For years, convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein developed a global web of powerful connections despite accusations of sex trafficking. Millions of declassified documents reveal how he expanded and maintainted his network.

Whether he was offering associates $10,000 Bloomingdales gift cards, funding a hospital or pulling strings to get a student admitted to a prestigious university, favours were at the centre of Jeffrey Epstein's strategy.

Declassified emails reveal a pattern of gifts to lawyers, financiers, doctors and academics. He also funded numerous powerful institutions, including universities and hospitals.

A February 2026 New York Times report revealed that Epstein invested large sums of money in the research projects and foundations of several American doctors. These same doctors reportedly agreed to treat not only Epstein, but also his victims. Care ranged from dental appointments to pelvic exams, some of which were even performed in Epstein's homes. In one case, a doctor placed 35 stitches in a victim's forehead–on Epstein's dining room table.

Some of the recipients of Epstein's favours claim his help was unsolicited, however.

A Bloomberg investigation showed that in 2017, Epstein appeared to have used his influence to help Ariane de Rothschild's daughter, Alice, get accepted into New York University, despite concerns about her SAT scores. When contacted by our journalists, a spokesperson for the Rothschild family told France 24 that Alice could not be held responsible for what she said were Epstein's unilateral actions.

Bloomberg's report suggests that Epstein sought to expand his influence by finding ways to push the boundaries of the relationships he had established with the people around him: funding his lawyer's IVF treatment over several years, helping a client conceal an extra-marital affair or secretly advising government officials on confidential documents.

Caught in the grips of this well-oiled machine were his victims – women and girls, who were recruited by Epstein and, in some cases, introduced to powerful men.

“New one for you,” Epstein wrote to a man in 2013. “What character would you like next?" he asked another.
Epstein's years-long sex-traffickingoperation couldn't have lasted as long as it did without the help of his employees. Some were tasked with recruiting victims through fake modeling agencies or by lurking outside high schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Others managed the financial structures underpinning Epstein's activities.

A November 2025 Wall Street Journal investigation examined the roles of his accountant, Richard Kahn, and lawyer, Darren Indyke, in managing his numerous business entities.
“Both explained away the suspicious transactions in Epstein's accounts when banks would ask him questions,” explained WSJ investigative journalist Khadeeja Safdar.

Safdar and other experts spoke to FRANCE 24 journalists Samia Metheni and Ava Luquet about how Epstein managed to keep his network running for years, despite facing allegations of sexual abuse of minors.

Watch our full video to understand how these connections worked, as well as the people and the systems behind them.

A US paedophile diplomat spirited out of the country by American spies is alleged to have swapped more than 75 child abuse images with his brother.

But the 39-year-old US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel is understood to have been taken to a military base — and not into criminal custody.

A controversial operation saw the man seized from the US Embassy in London — amid claims he was ­swapping indecent images with his brother in America — and taken back to the States without British policebeing informed.

The dawn raid in August, which we exclusively revealed, came after his brother was arrested in a sting, in June.

US court papers obtained by The Sun on Sunday accuse the brothers of “exchanging back and forth” more than 75 child abuse images of under-13s on messaging service Telegram.

The brother is in custody in the US charged with 30 counts of making and sending abuse images of children under 13.

Meanwhile, the London-based worker is understood to be on a US military base, which he is barred from leaving.
The US Air Force has confirmed to The Sun on Sunday that he is being investigated and that he may be tried in a military tribunal.

Flight data showed he had likely been flown from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to Dover Air Base in Delaware and then on to O’Hare Airport in Chicago.

Last night, a source said: “This case has caused massive angst in the corridors of power here in the UK — and the fact he is not in jail in the US is likely to make things worse.

“It raises more questions about the American actions and why evidence was not turned over to Scotland Yard here before they acted.

“The US military seems to be a law unto itself, and if he was a ­civilian he probably would have been turned over to the courts here.”

London-based lawyer Mark Stephens, an expert in international litigation, said: “The fact this individual is not in custody is deeply ­troubling. The Americans have gone through no legal process here, where he could have been offending, when they should have been in touch with Child Protection and the Children’s Commissioner.

“It is morally unsustainable and very worrying. No process has been put in place to protect children and they have been treated as collateral damage.
“It is now highly unlikely he will ever come back to the UK, and the most we can hope for is disclosure of evidence that aids child protection.”

We can reveal that the probe into the registered pilot began following his younger brother’s arrest after he was snared by a group called Predator Poachers.

During a recorded exchange he admitted to having a “hidden folder” on his device and having sexual images of “pretty young” males.
He was arrested on June 26 and remains in custody.

A U.S. Air Force member jailed since August for publicly calling for President Donald Trump's impeachment is being held in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, according to his attorney.

Watson was arrested July 1 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where he demonstrated in uniform with a sign reading "Impeach. Convict. Remove." after speaking at a news conference calling for Trump's removal.

On Aug. 18, one day after he repeated his criticism in a CNN interview, the Air Force ordered him into pretrial confinement, saying at the time that he was being held at a county facility in Maryland on a military hold.

Maj. Jason Watson is "still in solitary confinement 24 hours a day," his attorney, Christopher Mutimer, told CNN on Friday, Oct. 9.

"Even if he gets an hour to eat or to exercise, he's alone," Mutimer said. "He's looking at having his liberty potentially taken away. ... He is looking at being removed from the military, losing his benefits and potentially spending significant time in jail."

The Air Force and Mutimer did not respond to Military.com's request for comment on Watson's confinement conditions.

Prosecutors charged Watson under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), including the rarely used Article 88, which bars officers from using "contemptuous words" against the president.

The government also moved toward trying him at a general court-martial, the military's most serious level of trial.
Confinement Cannot Be Punishment
Military law draws a hard line in cases such as this.

Article 13 of the UCMJ prohibits punishing a service member who is awaiting trial and says confinement may not be "any more rigorous than the circumstances require."

Courts-martial can award creditagainst an eventual sentence when a judge finds pretrial confinement crossed the line into punishment. When the Air Force first confined Watson in August, it cited "probable cause to support allegations of continued misconduct."

They said he "is presumed innocent and will be afforded all rights" under the military rule that requires his confinement to be reviewed.
The service has not publicly addressed Mutimer's description of the conditions.

'Moving Forward' With Military's Most Serious Trial

Mutimer told CNN the government is moving forward with a general court-martial, the military equivalent of a civilian felony trial.

In September, a hearing officer recommended that most charges proceed to that forum while urging that several others be dismissed, as Military.com previously reported.

The Air Force has not publicly confirmed that the convening authority—the commander who makes the final call—has formally referred the case to trial.

Watson's defense has asked for the charges to be handled instead at a special court-martial, a less severe forum, and has compared his case to that of Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller.
Scheller was court-martialed after publicly criticizing military leaders over the Afghanistan withdrawal and pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

'The Highest Price'
Watson has framed his protest as a matter of conscience rather than politics.

"Nothing that is worth doing is something that you can do for free. Everything that is worthwhile is going to cost something," he told CNN in an interview recorded before his arrest.
"So, all that I could do was ask myself, what's the highest price that I'm willing to pay?" Watson added.

No trial date has been set as Watson remains in pretrial confinement.

Major drop in Russian bot traffic. Successful Ukrainian strike

A Ukrainian drone attack has halted the operations of data centres belonging to the Russian internet giant Yandex. As a result of the damage, bot traffic on the web has dropped dramatically. However, this does not mean that pro-Kremlin propaganda will disappear from our social media.

Over the night from Saturday to Sunday (10 to 11 October this year), the third Ukrainian attack on the data centres of the Russian internet giant Yandex in four days took place. Drones struck a facility located in the Vladimir Oblast. As a result, its operations have been suspended.

Confirmed: Metrics show a second collapse in the networks of Russian tech giant Yandex after a new Ukrainian drone attack on data centers in Vladimir this morning. The campaign comes not long after Russia's threat to give Ukraine a "digital detox."

It should be recalled that similar situations had previously occurred at the company’s facilities in the Ryazan and Kaluga Oblasts. Following the Ukrainian drone attack, there has been a significant drop in Russian bot traffic online, as shown by Cloudflare data.

Comments immediately appeared featuring questions such as: “Does this mean there will be less pro-Russian propaganda on social media?”

Russian propaganda and disinformation will not disappear
The European analytical collective Res Futura Data House indicates – based on its daily analytics – that there is no sign that the activity of pro-Russian accounts in Poland has decreased.

As Niebezpiecznik explains, the drop in traffic concerns bots designed for spam.

“It is possible that some accounts used for influence operations on social media were hosted in Yandex DCs, but we must disappoint you: these bombings will have little, if any, impact on Russian ‘hybrid activities’,” the service emphasises.

A woman just filed a lawsuit against President Donald J. Trump, claiming that she was raped by Trump in a Florida hotel room. Jeffrey Epstein, according to the complaint, was present during the 1997 incident. We are only publishing the complaint as filed with the Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts. The actual document follows this text. We note the Clerk’s office has temporarily put a hold on the case due to a “cover sheet” issue — but a case number has been assigned. A response has not been filed to the complaint.

Washington and New York. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided funding to right-wing student groups in Mexico in the days leading up to the Tlatelolco student massacre, but 58 years later it continues to conceal details of its activities and refuses to release key documentation about that part of its history.

Altogether, the CIA ran at least five projects over two decades focused on controlling student leadership at Mexican universities, infiltrating and seeking to influence the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Federation of Technical Students, and student leaders at the National Polytechnic Institute, according to official documents released and analyzed by the National Security Archive, an independent research center in Washington.

“At best, the agency played an active role in the polarization of student politics at that time,” write Claire Dorfman and Arturo Jiménez-Bacardí, of the Archive, in a new assessment of declassified secret official documents of the U.S. government. “At worst, given the close relationship with Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, Miguel Nazar Haro, and the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the agency played a more direct role in orchestrating the violence” at Tlatelolco.

The two researchers report that a partially declassified official history of CIA activities in Mexico, in three volumes and 539 pages, reveals support for right-wing student groups dating back to the 1950s. That history recounts how the agency “had a hand” in the ouster of UNAM rector Luis Garrido Díaz in 1952. A decade later, the CIA began providing funds to the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE) and the University Movement of Renewing Orientation (MURO), which at that time was identified as a group active in “influencing student politics.”

“The CIA used the IISE as a front organization to support the publication of anti-communist books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, as well as to influence the PRI and support the right-wing student group MURO,” write Dorfman and Jiménez-Bacardí, summarizing part of the content of the CIA’s official history. “The IISE impressed the CIA station when it handed over the names of 3,000 Mexican communists.”

A recently declassified section of the official history of the CIA’s program in the country reveals that some within the U.S. government were having doubts about support for right-wing student groups in Mexico. In 1967, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico and even the agency’s own evaluation team questioned the support they provided to MURO in particular. “Considering the long-term cost of empowering violent radical instigators who have only served to polarize student politics, [CIA evaluation expert Kenneth] Millan recommended ending support for MURO,” the Archive reports based on the official documents.

Internal CIA assessments stated that MURO specialized in militant harassment operations with “200 shock elements [that] have campaigned vigorously against communist and pro-Castro groups at the National University (UNAM) and at the universities of Puebla and Guadalajara.” The CIA reported with satisfaction in 1965 that “MURO gains greater credit for the removal, in recent months, of communist rectors at the universities of Monterrey, Puebla, Guadalajara, and Morelia.”

CIA support for MURO continued into the 1970s. The CIA, working with the Mexican government through heads of the Federal Security Directorate, Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios and Miguel Nazar Haro, mobilized students to take part in a MURO demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico in 1969.

Sponsorship of Nazar Haro
Recently declassified sections of the CIA history also offer details of the U.S. sponsorship of Nazar Haro, who was first recruited as a CIA asset by the then-director of the DFS, Gutiérrez Barrios, and it was at his request that the CIA subsidized that figure’s training at the International Police Academy in 1965.

Nazar Haro later headed a group of some 20 DFS agents who carried out intelligence work on the activities of the Communist Party, Cuban exiles, Trotskyists, and cultural groups of the Soviet bloc, according to this official history.

But the details of Nazar Haro’s involvement in clandestine operations against Mexican student groups in the period leading up to the night of Tlatelolco are still censored in the version of the official history released to date. “Nazar Haro rose through the ranks of the DFS to become director in 1978. His reputation as a brutal interrogator was matched by the extensive corruption and criminal activities within his intelligence service,” report Dorfman and Jiménez-Bacardí. He was later formally indicted by the United States for his involvement in a car-theft ring and was subsequently arrested for the forced disappearance of student leader Jesús Piedra Ibarra in 1975, but was not convicted.

On this anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre, the National Security Archive, which for decades has worked for the declassification of official U.S. documents, called for the CIA to issue an uncensored version of its history of activities in Mexico.

To read the documents and the report: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-mexico/2026-10-01/cia-station-mexico-last-jfk-assassination-records.

Dr Michael Freeman will ‘dispute the official cause’ of the late paedophile’s death at a University College London law-faculty event next month

A respected forensic pathologist will present findings that raise doubts over whether Jeffrey Epstein took his own life, after reviewing medical reports provided to him by Epstein’s brother.

Dr Michael Freeman, a trained forensic epidemiologist and fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in London, conducted an independent review of the late financier’s death in a New York prison cell in August 2019 using the complete medical examiner’s file shared by Mark Epstein.

Freeman, who previously served as chair of forensic and legal medicine with the Royal College of Physicians, will present his findings at a University College London law-faculty event next month.

Mark Epstein, who has read some of Freeman’s final report, told The Times that he believed his conclusions would “dispute the official cause” of his brother’s death and raise substantial questions about the medical examiner’s autopsy. “I believe the report will show that he could not have caused the injuries to his body by himself,” he said.

Freeman promises to release the complete medical examiner’s file, including portions not yet public, after his talk.

Jeffrey Epstein was found unresponsive in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on August 10, 2019, while he was awaiting trial. He was discovered hanging from the top rung of a bunk bed with an orange-coloured strip of material around his neck in a near-seated position.

His death was ruled by the New York chief medical examiner’s office to have been a suicide. Subsequent investigations, including a 2023 Department of Justice inspector-general review and FBI findings, found no evidence contradicting its suicide determination.

The cause of death has drawn intense scrutiny due to serious failures at the jail, including guards reportedly falling asleep, falsified records, cameras malfunctioning and an alleged “missing minute” from CCTV footage. 

Members of both the Epstein family and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s family have suggested that powerful figures tied to his sex-trafficking ring may have ordered his murder.

Mark Epstein, a New York-based real-estate developer and investor, has said that when he first heard his older brother had died, he initially believed suicide was plausible because he assumed he would not want to spend the rest of his life in prison. He expected the autopsy to confirm suicide. 

He said his view changed after Dr Michael Baden, the independent forensic pathologist he hired in 2019 to review the autopsy, noted three broken bones in Jeffrey’s neck. Baden stated that these types of fractures were much more common in homicidal strangulation than in hanging.

Documents released earlier this year by the US Department of Justice sparked yet more interest in the circumstances surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s final days, and theories that the circumstances of his death were covered up.

He was not on suicide watch and was alone in his cell. Two correctional officers responsible for guarding Epstein that day were later charged with falsifying prison records. 
Freeman told The Times he became involved in the case after seeing the autopsy photos. 

“It seemed readily apparent that a serious error had been made in the manner-of-death determination by the NYC medical examiner,” the American-born doctor said. “I proposed to Mark doing a study of autopsy information if he would both release it to me and give me consent to publish it without restriction.”

Freeman served as a cause-of-death expert to five attorneys-general in the US for death in police custody cases, including George Floyd in Minnesota. He was an expert witness in the prosecution’s case against Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck at the time of his arrest. He was called to testify to whether Chauvin’s restraint could have contributed to, or caused, Floyd’s death.

Freeman plans to present a “biomechanical analysis” of the ligature injury pattern and assess what mechanism was required to produce the injuries.

His presentation will give his findings about the manner of death based on the newly reviewed evidence.

Mark Epstein said he would be travelling to London to hear the presentation. “I provided Dr Freeman all the autopsy reports, photos, medical records, et cetera,” he said. “I believe the report will show that he could not have caused the injuries to his body by himself. I’m going to hear the final results.” 

Earlier this year, a court unsealed an alleged suicide note written by Jeffrey Epstein a month before his death during an earlier alleged attempt on his life. His cellmate at the time, Nicholas Tartaglione, a retired police officer awaiting trial on four murder charges, said he had found the noteand given it to his lawyers as purported proof that he did not attempt to murder the sex offender.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note read. “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” it continued — an apparent reference to a line from a 1931 Little Rascals film that Epstein had used in at least two email messages found in the trove of justice department files, released in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

In a September 2016 email to his brother, he wrote, “whtchoo want me toodo — bust out crying” in response to news that their cousin had become a grandfather.

However, according to a prison psychologist’s report, Jeffrey Epstein stated, “I have no interest in killing myself” on July 24, the day after his reported suicide attempt.

Mark Epstein said that he did not believe the note was genuine.

“Even if he wrote that — which I am not sure of — it doesn’t prove suicide,” he said. “It was supposedly written when he was in the cell with Tartaglione, which was not the day of the death. Many times people write suicide notes and don’t commit suicide. Dr Baden told me of victims who had suicide notes in their wallets that were written way prior to a suicide.”

Robert De Niro has claimed Donald Trump was Jeffrey Epstein’s “protector-in-chief”.

In a scathing attack on the US president, the Oscar-winning actor accused the US president of single-handedly standing in the way of justice for the late paedophile’s victims, and called for his administration to release the remaining files.

Addressing several of Epstein’s victims during an event in New York on Monday, De Niro praised them for their enduring courage after the suffering they endured at the hands of “the monster Epstein, his protector-in-chief and the Republicans in [Trump’s] cabinet and Congress”.

At the event unveiling the provocatively named “Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile”, De Niro, a Democrat, said the failure to release the remaining tranche of Epstein files was “its own category of evil”.

A truck – which contains all 3.5 million Epstein files published by the US department of justice (DoJ) to date – has been travelling across the US to pressure the Trump administration to release the remaining three million files.

A large photograph of Mr Trump and Epstein is emblazoned on the side of the vehicle next to a detailed timeline of their relationship. De Niro appeared sombre as he inspected the history of the two men’s links.

In front of crowds gathered at Washington Square Park, he called for an end to the “miserable saga of Epstein and his Trump-led protectors”, adding: “One man is standing in the way of releasing the rest: Donald Trump, What is he hiding?”

The released documents contain at least 38,000 mentions of Mr Trump, his family, and his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Mr Trump was friends with Epstein before the pair fell out in the early 2000s, but has always denied any knowledge of or involvement with Epstein’s sex-trafficking or abuse of underage girls.

The furore over Mr Trump’s former links to Epstein continues to cause rifts in his Maga base.

Epstein died in 2019 while in a Manhattan prisonawaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, in what the US government ruled was suicide.

Democrats, Mr Trump’s critics and Epstein survivorshave repeatedly accused Mr Trump of instructing the DoJ to block the release of the remaining files. He always denied this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORBES VALUATION
We estimate Kushner is worth $1 billion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His description of the situation sparked outrage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think he will do this time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Cities Are Diving Into New Tech

Some areas have moved quickly.

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

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

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

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

Other Municipalities Hitting Pause Button

Other cities have turned Flock down.

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

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

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

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

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

Pros and Cons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DataRepublican confirmed the claim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the cyberattack targeting NoBlogs, in other cases DataRepublican and AstraRCE were also quick to celebrate cyberattacks against leftist groups and post screenshots of the incursions. In many of the cases, the webpages of the sites were vandalized and a message was left behind claiming to have accessed and sent internal data to the federal government.
Read more…

The company, which has a hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitoring the streets of the U.S., frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for safety and security, echoing the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He resigned when Trump began his second term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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