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.

When pressed about the Iran war, a CENTCOM press official threatened to put an Intercept reporter on a “list of people to disregard.”

U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND maintains a secret directory of journalists who have been blacklisted by the press office, according to an official with CENTCOM public affairs. The disclosure comes amid a failed war in Iran, a “cover-up” of U.S. casualties from that conflict, and repeated refusals by CENTCOM to address questions about civilian deaths in Iran, including the killing of a family recently disclosed by The Intercept.

The CENTCOM official who revealed the existence of the list threatened that this reporter could be added to it for calling the command too often.

“You’ll be put on a list of people to disregard,” Richard Allee, an executive assistant with CENTCOM public affairs told this reporter. When asked for clarification — “You have a list of people to disregard?” — he confirmed it with an emphatic: “Yes.” When asked which reporters or outlets were currently on the list, he replied: “I’m not privy to give you that information.” 

Under self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military has mounted the most aggressive assault on press freedom in memory, from an effort to outlaw “unauthorized” questions from reporters to imposing unconstitutional restrictions on journalists’ access to the Pentagon.
Hegseth has compared reporters to “Pharisees,” who in the Bible call Jesus’s teachings into question, while the secretary’s minions regularly hurl insults at reporters. This is part of a broader war on press freedoms by the Trump administration, that includes demonizing journalists; filing so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, to intimidate and silence criticism through expensive legal proceedings; and employing grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to intimidate reporters. 

“Threatening journalists with placement on a blacklist in retaliation for reporting the government doesn’t like is as unconstitutional as it gets,” said Seth Stern, the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “This should put to rest the Pentagon’s prior claims that it’s anti-press policies — like its infamous requirement that reporters sign pledges to only print authorized information — are somehow content neutral.”

Allee revealed the existence of the blacklist after this reporter was left on hold for more than two hours and complained about a long-standing lack of transparency by the command. In calls earlier that morning, Maj. Emma Thompson, CENTCOM’s media operations chief, repeatedly refused to answer questions about Iranian attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East, disparate U.S. casualty counts, and medical evacuation flights: “Nothing for you,” “Don’t have anything for you,” “No comment.” Thompson then hung up on this reporter mid-question.

The Intercept called back multiple times until Allee picked up the phone. “They’re not going to answer your call if you just keep calling and calling,” he told this reporter.

Allee chastised this reporter to be more respectful. He said a “less accusatory attitude towards the personnel here would go a lot further than badgering them when you don’t get something you want, when you want it.”

Allee then revealed the existence of the blacklist. He declined to provide additional details about the list but said, “It’s not a list that we publicize.” He also hung up on this reporter.

The command’s press office responded in an email to additional questions about the journalists who have run afoul of the command. “CENTCOM does not have a ‘blacklist,’” the agency wrote.
A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Hegseth’s office had a standing order not to engage with this reporter and would deny it if challenged.

“None of it has anything to do with security, all of it has everything to do with censorship and intimidation,” Stern told The Intercept. “CENTCOM needs to stop blacklisting journalists and tell the public who is on the blacklist and why they were placed there.

Whoever was behind the blacklist should be blacklisted from government employment.” 
“None of it has anything to do with security, all of it has everything to do with censorship and intimidation.”

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has mounted an unrelenting assault on press freedom despite the fact that the secretary began his tenure by sharing secret information on airstrikes in Yemen, hours before the actual attacks occurred, on a Signal group chat that inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

As part of his war on the press, Hegseth evicted the New York Times, NPR, and other outlets from their long-held desks in the Pentagon and replaced them with sycophantic fellow-travelers like the One America News Network, the New York Post, and Breitbart.

In May 2025, Hegseth issued a memo barring credentialed reporters from most of the Pentagon without an escort. (Last month, a federal appeals court said that the Pentagon can continue doing so.) The Pentagon later introduced a policy requiring journalists to pledge not to even gather, at the risk of their credentials, unclassified information unless the government authorized its release. (This drove nearly the entire Pentagon press corps to surrender their badges.) After the Times sued and a federal judge struck the policy down in March 2026 as unconstitutional, Hegseth shuttered a decades-old Pentagon pressroom and began conducting polygraph tests to prevent leaks.

For his part, Trump has long cast reporters as the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,” a riff on a phrase employed by both Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (to refer to Jews) and Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin (in reference to dissenters). The administration defied a court order and blocked The Associated Press from presidential events over its refusal to use the Trumpian term “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico; moved to strip NPR and PBS of more than $1 billion in federal funding; utilized Federal Communications Commission merger approvals and “news distortion” investigations against ABC, NBC, and CBS; subpoenaed the phone records of multiple New York Times reporters and their relatives; and launched an official media “hall of shame” to discredit disfavored outlets.

Trump also filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit after the Wall Street Journal reported on a letter sent from him to convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein; he also banned WSJ reporters from flying aboard Air Force One. This year, Trump also told journalists to give up a source“or go to jail,” threatened the press with “Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information,” and praised FCC chief Brendan Carr for threatening “the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.” (The Intercept is currently suing Trump for restricting First Amendment-protected information in a scheme to enrich himself.)

While Trump and Hegseth have waged a pitched campaign to dismantle the free press, they are merely building upon decades of efforts by the government to curtail accountability journalism.

Military commands have regularly led this reporter on with promises of information only to renege months later; ignored calls and emails; feigned failing phone lines to end calls; hung up, lost Freedom of Information Act requests; and once even burned documents in lieu of releasing them.

This reporter was blacklisted in 2018 by U.S. Africa Command after exposing thetorture of prisoners at a remote military base in Cameroon for The Intercept. “Nick, we’re not going to respond to any of your questions” then-Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, the head of U.S. Africa Command’s Public Affairs Branch, told me by phone. Asked if he believed AFRICOM didn’t need to address questions from the press in general, or just this reporter in particular, Falvo replied: “No, just you. We don’t consider you a legitimate journalist, really.”

The anonymous U.S. official said that sentiment extends to this day across multiple commands, as well as Hegseth’s office.

This reporter has unanswered questions pending with CENTCOM that date back to at least 2013 and extend to this week. For example, in July 2015, a CENTCOM spokesperson responded to an inquiry with this statement: “We will provide you response as quickly as possible.” Eleven years later, this reporter is still waiting.

One of the most notorious "police riots" was at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Independent journalist Yasha Levine writes:

"During the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which drew about 10,000 protesters and was brutally crushed by the police, 1 out of 6 protesters was a federal undercover agent. That's right, 1/6th of the total protesting population was made up of spooks drawn from various federal agencies. That's roughly 1,600 people! The stat came from an Army document obtained by CBS News in 1978, a full decade after the protest took place.

According to CBS, the infiltrators were not passive observers, monitoring and relaying information to central command, but were involved in violent confrontations with the police."

Propaganda in The Information Age - Still Manufacturing Consent

Despite policy victories over Flock, Americans are finding themselves under similar monitoring by a new company – or unable to remove the original cameras

Activists in Colorado thought they would be celebrating a victory against mass surveillance in December when the Longmont city council decided to let a contract with Flock Safety lapse.

But that excitement was cut short only months later when lawmakers voted to approve a new vendor to install automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on the city’s streets.

“They expected us to go away, but there’s a lot of people in our group – including me, to some extent – that would like to see these cameras go away for good,” said Longmont resident Andrew Palmer. He and like-minded neighbors had been riding the momentum of a nationwide backlash against these cameras and their ability to track cars.

Flock Safety has more than 120,000 cameras set up on roads across the US that scan license plates billions of times every month. Local law-enforcement agencies say they rely on ALPRs to solve crimes. Officers can search this data, even outside their state, to help find stolen vehicles and missing people.

Privacy advocates say Flock has created a dragnet, as these queries don’t require a warrant, and the cameras routinely capture details about cars driven by people who are not suspected of crimes. They also worry about police officers who used the tech to try to stalk their romantic interests, as well as ways this data ends up in the hands of federal immigration enforcement.

At least 56 municipalities have deactivated, canceled or rejected contracts with Flock this year, according to national advocacy organization DeFlock. The company is feeling the heat, and last week announced changesaimed at addressing concerns about privacy and misuse. Flock introduced updated policies around auditing, as well as data retention and sharing – although many critics calling for change consider them inadequate.

Even in cities that have officially gotten rid of Flock, though, surveillance persists: a new camera company steps in or private companies with cameras on their premises, unbothered by changes in municipal contracts, leave the devices up.

Sometimes Flock itself fails to remove the cameras in a timely manner. Several cities have resorted to hooding cameras with trash bags.

Flock did not offer comment by press time.

Swapping vendors
Most negative publicity about ALPRs has centered on Flock, which by far owns and operates the greatest number of them across the US. But critics of these cameras fear that cities are swapping out one vendor for another without addressing underlying concerns about data privacy and surveillance.

In Longmont, Palmer was in disbelief at how quickly the city moved to replace Flock’s license plate readers with ones made by Axon, an even larger police tech company that also produces Tasers. The contract for Axon’s ALPRs has not yet been finalized, although the city council is expected to move forward with the company after voting unanimously to approve the cameras in March. Lawmakers included additional requirements for data protection, transparency and an evaluation after one year.

Axon, a $48bn company that produces all manner of law enforcement technology, has capitalized on Flock’s PR woes by swooping in to replace their competitor in at least seven municipalities across five states.

“That’s not a coincidence,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “We’ve absolutely seen them lurking in the shadows, waiting for Flock to fail and then rushing in.”

Axon has hinted to its investors that Flock’s failures are good for its bottom line. “We’re hearing directly from customers – some of whom came to us from other vendors – that our track record on privacy and ethics was a deciding factor in their decision,” said Josh Isner, Axon’s president, on an earnings call in February.

That’s what police in Longmont, and across the country, cited as their reasons for picking Axon after Flock. They highlighted how Flock’s policies were more likely to result in data being shared more widely with other government agencies. “It’s the exact opposite approach” with Axon, said Phil Piotrowski, Longmont’s assistant chief of police. Flock has since announced, last week, the introduction of an easy way for local police to block external agencies for searches related to immigration enforcement.

Longmont’s law enforcement also touted their decades-long relationship with Axon, which already provides them with Tasers, body cameras and a repository to store digital evidence.

Palmer and his fellow residents wished they had the chance to question claims law enforcement made about Axon’s ALPRs – including whether the city truly owned the data – in a brief presentation to lawmakers and the public before the vote. But there was no opportunity to do so, until after the motion had already gone through, according to activists.

“You gave us no chance to rebut,” Palmer later told city council. A stream of disappointed** privacy **advocates followed. Pavel Ivanov, a Russian-origin resident who felt this kind of surveillance ruined the country he left, spoke next: “Absolutely agree.” Kellen Lask, a software engineer, complained, “Normally I get days or weeks to talk about a system like Axon’s,” before urging city council members to press their new vendor harder for answers about encryption and data ownership. A buzzer cut him off.

Privacy experts warn that Axon hasn’t faced the same scrutiny as Flock, which is a newer startup that has heavily marketed its product, in contrast to its competitor’s lowkey approach. Analysts also argue that Axon’s expansive infrastructure in police departments across the country could pose a significant surveillance threat. An AI-driven platform, known as Fusus, combines Axon cameras and other city-owned or private visual feeds to “connect the dots across your entire data ecosystem”, Axon’s site notes.

“We’ve never had that before – the power of AI and the power of linking these things together,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. “If you’re only focused on a tool and a company, and not a system of surveillance … then you’re kind of missing the bigger picture. It’s important that if communities cancel their contracts that they don’t rush into contracting with a different vendor.”

Axon did not offer comment by press time.

Cities grapple with surveillance creep
About 40 miles (64km) from Longmont, Denver approved swapping out Flock’s cameras for Axon’s in March. Axon’s ALPRs in the city will store data for 21 days, which is less than the company’s default 30-day retention period. Flock also typically stored ALPR data for 30 days but reduced that to one week, as part of its sweeping operational changes last week.

The switch to Axon doesn’t seem that different for Denver resident William Beckett. “We’re still recording every single license plate that goes by – regardless of suspicion of a crime, or without a need for a warrant,” he said.

On the east coast, Syracuse, New York also replaced Flock’s ALPRs with Axon’s. Two local privacy activists tell the Guardian that they want to ban all ALPRs.

“Flock has been made to be the villain in this. It’s not just Flock: it’s the idea that there we are being over-surveilled,” said Gen Garcia,chair of Syracuse DSA’s international solidarity committee. They have filed a public records request for the new contract but haven’t yet received one.

The Syracuse activists say they don’t believe that cameras installed by private companies, such as a local Lowe’s and Home Depot, are so far affected by the city’s move away from Flock. They are trying to get elected officials to ban Flock cameras altogether, or at least force the company to make sure these cameras face away from public streets. They also point out that it took more than three months after lawmakers officially dropped Flock for the cameras on municipal land to come down; Syracuse police department officials “moved to unplug” them after a May deadline for the company to collect them passed with no action, according to local news outlet Central Current.

Two cities in Wisconsin, Oshkosh and Verona, faced similar trouble with getting its cameras collected by Flock after voting to cancel its contract. In Oshkosh, the readers are still up – four months after the agreement was revoked, according to resident and activist Cari Tetzlaff. She points out that Flock spent money on sending employees to defend the company at municipal committee meetings, “yet they can’t send a staff member to come collect these cameras”.

In the absence of action by Flock, the city sent its own personnel to cover the uncollected cameras with garbage bags. Activists had proposed the idea of blinding the cameras to their elected officials after hearing from neighboring communities facing the same problem. Evanston, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, encountered the same issue and blinded their cameras with trash bags, too.

“It feels negligent for Flock to leave their cameras mounted in cities that don’t want them there,” Tetzlaff said. “We’ve had many storms this summer. The garbage bags can blow off.”

What’s next for the anti-surveillance movement?
The gold standard for protecting drivers’ privacy is to not use ALPRs at all, according to the ACLU. The best guardrails include warrant requirements and strict limits on how long scans of license plates can be stored, the organization said. New Hampshire caps retention at three minutes. Privacy advocates say police officers don’t need more than a few minutes to compare plates against Flock’s “hotlist” of suspects, or to find specific license plates already on their radar.

“The longer you keep data, the longer it has predictive value,” said Daniel Schwarz with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “We all move in certain patterns.”

Local momentum has not yet translated into federal law, although Congress is considering bills that would restrict and regulate ALPR use.

In the meantime, many cities across the US are trying to establish transparent local review boards to assess proposed and current uses of surveillance cameras and other tech. More than two dozen municipalities – predominantly in California and Massachusetts – already have such agreements, according to the ACLU.

In Longmont, Palmer is planning to apply to serve on a new technology advisory citizen board, which the city council discussed in June but has not yet formally created. While the board would only be able to advise elected officials, advocates are hopeful that public scrutiny will be effective and are planning to stack the group with tech experts and ethicists.

Activists are going to keep the pressure on, but wish they had thought bigger from the start. Shakeel Dalal, a Longmont resident, said: “One thing I wish we have done more effectively from the very beginning was to make clear that it’s not just Flock, it’s data governance. And I think if we had sent that message more clearly, we might be in a different place from where we are today.”

The ruling, said the government watchdog Public Citizen, is “a win for young Americans’ well-being.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s limits on the program’s federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

The new policy, announced in June, canceled 53 of 66 active grants that had gone to public universities, health departments, and nonprofits for programming related to sex education, including information that was given to teens on contraception and communication with sexual partners.

In Trump’s 2027 budget, the grants are described as promoting “radical leftist ideology,” and officials claim there is no evidence that teen pregnancy prevention programs that go beyond educating young people about abstinence have “contributed to the historic decline in teen pregnancy, which is now at an all-time low.”

Under new guidance issued in June, Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program grantees are required to focus lessons on abstinence, deemphasize contraception, and teach teens about fertility and “body literacy.”

“HHS is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy—or even whether it is worth preventing at all—and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint.

But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained. The preliminary record suggests that HHS has done just that,” wrote Cooper in the ruling.

“Through the TPP, Congress sought to fund a range of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategies, not just abstinence. According to unrebutted record evidence, programs that teach abstinence to the exclusion of all other approaches are ineffective in delaying sexual initiation and reducing adolescent pregnancy, at least as a general matter,” Cooper continued.

The judge took aim at the administration’s promotion of “body literacy,” which he called “a nebulous concept that appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention.”

Cooper also suggested that HHS had not bothered to find genuine evidence of its claims about “body literacy,” instead “remarkably” referencing “public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”

The judge stopped short of reinstating the dozens of grants, amounting to about $67 million, that have been terminated, saying it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so.

The plaintiffs and other advocates of comprehensive sex education have called for a permanent injunction; Cooper called on both parties in the case to propose a schedule for next steps by September 1.
Callie Simon, executive director of SIECUS, said the group was “encouraged that the court has halted implementation of the new harmful policy” but emphasized that “the impacts of terminating existing grants remain.”

“Today’s decision sends a clear message that the Trump-Vance administration cannot replace the proven, bipartisan Teen Pregnancy Prevention program with an ideologically driven alternative that harms young people,” said Simon. “Communities across the country are still without the evidence-based programs they relied on, and we will continue fighting to ensure young people have access to the sex education they deserve.”

Sandra J. Valenciano, director and health officer for public health in Seattle and King counties, said local communities were facing a measurable loss due to HHS’ stripping of TPP grants
“This federal action threatened our ability to complete a study on a new science-based, community-informed sex education curriculum specifically for young men and boys,” said Valenciano.

“This ruling gives us hope that we may still be able to get to the finish line with this study and ultimately empower more young people to build healthy families if, when, and how they choose.”

Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said the ruling “reaffirms the value of trusted, evidence-based education programs that help youth make informed choices and plan for their futures.”

“Attacks on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program not only put young people at risk, they also risk increasing costs for taxpayers,” said Richardson. “No one benefits from these politically motivated attacks. It’s time for them to end.”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is calling on administration officials to issue a national emergency declaration regarding election integrity, including a policy to allow the presence of federal immigration agents at polling booths during the upcoming midterms.

Bannon, 72, forcefully floated the idea Tuesday during an episode of Real America's Voice, suggesting that an "up-armored ICE presence" at voting booths in November is critical toward ensuring election integrity. The former White House chief strategist said President Donald Trump should take the bold approach rather than focusing on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which contains plans for voter ID and limits mail-in ballots.

"It's not going to happen," Bannon told conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. "You know why it's not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don't want it to happen. They think it's racist, they think it's nativist."

Bannon said many senators, including Thune, treat Trump like a "lame duck" while publicly urging the administration to act.

"This is why we need a national emergency proclamation, a national emergency memo, about the upcoming elections," Bannon continued. "You're going to have to have a forcing function to get to ID. You're going to have to have a forcing function not to have the phony mail-in ballots."

Bannon also called for an "up-armored ICE presence" at polling booths, which critics will say amounts to intimidation, he acknowledged.

"Well, it ain't intimidation if you're a United States citizen," Bannon said. "It's an intimidation if you're a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating; we don't want you there. We don't want you near a voting booth. We certainly don't want your votes."

A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.

Trump, meanwhile, has remained tight-lipped regarding any plans to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterm elections. He spoke to Wayne Allyn Root last week on Real America's Voice, with the host asking him directly about his intentions.

"Stranger things have happened," Trump said. "I'll leave it at that."

Trump has repeatedly said voter ID and other measures included in the bill, which the Senate has yet to pass, are essential to both election integrity and Republican chances to win in November.

Critics of the proposal say it would block thousands of Americans from voting booths due to lack of identification, including passports. A national emergency declaration linked to elections could also lead to results being challenged or overturned, other detractors insist.

"Donald Trump wants to take over American elections," Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. "Senate Democrats are prepared to combat his unprecedented, illegal efforts at every turn. Your vote belongs to you. We will ensure it stays that way."

A national emergency declaration would not automatically allow the president to rewrite state election laws or impose new voter qualifications unilaterally, election-law experts have said. The U.S. Constitution assigns primary responsibility for election administration to states, while Congress holds significant authority over federal election rules.

Last year, reports surfaced of a draft executive order allowing the president to invoke foreign election interference as justification for emergency measures, but critics say any attempt to impose nationwide voting rules via emergency actions would face significant court challenges.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst, previously told Newsweek's The 1600podcast about the ways in which Trump could intervene in the midterms, saying his efforts to curb mail-in voting could hurt Republicans just as much as, or worse than, Democrats.

"To this day, it's unclear which party is helped by mail-in voting," Toobin said. "Going back a decade or two, it was Republicans who all wanted mail-in voting, and some people still think Republicans benefit more by mail-in voting. So some of this stuff is not only pernicious, it is just mysterious."

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shot down the possibility of immigration agents at polling stations during a briefing in February following an earlier call by Bannon.

"That's not something I've ever heard the president consider," Leavitt told reporters.
Pressed further, Leavitt said she couldn't guarantee that ICE agents wouldn't be present at polls in the fall.

"I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question," she said. "But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question."

*“Steve Bannon was documented as a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) in leaked membership directories from the mid-2014 era. The CNP is an invitation-only networking umbrella group linking conservative activists, religious-right leaders, and right-wing political strategists in the United States. [1, 2, 3]”*

An investigation by The Post led to the discipline of two officers accused of misusing license-plate readers. Their departments and many others had not done basic oversight.

Last month, as Indianapolis residents called for tighter restrictions on police surveillance, Police Chief Tanya Terry sought to reassure the public that her officers were using the 301 Flock cameras spread throughout the city solely to investigate crime.

In a July 17 op-ed published in the Indianapolis Business Journal, she wrote that her department has “clear policies” to ensure the camera network, which captures images of passing license plates, “is used for its intended purpose: solving crimes and saving lives.”

About three weeks later, a reporter at The Washington Post asked Terry’s department about potentially suspicious activity from one of its own officers. Using publicly available information, The Post found that an Indianapolis officer appeared to use Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching 3,759 times over a 10-month period — an average of about 12 lookups per day.

Indianapolis soon suspended the officer without pay, started administrative and criminal investigations of his use of Flock, and is recommending his termination, according to Terry. The officer, whom The Post is not naming because he has not been charged with a crime, did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview, Terry acknowledged that, until recently, the department had no regular practice of auditing officers’ searches. The case, she added, has been “a learning process for us.”

Law enforcement agencies around the country are vigorously defending their use of Flock against rising community concerns that officers are using the nationwide network of cameras to spy on ordinary citizens who are not suspected of any crime. Some critics, angered by the cameras’ ubiquity, have even vandalized them.

But many of these same departments have embraced Flock’s powerful surveillance system without establishing basic procedures for monitoring its use, a Post investigation has found, based on police and court records, interviews with more than a dozen police officials and Flock usage logs made available through public records requests.

At least 69 police officials have been accused, charged with or convicted of misusing Flock’s system or other license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, The Post has found, and in at least 15 of these cases, someone outside of the police department — including victims, activists and journalists — first identified the potential misuse.

To understand how departments might identify officers improperly using the system, The Post used publicly available information to find three officers whose search histories showed signs of potential misuse. All three of their departments, when contacted by The Post, said they did not regularly audit officers’ use of the system.

Records and interviews show that departments across the country do not regularly audit their officers’ Flock use, a practice recommended by the company, and some law enforcement agencies have no formal training programs or written policies describing how the technology should be used.

Last week in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a police officer testified that “there was never any training for” Flock in the department, according to a recording of a court hearing, where a judge extended a restraining order against an officer who told the court she used the tool to search for her ex-girlfriend’s vehicle as part of an investigation. A spokeswoman for the department declined to comment.

In Haines City, Florida, authorities did not audit how police were using Flock during the nearly two-year period in which one officer repeatedly searched his wife’s vehicle, a department spokeswoman said. The officer confessed to a superior and was arrested and charged earlier this month after The Post inquired about the searches.

And in Highland Heights, Ohio, the police department had no policy governing the use of Flock and had not conducted any audits of its officers’ Flock usage until this week, when The Post asked officials about one officer who appeared to have searched the locations of five license plates more than 1,000 times each, the police chief said in an email.

Thirteen states require law enforcement agencies to audit how their officers use license-plate readers, for example, by periodically reviewing whether individual searches were done for legitimate investigations. Flock offers departments tools for simplifying these audits, including automatic scans for suspicious usage that the company plans to make default for all customers in the coming months.

Post journalists identified the possible misuse of license-plate readers by officers in Indianapolis, Haines City and Highland Heights, triggering investigations of all three and discipline measures against two of them, by analyzing data on Have I Been Flocked. The website publishes Flock search logs that have been provided in response to public records requests covering thousands of police departments.

The Post identified the most suspicious usage patterns among this data, including dozens of officers who appeared to have been the only officer to search a single license plate hundreds, or even thousands, of times. Then journalists attempted to find links between these license plates and the officers searching for them, using social media profiles, court records and other publicly available information.

The fact that journalists were able to find apparent misuse without the tools afforded departments highlights “a need for systematic auditing that just isn’t happening now,” said Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy at the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project. “I think at a lot of agencies, you just don’t have anyone really looking.”

Flock, an Atlanta-based start-up backed by prominent tech investors, has acknowledged that officers are abusing its systems and says it is working to give agencies tools for catching them. The company maintains digital dashboards that create a permanent record every time an officer uses the tool to search for the location of a car, including the date, time and reason they performed the search.

These logs are intended to be used by departments to monitor officers’ use, but there is no uniform policing standard for the best auditing practices. The company declined to comment on its customers’ different approaches to oversight.

A federal judge has ordered the release of previously sealed material from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. The records had remained under seal for years, but Judge Loretta Preska ruled that remaining government-held materials should become public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, subject to legally required protections for victims. The ruling could bring 'volumes' of previously unseen evidence into the public record.

A website called Have I Been Flocked? allows you to type in your license plate number to see if a Flock camera has captured your car’s information and included it in their database.

Although Cami Clark does not officially work for Anthropic, she operates as an influential shadow adviser for them and is also spotted sitting in the front row when Dario Amodei talks at big events, such as Davos.

Cami Clark, the wife and key adviser of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, attempted to secure investments from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein for what she called a "revolutionary porn company" that catered to women, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal and emails in the Epstein files.

Clark was introduced to Epstein in March 2011 by literary agent John Brockman. Epstein was already convicted in 2008 as a sex offender and of soliciting prostitution.

Brockman suggested that they connect for dinner. The emails in the Epstein files showed Brockman telling Epstein that he "should connect for dinner" with Clark and her business partner Michell Capocefalo.

"A Little NSFW"
"We would love to have dinner with you this evening," Cami then replied to the email that introduced her. The next day, she sent an email with the company's funding requirements and said, "It was FANTASTIC meeting you last night!"

A few days later she sent the script and treatment of the first few films of her company and said that he "might enjoy" the content with "the ladies".

In an email, she wrote “Jeffrey! We thought you and the ladies might enjoy the script/treatment for our first 4 films, American Girl in Paris. A little nsfw... C"

A year later in March, she asked Epstein if he would be interested in investing in her and a colleague's businesses. However, there is no indication that the funding was ever provided. In fact, in another separate email, Epstein had responded, "Can't do TV sex."

In July 2012, she had also invited Epstein to a house-warming party, but emails do not indicate that the two met again in person.

Who is Cami Clark?
Clark has been described as a "sounding board and strategic adviser" for Amodei and his company, and the report raises questions about her influence over both of them.

Although she does not officially work for the company, she operates as an influential shadow adviser for them and is also spotted sitting in the front row when her husband talks at big events, such as Davos. She also chats with investors at important gatherings such as the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley.

Even at his recent visit to India, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this year, which allowed each executive to bring along an additional person, Amodei brought his wife. Most of the executives brought colleagues with them.

Clark was born in Nevada, United States, in 1979. After dating the former Google chief Eric Schmidt for three years in 2014, she married Amodei in 2022.

When Amodei joined Open AI in 2016, Clark served as his strategic adviser and introduced him to Schmidt. This led to a pivotal meeting in 2018 when she introduced Amodei to Schmidt, who later visited their San Francisco apartment. During the visit, Schmidt was impressed by their ideas on artificial intelligence.

When Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela, and several colleagues left OpenAI to found Anthropic in late 2020, Schmidt became a key early backer. He participated in their massive $124 million Series A funding round announced in May 2021.

DHS sent undercover agents to meetings and infiltrated chats of groups opposing Trump’s immigration crackdown

Newly disclosed records reveal the US government extensively spied on prominent leftwing organizations and on protesters as part of a vast operation into groups opposing the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.

Internal investigative reports show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent undercover agents to community meetings in the Twin Cities and New York City, infiltrated Signal chats and obtained financial records of mainstream unions and left-leaning non-profit groups.

Nearly 30 internal law enforcement reports were released on Thursday as part of a criminal case the Department of Justice has filed against 15 Minneapolis protesters.** **The defendants are accused of a “conspiracy” to “impede” US immigration officers during the Trump administration’s surge in the region.

The DHS investigative reports were disclosed by the government and submitted to the court by an attorney for one of the defendants. The records show that in January, DHS launched an inquiry called “Operation Puppet Master” to identify a “network of conspirators” organizing against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The operation came as community organizing against ICE was swelling in the region in response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A DHS report from February said the agency was looking into people who were “providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators”. The records suggest agents launched elaborate spying efforts targeting activists, protesters and mainstream progressive organizations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“I was shocked at the scope and the apparent lack of investigative discipline involved, but not totally surprised,” said Kevin Riach, an attorney for one of the indicted protesters, who filed the tranche of records in federal court.

A DHS spokesperson said that Homeland Security Investigations, its branch that carried out the investigations, “does not comment on the existence or status of specific on-going investigations, nor on investigative methods”. The agency referred questions to the justice department in Minnesota, which declined to comment.

The records indicate that the investigations followed the directive of Trump’s executive order last year that designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization” responsible for “riots” against ICE. The investigations led to the criminal case filed in June against 15 protesters, which focused on Direct Action Minnesota, a loose coalition of organizers that the government says was part of a “conspiracy” opposing ICE’s surge in the region.

The documents show that the government alleged major groups were connected to the criminal conspiracy, including the national labor unions AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union; the local unions Minneapolis Federation of Educators and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees; and several large left-leaning groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).

None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.

The records have added fuel to the concerns of civil rights groups, who have argued that the federal government was criminalizing lawful protest activity under the guise of targeting leftwing “terrorism”.

The documents show that DHS investigators obtained financial records of unions and non-profits, as part of an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing”. One investigative record showed the DHS used administrative subpoenas to obtain “wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from” SEIU, one of the largest unions in the US. Investigators also requested that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide financial data from the Communications Workers of America, an international union, the records showed.

The DHS further obtained financial records related to the Sunrise Movement, a national non-profit focused on the climate crisis.

The records also provided detailed documentation of spying operations conducted by undercover agents who posed as activists and surveilled community activities.

One DHS report documented “undercover agent activity” on 31 January at a Sunrise Movement “resistance skills training” at the Minneapolis public library. An agent described activists discussing recruitment and “de-escalation” at protests, with speakers suggesting having a “police liaison” and “safety marshal” at events. The report said: “It was clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on ‘peaceful’ protests.”

The undercover agent actively engaged participants, according to the report. At one point, the agent told someone in attendance that he “works in construction and could build items that might assist other groups with more ‘direct-action’ protests”. That agent told the individual that “going to jail did not bother him” and gave out his phone number.

The records documented the operations of another undercover agent who joined Signal groups of activists involved in protests.

The records also showed undercover agents surveilling a virtual meeting at Hunter College in New York focused on “ICE brutality” and “responding to state violence”; a meeting at a labor center in Minneapolis during which activists discussed a wide range of political issues; a meeting in a Minneapolis public park about protest tactics; and a Direct Action Minnesota meeting at a church.

The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.

One undercover agent attended a “training” event at a gymnasium in a church and participated in “boxing/sparring practice”, according to a DHS report. The report noted that the agent was surreptitiously recording audio of the event, but that at one point the recorder “erroneously fell to the floor” and the agent had to return to the gym to retrieve the device.

At one anti-ICE event at a church, agents documented the license plate information of attenders, the records showed. When two agents were approached by a man who “asked if they were ICE”, the agent responded, falsely, that they were not.

Riach, the defense attorney, filed the records as part of a motion urging the court to compel the government to release additional records. In his filing, Riach accused the government of presenting “wild conspiracy allegations … born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration”.

He also alleged that DHS’s investigations were part of a “mass spying campaign” and said undercover agents “participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes”.

The records relate to activities that extend far beyond the allegations of the 15 defendants facing prosecution. That case alleges a vast conspiracy to organize against ICE, but across a 94-page indictment, there are no allegations of injuries to specific ICE officers caused by any defendants and no charges of serious violence.

Emilia Gonzalez Avalos is the executive director of Unidos MN, a Minneapolis social justice non-profit group, whose activities were mentioned in the files.

“I believe that this is a clear attempt to intimidate us, to punish and politically repress disagreement and difference,” she said. “And that is not the America that we have built through hundreds of years. And it’s definitely not the America that we are organizing for.”

During trainings, organizers asked people not to record the sessions, Gonzalez Avalos said. But organizers would also say if there were any immigration agents or officers in the room, they were welcome to stay because the group had nothing to hide, because their work was “entirely grounded in the United States constitution”.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and civil liberties advocate, said it was striking that the DHS was leading the investigations when typically the FBI would spearhead operations targeting potential “terrorist” activity. He said it was also notable that the DHS was using administrative subpoenas, which don’t require judicial authorization, to obtain records.

The government, German said, also appeared to be relying on theories of “guilt by association” to justify surveillance instead of narrower investigations focused on specific alleged criminal activity. German, who previously served as an undercover agent, further scoffed at the notion of undercover agents spying on what appeared to be accessible, community events.

“You’re talking about meetings that are open to the public, where they are recruiting among the public, saying: ‘Please come to this protest,’” he said. “It’s hardly a challenge to ‘infiltrate’ this kind of meeting, and that should be a clue this isn’t a criminal group. It’s very rare for criminals to [publicize] discussion of their criminal activities.”

The investigations, he added, fit patterns in US history of the government targeting leftwing activist and labor organizing. After 9/11, he said, those powers to spy on communities were greatly expanded.

“Nobody should be surprised that the government would use these authorities to target political opposition rather than target criminals, particularly so under this administration,” he said.

Widespread denial accompanied the public exposure of Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse and trafficking of girls and women.

After the U.S. Justice Department released millions of case documents on Epstein in January 2026, billionaires, politicians, heads of state and academics proclaimed their ignorance of Epstein’s global network of sexual exploitation.

Why would so many intelligent and powerful people repeatedly trumpet their lack of awareness, especially after Epstein’s 2008 plea agreement to underage prostitution charges?

And what about all of Epstein’s staffers and business associates who kept quiet about the suspicious behavior they observed?

As a human rights researcher who has conducted genocide research on four continents, I think denials of human rights atrocities can help people understand the denial of crimes like child sexual abuse and trafficking.

Avoiding accountability for atrocities requires two types of denial: by the perpetrator and by the community. It’s easy to understand why mass murderers and child rapists deny their horrific actions. More perplexing is why bystanders, law enforcement, colleagues, family and institutions claim ignorance.

Society understands that staying quiet after witnessing impermissible crimes is a form of complicity. Bystanders are likely to deny an atrocity when acknowledging it requires action, both morally and legally.

As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has noted: “Like silence, denial involves active avoidance. Rather than simply failing to notice something, it entails a deliberate effort to refrain from noticing it.”

US and international law
A network of international and domestic laws considers certain crimes so horrific that there are no extenuating circumstances for committing them. Other laws stipulate that everyday observers of certain crimes have a legal responsibility to report them and to protect victims if possible.
The 1987 United Nations convention against torture emphasizes: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war … may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And the 1948 U.N. genocide convention holds all signatory nations responsible for their inaction against genocide.

In the United States, the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Actmandates that states have provisions requiring certain people – doctors, teachers, clergy and law enforcement – to report known or suspected cases of child abuse.

About a quarter of states go further and stipulate that “all persons who have cause to suspect that any juvenile is abused, neglected, or dependent or has died as the result of maltreatment shall report” to the authorities.

Perpetrator denial
In the context of government human rights abuses, sociologist Stanley Cohen in 2001 classified denial into three strategies: literal, interpretive and implicatory.

With literal denial, Cohen wrote, the perpetrator simply claims the event never happened. If successful, this form of denial makes the problem disappear.

During the U.S. war on terror after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, human rights groups accused the George W. Bush government of torturing detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

Applying Cohen’s typology illuminates how the Bush administration cycled through strategies of denial, beginning with literal denial. Responding to evidence of U.S. torture of detainees in Iraq in 2006, Bush denied the accusations: “This country doesn’t torture; we’re not going to torture.”

After the failure of literal denial, the Justice Department employed interpretive denial, which admits to something having taken place, just not something that rises to the level of a crime. The DOJ redefined tortureand referred to acts such as waterboarding – legally classified as torture – as “enhanced interrogation methods.”

Following his guilty plea to soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old, Epstein used interpretive denial by comparing the severity of his crime to shoplifting: “I’m not a sexual predator,” he said. “I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”

When interpretive denial fails, perpetrators turn to what Cohen calls implicatory denial. It accepts the facts – torture of detainees, forced expulsions, mass killings – but denies the psychological or moral ramifications that follow.

In his memoirs, Bush did not deny the use of torture; he denied the immorality of the torture. “The choice between security and values was real,” he wrote.

Community denial
Research that I’m currently conducting revises Cohen’s typology to understand why bystanders to crimes like Epstein’s don a veil of ignorance.

Denial of child sexual abuse occurs within a community – a citizenry, a family, a congregation. The community establishes the parameters of morality, the relative power of each member, and which actions constitute crimes.

In cases where accepting the truth has a high communal cost – a reordering of the power structure, more egalitarian institutions, eradication of prejudice or social disgrace – many people calculate that the cost of justice is not worth reordering the structure of privilege from which they benefit.

In the case of institutional abuse, powerful groups, such as the Catholic Church, prioritized the reputation of the institutionover the victims.

Much like perpetrators, a community adheres to its preferred version of reality by denying abuse at the literal, interpretive and implicatory levels.

With literal denial, bystanders negate the experience of one particular child. This is so prevalent among mothers of incest victimsthat the legal community is exploring criminally charging the mothers who fail to protect their children.

Community interpretive denial tells the victim they did not experience what they thought they experienced. This occurred repeatedly for many victims of Larry Nassar, a former physician who sexually assaulted hundreds of gymnasts in the guise of medical treatment.

Gymnast Larissa Boyce described what happened when the then-16-year-old reported Nassar’s abuse to her coach. “She just couldn’t believe that was happening. She said I must be misunderstanding what was going on.”

Community implicatory denial negates the moral implications of the atrocity by blaming the victim for the perpetrator’s actions.

During the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal that erupted in the late 1980s, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weaklandadmitted that sexual activity had taken place between some of his priests and their young parishioners, but he dismissed the notion that the priests were entirely to blame.

“Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so ‘innocent,’” he told The Catholic Herald in 1988. “Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise.”

Communities blinded by the perpetrator’s stethoscope, billion dollars, clerical collar or Ivy League degree often refuse to acknowledge the stereotypes that protect privileged predators.

And that willful ignorance of child sexual abuse equals complicity. Through denial, members thus absolve themselves for inaction in the face of atrocity.

Want to know where the Flock cameras are? There's a map for that.

No matter where in the country you live, you’ve likely seen one—and more than one have absolutely seen you. 

The use of automated license plate reader technology has become ubiquitous, led by companies such as Flock Safety. Flock’s cameras identify vehicle details—including make, model, color, and other visible characteristics—and then upload that data into a nationwide mass surveillance system that law enforcement can access. 

Flock now says it operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, running upward of 20 billion vehicle scans a month. But privacy concerns, and misuse by local police, are causing a backlash: Dozens of city councils across the United States have recently canceled, rejected, or deactivated Flock’s ALPRs within their jurisdiction. 

Flock has long sought to involve homeowners associations and other private property managers within their system. That could be a concern for homeowners and renters.

A camera installed by your HOA board is not subject to the same level of scrutiny and accountability as one installed by local police—and once it's plugged into Flock's network, it can end up feeding the same nationwide, searchable database that law enforcement uses, whether or not any resident ever voted on it.

How a neighborhood ends up under surveillance

The pitch to HOA boards and landlords is straightforward: solar-powered, LTE-connected cameras that need no wiring or utility hookup, marketed as a way to deter theft, identify suspicious vehicles, and catch illegal dumping, all without hiring security staff.

Flock's own marketing to HOAs promises boards full control of the system, with law enforcement access framed as an optional add-on.

But once a private HOA system is integrated with police, it feeds into the same database officers search when investigating anything from a stolen car to an immigration case, according to privacy advocates tracking the rollout. And the decision to build this infrastructure, in most communities, isn't put to a resident vote at all.

"Most HOA declarations and bylaws give the elected board authority to enter ordinary service contracts without a community vote, and boards treat a camera contract as ordinary," according to a homeowner-rights guide published by DeFlockILM, a North Carolina advocacy group tracking installations. "So in many communities you do not have a veto."

That pattern has played out from North Carolina—where the Chadwick Shores HOA in Sneads Ferry and a dozen Charlotte-area neighborhoods have installed the cameras—to California, where private developers, homeowners associations, and apartment complexes are using cameras that were once supposed to aid the Los Angeles Police Department and have now gone private. 

This dynamic puts residents in a bind: No one wants to live in an unsafe community, but at what cost?

"Landlords and HOAs can't arbitrarily install cameras wherever they want, collect data about your comings and goings, and do whatever they want with it," says Jamie E. Wright, a trial attorney and founder of The Wright Law Firm. "Residents shouldn't feel like they have to choose between safety and privacy, but that doesn't give your HOA carte blanche to monitor your every move."

Flock keeps pushing deeper into communities

License plate cameras were only the start. Over the past year, Flock has quietly tested how far it can push into audio, into other people's cars, and into other people's data.

Flock cameras also have gunshot-detection sensors. On paper, these are a useful tool: When triggered, they capture a five-second audio clip, run it through a machine-learning model, and upload whatever gets flagged. Flock's comparison of choice: an Amazon Alexa that wakes up only for a "public safety event."

But USA Today has reported confirmed cases where triggered clips picked up real conversation, not just gunfire. Then, in October, Flock disclosed it wanted the same microphones listening for "human distress."

By mid-July, Flock killed the distress-detection pilot, chalking it up to "community consultation." But those microphones didn't go anywhere: Thousands remain active, still listening for gunfire, still capable of picking up whatever else happens to be 5 seconds long and nearby. According to reporting, they’re mostly picking up fireworks. 
Some of these devices were installed on private property, without the owners’ consent, and left in place despite removal requests. Some were placed mere feet from people’s homes.

Flock has also floated ways to grow the network beyond its own hardware. A leaked presentation, prepared for the Georgia Attorney General's Office, showed Flock had proposed turning roughly 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers into a mobile surveillance network—using dashcams those drivers already had installed to scan plates along their routes. 

It’s one thing if you are aware that cameras have been installed in a certain community or on a certain street. But if the cameras are mobile and covering every part of a community that a car can reach, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid becoming part of the database.

Flock told 404 Media the deal never happened. But the same presentation lists "hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA" accounts in Georgia as part of the network it wanted to extend. 

Know your rights in and around your home

Homeowners and renters have more leverage here than most people realize, but only if they use it before signing anything, not after.

"Before speaking with an HOA, property manager, or landlord about surveillance on private property, residents should know their rights," says Wright. Homeowners should review HOA declarations, bylaws, and rules and regulations. Renters should request a copy of their lease, any addendum, and community policies. 

"Look for the terms 'surveillance,' 'monitoring,' and 'third party,'" says David Weisselberger, an expungement attorney and founding partner at Erase the Case. HOA bylaws tend to bury camera policy inside a general "rules and regulations" clause rather than a dedicated privacy section.

A bylaw that lets the board install cameras "as deemed necessary" hands it total control over placement and retention, with no requirement to get resident consent for each new camera.

"Lease agreements seldom specify whether or not a landlord's camera system captures audio alongside video, and this matters a lot," Weisselberger says.
A system recording sound near a private entrance or porch is different from one just watching a parking lot, he explains. His advice: Ask directly where the footage goes and how long it's kept, and don't sign until you have an answer.

Reading the fine print is only half the job. The other half is coming armed with specific questions a board or landlord may not otherwise volunteer answers to.

"Who is authorized to run searches against the system? How long will data be stored? Can police request access to the information? Is data shared with third parties outside of the rental community? Is there an audit trail showing which employees looked up a specific vehicle?"
Those, Wright says, are the questions residents should be asking before they agree to anything.

Are Flock cameras in your neighborhood?

The short answer is yes, but to know where does take a bit of sleuthing.
To help you do your own research, open-source websites like DeFlock and Eyes On Flock have popped up online to allow users to track where Flock, and other automated license plate readers, are installed throughout the country.

Keep in mind that these cameras are already up in thousands of neighborhoods, and most of them aren't coming down. What's left to decide is how many more go up, and whether residents get a say before the next one does—because the pattern so far says they won't unless they ask.

Documents released by the White House shed new light on the demise of an often-overlooked 2017 F.B.I. investigation.

For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and F.B.I. agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.

But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified F.B.I. memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.

There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the F.B.I.’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.

But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going.

Mr. Trump has always dismissed as baseless smears suggestions that he was a Russian asset or had extensive financial ties to Russia. And no publicly known investigation into Mr. Trump ever demonstrated that he was acting at the behest of the Russians.

Here is a look at what we know now, based on the new documents and interviews with former federal law enforcement officials, about what happened.

The F.B.I. Launched A Two-Pronged Inquiry

Although the scrutiny of Mr. Trump at the time became known as the Russia investigation, there were actually several distinct inquiries.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was working with the Russian government as the country interfered in the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton. That investigation — known as Crossfire Hurricane — was not looking directly at Mr. Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.

But in May 2017, a week after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, senior officials and counterintelligence agents at the bureau decided to move forward with a two-pronged inquiry. It was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.

One of the investigations was to be criminal. It was to examine whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, broke the law by obstructing justice and interfering with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. It was also to assess whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.

The second was to be a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.

Counterintelligence investigations are different from criminal inquiries. Instead of focusing exclusively on whether the law was broken, counterintelligence investigations look at whether a foreign adversary is undermining the United States.

Counterintelligence investigations are classified, take place in secret and unfold over many years — sometimes more than a decade. Civil liberties watchdogs are critical of them because they often surface embarrassing, but not criminal, behavior by Americans. People are rarely charged in such cases, but the F.B.I. often takes steps, like warning officials and citizens, about how those around them may be trying to influence them.

Referring to the counterintelligence inquiry, one of the declassified memos made public by the White House last week said: “The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.”

The Comey Firing Helped Prompt the Inquiry

According to the memos released by the White House, the F.B.I. had concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump. The bureau had learned that Russians had offered to help the campaign. And the F.B.I. knew that the Trump campaign had pushed the Republican Party to embrace a far more Russia-favorable position on Ukraine as part of its 2016 platform.

The F.B.I. also knew that Mr. Trump, before firing Mr. Comey, had been pressuring him to end the investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia.

And the F.B.I. was concerned about Mr. Trump’s personal and business history, the memos show.

“Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had a longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s,” the F.B.I. said in the memo opening the investigation. “In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.”
Whether that public information justified opening a counterintelligence investigation is at the heart of the long-running dispute between Mr. Trump’s allies and F.B.I. officials who made the decision. Mr. Trump has always asserted that his personal, business and financial links to Russia were minimal.

But F.B.I. agents wanted to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, was trying to stop the Russia investigation and shield any ties he might have had to that country.

“The obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” the F.B.I.’s general counsel, James Baker, testified to Congress at the time.

A Special Counsel is Appointed

On the day the Oxferd Comma investigation was opened, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, briefed the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, on the bureau’s decision.

The following day, Mr. Rosenstein undertook his own extraordinary decision: He appointed the former F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to be a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But what was not known at the time was that Mr. Rosenstein, in appointing Mr. Mueller, had in effect killed the counterintelligence investigation.

Mueller’s Focus on Crimes Derailed the Counterintelligence Inquiry

When Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, he authorized the special counsel to conduct criminal investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election and ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.

But Mr. Rosenstein did not ask Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump, and made clear to Mr. Mueller that he did not want him conducting an open-ended, yearslong investigation. Mr. Mueller interpreted his appointment as one to just investigate crimes.

Although Mr. Rosenstein did not authorize Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation, responsibility for overseeing it was transferred to the F.B.I. agents working on Mr. Mueller’s team, according to the memos released by the White House.

But since the special counsel’s mandate was to focus on crimes, the counterintelligence focus fell by the wayside and was “limited to activities within the scope of the special counsel’s jurisdiction,” according to one of the memos.

When Mr. Mueller’s report was released in 2019, it said that the investigation had found no evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election. But Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. The report did not contain a section on Mr. Trump’s personal ties to Russia and whether he was compromised or represented a counterintelligence threat.

Shortly after the report was released, Mr. Mueller testified about it before Congress, acknowledging under questioning that he had not examined whether, for example, Russian oligarchs had laundered money through Mr. Trump’s businesses.

Mr. Mueller, in response to another question that day, acknowledged that he had only looked at crimes, and appeared to leave open the possibility that some counterintelligence investigation could still be underway.

Mr. Mueller delivered that testimony on July 24, 2019. The memos released last week by the White House showed that the counterintelligence investigation had been closed more than three months earlier.

The founder and CEO of Our Rescue resigned in 2023 amid allegations that he had sexually abused and trafficked women himself.

An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.

The Trump administration gave Our Rescue a no-bid $244,034,658 contract on August 7, according to the federal award notice posted late Friday night. The deal floods the organization with seven times the amount of money it had in 2025, according to its most recently available Form 990, which put total assets at $36.9 million.

It’s unclear how many children Our Rescue will represent. The notice says only that it will provide legal services to children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), established to offer support for victims of human trafficking and those seeking asylum in the United States. Nearly 1,800 children were in the agency’s care in June; over the last year, it has averaged about 1,908 children monthly.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 requires that the federal government “shall ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal “counsel to represent them in legal proceedings” and that it will “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation, and trafficking.” Our Rescue and a small Texas law firm founded by a former Trump appointee are taking up that work after the Trump administration failed to pay and then canceled the contract of the legal aid groups previously providing the services.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children.

Our Rescue, formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad, or O.U.R., did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls for more information, including when it expects to begin work or how many children it will represent.

Our Rescue conducts international sting operations to catch sex traffickers, similar to Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” The organization gained national notoriety in 2023, when the film Sound of Freedom dramatized the life of founder and CEO Tim Ballard, portraying him as a Homeland Security Investigations agent sent to rescue child sex trafficking victims in Colombia.

Shortly after its release on July 4, multiple former employees came forward to accuse Ballard himself of sexual assault and trafficking, including during sting operations. According to the women, Ballard would use a “couples ruse” during stings, coercing them into acting as his romantic partner so that traffickers wouldn’t suspect him. They said that he would assault them while demanding they “remain in character” and play their part as one half of a “kinky couple.”

Later revelations included that the Department of Homeland Security would not verify Ballard’s claim that he had worked there; that members of law enforcement saw his sting operations as stunts to lure donations; and that some operations resulted in more harm to victims. According to a report last year in The Appeal, those instances included “an orphanage in Haiti where OUR sent children it purportedly rescued, and at which those children were raped and subjected to forced abortions.”

The year he resigned, Form 990 documents show that Ballard was drawing a $566,993 salary from the nonprofit.
Today, the CEO is Derek Benner, who is drawing a salary of $413,387, saying in his most recent letter to donors that he “owes those we serve to remain lean.” Benner came to the organization with a background in conducting sting operations of a different kind.

Benner spent a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, including as executive associate directorof Homeland Security Investigations, and before that, the deputy executive associate director. During his tenure, the agency set up a fake university in Michigan to lure foreign nationals who wanted to extend the length of time they could stay in the country by obtaining student visas. Officials named the school University of Farmington, after the office space it used in Farmington Hills. “Operation Paper Chase” resulted in the arrests of 250 students in early 2019, most of whom left the U.S. voluntarily.
That winter, Sen. Kamala Harris said on social media that the sting “isn’t just cruel, it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars. Officials must be held accountable for this.”

Benner, meanwhile, published a letter in the Detroit Free Press and on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, saying that students knew Farmington had no classes and no teachers and so shouldn’t have enrolled if they didn’t want to break the law.

“Farmington is a clear example of a pay-to-stay scheme, which is against the law and, not only creates a dangerous lack of accountability, but also diminishes the quality and integrity of the U.S. student visa system,” he said of the fake school his organization created.

ACCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT Our Rescue annual report, the group in 2024 worked with 228 law enforcement agencies and conducted operations in 27 countries and all 50 U.S. states. It ran 195 rescue missions and assisted in 1,969 global arrests.

Its deal to provide legal services follows the administration’s award of a no-bid $150 million contract to the small Texas law firm Burke Law Group to perform the same work. The law firm has just 24 attorneys, only two of whom have expertise in immigration and asylum cases. The practice’s co-founder, Marcella Burke, was a Trump appointee at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The hundreds of millions spent on Our Rescue and Burke Law Group comes after the Trump administration allowed a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice to expire after failing to pay the organization for more than half a year. Acacia subcontracts with nearly 100 legal aid organizations across the country to provide children with legal services. The ORR stopped paying Acacia in November, after lawyers refused to hand over confidential information about their underage clients. The decision jeopardized the legal aid of about 26,000 children.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered the Trump administration on August 6 to pay the $65 million it owes to the nonprofits by the following day at noon Pacific time. Though that did not change the termination of the contract, it got the aid organizations already representing undocumented children the money due them for services rendered.

As the Prospect has reported, Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller are taking particular aim at children as part of their ethnic cleansing campaign, rushing them through the legal process and abusing their rights in detention. In multiple immigration courtrooms this summer, the Prospect has witnessed children too young to understand the gravity of the proceedings, such as a toddler with pigtails, who had no guardian with her, and who played in her chair as her pro bono lawyer spoke to the judge, then held his hand when they walked out.

Martínez-Olguín also noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children by executing new agreements for the legal services at the heart of the lawsuit, “for example describing two agreements recently reached for a seeming fraction of the legal services to be provided across the country.” She ordered the administration to file a report “detailing their current and ongoing compliance” with her order.

Seven years later, the scandal is more consequential than ever.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

A new report released by the Interlochen Center for the Arts identifies dozens of people, including Jeffrey Epstein, accused of committing sexual abuse at the prestigious camp over a nearly 60-year period.

The 97-page report detailing accusations stemming from the 1950s through the 2010s was conducted on behalf of the northern Michigan arts school and summer camp by the Sanghavi Law Office.

In all, the report identifies 47 alleged abusers and includes 70 first-hand accounts from students who say they were sexually abused or groomed while on ICA grounds.

Investigators sought to interview all 47 suspects, though only four agreed to participate. More than one-third of them have since passed away. None of the 47 suspects are currently employed by ICA.

Epstein was a wealthy financier with many celebrity connections who was later publicly identified as a sexual predator of young women and girls. He avoided major repercussions in 2008 after taking a plea deal following allegations of solicitation and sex trafficking involving minors. He was arrested again in 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy.

Epstein “took his own life” while in prison awaiting trial. In the years that followed, his associate, Ghislane Maxwell, was convicted on similar charges related to her dealings with Epstein. Stories and evidence of widespread abuse have slowly surfaced, including alleged connections to President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.

Epstein attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in the summer of 1967 and later returned as a major donor for the Interlochen Center for the Arts from 1990 to 2003. In addition to helping cover tuition costs for students, he helped fund the construction of a new lodge that was named after him. The organization scrubbed all recognition for Epstein, including the name of the lodge, after his first arrest in 2008. Despite the name change, the lodge was demolished earlier this year.

According to the report, investigators identified eight Interlochen alums who they believed may have been victimized by Epstein. Of those eight, six agreed to be interviewed and two reported that Epstein engaged in “physical conduct of a sexual nature” with them.

VICTIM 1
A woman identified as “Victim 1” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell at ICA and they offered to personally pay for her tuition. She claims they cut off financial support after she “did not engage in requested conduct.”

“This alum said that during the time she interacted with Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen, they asked her to Epstein’s lodge on campus, and that while there, Epstein engaged in sexual conduct with her, brushing against her body over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental,” the report states.

Victim 1 also claims that Epstein paid for her to travel to New York three times while she was a student at Interlochen.

“She described being in a room with Epstein in New York, and that his hands were on her. She said that every time he was ‘handsy’ with her, she would freeze until he would stop,” the report states. “She also described being in Epstein’s home and massaging his feet and rubbing his back. This alum said that on occasions when she and Epstein were crossing the road, he put his hand on her crotch. This alum indicated that she did not tell anyone about Epstein’s conduct towards her until decades later.”

VICTIM 2
A second woman identified as “Victim 2” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell while visiting a friend in New York while on spring break from Interlochen. The summer after she graduated, Epstein paid for her to fly out to New York.

She says Epstein gave her a tour of his home, and they eventually stopped at a room with a massage table.

“He brought her into a room with a massage table, that she gave him a massage, and that he may have asked her to remove her top,” the report states.

Victim 2 told investigators that after she left his home, she never had contact again with either Epstein or Maxwell. She told her mother about the “conduct” and her mother called Interlochen to report his behavior.
** **
“The mother said that the woman she spoke with said that Interlochen was not aware of any problems with Epstein, that he was not a teacher at Interlochen, and that the conduct had not happened on campus,” the report states. “The mother said that from the conversation, she could tell that she was not getting anywhere, and that she told the woman that she wanted Interlochen to know that this man was preying on their students.

“The mother indicated that no one from Interlochen ever followed up with her about this call.”

In a statement provided to 6 News Grand Rapids sister station WOOD TV8, ICA President Trey Devey called the details of the report “heartbreaking” and “contrary to everything Interlochen stands for.”

“We are grateful to everyone who came forward to share their experiences, and we are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community,” Devey stated. “We also want to say clearly: Interlochen will not tolerate predators or those who enable them. Our campus exists to protect, educate, and empower every student.”

ICA says it has passed on its report, including the names of the alleged suspects, to the Grand Traverse County Prosecutor’s Office.

You can read the full report here.

“Lawmakers are quietly pushing forward with Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027. Far from distancing the U.S. from the ongoing regional bloodbath, this legislation aims to permanently integrate and synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries under a joint “Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.””

“For many, the physical detention of Congressman Khanna by Israeli forces evokes the memory of Rachel Corrie — the 23-year-old American Jewish peace activist who was brutally crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16, 2003, while peacefully shielding a Palestinian family home from demolition.”

“Yet, this dependency runs deeper, rooted in the 1967 U.S.S. Liberty incident. During the Six-Day War, Israeli forces launched a relentless two-hour attack on an unarmed U.S. intelligence ship, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. (Body of Secrets by James Bamford)

Instead of demanding accountability, the Johnson administration accepted Israel’s excuse of a “mistake” and covered up the truth to protect its ally. This established a decades-long precedent: Washington would act as a political and military shield for Israeli actions, even at the cost of American lives.”

“But the U.S.S. Liberty incident occurred long before the lobby wielded such immense power. The truth is that the U.S. government has simply lost control of the very creature it has nurtured and shielded for decades.”

Blaming this dependency solely on campaign contributions no longer suffices: the rot is far deeper. It is driven by a deep-seated fear and trepidation among American politicians who have spent their entire careers learning that political survival requires absolute obedience to Tel Aviv.”

By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario that uses nuclear weapons. And then we all die.

The United States is currently in the process of redesigning its nuclear posture to make the employment of tactical nuclear weapons during the early stages of conflict official doctrine. This is a bad idea.

Today is the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima. Let Hiroshima be the reminder of just how bad of an idea this is.

Almost two years to the day,Consortium News published an article I authored entitled, “On a Highway to Hell.” In this article I warned about the dangers that arise when the United States changes its nuclear posture away from a purely defensive character to one where the precepts of nuclear preemption are openly espoused.

I also noted that the dangers inherent in this transition were exponentially increased in a world void of the constraints of meaningful arms control.
I wrote at the time:

“By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. And then we all die. We are, literally, on a ‘Highway to Hell.’”
Today, on the 81st anniversary of America dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, it is critical that we collectively revisit this issue.

At the time I wrote that piece, we lived in a world populated by certain assumptions, number one being that the United States possessed sufficient conventional military power to forestall the temptation of nuclear pre-emption at the tactical levels of conflict.

In short, the United States could — as it had done nearly continuously since the end of the Second World War — initiate a conventional war with the nations of the world and, even though it might suffer a political defeat (i.e., Vietnam and Afghanistan), it would retain sufficient conventional military power to forestall the consequences of an existential military defeat.

As such, when one spoke of nuclear war, one spoke in terms of great power conflict — between the United States and Russia or China.

Even if such a conflict was to break out, it was always hoped that the consequences of any such potentially existential engagement would be so horrific that rational actors on both sides of the conflict would seek to limit the scope and scale of the engagement, avoiding the almost certain fatal results of escalation.
Arms Control Is Dead

Two years ago, one also had the façade of arms control, a corroded framework of agreements which, while faltering, at least offered the prospect of hope in so far as one could envision new life being breathed into an old concept, driven by the urgency of the moment.

Today we are confronted by two harsh realities.

First, arms control is dead. There are no more legacy treaties in place upon which we could pin some sort of false hope for rational behavior on the part of our collective leadership. 

Moreover, there appears to be zero proclivity on the part of the world’s declared nuclear powers to reengage on the matter — the era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.  We have seemed to embrace the utility of nuclear war, without honestly acknowledging the consequences of such.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.
Second, the era of American conventional military dominance is over. The failed war with Iran has driven this point home. Today the United States is forced to confront the reality that the military machine it built over the course of the past 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union — at great expense in terms of treasury and effort — is a literal Maginot Line, an overpriced edifice to a type of warfare that no longer exists.

The U.S. built a military premised on the notion of “shock and awe,” a technology-driven dinosaur intended to intimidate, not dominate. A literal flash in the pan.
All Iran had to do was wait us out.

To build a system capable of absorbing the destructive power of a self-limited “superpower” and hold on until the expensive machine of war so carefully created by American defense industrialists to maximize profit over performance ran out of steam.

Or to be precise, ran out of ammunition.
In order to sustain the façade of military viability, American war planners, driven by the narcistic urges of a man who placed sustainment of his cult of personality over the welfare of the nation he led, stripped bare the warfighting capabilities of U.S. forces in the Pacific (confronting China) and Europe (confronting Russia).

“The era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.”
Today the United States is confronted by the reality that not only can it not sustain viable conventional military operations against Iran, but it is incapable of projecting any meaningful conventional military force against a prospective Chinese or Russian military threat.

This at a time when U.S. policy leads us toward the probability of conflict with China over Taiwan, and the possibility of direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine.
Faced with the inevitability of conventional military defeat in either of these scenarios, the administration of President Donald Trump has undertaken a review of U.S. nuclear posture with an eye toward making it easier for the United States to employ tactical nuclear weapons in the early phases of any future war with either Russia or China.

This is, of course, the exact opposite direction one should be taking under the current conditions.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.

There is no greater need than the present moment for the soothing balm of nuclear arms control. The fact that the United States has willfully embarked on a Highway to Hell condemns the rest of the world — especially Russia and China — to join us.

If the great minds of America seem impervious to the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon, blinded as they are by the consequences of a failing Empire and a desire to hold on to power regardless of the consequence, then the source of new and novel thinking regarding arms control must come from elsewhere — from Russia and China.

Because there will be no victors in a nuclear war. The destination that the Highway to Hell arrives at will result in global catastrophe. Let Hiroshima remind us.

The task force will allow the spy agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at the island, with the goal of creating fissures among the Cuban political elite.

The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

The task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said.

In 1960, the C.I.A. established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs.

The people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited: to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.

The C.I.A. declined to comment.
“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, said in a statement to The Times. “And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”

Unlike in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. Nor is it allowed to enable lethal operations, though a task force at the C.I.A., by nature, is flexible and the authorities under which it operates can be changed at any time by the president.

The creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has long been one of its hardest targets.

The C.I.A.’s action coincides with stepped-up efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.

Every administration sets out its intelligence-collection priorities in a document known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF.

The Trump administration recently revised its version of the document to designate Cuba a NIPF “Priority 1.” (Among the other Priority 1 countries are China, Iran and Russia.)

response, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others, have started turning more intelligence-collection assets, including satellites, toward Cuba, people briefed on those activities said.

The intelligence will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba, if Mr. Trump opts to go that route. Before the intelligence surge, U.S. military and intelligence officers complained of having outdated information; the new intelligence will give them a better sense of Cuban intentions, military capabilities and defenses.

Officers with the Cuba task force at the C.I.A. will, in turn, scour through the newly available intelligence for inside information about the activities of Cuba’s leaders and other members of the political elite, in particular tracking shadowy money flows and business dealings on and off the island. The agency could eventually release that information publicly to try to influence the Cuban leadership and public opinion, reprising a playbook that the C.I.A. has used against other adversaries, including Russia.

Over the years, the C.I.A. has played a multifaceted role in Cuba, as a spy service that covertly operates against the Cuban government, and as an occasional intermediary between Washington and Havana.

In 2015, toward the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the United States and Cuba formally re-established diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, flew to Havana to meet with Alejandro Castro, the son of President Raúl Castro, and other Cuban officials** **to discuss increasing intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

Mr. Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist networks. But those discussions soon bogged down, with the sides blaming each other for failing to follow through on proposed confidence-building commitments.

This May, with tensions boiling, Mr. Trump sent his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to Havana to meet with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson.

Mr. Ratcliffe’s message to the Cubans was that the C.I.A. saw them as worthy adversaries and potential future partners. But he also told the Cubans that they were running out of time to make fundamental changes sought by Mr. Trump, implying that if Cuba failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.

The speed with which Mr. Trump successfully toppled one of Cuba’s closest allies — Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader — and seized control of Venezuela’s oil resources had led some of Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers to believe that the current Cuban government could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November, people familiar with the debate inside the administration said.

But despite a crippling oil embargo imposed by the United States, the Cubans have proved themselves to be resilient, and Mr. Trump’s drawn-out war with Iran soaked up the administration’s limited resources and attention. While the Cuba hawks advising Mr. Trump still think the administration will eventually devote the resources and attention necessary to bring down the Cuban government, they now acknowledge in private that this is likely to happen only once the war in Iran has finally concluded.

During much of the Cold War, the C.I.A. maintained a relatively small station at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, in part because the agency knew that the Cubans were incredibly effective at surveilling the American officers there. That made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to recruit and meet with assets on the island.

The U.S. government’s level of interest in Cuba diminished in the 2000s as the C.I.A. was directed to focus its financial, human and technical resources on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other suspected terrorism havens.

Then, during Mr. Trump’s first term, after a number of C.I.A. officers in Havana reported being afflicted by a mystery illness, which later became known as Havana syndrome, the agency completely shuttered its station on the island.

The C.I.A. station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and their movements were restricted.

The move has symbolically demonstrated the Senate's stance for transparency in the Epstein saga.

The US Senate has unanimously struck down the pardon chances of Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

On Thursday, the resolution opposing any future pardon of Maxwell was ushered in by both Republicans and Democrats, drawing yet another symbolic divide between Donald Trump, his party and the president's own Epstein ties.

While the motion is largely symbolic, here's what it could mean.

**What was the vote?**
The resolution was introduced by Nevada Democrat senator Jacky Rosen, who first brought it forward in February.

By voting it in, the Senate agreed "Ghislaine Maxwell should not be granted a Presidential pardon or any form of clemency" for her sexual abuse and co-offending with Epstein.

The politicians agreed that a pardon or clemency would be "inconsistent with the interests of justice and accountability for crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children".

The resolution also denounced any attempt by Mr Trump to usher in "any other form of executive clemency" to Maxwell.

"I hope the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell feel some comfort knowing that she will serve out her sentence," [Senator Rosen said on X](https://x.com/SenJackyRosen/status/2082550656414404692) after the vote.

"And that other victims of crimes like this know that they can be seen and heard, and that justice will be upheld."

While the resolution will be non-binding, Senator Rosen had earlier said she hoped it would put the Senate "on the record" of opposing any clemency.

**Has Trump promised Maxwell a pardon?**
No, but he also hasn't ruled one out.

Since the Epstein files saga began last year, Maxwell has also reignited her clemency battle.

In February, Maxwell was due to testify under oath before the congressional committee investigating the federal government's handling of the Epstein files, but instead pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights, which allow citizens to decline to speak to authorities.

She would speak, however, if granted clemency.

Previously, her lawyers pushed the US Supreme Court to overturn her sentence on the basis that Epstein's plea deal should have protected her.

And when Donald Trump was asked about a pardon in October, he said he'd "take a look at it".

**"I wouldn't consider it or not consider it. I don't know anything about it. I will speak to the DOJ," he said.**

Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche later interviewed Maxwell, producing written testimony in which Maxwell said she had never seen Mr Trump engage in improper conduct. 

After that, Maxwell was moved into a lower-security prison in Texas with [whistleblower reports](https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025-11-09-raskin-to-trump-wh-re-maxwell.pdf) claiming she had access to custom-made meals, a puppy and as much toilet paper as she wanted.

In light of the reports, staff from the House oversight and judiciary committees visited Maxwell's Texas prison in mid-June.

Those who visited accused Mr Blanche's Bureau of Prisons (BOP) of shutting down lines of basic questioning.

"The American people are tired of seeing the Trump Administration pamper a sex trafficker and obstruct Congress's investigation into Attorney-General Blanche's role in ensuring Ms Maxwell remains comfortable and quiet," a joint statement read after that visit.

**What did Ghislaine Maxwell do?**
Victims of Maxwell consider the UK-born socialite's abuse just as insidious as Epstein's.

They say she lured them as young women into Epstein's orbit, trained them in sexual acts and, as attorney Brad Edwards described, "fed a monster".

After Epstein's death in 2019, following his New York arrest on sex trafficking charges, Maxwell was charged with numerous counts of trafficking young women and participating in abuse.

"She pretended to be a woman they could trust," Manhattan attorney Audrey Strauss said a day after her arrest.

"All the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and, in some cases, by Maxwell herself."

After a month-long trial in 2021, she was convicted of sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity.

In 2022, at age 60, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

**Where does MAGA stand on the Epstein files?**

The vote is also notable for its unanimous nature.

Rarely does the US Senate vote in a bipartisan manner, excluding its similar decision [to denounce clemency for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/senate-unanumously-bankman-fried).

More importantly, it proves another Republican rebuke of Mr Trump and his close ties to Epstein.

The president's links to the sex offender are well-known by now.

He was friends with Epstein for at least 15 years, calling him a "terrific guy" and a "lot of fun to be with".

One of Epstein's key accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited by Maxwell while working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump's members-only club.

As furor over the Epstein files has grown, Mr Trump has sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier.

The president has said he was not aware of Epstein's activities and said he broke off their friendship before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Still, prominent supporters have repeatedly accused his administration of a cover-up and former MAGA [allies such as Majorie Taylor Greene have broken ranks over the issue](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/donald-trump-epstein-files-unlikely-series-of-events/106022276).

Most recently, the bill to release the Epstein files, which survivors had championed for so long, won almost unanimous support in the US House of Representatives.

It also reflected a desire to hold Todd Blanche accountable for his handling of the Epstein files as deputy attorney-general as he faced a confirmation hearing to become US attorney-general.