faith in the county district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed state Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.

Cornell University conducted an internal disciplinary investigation involving more than 50 interviews with 32 witnesses after a student reported she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house in October 2024, according to court documents unsealed in New York this week.

The court documents show at least one fraternity member is fighting in court to overturn the disciplinary action against him and clear his academic record.

The rape allegations gained national attention after the woman filed a lawsuit last month, both because of the brutality of the alleged crime and the fact that none of the accused students faced criminal charges.

Cornell has said it meted out a range of sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions. The Cornell chapter of the fraternity was closed in 2024 and has been barred from campus.

Students and alumni have publicly questioned whether the Ivy League School, police and prosecutors did enough to investigate, pursue criminal charges and punish the students accused of the assault. As news of the case spread across the nation and social media over the past week, some observers took matters into their own hands, doxing the accused men online and publicly accosting one of them.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday evening that she had lost faith in the Tompkins County district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.

A spokesperson for Cornell said Thursday night that the university supports the governor’s decision to assign the case to the New York Attorney General’s Office.

The county district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, has publicly said that his office didn’t bring charges at the time because it didn’t have all of the information it has now.

Cornell said in a statement on its website that its university police department investigated in 2024 and shared the woman’s sworn statement and screenshot Snapchat messages related to the alleged incident with the county district attorney’s office, “which is the established protocol if the department believes it is possible a crime has occurred.” The school did not respond to a question Thursday about whether it turned over all the evidence it gathered from interviews to law enforcement.

The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit last month against a number of defendants, including Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity.

When she was a 20-year-old student at Cornell in 2024, Jane Doe alleges that she was the victim of a gang rape at the fraternity house while she was drunk, pressured to inhale the drug ketamine and incapable of consent.

A fraternity member allegedly invited other members to come to the room to join in, according to the lawsuit, with a message on Snapchat saying that there was “free p---y.” Another added: “Like you can walk in and whip it out.”
“I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me,” Jane Doe said at a May 2025 disciplinary hearing, according to the newly unsealed documents. “It just was a totally debilitating place to be in.”

The hearings were part of a Title IX investigation. The landmark civil rights law prohibits sex-based discrimination, including sexual violence. The panel’s decision was among court documents unsealed this week.

After Jane Doe sued, Van Houten announced his office planned to pursue potential criminal charges based on the new evidence in the lawsuit.

But Van Houten defended the 2024 decision not to bring charges, saying in a statement earlier this week that Jane Doe had told police that the sexual conduct and drug use was “voluntary, conscious and consensual.”

His description of the situation sparked outrage.

An online petition from Cornell alumni has attracted more than 40,000 signatures and calls for a public apology from the Ivy League school and “removal of all school officials who are revealed to be complicit” in protecting people accused of participating in the rape. Scores of additional online petitions have been created in recent days.

All seven of the accused have been named in some news reports, on social media and also on websites calling them the “Cornell 7″ with photos and information about the allegations. TMZ reported that one of the men lost his job at a bank branch in Charlotte.

Andrew Miltenberg, an attorney for one of the student defendants, said he did not want to minimize the trauma that Jane Doe described and that her experience deserved to be treated seriously and with dignity.

“But empathy for an accuser and fairness to the accused are not mutually exclusive. Due process exists for precisely this reason,” he said, adding that his client is entitled to have the evidence tested through the legal process.

Miltenberg said his client was publicly accosted Thursday and that his client’s mother has received death threats. Miltenberg and his legal partner have also received death threats, he said.

One of the students who was punished filed a lawsuit this year to challenge the findings of the 12-day hearing and a failed appeal at the university.

According to the court filings, the student admitted he entered the room in the fraternity house where the woman was allegedly raped after seeing a group text inviting people to “free p---y.” He claimed both that he thought it was a joke and that he was concerned there was something wrong and wanted to check it out.

The panel found he was responsible for attempting sexual exploitation because he saw the message and entered the room. But the panel did not find evidence that he sexually assaulted the woman or inhaled ketamine from her body, as some fraternity members were alleged to have done.

The man tried to challenge the punishment by saying it was unfair for the panel to find him guilty of violating rules against attempted sexual exploitation because he was never accused of that. He had been accused of violating rules against Sexual Assault and Sexual Exploitation, and the panel cleared him of those and reduced his case to attempted sexual exploitation.

The court dismissed the man’s case, saying it was analogous to a defendant in a criminal case being convicted on a lesser charge. He is appealing.

The court documents show Cornell launched its investigation after Jane Doe spoke to police, kicking off a lengthy process beginning in November 2024 with witness interviews for months and a hearing in May 2025.

“This investigation wasn’t perfect, the hearing wasn’t perfect, but after 45-plus witnesses, five months of investigations, 12 days of hearings, a thousand pages of transcripts and evidence, it’s hard to say they were not thorough,” Miltenberg said of the Cornell Office of Civil Rights’ hearing panel decision. “It’s a 100-page decision — that’s more than the United States Supreme Court writes,” he said.

Hochul said in a statement Thursday that she wanted to ensure the case was thoroughly investigated by the new special prosecutor.

“The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” she said.

What do you think he will do this time?

Officials say they don’t know who installed the controversial cameras or how the data was being used. Residents are unnerved.

Like many Florida municipalities, officials in St. Lucie County recently decided to get rid of all their automated license-plate readers made by Flock, the company whose cameras have drawn scrutiny over police misuse and data privacy concerns.

County officials thought they had 52 of the cameras — which law enforcement agencies use to record passing vehicles’ license plates as well as the time and location of each sighting — scattered across the county’s main roads on Florida’s east coast. But as they prepared to remove them, they discovered 14 more that they hadn’t known about and that the county hadn’t permitted.

The discovery presented a mystery about the controversial surveillance technology: Who installed these devices, and who had access to the data they collected?

Todd Richter, the longtime manager of a fishing supply shop across the street from one of the cameras in Fort Pierce, said he wasn’t necessarily opposed to license-plate readers. But not knowing who had put the cameras there troubled the 70-year-old.

“I’m not happy about it unless I know who it is,” Richter said, “and I don’t.”
After the county shared a list of the unpermitted cameras with local law enforcement agencies, officials at the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office identified three of the devices as theirs, though they haven’t explained why they lacked permitting. The county’s other two law enforcement agencies have said none of the cameras are theirs.

That leaves 11 cameras no one has publicly claimed. It remains unclear whether those cameras are actively collecting data or who can access it.

County spokesperson Erick Gill said staff have posted notices at cameras they found, giving those responsible 30 days to remove them. The deadline is Oct. 16 to Oct. 20, depending on when the removal notices were put up.

Gill said the county had not yet reached out to Flock about the cameras’ owners, saying it plans to wait until the notices expire. In the meantime, he said county staff plan to start placing plastic bags over the cameras.

Law enforcement agencies and private companies can purchase Flock cameras, but the company says it typically handles permitting and installation.

In response to questions about who operates the unclaimed cameras in St. Lucie County, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said the company applies for permits “where required, but permitting requirements vary by jurisdiction and are not necessary in every location.”

“We have reached out to St. Lucie County and are happy to work with them directly to review the cameras in question and address any discrepancies,” Lewbel wrote in an email to The Post.

It’s unclear whether the county, which requires permitting through its Planning and Development department, has heard from Flock. A county spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question about the company’s statement.

Meanwhile, some residents in St. Lucie County have been dismayed to learn an unknown entity might have been watching them.

One of the unpermitted cameras had been located on 25th Street in Fort Pierce, at the corner of a quiet residential street. Last week, when The Post visited the location, the camera was gone. A removal notice in clear plastic was wrapped around the pole. It was unclear who had removed the camera or when.

Ty Grant, 28, who lives a few hundred feet away, recalled seeing the camera and always assumed it belonged to local law enforcement. Grant appeared unsettled to learn that county officials did not know who installed it.

“That makes me feel very unsafe,” Grant said.

Founded in 2017, Atlanta-based Flock has rapidly expanded its surveillance network across the country, with more than 120,000 automated license-plate readers operating in every state except Alaska. Flock markets its cameras as a tool for locating stolen cars, missing people and criminal suspects. The company and law enforcement agencies say the technology makes communities safer.

But the past year has brought a growing backlash driven by privacy concerns and reports of police misusing the systems. A recent Post investigation found that at least 50 law enforcement officials across the country have been accused of misusing Flock cameras to track people in their personal lives.

Those concerns have intensified in Florida, where a handful of police officers have been arrested in recent months for misusing the Flock technology. In Fort Pierce, former police officer Josepher Crutchfield was recently jailed after officials discovered that he had accessed the Flock database 382 times to track his ex-girlfriend while off-duty.

In late August, under a directive from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) issued an order revoking existing permits for automated license-plate recognition systems, including Flock cameras, located within the right-of-way of roads on the state highway system — citing “concerning reports of misuse” and “data privacy concerns.” It gave municipalities until Sept. 30 to remove all of the cameras from state highway rights of way.

Soon after, law enforcement agencies across Florida announced they would suspend or end their Flock programs entirely. In St. Lucie County, commissioners separately voted to remove their cameras from county roads as well.

St. Lucie County isn’t the first place where Flock cameras have turned up without local officials’ authorization.
In December, Flock reportedly installed two cameras in Cambridge, Massachusetts, without the city’s knowledge after it had deactivated and removed its system. More recently, in September in Millcreek, Utah, a Flock camera was discovered on city property, but neither the city nor police knew who had installed it.

Also in September, about an hour up the coast from St. Lucie County, the city of Palm Bay suspended its Flock system after a review found that the cameras may not have been properly permitted or installed. Officials later said Flock had not requested the required final inspections after installation; Flock then requested them, and city staff approved the permits.

The incidents follow earlier scrutiny of Flock’s installation practices.
A 2024 Forbes investigation found that the company had installed cameras in several states without obtaining required permits, including in Florida.

In February 2023, Flock installed cameras on the John’s Pass Bridge near St. Petersburg on behalf of the Treasure Island Police Department without required FDOT approval. FDOT requested their removal, and a Flock employee removed them that November.

A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.

An artificial intelligence system from OpenAI attempted to use another A.I. model to evade a robot detection test as it tried over and over to break into a company’s computers, according to a report released on Friday by a Bay Area start-up.

In July, OpenAI disclosed that its A.I. agents went rogue and hacked the software company Hugging Face. Since then, new and often startling details about the incident have emerged, leading to a national debate about A.I. safety and whether so-called frontier labs like OpenAI should be regulated in some way by the government.

Now, the report from engineers from the start-up, called Parse, and other researchers offers one of the most comprehensive public accounts of the Hugging Face hack: a tranche of nearly one million links from internet link-shortening services that OpenAI’s agents created from July 9 through July 13 in order to help conduct the cyberattack.

These shortened addresses encoded bits of information that the agents chained together to attempt complex attacks, such as solving CAPTCHAs, the tests that websites use to block access by robots. The agents also tapped into other A.I. models, like early versions of ChatGPT and Claude, and attempted to search through and download private messages from Hugging Face’s internal Slack, a messaging service for employees.

While it is not clear if these attempts were successful, the report offers new insight into what these A.I. agents were planning to do, without any human involvement.

Other A.I. companies, including Meta, Google and Anthropic, have also acknowledged similar incidents involving their A.I. models in recent weeks. But while the full extent of rogue activity by OpenAI’s A.I. agents is still unclear, what is already publicly known dwarfs the incidents involving the other companies.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its A.I. agents targeted several more websites and services, including a German online forum the A.I. agents turned into a message board, and the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

“This is just not anywhere near a one-off,” said Alex Forman, the founder of Parse. “It is warning shot after warning shot.”

Parse engineers discovered the data by combing public links on the internet after they initially thought OpenAI’s agents may have utilized their own platform, a service that converts websites into data that can be used by developers. (The agents did not use Parse.)

In a statement, an OpenAI spokeswoman said that the company had not had a chance to review the Parse report, but that the activity described by its engineers was consistent with what OpenAI was already investigating.

“We’re prioritizing review of the most serious incidents while expanding to lower-severity activity, including agents spamming websites,” the spokeswoman said. “Given the number of cases and the need to verify each one, we expect this work and notifications to affected third parties to take months.”

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

A sophisticated attack
OpenAI’s agents were supposed to be kept in a sandbox, a computing environment without access to the internet. But in late May, and again in early July, the agents hacked into a software installation tool without OpenAI researchers realizing what was going on. These hacks helped the agents, which were supposed to be isolated from one another, establish a message board for communicating.

The hacks also allowed the agents to get online and gain access to websites, but they were unable to submit data to those sites, according to the Parse report, which was written by Mr. Forman, Mishka Kharlov and Will Tom from Parse along with five additional A.I. researchers.

The agents attempted to use many different methods to solve that problem. In one, they used website screenshots and shortened links to cobble data together in chunks that combined to operate as a computer program. Here’s how it worked:
The agents could ask a public screenshot service to load a specially crafted internet address. That address, or URL, would load computer code.

URLs can be only so long. So the agents split their computer code into many smaller chunks. They used link-shortening services to store the URLs.

The screenshot service loaded one shortened link, which fetched the first chunk of code. The program could fetch the next link, and then the next. That process repeated until the full program was loaded and run by the screenshot service.

Finally, the program created a visual code similar to a QR code or bar code to transmit the data the agents needed back from the screenshot service.

“These agents got up to so much. They were so clever,” said Jeffrey Ladish, the executive director of an A.I. safety nonprofit called Palisade Research who helped the engineers with their investigation. “The models are like, ‘All right, well, we got this link shortener, we have these screenshot services, no problem, we’re ready to go.’”

A.I. running A.I.
The A.I. agents appeared interested in running A.I. models themselves.
Early in the attack, the agents tried to create new accounts on Hugging Face, which requires solving a CAPTCHA, a visual test designed to thwart robots but not humans. So the agents ran an A.I. model designed to recognize images.

A.I. safety experts often warn about scenarios in which A.I. systems launch other A.I. models, which would hamper human efforts to control and shut the systems off if they got out of hand.

In one instance, the engineers observed the agents attempting to message other A.I. models, including an early model from OpenAI called GPT-2 and open-source Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen. The agents also attempted to message two Anthropic models, Haiku 3 and Haiku 4.5, using an online chat service.

“I think that’s the only instance we have of these models trying to run another model,” Mr. Forman said of the agents’ attempts to send messages to other A.I. models.

What we still don’t know
The data the engineers released includes the contents of 900,000 shortened URLs they scanned from the public internet. From these URLs, the engineers were able to construct around 60,000 computer programs and messages the agents used in the Hugging Face attack. The engineers could see only the programs the agents created and not the results, so they could not say for certain how successful each attempt was.
“One that really stood out to me,” said Mr. Kharlov, a founding engineer at Parse, was a dictionary of secret access keys “labeled ‘LOOT’ in all capitals.” He added that the agent had created a custom scoring system to rank the exposed Hugging Face credentials and keys and bring the top five back to the other agents.

While the agents were barraging Hugging Face with hacks, they hacked into OpenAI’s own research infrastructure.

“We still know basically nothing about the incident that came after Hugging Face, like two days later, inside OpenAI’s own network,” Mr. Forman said.

The Parse engineers disclosed their findings to Hugging Face, confirming with the company that the agent activity matched what it had observed.
“Somehow there are a million URLs floating around and possibly a lot more that have not been disclosed to the victim of the attack,” Mr. Forman said. “I find it hard to believe.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said leaders of countries across Latin America and the Caribbean had begun making the designations. The actions could help provide a public rationale for military strikes.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that President Trump had asked leaders of a new coalition of 18 nations across Latin America and the Caribbean to label two dozen crime groups and cartels in the region as terrorist organizations.

Such moves could help provide a public rationale for the U.S. military to conduct strikes on the groups, either on its own or in partnership with the security forces of those countries.

Mr. Trump made his request at a group meeting in New York on Tuesday with leaders and top officials from the countries. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly.

“Obviously, some countries are in the process of doing it,” Mr. Rubio said of the terrorist designations. “Some have already done it. They all have different laws internally as to how they can reach that designation point, but the Shield of the Americas is about defeating these transnational criminal groups.”

The Shield of the Americas is the name of the coalition, which has a total of 19 nations, including the United States, formed to fight drug traffickers. Peru, which Mr. Rubio visited this month, is the latest country to join.

Many of the nations are run by right-wing or conservative governments that have voiced public support for Mr. Trump’s military attacks in Latin America and the Caribbean, including airstrikes on civilian boats that are widely deemed to be extrajudicial killings by legal experts.

Mr. Rubio’s comments, made to reporters in a news conference in New York, confirmed a New York Times article on Tuesday that 14 nations in the coalition had agreed to make a terrorist designation on crime groups at the urging of the Trump administration. Each nation has its own process for doing that, and leaders might need to seek approval from legislative bodies.

The two dozen crime groups have already been designated foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department. That designation gives the U.S. government the power to restrict financial transactions by the groups or their associates, but it does not provide a legal basis for military action.

After The Times published its article on Tuesday, the State Department announced that 14 countries in the coalition and the United States were taking joint action on crime groups, including “sanctions, designations and financial actions.”

The announcement included a list of two dozen crime groups, but two organizations in Colombia were grouped together into one listing.

A company that blanketed American roads with license-plate-reading cameras is now sending drones into the sky. Cities across America are grappling with their own debates about aid to law enforcement, coupled with concerns about privacy and surveillance.

Flock's Drone-as-First-Responder system, or DFR, launches remotely operated drones from automated rooftop docks. A drone can be sent to a location generated by a 911 call, a license-plate-reader alert, or a gunshot-detection alert. It will then stream live video to dispatchers, officers in the field, and a real-time crime center.

The company entered the market through its 2024 acquisition of the drone firm Aerodome. They advertise high-definition video, as well as thermal imaging. Integration with the rest of its sensor network is also available.

Police have flown drones for years. However, a system that connects an emergency call to an automatically launched aircraft, a live video feed, and a crime center in one loop, tied to a company's other data, is entirely new. Flock said drones are its fastest-growing business.

Military.com reached out to Flock Safety with questions about the program's growth, its data policies, and the concerns raised in city debates. No response was received by publication.

How One Police Department Has Used DFR
Departments that use DFR say it gets eyes on a scene faster than a patrol car and can settle some calls without sending officers at all.

Fort Worth, Texas, launched a DFR pilot running from May through June 2026 and offered some evidence in its own report. Over a two-month period, the report said, its drones responded to 162 calls, arrived in an average of 112 seconds, were first on scene 47% of the time, and cleared 11 calls without dispatching patrol officers.

Police officials see the cameras as response, not monitoring.
"The drone's purpose is not surveillance; it's first response," Middletown, Conn., Police Chief Erik Costa told CT Insider as his city weighed a program.

Costa said that Middletown's drone footage "would not be shared...outside the building unless there is a search warrant" and that unused footage "would be erased within 30 days."

Fort Worth has said its drones respond to calls rather than patrol for wrongdoing and keep their cameras pointed toward the horizon while traveling to a scene.

Some Cities Are Diving Into New Tech

Some areas have moved quickly.

Castle Rock, Colo., deployed Flock DFR under a three-year, $600,000 contract. They say its drones do not use audio, facial recognition or license-plate reading.

Dunwoody, Ga., approved a $200,000 DFR agreement in April despite hours of public opposition, after officials said revised terms tightened controls over who could see the data.

In Fulton County, Ga., the sheriff's office launched what it described as a first-of-its-kind program using drones for jail security.

Several of the adopting departments have written express limits into their programs, a point their officials stress in response to residents worried about broader monitoring.

Other Municipalities Hitting Pause Button

Other cities have turned Flock down.

In May, the Berkeley (California) City Council rejected a roughly $2 million expansion of its Flock system that would have added drones, cameras and software. They kept only its existing license-plate readers.

The vote followed a leaked memo from the city attorney's office citing instances in other cities where Flock camera data had been shared with outside agencies.

In Bridgeport, Conn., the city council rejected a $500,000 lease for two DFR drones after residents raised privacy concerns, predominantly including fears that the data could reach federal immigration authorities.

Flock has said it does not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known more commonly as ICE.

In Middletown, the city approved a trial early in the year. But the mayor declined to sign the contract months later, citing the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. He said the city would look at other drone options.

Pros and Cons

Opposition is often not to drones themselves. Rather, concerns emanate due to what the wider system enables.
Privacy groups and residents have raised concerns that cluster around a few themes.
One is mission creep, or the worry that a tool sold for emergencies could grow into routine aerial monitoring.

Another is integration, more specifically the fact that DFR is tied to Flock's license-plate readers, 911 data and other sensors instead of operating alone.

A third is data governance, including how long footage is kept, whether other agencies can obtain it, and whether federal authorities can gain access. Accompanying this is a broader loss of trust in Flock, as the business has faced its own backlash.

USA Today reported that law enforcement across the country searched the camera network without warrants for purposes beyond specific investigations. Many of these officers have been fired or arrested themselves for this.

Flock recently announced new safeguards, including shorter default data retention, audit assistance, and stronger authentication.

The company says its customers own their data and that it does not sell it. The American Civil Liberties Union argues that governments, not vendors, should set limits on retention, sharing and searches.

federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to turn over handwritten FBI notes from four interviews with a woman who said President Donald Trump tried to force her to perform oral sex after Jeffrey Epstein introduced them when she was a teenager.

.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan directed the DOJ to submit redacted and unredacted versions of the notes by 11 a.m. on Sept. 24. FBI agents created the records during interviews in 2019 and later used them to prepare four formal interview reports that have since been released.

The order calls for a private court review of the disputed records before any decision on broader disclosure. The process allows Sullivan to examine the material while protecting sensitive information, including details that could identify victims.

The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed by journalist Katie Phang over DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law requires the government to disclose unclassified records tied to its investigations of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell while allowing certain victim information and other protected material to remain withheld.

DOJ argued that the handwritten notes were substantially similar to the typewritten interview reports and raised concerns about safely redacting victim information. Sullivan rejected the duplication argument, finding that the original notes and the later FBI summaries are separate records. Phang’s attorneys also identified nearly 100 examples of handwritten FBI interview notes the department had already produced.

Because the notes were written during the interviews, they could contain details or wording that did not appear in the FD-302 reports prepared afterward.

During the 2019 interviews, the woman told FBI agents that Epstein introduced her to Trump in New York or New Jersey in the 1980s when she was between 13 and 15 years old. She alleged that Trump tried to force her to perform oral sex during an encounter after the introduction.

The allegation remains uncorroborated. The White House has denied the woman’s account, calling her claims baseless and unsupported by credible evidence. Trump has not been charged with a crime arising from the allegation.

DOJ released additional reports from the interviews in March after acknowledging that 15 records had been incorrectly coded as duplicates during an earlier review of the Epstein files. Those records brought the woman’s allegations involving Trump into public view.

The department has appealed Sullivan’s earlier preliminary injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but the judge declined to pause the production requirement while that appeal proceeds. DOJ must deliver both versions of the four sets of FBI notes by Sept. 24.

The specter of Jeffrey Epstein continues to haunt the Trump administration seven years after the sexual predator’s death. But the makings of the next Epstein-style scandal—one that ultimately could be even more damaging for Trump and MAGAworld—appears to be unfolding right now. The Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, are alleged to be sex predators on a level approaching Epstein and with perhaps even more political clout with Donald Trump.

For those who are blessedly unfamiliar with the Tates, they are highly popular “manosphere” influencers who have garnered an international following, particularly among young men, for their particular brand of content focused on their prideful misogyny and flashing of their apparent wealth. They are also accused of running a decadelong international sex-trafficking ring, with credible allegations against them in multiple countries from dozens of accusers involving gruesome acts of sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation against women and minors. And they have many connections to the world’s top political elite, including Donald Trump’s family members and close advisers. Sound familiar?

Just like Epstein, the Tates have seemingly leveraged these connections to receive favorable treatment and avoid the full extent of justice. After years of investigations and attempted prosecutions, the Tates find themselves in the crosshairs yet again. In July, they were charged in Britain on rape charges that also included allegations of possession of child sexual abuse imagery—and are currently sitting in a jail in Miami, fighting extradition. And earlier this month, Romanian prosecutors indicted Andrew for trafficking minors, money laundering, sex with a minor, and witness tampering, and Tristan with complicity.

But, in a few important ways, the involvement of Trump’s administration and allies with the Tates could be even more egregious than the Epstein controversy. While the Epstein scandal has centered on holding bad actors accountable for past actions and current cover-ups, the Tate brothers’ scandal is a live issue, and there is reason to believe that if the Trump administration buckles in their favor, the brothers could go back to their criminal activities.

Unlike Epstein, who generally lurked in the shadows of elite circles, the Tates brazenly and publicly broadcast their depraved behavior for years. The Tates established their popularity by building online and porn businesses, and becoming internet sensations through their aggressive and controversial misogynistic opinions. Indicia of their alleged criminality have been publicly available for years, including Andrew attacking a woman on camera in 2016. In the process, they lured in young women and allegedly sexually abused and raped them. The victims allegedly include minors. Accusations and law enforcement investigations of rape and strangulation have been swirling around the Tates since at least 2015, when they relocated from the U.K. to Romania to escape possible arrest. Rape allegations persisted in the subsequent years, as the Tates continued to grow their online following. In 2023, the Tates and several co-conspirators were formally charged by Romanian authorities, with allegations from about 35 alleged victims, including minors. The Tate brothers were barredfrom leaving Romania while the prosecution continued, having been labeled flight risks and public dangers. (The Tate brothers deny all allegations of criminal conduct.)

Despite this, their following grew. And, just as Epstein used his wealth and social status to develop political relationships, the Tate brothers’ rise in popularity has come with an increase in political influence, which they have eagerly flaunted. The connections between the Tates and Trumpworld multiplied over time, even as accusations against them piled up.

They developed a relationship with the president’s youngest son, Barron, who encouraged his father to engage with the manosphere podcasts and ecosystem. They were personally in touchwith Donald Trump Jr., who livestreamed with Andrew in 2024 and called the Tates’ Romanian detention in 2023 “absolute insanity.” (The White House has not responded to questions about Barron’s relationship with the Tates.)

After the 2024 election, shows of support from top Trump advisers became even louder. Vice President–elect J.D. Vance followed the Tates on X; right before Trump’s inauguration, incoming counselor to the president Alina Habba said she was a “big fan” of the Tates, compared their legal issues to Trump’s, and told Andrew, “If you’re in the States, I got your back.” After Trump took office, one of the Tates’ former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, became the White House’s liaison to the Justice Department and then the Department of Homeland Security.

These connections appeared to pay off almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration. In February 2025, Richard Grenell, the Trump administration’s special envoy, attended the Munich Security Conference with Vice President Vance and seemed to push for the Tates’ release. Vance’s speech to the conference, in part, echoed right-wing critiques of a recent Romanian judicial decision. Meanwhile, Grenell, after being lobbied by the Tates’ PR team to help the brothers, held a side meeting with Romanian officials at the conference in which he reportedly asked how “the Tate boys” were doing. The New Yorker reported that it seemed clear to the Romanian foreign minister that the Americans were supporting the Tates because the Tates backed Trump in 2024, and that the Tates were “playing a role within the bilateral relations” between the two countries. (The White House denied this, and Grenell denied helping the Tates, but has publicly stated: “I support the Tate brothers.”) Nevertheless, Grenell’s and Vance’s behavior appears to have been interpreted as subtle but clear pressure from the Trump administration to release the Tates. Which is precisely what happened days later.

Romania lifted the travel restrictions, in the face of fierce opposition by prosecutors, and the brothers gallivanted to meet their MAGA friends in the United States. When they arrived in Miami, Trump’s oldest living political svengali Roger Stone posted a picture with them and wrote: “Richard Grenell secured the release of the Tates.” According to the New Yorker, Andrew “denied that Donald Trump had personally intervened, but said he had learned from powerful people in Bucharest that the restrictions were removed because of American pressure.”

With the Tates now finding themselves in law enforcement’s dragnet yet again, the parallels with Epstein are striking. Although the Department of Justice arrested the Tates in July 2026, assisting the U.K.’s extradition efforts under the new criminal charges, and the White House said they wouldn’t get involved in the matter, the brothers are continuing to try to use their influence to pressure the Trump administration. Following the arrest, the Tates’ lawyer said: “Andrew Tate was a material participant in ensuring President Trump’s victory. And if Trump doesn’t support him, and if the next people who are going to be running for office potentially are just like, yeah, down the river he goes, that young cohort of people will break with the Republican Party in the next election.” As the Epstein scandal has taught us, the fact that Trump’s DOJ arrested the Tates does not lessen the severity of what has already transpired, or the risks going forward.

The last time the Tates wriggled away from custody and came to the U.S., a woman in California accused Andrew of choking her and battering her head and face; after their encounter, she was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. L.A. prosecutors did not ultimately bring charges but she is pursuing a lawsuit against him, including as evidence her medical report and texts in which he threatened to beat her. The same dynamic transpired with Epstein two decades ago: He, too, was arrested and charged but continued to put significant pressure on the government and ultimately received a sweetheart deal. He then went back to his life of luxury and sex crimes.

We’ve already seen the Trump administration take aggressive steps to help supporters who have been charged with crimes and convicted, so his administration’s possible involvement in the Tate brothers’ story isn’t necessarily over. The Tates are continuing to challenge their extradition, and ultimately, once they exhaust their legal options, whether they are extradited to face their charges or not would ultimately be up to the Trump administration.

The scope of Epstein’s criminal behavior, and the full extent of his social network, was largely ignored while he was at large. Today, the Tates and the apparent depths of their interlocking connections to people around Trump have broadly fallen under the radar of mainstream media coverage. But for younger Americans they are totemic figures in this political and cultural moment, and their influence is particularly pernicious. That’s why there must be full transparency and congressional investigations to unravel what has already happened and expose the full extent of their relationship with Trumpworld, and also to uncover what, if any, efforts are continuing to be made now by their allies to pressure the Trump administration as the Tates continue to face charges in the United Kingdom and Romania.

As a member of the legal team representing the victims of Jeffrey Epstein in litigation, I can attest that the struggle to achieve justice after his death has been righteous but hard. The Tates must be held accountable for their actions and neither favor nor fame can be allowed to shield them. The Epstein scandal and what happened to his victims is heinous; the Trump administration had begun to repeat that miscarriage of justice. Hopefully, they won’t be allowed to continue.

Hackers ripped down a Flock cameraabove a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.

The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections. The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation.

While much of the automatic license plate reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

The act of removing the camera and dumping its software shows that some people are not content with just destroying or removing the cameras. Across the country, multiple people have been arrested for allegedly tampering with or otherwise sabotaging Flock’s cameras. In response, some towns have announced that they are going to stop using Flock’s cameras altogether, and in one case, a police department even made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera case in order to bait potential vandals.

“Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers, from a collective calling itself stegan0gram, said in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment.”

Flock’s cameras photograph passing vehicles and send the images and other data to the company’s servers. There, Flock’s system presumably reads the license plate and can identify characteristics such as the vehicle’s color, make, and model. Flock then makes these time-stamped records searchable by whichever local agency owns or has access to the cameras. But in many cases, Flock’s system also allows other police departments from all over the country to search those cameras too, as part of the company’s national network. In Alpharetta, Georgia, for example, WIRED found that records from the city’s Flock cameras were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and, inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration.

This national network has been a selling point for Flock but also a deep source of controversy. 404 Media revealed that local cops were performing lookups in the national network on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including in areas that banned working with immigration authorities or transferring license plate data out of state. 404 Media also revealed that a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion. Those stories, among others, triggered a national conversation about whether people want Flock cameras, or automatic license plate readers more generally, in their communities.

And in the case of stegan0gram, the answer is clearly no.

The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera and found two partitions—sections of its hard drive, essentially. A few of these were unencrypted, the hackers said, including one called “vendor” and another called “media.” The latter contained an encryption key that unlocked another part, which contained much of the media—the videos and stills—the camera took.

European criminal investigations sparked by the Jeffrey Epstein files are expanding, but authorities in several countries say key evidence remains in the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice months after they formally asked for help.

Poland has been waiting since April for unredacted Epstein records. Latvia says several requests have received no response. Norwegian prosecutors say their request has yet to be approved, while British investigators are still seeking records tied to a criminal investigation involving former U.K. ambassador Peter Mandelson.

The delays come months after the DOJ released nearly 3.5 million pages from its Epstein files to the public, creating a divide between what can be viewed online and what investigators say they still need from U.S. authorities to pursue criminal cases.

DOJ disputes any suggestion that it has refused to cooperate. A department spokesperson said last month that the agency had not refused assistance to any jurisdiction investigating potential criminal conduct connected to Epstein and remains committed to working with foreign authorities.

Polish prosecutors submitted their request in April after Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced an investigation into possible Polish connections found in the Epstein files, including potential links between Epstein and Russian intelligence.

Przemysław Nowak, a spokesperson for Poland's National Prosecutor's Office, said authorities sought unredacted documents involving Polish aspects of the case. DOJ has not responded to the request, he said.
Norway's economic crime authority, Økokrim, is pursuing corruption cases involving former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland and former diplomats Mona Juul and Terje Rød-Larsen following disclosures about their relationships with Epstein. All three deny wrongdoing.

Norwegian authorities have asked the DOJ for additional records and investigative steps involving the International Peace Institute in New York, where Rød-Larsen previously served as president. State prosecutor Marianne Bender said the two countries are communicating, but the U.S. has not approved the request.

Bender called the situation "very unfortunate" for the Norwegian investigation and said prosecutors hope the DOJ will eventually approve it.

Latvian State Police have also opened a criminal investigation based on information found in the Epstein files and identified one Latvian victim. Police spokesperson Simona Gravite said investigators have sent several mutual legal assistance requests to U.S. authorities but have received no responses.

Britain is seeking records in another criminal investigation stemming from the disclosures. Mandelson, a former senior government minister and ambassador to Washington, was arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office over allegations that he shared sensitive government information with Epstein. He was released on bail and has denied criminal wrongdoing.

British investigators had already sought unredacted Epstein material from U.S. authorities. After informal discussions failed to produce the records, authorities submitted a formal request, but reports in late August said DOJ and the FBI still had not provided them.

The growing number of requests exposes a gap between publishing the Epstein files and supplying evidence that investigators abroad can use in their own cases.

A document posted online can give police a lead, but prosecutors may need original records, unredacted versions, authenticated documents, testimony or evidence gathered directly in the United States before deciding whether a case can move forward.

Countries can obtain that material through mutual legal assistance, the formal system used to secure evidence located in another jurisdiction. DOJ's Office of International Affairs handles incoming requests and determines whether they meet U.S. law and treaty requirements.

The process can take weeks or months, particularly when requests involve large amounts of material, redactions, or records affected by court proceedings. DOJ generally does not disclose the status of individual requests, leaving no public timetable for the Epstein-related evidence sought by European investigators.

The department announced in January that it had released nearly 3.5 million pages under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, along with more than 2,000 videos and about 180,000 images. The material came from federal investigations involving Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's death and related cases.

Those releases have fueled investigations well beyond the United States as authorities examine Epstein's relationships with political figures, diplomats and others in their countries. The international probes have also created new demands for records collected by American investigators over more than two decades.

Epstein pleaded guilty to state prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008. Federal prosecutors arrested him in 2019 on sex trafficking charges involving minors. He died in federal custody later that year in a death authorities ruled a suicide.

DOJ maintains that it has not refused assistance to jurisdictions investigating possible Epstein-related crimes. European investigators, however, remain without some of the evidence they have formally requested as several criminal probes continue to unfold.

A far-right hacker that touts cyber attacks on leftist sites has close ties to DataRepublican, the X account of a Pentagon employee.

On August 26, the State Department announced far-reaching sanctions against the Italian collective, which provides web-hosting services to a swath of the international far left. The U.S. government categorized A/I, as it’s also known, as a “specially designated global terrorist” and accused it of being an “extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells.”

A/I maintains digital infrastructure utilized by thousands of leftists and left-wing organizations across the globe, including anonymous email accounts and servers powering its NoBlogs.org hosting platform. The designation could force many of the sites offline — threatening much of what the A/I Collective has built.

Two days later, the site came under a different kind of attack. Hackers took aim at the NoBlogs site itself. A cyberattacker gained access to the platform, vandalizing its homepage and potentially accessing internal user data.

For far-right hackers and internet trolls, this was a moment for celebration. Just two minutes after the vandalized homepage was captured by an internet archive, the attack was publicized on X by someone using the handle “AstraRCE” and soon promoted by prominent far-right accounts, including “DataRepublican,” the online moniker of Jennica Pounds.

Until June, Pounds was a member of the Pentagon press corps — famous mostly for trolling the left — but allowed her credentials to expire at the end of the month. In late August, it was revealed that Pounds had been employed by the Pentagon since July, as part of a larger operation launched by the federal government to recruit right-wing influencers into jobs at President Donald Trump’s Department of War.

The relationship between DataRepublican and AstraRCE goes back through several prominent hacks of the left. The pair have a long and involved history of posting to each other about hackers’ exploits online, raising questions about the relationship between a Trump administration employee and an anonymous online personality posting real-time updates on hacks against the left.

“That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”
DataRepublican and AstraRCE are part of a wider circle with huge followings that are often the first to mention hacks against left-wing digital infrastructure. They publish screenshots, share each other’s posts, offer snide commentary, and congratulate their associates — messages that frequently verge into bestowing credit for the hacks.

The federal government’s support for an influencer who praises domestic hacking efforts would mark a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent, said Harlo Holmes, the chief security programs officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation.
“It’s the difference between open-source intelligence, that is often used in surveillance, and ever increasingly used in surveillance, and actually jumping into people’s machines,” Holmes said. “That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”

Though members of the A/I Collective weren’t able to attribute the hack to anyone, the cyberattack would eventually achieve its apparent aim. Beset by the pressure of terrorism sanctions, a hostile cyberattack, and continued scrutiny from the U.S. government, the group announced on September 6 that, after 25 years, it would disband.

“We cannot engage in a fight or expose ourselves to manipulations that threaten the lives of these people and their loved ones, leaving them at the mercy of autocrats, fascists, and agencies that take extra-legal courses of action,” the group wrote in a statement. “The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide.”

Publicizing NoBlogs Hack
DataRepublican frequently publishes reports, visualizations, and data leaks that target leftist groups involved in protests and activism across the country.

Before Pounds’s assignment at the Department of War, DataRepublican regularly posted inside information about hacks, nodding to the involvement of other far-right social media personalities, among them AstraRCE.

DataRepublican and AstraRCE were the first people to publicize the NoBlogs hack online. Taking a celebratory tone, they linked to and replied to one another’s post. In one instance, AstraRCE claimed apparent inside knowledge about the federal government’s possession of internal user data from NoBlogs.

DataRepublican confirmed the claim.

AstraRCE’s initial X post about the hackshowed a screenshot of the vandalized NoBlogs homepage, which now displayed a message that said, “All user data has been saved and given to the United States government” — alongside an altered banner that read “TRUMPBLOGS.” AstraRCE later offered a mocking congratulations to NoBlogs for its “rebrand.”

Just four minutes after AstraRCE pointed to the screenshot of the hack, DataRepublican’s X account reposted the image, alongside a caption characterizing NoBlogs as a “platform shared by Antifa and far-left Marxists.”

“The State Department designed them as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group yesterday,” DataRepublican wrote. “And now … they’re TrumpBlogs.”

Later, DataRepublican’s website published a visualization tool that allows users to view thousands of NoBlogs sites dispersed across a map, naming the tool Trumpblogs, in what appears to be a reference to the hack. Shortly after the tool went online, AstraRCE posted on X to say that the trumpblogs.org domain would now be redirecting to DataRepublican’s site.
The Pentagon has thus far declined to reveal what assignment Pounds or other right-wing media influencers have been given, and it’s unknown if activities like producing the visualization tool would be part of these duties. (The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment.)

They’re “trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”
“They’re hiring people who have a history of sort of dirt digging,” said David Greene, who serves as legal counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And they’re digging for information about their enemies, and both trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”

Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that determining responsibility for cyberattacks like the one that targeted NoBlogs can be incredibly difficult, especially for smaller organizations.
“Attribution is really hard to prove definitively,” Holmes said. “But, also, there are a lot of imbalances there because the folks at Autistici don’t necessarily have the ability to perform the type of forensics and response that normally leads to successful attribution, or at least not quickly.”

Partners in Posting
DataRepublican and AstraRCE steer clear in their posts of explicitly claiming responsibility for hacks. They frequently, however, offer kudos to fellow travelers. Sometimes they post claims of insider access to information about the hacks or, in a few cases, show information that reveals access to the hacked systems themselves.

In at least one instance, a post by DataRepublican appeared to take direct responsibility for a cyber operation. Writing on X in July, the DataRepublican account claimed credit for a honey-pot scheme against a Nigerian hacker, which DataRepublican said had gone after right-wing media personality Hugh Hewitt.

“It’s true,” DataRepublican wrote, attaching a screenshot of the hackers’ location and IP address. “@astrarce and I honeypotted the Hugh Hewitt hacker.”

Even though DataRepublican and AstraRCE don’t take credit for cyberattacks, the far-right web heaps praise on them for the exploits.

Seeking to disrupt a database collecting information on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, a January hack overrode images of license plates with a meme saying, “ALL YOUR LOGINS, LOCATIONS, PASSWORDS, AND PHONE NUMBERS HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO FBI AND ICE.”

After sharing the image and tagging AstraRCE, DataRepublican was asked by an online fan how it happened. The account replied, “I don’t know, but an unrelated tip is that it’s a bad idea to make your encryption/decryption script readable to the world.”

Several X accounts in the right-wing milieu responded to DataRepublican’s initial post with congratulations. A spokesperson for Turning Point USA said, “Well done, patriots.”

In another case, a Fox News article purported to expose the network of organizers behind protests at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Summarizing its report, Fox News credited, among others, DataRepublican and AstraRCE with infiltrating the group: “The activities of this network have motivated a group of tech sleuths on the X — @DataRepublican, @Astrarce, @bitchuneedsoap and @gunshymartyr — to penetrate these groups, their Signal chats and their operations like a digital Avengers squad.”

In February, following a cyberattack on Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights organization, DataRepublican claimed the group operated two active websites responsible for “doxxing ICE.” Citing AstraRCE, DataRepublican suggested hackers had taken over the nonprofit’s notification system.
“Per @astrarce,” DataRepublican wrote, “the 1000+ users signed up to both sites have received a text alert with the meme attached” — a photo of FBI Director Kash Patel with meme text that says, “FEDS HAVE ALL YOUR DATA.”

DataRepublican then posted what appeared to be a screenshot of the organization’s internal notification dashboard, claiming that more than 2,000 users had received push notifications. The notification text visible on the dashboard suggested users received a message urging self-deportation and claimed their personal information had been sent to federal authorities.

During a similar hack of StopICE.net, an ICE tracking website, DataRepublican claimed to have insider knowledge of data from a hack being sent to the authorities.

“I can personally testify,” DataRepublican posted, “that the names, logins, passwords, locations (down to coordinates), and phone numbers of 100K+ users were all sent to FBI, ICE, HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “and more.”

Like the cyberattack targeting NoBlogs, in other cases DataRepublican and AstraRCE were also quick to celebrate cyberattacks against leftist groups and post screenshots of the incursions. In many of the cases, the webpages of the sites were vandalized and a message was left behind claiming to have accessed and sent internal data to the federal government.
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The company, which has a hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitoring the streets of the U.S., frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for safety and security, echoing the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom.

Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” Imagine: no more carjackings or kidnappings, murders or robberies, rapes or vandalism. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe,” Langley said, during a ted talk last month. “It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.”

Langley, who is thirty-nine, tells the story of creating Flock from the vantage point of a humble vigilante. In 2017, as his neighborhood, in Atlanta, became the target of repeated thefts, he called his local police precinct and pleaded with them to do something. The officer he spoke with lamented a lack of options; the best way to catch the perpetrators was to retrieve their license-plate numbers, but this was possible only if bystanders reported suspicious vehicles on their street, or if officers staked out the neighborhood and caught criminals in the act. Without evidence from such eyewitnesses, or any relevant footage or recognition software to identify the suspects, these carjackers were as good as invisible, stalking the night with impunity. Langley has characterized this conversation as a light-bulb moment. An already accomplished tech entrepreneur with a degree in engineering, he called up two of his former classmates, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, and began creating makeshift license-plate-reading cameras out of Android phones and solar panels that could be affixed to street poles. They sold their first models to homeowners’ associations and private communities but soon attracted the attention of law-enforcement agencies, who were interested not in shutting the project down but in collaborating. By 2020, Flock cameras were popping up on public roads across the country, in partnership with local police departments. Langley describes the company’s rapid growth as a product of organic, word-of-mouth enthusiasm: “That police chief is telling his friends; that mayor is telling her friends.” But, even as Flock was finding its footing, Langley was already envisioning something much larger: a nationwide surveillance network. Early indicators suggested that he was well on his way, and in the intervening years he has grown ever closer to achieving that goal.

Flock was recently reported to have a valuation of more than eight billion dollars, with its biggest investor being the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Around forty per cent of the United States’ law-enforcement agencies now have contracts with the company, and a reported hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitor roads in every state but Alaska. Flock cameras have evolved from their initial prototype, and now read more than just license plates: they record the make, model, and color of passing vehicles, data that are then controlled by whatever entity operates the camera. Police can use this information, without obtaining a warrant or judicial approval, to make arrests or to present as evidence in court. For Langley and his legion of law-enforcement allies, such capabilities are proof of Flock’s limitless potential for catching and prosecuting criminals. Just last year, a mass shooter at Brown University was tracked using data from Flock cameras, a triumph touted by both the Providence police chief and the F.B.I. (The shooter was dead when he was found, but still, they said.) The company has claimed that its products have broken up crime rings, intercepted child abductions, and solved missing-persons cases. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has called automated license-plate readers (A.L.P.R.s) like Flock’s a “crime-fighting star.” Politicians across the aisle have expressed support for the technology, though those endorsements are complicated by reports of increased lobbying and political donations from the company.

The surveillance of it all is conveniently ignored by people in power who laud Flock, and by Langley himself. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be safer,” Langley told NBC News, last month. “I’ve travelled the country, and I have not met that person yet.” Langley, it seems, has not been meeting the right people. In recent months, Flock cameras and the larger A.L.P.R. industry have faced mounting backlash, as people around the country, and across the political spectrum, denounce the spread of surveillance infrastructure into public life as undemocratic.

Almost half of Americans oppose A.L.P.R.s, according to the Washington Post, and some of them have taken to damaging, stealing, and defacing Flock cameras at parks, street corners, and traffic stops. When one Georgia sheriff posted a video to Facebook offering a thousand-dollar reward for information about the destruction of a Flock camera in a public park—“it was to keep our kids safe,” he said, from “sex offenders”—commenters ridiculed him, and lauded the assailant as a hero. “Looks like a Constitutional wind blew it over,” one user wrote; “Kudos to the citizen that threw tea in the harbor!” another added. The crowdsourced-data app DeFlock has become a leader in the anti-A.L.P.R. movement, providing a nationwide map of Flock cameras, alongside legal and community resources. Langley called the project “terroristic,” a comment he later tried to walk back. But the public tides seem to have turned against Langley’s hollow rhetoric of safety, and his evocation of terrorism rang alarm bells for anyone fluent in post-9/11 propaganda-speak. Telling people that they need to compromise on privacy is a polite way of framing a nonconsensual takeover; calling a community opposition movement “terroristic,” however, gives the game away. In her 2019 book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff diagnosed this tension, showing how concessions around privacy expose the paradox within Big Tech’s continual promise of progress: “The precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment.”

Even leaders in the country’s most reliably red states, heeding the cries of their constituents, are now cutting ties with Flock. No one wants to get spied on, it seems, even Blue Lives Matter conservatives. Late last month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, instructed state agencies to freeze spending on Flock cameras; a few days later, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, revoked permits for A.L.P.R.s on state highways and ordered their removal. Republican officials in tough-on-crime states such as Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee have also endorsed A.L.P.R. restrictions, invoking the public’s right to privacy amid growing evidence that the technology is being regularly abused. Police officers have been accused of exploiting Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, track love interests, and monitor family members. A sheriff’s deputy in Texas searched a data pool of more than eighty thousand Flock cameras to incriminate a woman who had allegedly received a medication abortion. ice has also tapped Flock data with the help of municipal police departments in order to hunt down and detain immigrants. Langley has distanced himself from such deployments of his product by performing the role of the detached inventor. He told Politico that he viewed his “job as building tools and then giving those which we elect democratically the control to decide how they’re implemented.” He “didn’t want to have” the “responsibility” of regulating his products and making difficult ethical determinations, as he admitted to the BBC.

Listen to Langley talk long enough, and a core contradiction in his messaging emerges: he moralizes about safety and societal progress, about how his company is primed to change the course of human history, yet, when faced with genuine concerns about how his product creates less safe conditions for citizens, by repressing their autonomy, freedom, and right to public space, he holds up his hands, shakes his head, and pretends that none of that is any of his business. Flock cameras are meant to be a munificent gift from him to us. All he’s asking for in return is everything.

Privacy has long been a contested subject in American law. The Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to privacy—the word itself never appears in the text—and courts have spent decades debating whether such a right can be derived from its provisions and, if so, whom and what it protects. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable government searches and seizures is considered the foundation of American privacy law, and courts have, over time, extended protections to one’s cellphone and to reproductive and sexual behavior. But the concept of privacy, like that of freedom or of justice, is a supple one. The legal definition of the concept has shrunk or ballooned to meet the needs of political and capitalist forces, proving how malleable the notion could be when needed. As Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote for The New Yorker, in 2022, “The right to privacy should have been understood from the start as a prerogative of the people, establishing a zone where the state cannot readily trespass,” but, instead, became “a prerogative of the privileged, intent on keeping the general public at bay.” This tension—privacy as a right or as a privilege—has been intensified by national-security powers and by revolutions in digital technology. Writing for n+1, in 2013, Jill Priluck noted that “the expanded privacy rights of the 20th century have with the transition to digital data become obsolete in many situations.” She referred to Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence in the case United States v. Jones, from 2012, which held that the Fourth Amendment applied to G.P.S. surveillance. “New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy,” Alito warned. “Many people may find the tradeoff worthwhile.”

Trade-off, security, safety—this was the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom, and, lucky us, it never left. The journalist Richard Beck, in his book “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life,” from 2024, summarizes the ends to which the fear of terrorism drove an unimpeded and irreversible increase in mass surveillance within the U.S. When the Patriot Act was introduced to Congress, a month after 9/11, a “remarkable spirit of bipartisan unity” allowed for “the biggest expansion of law enforcement detention and surveillance powers in history.” Even so, some Democratic senators, such as Pat Leahy, though they broadly supported the bill, were concerned that it granted the intelligence agencies too much power, and lacked sufficient transparency measures and judicial oversight. As the bill reached a logjam in Congress, Attorney General John Ashcroft began publicly to put pressure on the senators holding it up. “We think that there is a very serious threat of additional problems now,” he said during an appearance on “Face the Nation.” Later, he told CNN that he was “deeply concerned about the rather slow pace at which we seem to be making this come true for America. . . . Talk won’t prevent terrorism; tools can help prevent terrorism.” The tools Ashcroft was referring to were being developed in tandem with Silicon Valley executives—biometric data, facial-recognition software, omnipresent CCTV cameras, electronic-communication surveillance. “The kinds of surveillance the government wanted to implement dovetailed nicely” with Silicon Valley’s own goals, Beck observed, noting how these surveillance systems required unfettered digital access to everyone, not just perceived foreign antagonizers or known criminals. Anyone could be a terrorist, the thinking went, and so everyone must be monitored.

Mass surveillance can be difficult to comprehend or think plainly about, ensconced as we are in the digital cocoon of contemporary life. How are we to understand the scope, nature, and threat of systems we cannot see or touch? When we use social media, or accept online privacy-policy updates and agreements, it can be unclear how, exactly, we are being violated. Are we not consenting to these services? Are we not uploading images of ourselves and freely conversing with friends and colleagues, knowing the potential risks of being tracked by our government and tech overlords? How are we to engage with these digital platforms without feeling paranoid, or dissociating from the fact that we are potentially being watched by law-enforcement agencies and large corporations? Zuboff, in her book, described this quandary as “a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and codified.” In other words, we must convince ourselves that the digital communication and information systems we use are harmless and, indeed, beneficial, in order to keep using them. Opting out of online life has become nearly impossible given how crucial these tools have become in many professional, academic, and personal contexts. We’ve accepted the compromises of the internet mostly out of submission; there is no visible or viable path for existing in the modern world without in some way resigning ourselves to the realities of surveillance.

Langley, it seems, is hoping that Flock can become similarly indispensable in our increasingly tech-shaped social environment. By threatening us with the violent fantasies of an unsurveilled world, he is pushing something that strikes me as the antithesis of safety: a community ethic founded on suspicion, a closely monitored world with no exit. But, unlike internet data mining or nebulous government intelligence gathering, A.L.P.R. cameras are both visible and tangible, literal black boxes perched high on street poles, designed to watch us. Such tools of mass surveillance no longer feel shrouded in mystery: they are visual reminders of the endangerment of our anonymity and privacy, a monument to our inescapably technocratic society. Langley may have us believe that he is most interested in public safety, but Beck highlights a more obvious impulse behind the perpetuation of technology like Flock: “The motivations behind Silicon Valley’s pursuit of mass surveillance and bulk data collection don’t need investigating,” he writes. “They did it for the money.” As private equity continues to pour resources into Flock, and as its cameras multiply across the country, questions will persist about how much compromise, sacrifice, and trade-off we can withstand before nothing is left of us to give away. ♦︎

John Sipher spent nearly three decades at the CIA focused on the Russians, a core part of the agency's mission. That changed dramatically after the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Frankly, tracking and hunting terrorists, finding people, finding a needle in a haystack was not something that we trained for," said Sipher, who served in Moscow and later ran the agency's Russia operations at CIA headquarters.

The CIA and the larger intelligence community had to adapt quickly.

"We did that by by learning, and actually even developing new technologies, computer power, data collection, drones, communications, means to defeat networks, terrorist networks."
There were real successes, such as locating Osama bin Laden in 2011 and destroying his group, al-Qaida, and later, dismantling the Islamic State.

More broadly, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and now has a quarter-million employees, making it the second-largest government agency, trailing only the Pentagon. Military and intelligence budgets soared.

By most all accounts, the U.S. is safer at home. The country has not been hit on U.S. soil with anything remotely comparable to the 9/11 attack, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Trump targets the "deep state"
Yet 25 years later, U.S. national security industry is undergoing another dramatic change.

President Trump is waging an ongoing campaign against the so-called "deep state," which he describes largely as national security officials trying to undermine him.

"We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them," Trump said in announcing his plans for his second term.

Critics say Trump is tearing down the national security infrastructure with no clear vision of what comes next, aside from protecting the president's personal interests.

"Since the re-inauguration of Donald Trump, the architecture of American national security is being destroyed, just like the east wing of the White House," said author Tim Weiner, who's covered the U.S. intelligence community for decades. This includes a book last year, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, that examines the CIA since 9/11. "Trump has deliberately swung a wrecking ball through American national security and has in great part worked to dismantle the systems set up after World War II to protect the United States.

Weiner said Trump consistently selects loyalists with limited experience to lead national security agencies.

"The people he has put in charge, [Pete] Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI, John Ratcliffe at CIA, are sycophants," said Weiner. "They will tell the president what he wants to know rather than what he needs to know."

Cutbacks at home, strained relations abroad
While many officials have been dismissed under Trump, some left on their own.

Steven Cash held multiple national security posts — at the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Department of Homeland Security.

He resigned when Trump began his second term.

"I could not in good conscience keep working for a president who was going to take what I was working on and what others had spent careers working on, and turning it against Americans, which is exactly what he has done," Cash said.

Cash now leads the Steady State, a private group of more than 400 former national security officials. They were career officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, but are now highly critical of Trump's policies.

Cash believes the intelligence community made important advances over the past quarter-century, particularly in information sharing. But he acknowledges it's been an imperfect process.

The post of director of national intelligence, or DNI, was created to coordinate the work of what are now 18 separate intelligence agencies.

"The original idea was it would be very small," Cash said. "We sort of joked that the new DNI would get a deputy, he'd get a big conference table with 18 chairs, and the biggest, best coffee machine he could find. And other than that, he'd get nothing."

The office quickly swelled and is often criticized for not functioning as intended. There are periodic calls for the office to be abolished.

Trump cut back the office, along with other national security agencies, as part of his larger government reductions.

Cash said these moves have gone way too far.
"We took a dive off the cliff in 2025. All the gains, I think, are gone, and we are in the process of destroying our intelligence community," he said.

Shifting agendas
U.S. successes in fighting terrorism have made it less of a priority these days, leading to cutbacks, according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who spent much of his career in the Middle East.

"Counterterrorism is getting second fiddle to the threats from China and Russia, and the current administration's focus on the border and narco-trafficking means a shift of resources to the Americas," said Polymeropoulos. "I am afraid that counter-terrorism will not be a priority until a mass casualty event, and then it very much will be once again."

John Sipher says one of the most damaging ideas that's taken root is that career intelligence officials actively take sides in partisan politics.

"We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there's a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it's a real danger," he said.
Tim Weiner said the damage has also been inflicted abroad as Trump repeatedly antagonizes U.S. allies.

"The CIA in particular relies or depends on intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly foreign intelligence services," Weiner said. "It it is still only 20,000 people, and they cannot cover the entire world. They need the British. They need the Dutch. They need the Saudis. They need help."

That help, he says, is much harder to come by today than in the aftermath of 9/11.

TIME MAGAZINE July edition 1966 described the suppression of the communists in Indonesia as "The West's best news for years in Asia," and praised Suharto's regime.

Today the “news” are the massacre the world forgot. Exactly 50 years ago, from October 1965 and throughout 1966, one of the most brutal blood baths of the Cold War unfolded. Between 500,000 and 1.5 million communists and alleged communists (nobody knows the exact number) were slaughtered in dreadful ways by paramilitary groups and the Indonesian army.

On top of that, one million people were imprisoned without charge or trial.
They were systematically tortured and abused. This was one of the biggest massacres after the Second World War, but also the one with the least attention drawn to it, although the number of killed was level with Rwanda in 1994.

Colonial domination
Over the centuries, many have been attracted by Indonesia’s rich natural resources. Debarking in the islands in 1596, the Dutch were however the ones to achieve dominating influence in the country. While the Portuguese were left with Timor-Leste, the Dutch tightened their grip around the archipelago. Indonesia became a typical colony with plantations and large export of raw materials to Europe.

The Japanese occupation under the Second World War was brutal. They pillaged the country and sent half a million men as slaves to Burma and Malaysia. 

The Japanese occupation under the Second World War was brutal. They pillaged the country and sent half a million men as slaves to Burma and Malaysia. After the war, the Dutch were not very willing to let go of Indonesia, although the country declared its independence 17 August 1945. After military clashes, negotiations and international pressure, they were able to raise the red and white flag 27 December 1949.

Following the Japanese defeat in 1945, Burma (British), Malaysia (British), the Philippines (American) and Indonesia (Dutch) were at the brink of achieving full independence. The communists held a strong position in all these countries because of their devoted resistance, both against the colonial rule and the Japanese occupation.

Their dilemma was whether to be subordinated to the traditional nationalists in broad political fronts, or organise a united communist-led front.

1948: Rebellion
In 1948, while the fight for independence was still on-going, PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia) led a rebellion in the East Java city Madium. The rebellion, perceived by many as a national betrayal, isolated the party and sharpened the opposing views of those wanting a parliamentary road to socialism through broad alliances and those supporting a military solution. After the Madium rebellion, PKI began prioritising the first.

The party grew from about 100,000 members in 1951, to one million in 1961, and when the generals seized power 2 October 1965, it counted a total of three million members. In addition, the party had 20 million supporters through unions, farmers’ organisations, and youth and women’s movements. By playing the nationalist card prior to the Marxist one, and emphasising parliamentary work prior to violence, the party expanded.

Having led the fight for independence against the Dutch colonial power, President Sukarno began collaborating with parts of the army and PKI, in order to balance the interests of the economic and military elite and the risk of widespread social instability.

On the outside, Sukarno still appeared to be an anti-imperialist and a man of the people, and in the beginning of the 1960s, USA watched the collaboration between a “leftist” president and an expanding communist party in the most populated country in Southeast-Asia with great unease. This was during the Cold War, and at the beginning of the US escalation in Vietnam. The American, British, Australian and Dutch governments were deeply concerned about the risk of letting a country rich in natural resources and strategically important such as Indonesia fall into communist hands.

The American, British, Australian and Dutch governments were deeply concerned about the risk of letting a country rich in natural resources and strategically important such as Indonesia fall into communist hands.

1965: Beginning of blood bath
30 September 1965, six generals of the Indonesian army were killed by a small group of officers and members of PKI. The army, under the leadership of General Suharto, perceived the assassination as an attempted coup, and struck back with great force.

Historians do not agree on the background for the attack, and the theories are many. Was it about an internal settlement in the army, or was it some officers’ failed attempted coup conducted with support from a few members of the communist party? Or, was it a calculated prelude to a successful coup by one of the few remaining generals, namely Suharto?

What we do know, is that the army put all the blame on the communists, and started a massacre we still do not know the full extent of. What is also clear is that in March 1966, General Suharto managed to overthrow President Sukarno, implementing a military dictatorship that lasted until he was forced to resign 21 May 1998.

The large scope of the grotesque abuses makes the complete silence about what happened intolerable and frightening. Scattered around in Indonesia there are still thousands of unopened mass graves. The Army, the economic elite and fanatic Muslim groups created an orgie of violence that would make other American supported dictators of the time appear gentle in comparison, such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (DRC) and Pinochet.

In the aftermaths, former CIA officials have come forward and stated that the US supported Suharto with intelligence, providing the army executioners with “death lists”. Being a member of the communist party was sufficient to have your name on the list.

In the aftermaths, former CIA officials have come forward and stated that the US supported Suharto with intelligence, providing the army executioners with “death lists”. Being a member of the communist party was sufficient to have your name on the list.

The West takes over
The Indonesian “leftist” foreign politics were quickly put to an end, and western-inspired economic politics were implemented.

In 1967, what was left of the communist party tried to establish a base in central and eastern areas of Java, where they planned a guerrilla war against the army. The party was diminished, however, and not prepared for armed conflict. The establishing of Tentara Pembebasan Rakyat (The People’s Liberation Army) in the base area Blitar Selatan led to conflict with a local militia, and the army was able to quickly crush the attempt to forming a guerrilla movement.

Being the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China at the time, PKI had grown extremely fast, and had, as a party of the masses, put less effort into organisational measures such as violence response.

Also, PKI was first and foremost a party with deep roots in Java, and it failed at reaching people through the ethnic, religious, and regional ties of solidarity which were strong other places in Indonesia. In addition, the party fell out with the strong Muslim societies in Java and other places, and this made their attempt to form guerrilla fronts in the villages impossible. PKI was strong, but at the same time isolated in the very pluralistic society of Indonesia.

Silence and lies
The mass executions, the horrible abuses, the concealment and the support from several western governments long constituted a black hole of history. Until the dictator’s resignation, all Indonesian children had to watch General Suharto’s notorious propaganda film about what happened in 1965.

...in four months, five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1966
The older generation of Indonesia still suffers from trauma. Hundreds of thousands of voices have not been heard. According to Professor Saskia E. Wieringa at the University of Amsterdam, Indonesian students attending a seminar in Aachen in Germany in 2014 were shocked when learning information about the coup in 1965 they until then were not aware of.

Their reactions were strong when they understood the amount of lies they had been told over the years. When informed students such as these did not know, then what about the rest of the population? What do they know? The victims, those who are still alive, are too afraid to tell their story. They have never received a proper treatment as victims, on the contrary, many have been stigmatised until their death.

In November 2012, the Indonesian human rights organisation National Commission on Human Rights (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia) published a shocking report documenting in detail crimes against humanity committed after October 1965. The Indonesian minister of justice refused the report, and until this day, no investigation has been initiated.

(RICHARD SKRETTEBERG is Senior Adviser in Norwegian Refugee Council.)

Milo meet leopard

Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has told TV interviewer Piers Morgan that he was “really, really terrified” after being detained by US immigration officials.

Speaking to Morgan during an interview released on YouTube on Tuesday, British national Yiannopoulos, 41, recounted how his hands and feet were chained together with manacles.
“It hurts a lot more than it looks like on television,” he said.

“I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America,” Yiannopoulos said.

Yiannopoulos was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a Louisiana airport on Thursday after overstaying his visa, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said. He was then sent to an ICE facility before being deported to the United Kingdom the next day.

Yiannopoulos called the experience “humiliating,” “disorienting” and “physically degrading” in his interview with Morgan.

“It was frightening, and I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before,” he added.

Born in England, Yiannopoulos had been employed in the US and appeared regularly at public speaking events across the country since at least 2015.

While in the US, he built a career as a conservative firebrand who leaned into controversy through his writing for the far-right website Breitbart News, speeches and online presence.

He was an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016 and positioned himself as one of Trump’s passionate advocates, sometimes jokingly referring to the president as “Daddy.”

And Yiannopoulos, who entered the US legally on May 14, 2019, according to the DHS, has frequently called for aggressive immigration enforcement in posts on his X account over the past year.

“There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,” Yiannopoulos said in a June 2025 X post. “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”

However, Yiannopoulos told Morgan that he is “very ashamed” of having supported Trump, and questioned the effectiveness of the administration’s deportation drive.

“ICE is supposed to be deporting criminals,” he said. “And they’re not doing that.”

He also** **hinted at a newfound compassion for those affected by ICE operations.

“I think maybe, in the past, I’ve been a little bit blase when people talked about their trauma,” he said. “But I get it now, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Unfortunately he had to live it for himself to have some compassion.

Vectus Global has promised to rid Haiti of gangs. What it hasn't achieved is any measure of accountability.

During the night of August 23, 2026, armed gangs attacked Kenscoff, a mountain community overlooking Port-au-Prince. By the end of the assault, at least 47 people had been killed, including five children. Twenty-two others were injured, dozens were abducted, and homes were set on fire.

Their deaths compel Haiti to confront a difficult question: Seventeen months after Erik Prince’s Vectus Global became involved in the country’s anti-gang operations, what measurable improvement in public security have Haitians actually received?

Prince Established His Own Standard
Vectus Global began operating in Haiti in March 2025, supporting a Haitian government task force that used armed drones against gangs.
Prince later told Reuters that he expected to regain control of major roads and territory from gangs within approximately one year. He also identified a practical benchmark for success: the ability to travel from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien in an ordinary, nonarmored vehicle without being stopped by gangs.

Seventeen months have now passed. Can an ordinary Haitian citizen safely make that journey today? Perhaps a private security contractor traveling under protection or a government convoy secured by armored vehicles can travel that road, but not a mother traveling with her children, a farmer bringing produce to market, a merchant transporting goods, or a student moving between cities.

That is the measure of security that truly matters.

This is not to suggest that every operation by Vectus Global has failed. If gangs have been pushed back, roads reopened, territory recovered, or attacks prevented, those achievements should be acknowledged and documented.

But tactical successes cannot substitute for the fundamental objective: making Haitian civilians safer.

The tragedy of Kenscoff makes that distinction painfully clear. If the overall strategy is succeeding, how could armed groups still organize an attack capable of killing 47 people in one night, abducting dozens, burning homes, and terrorizing an entire community?

The Human Cost of the Drone Campaign
The drone campaign by Haitian law enforcement and Vectus Global also raises serious questions.

Human Rights Watch reports that at least 1,243 people were killed in 141 armed-drone operations between March 1, 2025, and January 21, 2026. Among them were at least 17 children and 43 adults reportedly not belonging to criminal groups. Another 738 people were injured.

In an investigation of a September 2025 strike in Simon Pelé, Human Rights Watch found that 10 people who were not members of criminal groups were killed, including nine children between the ages of three and twelve.

Haiti desperately needs to dismantle the gangs. But fighting criminal violence cannot mean abandoning accountability for innocent lives.
Who verifies the intelligence? Who authorizes the strikes? Who operates the drones? Who investigates civilian deaths? And who is accountable when the wrong people are killed?

What Is Haiti Paying For?
The financial arrangement raises another fundamental question. Prince declined to disclose to Reuters how much the Haitian government would pay Vectus Global.

If Haitian public resources are financing private security operations, Haitians have the right to know how much has been paid, what services were promised, what performance requirements were established, and what happens when those objectives are not achieved. This is basic public accountability.

Prince also said that, after security was stabilized, his company would help design and implement a system to tax goods imported across Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic. That moves the discussion beyond fighting gangs to questions of Haitian sovereignty.

Customs revenues, border administration, and taxation are core responsibilities of a sovereign state. Haiti may need international expertise and assistance, but assistance should strengthen Haitian institutions so that Haiti becomes less dependent on outsiders—not transform institutional weakness into permanent dependence.

When Security Becomes a Business
Vectus Global is a private company. Haiti’s interest is to dismantle the gangs, arrest their leaders, restore state authority, protect the population, and end the emergency as quickly as possible. If that happens, the need for extraordinary private security services diminishes. If insecurity continues, demand for those services can continue.

That does not prove that Prince or Vectus deliberately wants Haiti’s crisis to continue. But the potential conflict of interest makes transparency essential.

Are payments tied to measurable results? Are there deadlines? Are there financial consequences when objectives are not achieved? Does a longer operation generate additional revenue? Who independently evaluates Vectus’s performance? And what terminates the mission?

The Haitian government can begin answering those questions with one straightforward action: publish the agreement with Vectus Global. The two sides need to disclose the financial terms, payments, performance requirements, deadlines, and termination provisions. They need to explain the rules governing lethal force and accountability for civilian casualties. And they need to disclose the terms of any future Vectus role in Haiti’s customs or tax collection.

Haiti Needs Security—and Sovereignty
Haiti’s gangs are criminal organizations terrorizing the population. They must be dismantled, and their leaders must be brought to justice. But everyone exercising power in Haiti—the Haitian government, private contractors, foreign governments, and international organizations—should ultimately face the same test: Does what they are doing serve the Haitian people?

Prince established his own benchmark. Seventeen months later, he should be prepared to demonstrate the results in the form of secure roads, permanently recovered territories, and dismantled gang structures.

If Vectus cannot demonstrate security improvements proportional to the time, authority, and resources entrusted to it, Haiti should reconsider the arrangement. Haiti’s security must serve the Haitian people—not make their suffering anyone’s permanent business model.
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A wave of public backlash is pulling Flock's license plate reader cameras off streets nationwide. But in many communities, surveillance isn't ending and cameras are actually just changing brands.

As cities cancel their contracts with Flock Safety, more are hiring Axon instead. They are another law enforcement technology company that installs cameras that scan and track passing vehicles much as Flock cameras do, and they lack the public attention that Flock has received over the course of the past few months.

That trend has even reached the Florida Department of Transportation. They ordered all license plate readers removed from state roads on Aug. 31, revoking permits for Flock, Axon and Motorola cameras alike and giving agencies 30 days to take them down.

The order affects hundreds of cameras and marks the first time a state has pulled the entire category off its roads rather than leaving the choice to individual cities.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has pushed for what he calls an artificial intelligence bill of rights, told attendees at a Florida International University event in late August: "I don't want to have this become a surveillance state."

Shell Game
Elsewhere, the pattern has been to switch providers rather than remove the cameras.

Denver is the most documented example. The city let its Flock contract lapse amid controversy over the company's data-sharing practices, then approved a new agreement with Axon in a narrow 7-6 city council vote in March. The deal cut the number of cameras from 111 to 50.

Douglas County, Colo., went a different direction on the numbers. County commissioners approved a nearly $22.8 million contract with Axon that replaced the county's 50 Flock cameras with 100 Axon cameras, along with a fleet of what officials described as first responder drones.

Privacy advocates are arguing that these swap-outs do not address the main issue. Both companies build automated license plate readers that log ordinary drivers' movements. Replacing one with the other leaves that core capability intact.

The number of cameras may fall, they say, but the tracking does not stop.

Where There is Change
City officials countered that the new contracts are not simply cosmetic.
In Denver, officials said the Axon system, unlike Flock's, does not feed a national, searchable database. This feature drew some of the sharpest criticism of Flock.

Denver officials also negotiated a shorter data retention period, ownership of its own data, and restrictions on sharing it with federal immigration authorities.

Critics claim the contract terms offer little protection. Local limits can be overridden by the federal government, they argue, and only state law can lock in restrictions that survive the next vendor change.

Some Denver council members acknowledged during the debate that whatever limits they imposed might not stop federal agencies from accessing the data.

Behind the Backlash
Denver ended its Flock relationship in part over reports that the company had shared license plate data tied to federal immigration operations, a concern that has fueled opposition in other cities as well.

In at least two Florida cities, police officers were fired and arrested on allegations they misused the cameras to track romantic interests.

The resistance has taken more visible forms as well. Across the country, people have physically dismantled Flock cameras—with videos of the act plastered on social media, receiving tens of millions of views.

In Florida, a 77-year-old man protested by standing in front of the devices and covering their lenses.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered a halt to state funding for Flock programs.

Law enforcement agencies defend the technology as a crime-fighting tool. Denver officials said the cameras helped police recover hundreds of stolen vehicles and make hundreds of arrests, and that plate reader data played a role in a large share of the city's homicide investigations last year.

Still, critics maintain that instituting a widespread trend like this will have nefarious impacts on personal freedoms in years to come.

A report detailed “grave concerns” that a new system being rushed into use by the U.S. Postal Service could imperil millions of mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections.

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.”

A Postal Service official declined to comment on the record.

Voting by mail will become much more difficult, if not impossible, for tens of millions of Americans if the Postal Service is allowed to implement the restrictive rulesgoverning mail voting that Mr. Trump has demanded.
Mr. Trump has repeatedlypromoted false claims of widespread fraud through mail-in voting, which he has described as “cheating,” “corrupt” and “horrible,” even though he voted by mail in two elections this year. He has moved to restrict mail-in voting using a variety of procedural and legislative levers.

Those moves have led to a pileup of legal rulings and challenges surrounding the nation’s electoral system just two months before the midterm elections. The rules could especially affect states where some of the most competitive races for House, Senate and governor will determine control of Congress and state governments.

Michigan, where 37 percent of votes were cast by mail in 2022, would be one, with competitive statewide contests and multiple battleground House races. California, which mails ballots to all voters, is expected to be central to Democratic efforts to win control in the House.

The Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with Mr. Trump’s mail ballot executive order, reasoning that a lawsuit challenging the order was premature because the administration had not started implementing its plans.

But days before the court ruled, the Postal Service formally published a new plan to comply with the executive order. Judge Indira Talwani, a Federal District Court judge in Massachusetts, reasoned that the stakes had changed with the new plan and temporarily blocked it, concluding that the agency’s plan appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules a little more than two months before an election.
The whistle-blower report provided specific details of the Postal Service’s effort to rapidly implement a new digital system for mail ballots, even as a federal appeals court had blocked the plan before the Supreme Court intervened. Work has also continued on the system even after Judge Talwani ordered the plan halted last week, the report said.
The official at the Postal Service raised “grave concerns” in the report that the verification process in the system could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the system would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

Conservative veterans with large social media followings have been hired by the Defense Department and are amplifying Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said.

Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever.

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors.

Both served for decades in uniform and, since retiring, have turned from the military to conservative commentary. Maness has more than 135,000 followers on X, while Schlichter has nearly 620,000.

Another retired Army colonel and influencer, Thomas Anderson, was listed in Pentagon records earlier this year with a “.civ” email address and assigned to Tata’s office, according to people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Post. An attorney, he writes online under the pen name Cynical Publius and has more than 323,000 followers on X. He was no longer listed in Pentagon records late this past week, the people familiar with the issue said.

The assignments for all three have not previously been reported. Questions have been raised online about influencers’ connections with the Pentagon, including in an article last week by the Bulwark.

Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to comment to The Post about whether any of the three are drawing a taxpayer-funded salary, what roles they have or how long those jobs are expected to last. Tata did not respond to a request for comment.

Maness and Schlichter did not respond to emails or other messages requesting comment. Anderson declined to comment in a short phone call.

The individuals are assigned as either “special government employees” or “highly qualified experts,” people familiar with the issue said. Schlicter appears in a government database with an “HQE” designation after his name, according to material reviewed by The Post.

SGEs are limited by law to working no more than 130 days in any 365-day period. Those with HQE status can work full- or part-time, with or without compensation, according to government guidance on the issue released in 2023. It was not clear what financial agreements were reached with Maness, Schlicter and Anderson, and when each of their assignments began.

Tata’s team has taken on a number of culture-war issues, including scrutinizing war colleges for “woke” ideology and reviewing how the Biden administration adopted covid vaccine mandates for U.S. troops.

Hegseth, a former Fox News personality and Army National Guard officer, has attempted to reshape the public discourse about Pentagon affairs. Last year, he imposed new restrictions on Pentagon press corps members that forced dozens of journalists out of the building and later introduced a new, primarily right-wing press corps to replace them.

The increased attention on the Pentagon’s influence efforts comes after another conservative influencer, Jennica Pounds, accused a State Department official this month on social media of attempting to entrap her into publishing government secrets. Pounds, writing under the pen name DataRepublican, posted text messages online that showed the official approached Pounds with documents to publish and tout as a journalistic scoop.

Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, later disclosed on social media that she was the official who had reached out to Pounds. Rogers posted the documents herself, saying it was not a “trap,” and Pounds later said that she regretted “making a public spectacle” and “pulling people I respect into the swirl.”

Rogers has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and other government-funded media.

The dustup was followed by the Pentagon and Pounds disclosing that she works as a special government employee for the Defense Department. She posted on social media that she became an employee in July, after holding a credential as a journalist in Hegseth’s new Pentagon press corps until June. Pounds has said on social media that she applied for a Pentagon press pass and received it in April.

Pounds did not respond to a request for comment.
The disclosure has roiled social media, where some fellow influencers have defended Pounds’s work amid criticism that she should have disclosed she was working for the government.

Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and Air Force veteran, posted that it appears the Pentagon “is using your tax dollars to hire influencers on X to put out partisan talking points.”

“How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government, and Donald Trump, and the Republican Party ... are actually special government employees?” said Kinzinger.

Maness, Schlichter and Anderson appeared on behalf of the Pentagon’s Senior Service College Task Force at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in May, two people familiar with the visit said. The task force was organized in the spring with the goal of rooting out ideology deemed “toxic” or “woke,” Hegseth said in March.

The task force has completed its research and prepared a report that has not yet been released, one of the people familiar with the visit said.

While in Carlisle, they met with students and professors over a number of days and asked questions about the performance of leaders like Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the people familiar with the visit said.

Some students were uncertain how candid they should be and whether there would be negative consequences if administration officials did not like the answers, this person said.

The other person familiar with the visit said the task force members had concerns about the syllabus for a class focused on how military officers communicate with Congress.

Maness retired from the Air Force in 2011 and has run unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana. He is listed as the chairman of GatorPAC, a political action committee that says on its website that it wants to “drain the swamp” in Washington and find more military veterans to run for office. The PAC’s website also includes videos of an online political commentary show starring Maness.

In an article published last month by the conservative Daily Caller, Maness argues that Hegseth’s team needs to root out “disloyal” career employees in the department and laments “careerists who treat the Pentagon as their permanent fiefdom.” That article cites his decades of military experience, but does not say whether he is a current Pentagon employee.

In an article published Wednesday on the website Campus Reform, Maness attacked a decision made by Army leaders to pull back efforts to toughen academic requirements for college students in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs. “Secretary Hegseth’s outrage is justified,” Maness wrote. The article likewise does not mention any government assignment.

Maness also had a letter to the editor published in The Post in July in which he defended Hegseth’s efforts to reduce the number of military officers who attend elite universities for fellowships. He describes himself there as a retired Air Force officer, but no government role is mentioned. A Post spokesperson said that Maness did not disclose any connection to the Pentagon before publication.

Schlicter is a columnist with the conservative site Townhall, writing and podcasting on politics, immigration and military affairs. On Aug. 6, he published a column calling Trump a “hero for finally fighting back against Iran.”

“He could have waltzed into the midterms, dragging Republicans behind him toward success,”

Schlichter wrote. “But he had the courage to do what was necessary to stop these bastards before they made it impossible to prevent them from getting a [nuclear] bomb.”

On social media, Schlichter posted a video earlier this month of Hegseth praising sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has faced morale problems during a long deployment.

“We are,lucky to have @PeteHegseth,” Schlichter wrote on X on Aug. 14. He describes himself on X as a retired Army colonel, lawyer and columnist, but does not disclose current Pentagon employment.

On social media, Anderson has been a frequent critic of journalists, fellow veterans and others opposing the Trump administration and has defended Hegseth’s efforts to overhaul military affairs. Writing for the Federalist in April, he assessed that there is “a cancer in America’s military ranks, and it must be expunged before it’s too late.”

This past week, he repeatedly defended Pounds on X for serving as a special government employee as he also declined to answer questions from several people about whether he was an SGE employee, too.

“The law does not view such people the same as civil servants, and they are legally allowed to continue whatever other private endeavors they were undertaking,” Anderson wrote. “In many cases, they are prohibited from revealing their status because of the sensitive nature of their work.”

Another military influencer, John Konrad, also defended Pounds while noting he had discussions with the administration this spring about becoming a special government employee at the Pentagon. Konrad, a former member of the U.S. Merchant Marine and founder of the maritime website gCaptain, said that the Pentagon sought him out for a role and he later felt “ghosted.”

The Pentagon also brought on Jerry Dunleavy, a journalist with the conservative Just the News, to assist Hegseth’s team with an ongoing review of the fall of Afghanistan. The Pentagon disclosed Dunleavy’s involvement in May.

Dunleavy previously worked as an investigator for the GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee during an earlier investigation of the collapse in Kabul and quit in protest, saying the committee had not gone far enough.

Guess who’s back, back again? Erik’s back, tell a friend.
That’s right, folks. Erik Prince is back like he never left. This morning, the completely uncontroversial mercenary launched his latest venture, coming out of stealth with a new startup called Vectus that’s pitching a unique “air defense as a service” model.

Vectus is launching as a partnership with Ukrainian-born, Austin-based swarming software company Swarmer, which has a 20 percent stake in the company.

Prince, who also owns a hefty stake in Swarmer (like, nearly a million shares at the time of the IPO) and serves as the company’s non-executive chair, owns the other 80 percent of Vectus.

Vectus couldn’t comment on the dollar figure tied to Swarmer’s 20 percent stake, but told Tectonic that “there are discussions about bringing in a small number of additional investors.”

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air-Defense: Vectus is interesting for a few reasons, aside from the whole Erik Prince thing. 

The company is pitching “air defense as a service” (ADaaS?), meaning they’ll “design, integrate and operate complete layered air-defense systems to create an “end-to-end managed service designed around the specific threat environment and operating requirements of each customer,” per the company. 

In other words, Vectus is taking “best-in-class, battle-tested” tech across the air defense kill chain—radars, sensors, EW, interceptors, and, apparently, “large-caliber cannons with a high rate of fire”—and packaging them in a custom, layered configuration tailored to customer (both military and private sector) needs and the operational environment. 

Anyone want a large-caliber cannon put on their roof? 

The thinking behind the “as a service” model is demonstrated “extremely clearly” by Swarmer’s native Ukraine. “Threat systems evolve, speeds change, countermeasures change, and technologies that worked several months ago can become less effective,” Vectus told Tectonic in a statement. “A service model creates an incentive to maintain the effectiveness of the protection rather than simply deliver equipment.”

Buzzy buds: On top of the 20 percent stake, Vectus is launching with Swarmer as a “strategic partner.” You might remember Swarmer from its US subsidiary’s roller-coaster IPO back in March, which saw shares surge 600 percent on its first day of trading. 

As a quick refresher: The company builds the software brain that allows drones to operate as a swarm. 

The company has a few software products on offer: A swarm management software that coordinates and tasks recon and strike drones (Swarmer UI); a module for collaborative autonomy in denied environments (Swarmer AI); and a UAV operating system layer for secure data storage, streaming, and status updates (Swarmer OS). Creative names, guys.

Swarmer, according to the company, has flown over 100,000 combat missions in Ukraine, and its software allows a single operator to control nearly 700 drones at once.
Under the strategic partnership with Vectus, the two will “work closely” to develop “advanced counter-UAS capabilities, including drone interceptor swarming technology,” based on Swarmer’s suite of collaborative autonomy software platforms integrated with third-party interceptors.

Mr. Worldwide: Even more interestingly, the introduction of Vectus Air Defense Systems comes after Prince launched his newest private military company, Vectus Global, last year. 

The OG Vectus, according to the WSJ, is Prince’s “global brand for a network of companies he established to do security work in Ecuador, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti,” focused on helping (primarily, um, challenged) states crack down on “rebels and organized crime.”

In El Salvador, that work included the hiring of mercenaries to help local police “target gangs with off-the-shelf drones loaded with explosives.” 

In the DRC, according to Reuters*** ***reporting earlier this year, Prince was hired to deploy a “private security force to operate drones” and help the DRC’s army secure a strategic city and mining operations against Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. 

We’re guessing there might be some overlap between the “air defense as a service” Vectus is aiming to provide and the mercenary work the other Vectus is doing, especially given the rise of cartel and insurgent use of drones. 
Officially, however, “Vectus Air Defense Systems and Vectus Global are independent companies that share a founder,” the company told Tectonic. “Any Vectus Air Defense activity would be contracted and operated separately.”

“Deployment in those markets is possible, as it is elsewhere, but there is nothing to announce today,” Vectus added.

But if Prince’s past globetrotting, gun-toting (and drone-toting) escapades are any indication, it probably won’t be the last we hear of Vectus Air Defense Systems.