Regrets, Maybe a Few

How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran (New Yorker)
Image: Saher Algohrra/NYT/Redux
[ed. Another blame shifting mea culpa, usually issued after some self-inflicted disaster that everyone warned against and finally can't be denied - "Who could have known?" and "If only we knew then what we know now". Etc. etc. Iraq, Iran, Climate Change, DOGE, Trump...]

More Bad Behavior in Prediction Markets

Trump teleprompter aide made $100,000 betting on what Trump would say, reports say.

Kalshi is a high-tech prediction market that allows people to “forecast the future” (their term). It is about contracts and information, the company says, making its offerings more like a soybean futures contract than a round of blackjack or a pull on the one-armed bandit.

Still, prediction markets look a lot like betting if you squint, which is why states like New York have tried to regulate them under gambling laws. To head this off, Kalshi has sought federal protection under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Yes, this means regulation for Kalshi, but it also means the CFTC will sue states like Kentucky, Minnesota, Illinois, and Rhode Island, trying to pre-empt their laws in favor of a single national standard that the CFTC controls.

While this battle plays out, government insiders continue to generate insider trading stories after using their work knowledge to place bets “forecast the future” and make huge sums of money. The classic example, of course, was Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US soldier who participated in planning the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and then made $410,000 from that knowledge on the prediction site Polymarket. Van Dyke was arrested in April.

But there are also more ridiculous stories, such as disgraced former Congressman George Santos, who allegedly talked up his upcoming appearance at the State of the Union, secretly bet on whether he would attend, and then didn’t go at the last minute to score a payout.

This activity raises questions, like: How many people are gambling forecasting the future based on government secrets or insider knowledge? How many are actively manipulating results they have bet on? Even the Trump White House was concerned enough to issue a memo in March telling employees not to “use nonpublic information to buy or sell these contracts.”

But concerns have lingered, especially after major wins on contracts involving US government policy or actions. Such suspicions will not be helped by new allegations today from multiple outlets that insider trading on Kalshi has extended even to President Trump’s teleprompter operator, who allegedly made $100,000 “forecasting” specific words and phrases that might appear in Trump speeches.

The mention market

According to sources speaking to NPR, Trump aide Gabriel Perez bet on something called a “mention market.” This is a section of Kalshi where you can sink money into contracts on crucial questions such as “What will Domino’s say during their next earnings call?” (Currently, $26,000 has been invested in this question; the smart money thinks that “Parmesan” and “DomOS” are more likely to be mentioned than not.)

In the case of Perez, his “forecasting” allegedly took place over several months at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and his contracts were sometimes adjusted in the middle of Trump speeches. According to ABC:

Sources say Perez typically has the final eyes on nearly all of the president’s prepared remarks—and is often known to take last-minute edits from Trump himself… In certain instances, investigators uncovered times when Perez would back out of certain bets mid-speech when Trump skipped over a portion of the speech that included a word he had previously bet would be mentioned, the sources said.

This conjures up an amazing mental image: The teleprompter operator for one of the world’s most powerful people tapping away at his phone during a Trump speech to ensure he made more money for himself. [...]

Whatever you want to call it, “predicting the future with money at stake” has become huge business in America. A recent (and terrific) long article by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic showed people what a year of online sports gambling looks like, and it raised serious questions about the negative issues that widespread, legal, bet-from-your-phone gambling might cause in a country where “roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.”

by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Sucker (The Atlantic article) mentioned. And: Truth Social to sell trading firms 'fastest' access to Trump's posts (Reuters).]

The Pre-Crime Machine

The Seminar Room

At an AI seminar at my university, I submitted three photographs of myself: one frontal, one profile, one smiling. Within a minute or so, the system had generated a video of me. What I watched was not a rough approximation. The micro-behaviors of my face, the slight asymmetry in my smile, the way my eyes crease at their corners, were all reproduced with an accuracy that made my skin cold. I had fed it three still images, and it handed me back myself.

I am a psychologist. I know what behavioral prediction means. I understand what large datasets do to the concept of individual uniqueness. But sitting in that seminar room, watching my own face move on a screen I had not animated, something shifted in my understanding of where we are and where we are going. I did not feel excitement. I felt the specific dread of a person who has just understood the nature of the cage being built around him.

Let us be honest about what is happening. The question is not whether artificial intelligence can predict human behavior. It already can, with a precision that should terrify every person who still believes in the concept of a private self. The question is who owns that capacity, whose interests it serves, and what kind of world they are constructing with it.

We Are More Predictable Than We Realize

Human beings are, as any serious scholar of behavioral science knows, far more predictable than we like to believe. We are creatures of pattern, of repetition, of legible habit. The self we experience as sovereign and spontaneous is, in aggregate, astonishingly consistent. Subtle cues in our environment routinely trigger our behavior without our awareness, while we experience the resulting action as a free and sovereign choice. Big data revealed this about us long before the current generation of AI systems arrived to exploit it.

What has changed is the scale and the granularity of the exploitation. Researchers have already demonstrated that AI systems can predict the sound of a person’s voice from a photograph alone, inferring the acoustic properties of the throat, the shape of the oral cavity, the structure of the face, and from these physical facts reconstructing something no still image was ever supposed to contain. We did not consent to this inference. We did not know it was possible. The technology did not ask us.

The invasion runs in both directions. As far back as 2022, before most people had any reason to pay attention, AI could take nothing but the sound of your voice and reconstruct your face. You were already legible from the inside out

The Pre-Crime Machine

Now consider what becomes possible when you feed an AI system not thousands but millions of hours of therapy footage, prison recordings, detention center surveillance, clinical interviews with people who have committed acts of theft, violence, or predatory sexual abuse. The AI does not think. It does not judge. It finds patterns in facial microexpressions, in the geometry of eye movement, in the timing of certain muscle groups, in behavioral signatures so subtle that no human observer could consciously detect them. And then it generalizes. It builds a model of what a future thief looks like before the theft. What a future abuser looks like before the abuse. It assigns probabilities to faces.

Connect this to the smart cameras already embedded in our streets, our transit systems, our shopping centers, our workplaces. Cameras that do not merely record but analyze, in real time, the faces and bodies of everyone within their field of view. The alert that fires to a police control room does not say this person has committed a crime. It says this person is behaving with seventy percent similarity to the behavioral profile of someone who will. Philip K. Dick imagined this in 1956 and called it science fiction. We have built it and call it public safety.

A Mask Changes Nothing

But facial recognition is, by now, almost the least of it. The more consequential technology is gait recognition, a biometric system that identifies individuals not by their face but by the specific, anatomically determined way they walk. The curvature of the spine, the rotation of the hips, the particular rhythm of a stride, these are as unique as a fingerprint and far harder to disguise. Gait recognition systems currently deployed can identify a person from security footage even when the face is turned away, obscured by a hood, or hidden behind a mask. The protesters who covered their faces at demonstrations believed they were protecting themselves. They were not. The system had already read them from the ankles up.

Gait recognition tells the system who you are, even when you believe you are hidden. What comes next moves deeper. Layer on top of this the emerging field of real-time emotion recognition, AI systems embedded in that same CCTV infrastructure that classify emotional states from facial expression, assigning labels of agitation, hostility, fear, or concealment to the faces of people who have done nothing except exist in a public space.

And the system is getting better.

Accuracy is what billions of dollars of investment buys, and the investment is relentless. The day is approaching — closer than most people understand — when the system reads the thousand markers encoded in your face, your gait, your microexpressions, and states with ninety-five percent certainty that you will commit a murder. That you will commit a rape.

Not that you have. Not that you tried. That you will. And when that threshold of confidence is reached, the pressure to act on it will be overwhelming. Society will accept it as grounds for intervention, for detention, for pre-emptive removal, and pre-crime will stop being a dystopian metaphor and become official state policy. A system that labels your face as hostile does not need to be right today. It only needs to become right. And it is. [...]

Palantir and the Architecture of Control

Palantir is not a hypothetical. It is a company with a current market valuation measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, deep contractual relationships with the United States military, the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, MI6, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a product suite specifically designed to do what I have been describing.

Its Gotham platform aggregates data from tax records, DMV files, employment history, educational records, immigration status, subpoenaed social media accounts including private messages and location history, and synthesizes this into individual dossiers that can be searched by tattoo, by neighborhood, by association, by movement pattern. Its immigration enforcement application, called ELITE, populates a map with what it designates as deportation targets and assigns each one a confidence score estimating the probability that a given address is where they currently sleep. The word target is theirs, not mine.

This is not a system built for national security in any meaningful sense of that phrase. National security was the pretext used to build it. What it actually does is make the population legible, sortable, and actionable to whoever holds the contract. Right now, those contract holders include an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to use these tools against students who attended the wrong protest, academics who signed the wrong letter, immigrants whose only crime was existing without documentation in a country that spent decades depending on their labor.

by Karim, BetBeats Newsletter |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Addicted to War

Whether it’s an addiction or an illness I’m not sure, but all too many of us and our leaders, it seems, have war fever (and a distinctly high temperature). And here’s the strangest thing: when you consider our history since World War II or look around this planet any day of the week, it seems as if all too many of our leaders simply can’t help themselves. They just (or do I mean unjust?) have to go to war. And it evidently matters not at all that the major powers on this planet can no longer seem to win any war they start. Not one in recent memory. And yet, explain it as you will -- an addiction, a fever, a grim desire -- at least two crucial leaders at this very moment, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, seem incapable of stopping themselves.

And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”

No longer, unfortunately.

And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?

In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.

And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!

After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian?  [...]

It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.

And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”

Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?

by Tom Englehardt, Substack |  Read more:

Image: A long wall of acceptance. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Washington. (David J. Jackson, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons)

The Billion Dollar Crypto Man

President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion dollars from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.

Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.

Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.

Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.

The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many that have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.

Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

The Trump business is growing abroad

The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.

Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid, and other important matters.

A property in the United Arab Emirates took in $10.4 million. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.

One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.

Trump took in in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.

The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.

Trump is now the billion dollar crypto man

After taking office last year, Trump reversed the Biden administration’s tough stance on the crypto industry and pushed policies friendly to the industry.

But regulators still had some concerns. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate polices, and are difficult to value.

Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled last month for a $10 million fine. [...]

Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their meme coin holdings drop significantly. The price spiked to more than $74 in the days after its launch in January 2025, but now sells for just $1.68. Also, the value of the World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they first started trading in September.

by Bernard Condon, Seattle Times/AP |  Read more:

Image: Alex Brandon
[ed. This actually plays like a feel-good story. The sheep MAGA cultists and influence buyers get fleeced - as predicted, as they deserve (Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t). Is this a great country or what? In other corruption news, see also: Trump is using a $500M no-bid contract to build his White House ballroom (Washington Post):]

***

White House officials last year secretly awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million for the construction of the East Wing ballroom in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The Washington Post. [...]

The estimated East Wing construction cost has tripled since July, when the project was first announced, with half expected to come from taxpayers, The Post previously reported.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the ballroom would be paid for by private donors and once said that Clark executives offered to build it for free.

“They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump told The New York Times in January.

Clark’s internal cost projections show the McLean, Virginia-based company, the largest general contractor in the D.C. metro area, stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the work...

The records reviewed by The Post do not break out Clark’s estimated profit margin for the entire project, but a March document shows the company projected it would receive a total of $65 million in combined profit, overhead and daily rates for on-site staff and other costs.

[ed. But, but... Hilary's emails!]

What If It All Came Out?

The nightmare began with an annoyance as benign and commonplace as a housefly. “Hi there Matt,” the July 11, 2024, email read. “We received a message from you earlier today through our support page related to a changed password on your account … If you didn’t make a support request,” the sender asked politely, “please let us know.”

Matthew Van Andel, 44, who goes by the nickname Dutch, had never heard of “nullbulge.se,” the domain name that sent the message. It appeared to be a classic phishing attempt, a prompt to get him to reply to the email with personal information. So he marked it as spam, swatting it away with a near-automatic series of clicks. Van Andel worked in technology at Disney corporate in Burbank. He loved his job at “the Happiest Place on Earth”; over his seven years at the company, he and his wife, Nicole, had become Disney adults, taking advantage of discounted park tickets with their two kids. Their house in La Crescenta, where Van Andel was working remotely when he got the email, was filled with Mickey and Star Wars and Marvel memorabilia.

Fifteen minutes later, another message arrived from the same sender. This one took a different tack. “Hi Matt. We regret to inform you we have gained access to certain sensitive information related to your personal life.” Van Andel would have deleted this, too, but he had received exactly the same message on Discord, a platform he used to chat about gaming. And it contained specific information that only a few people could, or should, know. “We noticed you had a conversation with Aadya and Shawn about being at Granville for ‘$veg && $keto,’” it read. That was strange. Aadya and Shawn were Van Andel’s co-workers; “$veg && $keto” was a joke about lunch that Van Andel had made while chatting to them on Slack, the internal-messaging system Disney used, a few days earlier.

Seeing his own private words on the screen, Van Andel messaged Disney’s information-security department. The emails had been sent to his personal account, which he was reading on his personal gaming PC in his home office. Info-sec told him his Slack account and work laptop appeared to be operating normally. Still disturbed, Van Andel deleted the second email. Immediately a third arrived: “You think we didn’t see you mark our first test as spam? Then our actual attempt [at] contact went right in the trash.” Van Andel felt his stomach drop. Someone had live access to his account and was watching him use it.

As an engineer, Van Andel thought he had above-average personal op-sec. He ran anti-virus software on his computer. He used Proton Mail, which encrypts messages between users. He turned on multifactor authentication for serious stuff like iCloud. For the past decade, he depended on a password manager called 1Password, which generates random, long, and complex passwords; stores them; and automatically remembers them whenever a user needs to sign in. For Van Andel, 1Password even managed his multifactor-authentication codes. But his diligent, longtime use of his password manager turned out to be Van Andel’s vulnerability. Having all that information in one handy place meant that once someone else was inside, they had a master key to every aspect of his life: his iCloud, iMessage, emails, photos, PayPal, financial information, medical records, social media, his parents’ financials. Over 1,000 accounts. The only way someone could have gotten into his email was if they had cracked his 1Password; when Van Andel realized they must have access to everything, the room began to spin.

He had no idea why the hackers had targeted him or what their plan was, whether they would drain his family’s finances or stalk his home. Eventually, after running another anti-virus program, he found a piece of malware hidden in a plug-in he had downloaded from GitHub, the open-source coding site, one day in February when he was messing around with an AI image generator. He had checked the code himself, it had looked legitimate, and others had reviewed it positively. But it seems it contained a Trojan-horse virus that gave the hackers free rein of his PC. Once inside, they just had to wait for Van Andel to log in to 1Password. From there, they were able to steal all his credentials, plus many of his multifactor-authentication codes, so every time Van Andel logged in to an app, a website, or an account, they could follow behind him. They’d had access for months.

By morning, Van Andel had received a call from Disney info-sec: The intruders had revealed themselves on a blog post celebrating the hack as NullBulge, an activist collective “protecting artists’ rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work,” according to their website. It was later reported that they were Russian furries. They had dumped the contents of Van Andel’s 1Password onto BitTorrent along with his full name — every personal log-in credential, his messages, his bank information, his medical diagnoses, his Amazon account. They’d also managed to access more of Disney’s data than just Van Andel’s Slack messages and published that too: employee Social Security numbers and Slack messages, budget spreadsheets and passport information for the company’s cruise-line workers. It was a massive breach. As people around the world tried to use the information NullBulge had posted, Van Andel’s iPhone began pinging every few seconds with attempts to get into his accounts. Someone logged in to his children’s Roblox profiles and began defacing them with Nazi screeds. Unknown callers left voice-mails. “Dude, your life is over, haha,” one said. “Just leave the country; that’s my advice. Good luck, have fun, and I hope your type 2 diabetes doesn’t get the best of you.” Van Andel raced around the house unplugging Ring cameras and Amazon Echos. Discovering every new potential violation was like learning he was bleeding from a limb he didn’t remember he had. Viscerally, painfully, he could feel the overwhelming breadth and permanence of everything he had ever recorded online, ephemeral and vital and intimate and stupid. Somehow it was only the first wave of exposure he would endure.

by Bridget Read, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Tracy Ma

[ed. Privacy is dead. Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia.]

SignalTrace: New Levels of Surveillance

If you thought Flock cameras were concerning, meet what comes next. 

A company called Leonardo has developed a system called ELSAG SignalTrace. It broke into public awareness just days ago and is already being marketed to law enforcement agencies across the country. It makes Flock Safety look modest by comparison. 

Here is what SignalTrace does: 

It clips sensors directly onto existing license plate reader cameras — the same poles, the same hardware already installed in your community. No new infrastructure required. A software and sensor upgrade is all it takes. 

Every time you drive past one of these upgraded cameras, the sensor sweeps up the unique electronic identifiers of every device in your vehicle. Your cell phone. Your smartwatch. Your wireless headphones. Your fitness tracker. Your laptop. Your tablet. Your car's own infotainment system. Your tire pressure sensors. Your vehicle's Bluetooth hotspot. 

And your pet's microchip. 

Every one of those devices emits a signal. SignalTrace captures those signals, timestamps them, ties them to your license plate, and stores them in a searchable database for future investigative use. The result is what Leonardo calls an electronic fingerprint — a unique profile built not from your face or your name, but from the constellation of devices you carry with you every day. 

Leonardo announced the ELSAG EOC Plus patent as early as May 2024, describing it as an electronic detection system for identifying people of interest through electronic device signatures. SignalTrace is the commercial product built on that foundation. The patent came first. The marketing came after. The sales calls are happening now. 

Here is where it gets worse. 

SignalTrace is explicitly designed to track vehicles even when the license plate cannot be read. If your plate is obscured, dirty, or misread — it does not matter. The system identifies your vehicle by the electronic fingerprint of the devices inside it instead. The plate reader becomes optional. The surveillance does not. 

The strategic advantage for police agencies is adoption friction. SignalTrace can be pitched as an extension of an existing ALPR ecosystem rather than a wholly separate surveillance buildout. That is exactly what happened with Flock. License plate readers went in first. Video came later through a software update. Nobody voted on the expansion. Nobody was told. SignalTrace follows the same playbook — attach to existing infrastructure and expand what it captures without requiring a new procurement process, a new vote, or a new public conversation. 

Who is Leonardo and why does their background matter? 

Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions is not a Silicon Valley startup. It is the American subsidiary of Leonardo S.p.A. — one of the largest aerospace, defense, and security conglomerates in the world, headquartered in Rome, Italy. Recent public market estimates place Leonardo S.p.A.'s market capitalization at approximately €29.76 billion — roughly $32 billion USD. For context that is nearly four times Flock Safety's valuation. [...]

What is ELSAG — and why SignalTrace is more dangerous than it sounds. 

ELSAG is Leonardo's license plate recognition product line — the company's core law enforcement technology that has been deployed across American communities for over two decades. ELSAG cameras are what you think of when you picture a standard license plate reader. Fixed cameras on poles. Mobile units mounted on patrol vehicles. Solar powered. Cellular connected. Reading plates and logging vehicle data. 

ELSAG is already deployed in all fifty states. Virginia State Police is a documented customer. Leonardo holds statewide procurement contracts in New York, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania among others, and is listed on the federal GSA schedule available to agencies nationwide. Their cameras are already on street poles and patrol vehicles across the country — quietly, routinely, and largely without public awareness. 

SignalTrace is not a new camera. It is not a new company. It is an upgrade — a sensor that clips directly onto ELSAG cameras already in the field and adds a new layer of data collection on top of the license plate reading that was already happening. The same pole. The same hardware. A new sensor attached to it that now also sweeps up every electronic device signal in every passing vehicle. 

That is precisely what makes it so significant. The deployment barrier is almost zero. Any law enforcement agency that already has Leonardo ELSAG cameras can add SignalTrace capability without purchasing new infrastructure, without a new procurement process, and — depending on how their existing contract is written — potentially without returning to their city council for approval. Sound familiar? It should. It is the exact same function creep mechanism that allowed Flock Safety to add video streaming, vehicle fingerprinting, and AI people search to cameras that were originally sold as simple plate readers. 

The infrastructure goes in first. The capabilities expand later. The public finds out last — if at all. [...]

The data retention problem. 

With Flock we at least know the default data retention period is 30 days — though the contract language grants Flock a perpetual license to use that data regardless. With SignalTrace the situation is more opaque. Leonardo's product materials state that all data collected may be uploaded to the EOC server and archived for future queries and analysis — with no published retention limit. How long does Leonardo store your electronic fingerprint? Who has access to it? Can it be shared with other agencies or federal entities? Can it be purchased by data brokers? Leonardo's materials do not answer these questions. That silence is itself an answer. 

The retail and private deployment problem. 

Leonardo is actively marketing SignalTrace to shopping malls, retail centers, and private businesses — not just law enforcement. Their materials describe deploying SignalTrace in parking lots and inside shopping centers to track individuals involved in organized retail crime. By identifying and correlating electronic devices carried by suspects, retailers can gain critical insights into criminal patterns. 

That means SignalTrace sensors could be on private property you visit every day — your grocery store parking lot, your shopping mall, your workplace — operated by a private company with no law enforcement oversight, no warrant requirement, no public accountability, and no notification to you. Your electronic fingerprint captured every time you park your car. Stored indefinitely. Shared with whoever the private operator decides to share it with. 

The no-plate-needed problem — and what it means for pedestrians. 

The implication of being able to track a vehicle by its electronic fingerprint without reading the plate goes further than most people realize. Deliberately obscuring your plate — which some people do to avoid surveillance — provides zero protection against SignalTrace. The sensor does not need the plate. It reads your phone. 

More critically — the sensor does not know or care whether the device it is reading is inside a vehicle or in the pocket of a pedestrian walking past the pole. A person walking down the sidewalk past a SignalTrace-equipped camera is emitting the same Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals as a person driving past in a car. The system's sensors capture signals from whatever passes within range. Whether that includes pedestrian device capture is not addressed in Leonardo's public materials. The fact that it is not addressed is worth noting. [...]

SignalTrace does not aggregate your vehicle's movements. It aggregates your personal electronic identity — every device you carry, every signal you emit — and ties it permanently to a location, a timestamp, and a plate number. It does not track your car. It tracks you. Personally. Individually. Every time you pass a sensor, whether you are suspected of anything or not. 

by BlackBetty (Anonymous), X |  Read more:

Image: Natasha Eliya/Michigan Daily via

[ed. Public service announcement. Are they actually able to do this with the weak signal of wifi and Bluetooth? Wouldn't be surprised. See also: SignalTrace just weaponized your AirPods against license plate readers nationwide (Cambridge Analytica).]

Trump Administration Continues Efforts to Dismantle Consumer Protection Agency

Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it (The Guardian)

Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the abolition of the agency. He has since ordered CFPB employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff, a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556. [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products and compel companies to engage with consumers when they file complaints.

Since its inception, the bureau has returned more than $21bn to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year.

by Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Getty Images
[ed. ... and the hits keep coming. See below. Until his supporters say enough is enough, we and they will continue to get screwed. The most relevant question now is if recovery will ever be possible again. Always easier to destroy than to create (or restore). See also: Why are US consumers so angry? It’s not just high prices (Guardian).]

Samurai vs. Squatters: Reclaiming California Property Owners' Stolen Homes

Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.

In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.

Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.

"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.

It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.

According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.

If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.

Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.

The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.

But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.

On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.

Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'

Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.

High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.

Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."

Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.

Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.

Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.

Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.

When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.

"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"

Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.

Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.

Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says.

The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.

How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?

Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.

When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.

"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."

The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.

Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.

Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.

The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.

When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.

When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."

After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.

When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.

Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.

California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.

But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.

Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.

Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.

by Christian Britschgi, Reason | Read more:

Image: Christian Britschgi/Midjourney
[ed. California.]

Thank You For Your Service

Dear Acting Attorney General Blanche: 

It has come to our attention that you have used your office to improperly shower government cash on Donald Trump’s political operatives and sycophants, beginning with corrupt seven-figure “settlements” for disgraced Trump officials Michael Flynn and Carter Page who had already lost their initial cases against the government in court. You have now proceeded behind closed doors to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to pay millions of dollars to former FBI agents who were suspended, fired, and had their clearances revoked for criminal activity, major breaches of national security, or violations of the standards of conduct and professionalism required of law enforcement agents. All of these handouts constitute an astounding and lawless abuse of government office and taxpayer dollars. 

The Committee on the Judiciary has learned from multiple sources that over the last several months, your office ordered the FBI to pay massive settlements to nearly a dozen FBI employees who were disciplined and suspended for gross violations of FBI policy and federal law. In one instance, an employee had his security clearance revoked and was fired from the FBI after he refused to investigate a violent white nationalist group. He later admitted to accepting commercial sex while on an official assignment overseas, yet under Director Kash Patel, the FBI reinstated him, reinstated his clearance and, amazingly after all this misconduct, paid him several hundred thousand dollars. In another case, an FBI employee participated in the violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and subsequently lied to the FBI’s Security Division about his actions on that day. He had his security clearance revoked for this blatant misconduct and then left the Bureau. But under your leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to pay him a lump sum payment and backpay of several hundred thousand dollars at the expense of the FBI.

Two threads seem to unify these astonishingly corrupt “settlements,” which are, of course, not actual settlements because the beneficiaries have generally already lost, or in many cases, not even filed their cases. These checks are just political handouts and payoffs.

by Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee |  Read more (pdf):]

[ed. Hear this on the nightly news? No?]

May 14, 2026

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Maine today to tout what the Trump administration claims is its push to combat fraud in public services. Vance blamed Democrats for fraud in Medicaid programs and vowed that the Trump administration would stop such fraud by refusing to distribute funds to states that were not cooperating with the federal government’s anti-fraud efforts. He announced yesterday the administration intends to withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.

This alleged push against fraud is part of an old playbook the Republicans have used since at least 2000 in which they accuse the Democrats of their own weak points and misdeeds.

This play was often associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, but in 2024, Caroline Wazer of Snopes noted that it is most usually associated with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Accusing opponents of what you, yourself, are doing, muddies the waters and makes it hard for real accusations against you for the same thing to stick.

Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients. Republican rhetoric claims a high rate of “improper payments,” but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services itself stresses that “improper payment measurement is not a measure of fraud.” Rather, that term identifies payments where the paperwork provided by the state or provider was incomplete. Those numbers have been high recently because the government allowed states greater flexibility during the Covid-19 public health emergency.

According to the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy, MaineCare is overseen by both state and federal agencies, and the most recent federal review found that only about 0.1% of total program spending was in incorrect payments. Indeed, last month, Reed Shaw of Just Security noted that the administration’s claim to be rooting out fraud appears simply to be a new way to punish perceived political enemies that might have a better chance of getting through the courts than the administration’s previous attempts did.

Accusing Democrats of fraud will also accomplish the political goal of muddying the waters to make it harder for voters to see that the Trump administration is the most corrupt U.S. administration in history. And concern about voters’ perceptions of corruption must be uppermost in the minds of administration advisors right now, since new Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Trump ally Viktor Orbán was driven in large part by voters’ fury at Orbán’s corruption.

Muddying the waters for voters is the best the Trump administration can hope for because, for all the administration’s claims to be fighting fraud, Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling.

He has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general—the people key to oversight—and in 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse. Matthew Purdy and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times noted in March that in both terms as of March 2026, Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.

Steven Greenhouse of The Guardian reminded readers today that in January, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker reported that the Trumps have pocketed about $4 billion, primarily through cryptocurrency enterprises. Greenhouse notes that Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran, and that the Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”

Even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is acting as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East, he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has already invested $2 billion with Kushner.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects to remake the national capital. As Greenhouse notes, corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami. In December 2025, Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart of the New York Times estimated that Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.

On May 11, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, and Allan Smith of NBC News reported that Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Although the UFC is paying for the event—and expects to lose as much as $30 million on it—and although tickets are technically free, Trump is picking who gets most of the tickets.

Sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC would comment on where the money is going. A Republican lobbyist told the NBC News journalists: “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump. They are raising a sh*t ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

And now Trump is in China on a state visit on which he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”

by Heather Cox Ricardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Monk Seals Under Attack

The response was swift.

A week after a bystander’s cellphone video appeared to show a tourist heaving a coconut-sized rock at a Hawaiian monk seal swimming in calm waters off Lahaina, barely missing its head, federal authorities charged the Seattle resident with harassing the endangered animal.

On Wednesday, they arrested the person believed to be in the video: Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk, 38. He’s expected to appear in court in Honolulu on May 27.

Those decisive moves followed near-universal outrage as images of the startled male monk seal and a defiant Lytvynchuk went viral in Hawaiʻi and beyond, prompting calls for action.

 

Outside of high-profile incidents such as that, authorities struggle to prosecute those who harass or even intentionally kill Hawaiʻi’s monk seals — one of the world’s most endangered species and a culturally important animal in the islands.

Protecting the mammals from human harm, advocates say, remains a complex and uphill battle.

Most incidents don’t get caught on camera. Federal enforcement is stretched awfully thin across the Pacific region. Misinformation about the seals competing with fishermen for food, seal advocates say, continues to spread through local communities and spur attacks. [...]

On Maui, Mayor Richard Bissen vowed to personally see that Lytvynchuk, who was vacationing there, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, Lytvynchuk faces up to one year in prison for each charge plus fines of up to $50,000 under the Endangered Species Act and up to $20,000 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Initially, authorities believed the seal nearly hit was a female named Lani but later determined it was a different, male seal, Bissen said in an Instagram post Thursday. [...]

Enforcement Challenges

Out of at least 16 incidents of confirmed, intentional monk seal killings by humans in the past 17 years that remain unsolved, federal officials have only managed to prosecute one case. That incident, on Kauaʻi, dates back to 2009.

NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, which is charged with protecting the seals under endangered species rules, did not respond this week to requests for comment.

Maria Sagapolu, assistant director of the office’s Pacific Islands Division, said in 2024 that there were fewer than 12 people to cover enforcement of the entire U.S. Pacific region, including Hawai‘i, Guam and other U.S. territories.

The Pacific represents the smallest of the OLE’s five divisions but has to cover the largest area, according to Sagapolu, representing some 1.7 million square miles. [...]

Among the $7.5 million in green fee tourism outreach funding cut by the Legislature was a $700,000 proposal to work with the tourism industry on better visitor outreach and more “culturally grounded messaging that promotes safe wildlife interactions,” according to a statement from the Department of Land and Natural Resources on Thursday.

Those dollars also would have funded a pilot marine protected species reporting app, the agency said, for the community to help report a host of threats related to Hawaiʻi’s wildlife, including monk seals. The project was recommended by Gov. Josh Green’s volunteer Green Fee Advisory Council, but the Senate removed its funding last month.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Hawaiʻi District Court document/2026; The Marine Mammal Center, NOAA Permit #24359/2023
[ed. The human capacity for stupidity and cruelty can never be underestimated (which appears to have infected Molokai as well). When a witness confronted the man, he said “he did not care and was ‘rich’ enough to pay any fines,”. Video here (Hawaii News Now).]

More Than Half of All Polymarket “Long Shot” Bets on Military Action Pay Off

More than half of “long-shot” bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognized to the security of sensitive information.

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.

The report, which analyzed more than 400,000 prediction markets settled on Polymarket between January 2021 and March 2026, comes as US prosecutors last week charged a soldier involved in planning the January raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro with placing Polymarket wagers on the mission that netted more than $400,000. [...]

Growing scrutiny has created a business opportunity for a wave of start-ups selling tools to help users profit by copying suspected “insiders.”

“The platforms are creating new rules to try to root them out and make it clear they don’t allow that activity. That to me [ . . . ] proves there is some informed flow in these markets worth following,” said Matt Saincome, chief executive of financial data provider Unusual Whales, which sells a $20-a-month “unusual predictions” tool to monitor suspicious bets on Polymarket.

Another start-up, Polywhaler, promises to help traders “monitor large bets in real-time” for $4.99 a month.

Polymarket has itself published a list of the 10 most-copied wallets in a blog post, including recommendations for traders on strategies to follow and pitfalls to avoid when copy-trading.

by Stephanie Stacey, Chris Cook, and Jill R Shah, Financial Times, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Financial Times 

[ed. Seems pretty clear prediction markets have some serious problems with insider betting, methods/terms of resolution, and maybe legal culpability.]

Drone Strikes on Data Centers Spook Big Tech, Halting Middle East Projects

A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.

The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.”

Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and also triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage, AWS reported through its service dashboard on March 1.

That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.

Crucially for Amazon’s bottom line, the company chose to waive customer charges in its Middle East cloud region for the entire month of March 2026, as reported by The Register. That decision cost Amazon an estimated $150 million—not including the damaged data centers—because existing civil law frameworks put the financial burden on data center operators to absorb costs and refund clients in the event of military conflicts, according to Tech Policy Press. [...]

Big Tech in the crosshairs

It has been clear for a while that tech companies cannot pretend to be mere bystanders in the ongoing conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data center was hit by a US or Israeli strike on March 11. The Iranian military organization released a list of “Iran’s new targets” that included offices and data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and it reiterated a similar threat against tech companies on March 31 in retaliation for Israeli and US military strikes that resulted in the assassination of Iranian leaders.

The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics. Although the Dubai Media Office initially dismissed the claim, it later confirmed that shrapnel had fallen on the facade of the Oracle facility after a “successful aerial interception” by local air defense systems. [...]

Silicon Valley investors and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also need to rethink plans for making the Middle East into a hub for AI data centers alongside the United States and China, Rest of World reported. US tech companies have each announced plans for data center developments worth billions of dollars, while certain Gulf countries have each pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in AI chips and data centers.

by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Giuseppe CACACE/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. It should be obvious that ALL data centers everywhere are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. Unless owners are ready to pay for military-grade defense systems, this will be an ongoing threat.]

Choosing Sides

[ed. Fact check: not from the Onion.]

President Trump has made no secret of his desire for total control over the historically independent Justice Department, publicly directing prosecutions and declaring that government lawyers must follow his interpretation of the law.

It is a norm-busting approach that has resulted in criminal investigations into several of his perceived political enemies. But his extraordinary influence over the department is now a potential obstacle to one of Mr. Trump’s other apparent goals: receiving a $10 billion payout from the government he leads.

In January, Mr. Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2019, arguing that the agency should have done more to prevent the disclosures. Mr. Trump, as well as his family business and two of his sons, demanded at least $10 billion in damages.

Officials at the Justice Department, which represent the I.R.S. in federal court, have struggled with how and whether they could defend the case, given that doing so would necessitate that they contradict the president on a legal question. A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case, and lawyers for Mr. Trump, not the Justice Department, asked to give the government more time to respond to the suit.

That has left the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, wondering whether the Justice Department even disagrees with Mr. Trump’s claims in the suit.

“Although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction,” the judge wrote in an order on Friday. “Accordingly, it is unclear to this court whether the parties are sufficiently adverse to each other.”

Judge Williams ordered the government and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers to submit briefs on the question, essentially forcing the Justice Department to state its position on Mr. Trump’s suit. As the judge explained in her order, the Constitution requires that the two parties in a lawsuit are genuinely opposed to each other — and not colluding to engineer a legal ruling favorable to both sides. Without a conflict, the lawsuit is void and the judge must dismiss it. [...]

Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor, not only leaked Mr. Trump’s tax returns to The Times, but also provided tax information about thousands of other wealthy individuals to ProPublica. Some of those other wealthy Americans have also sued the I.R.S. on the same grounds as Mr. Trump. In response to those suits, the Justice Department has contended that the I.R.S. should not be held liable for the conduct of Mr. Littlejohn because he was a contractor, not a direct employee of the agency.

Those arguments may or may not actually prevail in court. But for the government to not even raise them in Mr. Trump’s case would be a glaring change of course. Gilbert S. Rothenberg, a former tax lawyer at the Justice Department who signed the amicus brief, said he was hopeful that the judge would dismiss the suit, or delay it until Mr. Trump left office.

“That would hopefully be the result, because there would not be a case or controversy,” he said. “The new D.O.J. is not independent of the president in the way it used to be.”

But even if the judge dismissed Mr. Trump’s suit, the Justice Department could still potentially settle the case. Most government settlements are paid out of the Judgment Fund, an uncapped pot of money that does not require congressional approval for any individual payment. Top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, control the money spent from the fund.

“If this judge finds there’s no legitimate case before the court at this time, that doesn’t mean that a settlement would be illegal,” said Paul Figley, a former Justice Department official who worked on torts. “If the Department of Justice settles the claim, then the Judgment Fund would pay it.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. is not his only attempt to extract money from the government. In private administrative claims, he has also asked for the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as compensation for the federal investigations into him. Mr. Trump’s I.R.S. suit seeks an order of magnitude more money, though. His demand for $10 billion, if fulfilled, could more than double his net worth.

Mr. Trump has said he would donate the taxpayer money to charity.

“Nobody would care, because it’s going to go to numerous, very good charities,” he said in January.

by Andrew Duehren, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. Oh, ok. Everybody supports numerous, very good charities.]

via: X

Iran War Updates: April 24, 2026

Iran War: Trump Says Time Is on His Side, Iranian Leadership Is Divided, Iran Begs to Differ (Naked Capitalism)

Image: USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) sails in the Indian Ocean, April 23. CENTCOM/X

[ed. Updates from a variety of sources. Draw your own conclusions. See also: Iran War: Team Trump as Narrative War Captives? (NC).]