Favorite Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall. U.S. Customs and…
Favorite The crackdown is already happening. First, Mahmoud Khalil was snatched from his home in New York. Then, immigrants in the U.S. were targeted for their political views, and foreigners reported being denied entry at the border after having their devices searched. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in, border searches of electronics were steadily…
Favorite For years, U.S. officials villainized end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Signal as the domain of criminals and terrorists and a threat to national security. As fallout over a Signal group chat about Yemen war plans ricocheted through Washington, however, CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday that the…
Favorite Earlier this month, all of the employees at 18F, a unit of government technologists under the General Services Administration, awoke to a surprise. The entire department — which helps build, buy, and share technological products across government agencies — discovered they’d been placed on administrative leave. 18F, named after its headquarters at 18th and…
Favorite When the Drug Enforcement Administration’s access to a secret trove of billions of American phone records was exposed in 2013, the Obama administration said the data had been collected under a perfectly legal program. Civil liberties advocates, however, were not convinced about that the data collection program — which let the DEA see who…
Favorite One week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, thousands rallied outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles to protest the country’s retaliatory assault on Gaza. The protestors were peaceful, according to local media, “carrying signs that said ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘End the Occupation,’” and watched over by a “sizable police presence in the area.” The…
Favorite The cryptocurrency investors and executives who crowded into the White House for a summit with Donald Trump on Friday represented billions in net worth. They also represented more than $11 million in donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, a review of the guest list by The Intercept shows. The list of invitees to the crypto…
Favorite The Trump administration is planning to sell a major IRS computing center crucial to processing the tax returns of millions of Americans — just in time for tax season. The IRS Enterprise Computing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, is included on a list of over 400 “empty and underutilized” federal properties marked for liquidation.…
Favorite President Donald Trump doesn’t have fond feelings for whistleblowers. During his first term, Trump’s Justice Department carried out a clandestine spying operation to try to catch leakers. On the campaign trail, Trump on multiple occasions threatened to arrest journalists who don’t reveal their sources — and suggested they should be raped in prison until…
Favorite Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for…
