On Saturday, two Defense Department accounts on X posted images overlaid with the words “SEND ME.” The agency’s Rapid Response account published the phrase on a picture of a service member watching a helicopter above an aircraft carrier. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell quoted Isaiah 6:8 in a post and included the all-caps phrase on an image of a soldier silhouetted in the dark. The Department of War’s official account amplified both posts.

Isaiah 6:8 is a verse that appears in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament in which the prophet Isaiah answers a divine call. When God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah replies, “Here am I. Send me.” The passage is widely used in many Christian traditions as an expression of accepting God’s call to a divine mission. The verses that follow describe God sending Isaiah to proclaim a message of judgment that culminates in cities “without inhabitant,” houses emptied of people, and the land left “utterly desolate” before eventual restoration.

Jemar Tisby, a historian of religion, said Isaiah 6:8 functions in American evangelical culture “almost entirely as a standalone missions text,” commonly invoked at missions conferences, ordinations, and altar calls as a declaration of willingness to serve. “The most important context of Isaiah 6, the part most people miss, is that the devastation falls on God’s covenant people,” Tisby said. “The nation doing the sending, not a foreign enemy, is in view here.”

It’s unclear what, exactly, the biblical quotation was intended to convey. The Pentagon declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about whether the posts reflected an expression of faith or proselytizing, a message about the war with Iran, or a coordinated communications strategy. “Nothing to offer you on this,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.

The posts followed months of controversy over the role of religion in the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In March, The Intercept reported that the appointment of Christian activist Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk, to the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors alarmed former military leaders and constitutional advocates, who warned it could push the academy toward an overtly ideological vision of military leadership.

That same month, reporting later entered into the congressional record detailed complaints from more than 100 service members who alleged commanders described the war with Iran as “part of God’s divine plan” and encouraged troops to view the conflict through a biblical lens. Saturday’s posts placed similar biblical language on the Defense Department’s own official social media accounts.

Tisby said he viewed the Pentagon’s recent messaging as part of a broader pattern.

“Given Hegseth’s religious influences, tied to Douglas Wilson, and taken with the fact that Hegseth instituted worship services at the Pentagon, this reads as part of a larger effort to incorporate a narrow vision of Christianity into the military and the federal government writ large,” Tisby said.

Tisby compared the Pentagon’s recent messaging to a controversy during the George W. Bush administration, when the Pentagon used the exact same biblical passage, Isaiah 6:8, on intelligence briefings prepared for then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War. The use of the verse became public in 2009 and prompted criticism from religious scholars, who argued it had been removed from its broader biblical context. “In the Rumsfeld era, there was a public outcry about the misattribution of Bible verses in military contexts, and the administration pulled back,” he said. “Now, this administration is leaning into the framing.”

The messages marked a notable institutional shift. Previous controversies centered on statements by individual commanders or political appointees. This time, multiple official Defense Department accounts amplified the same biblical passage, and the Pentagon declined to explain why.

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That does not necessarily mean the Pentagon’s post violated the Constitution. The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from promoting or favoring a religion through its official actions. At the same time, courts have long allowed some traditional references to religion, including the national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Nelson Tebbe, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, whose scholarship focuses on constitutional law and religion, said the Pentagon’s post was different from those long-standing examples because it relied on a specific biblical passage rather than a general religious phrase and therefore could have a more direct impact on members of the military.

“Minor endorsements of religion by the government are common,” Tebbe said, pointing to phrases such as “God save this honorable Court,” commonly invoked in the Supreme Court. “This particular example involving the Pentagon spokesperson is less minor or incidental.”

Even so, Tebbe said recent Supreme Court decisions have made it unlikely that a court would strike down the Pentagon’s post.

“Recently, the Supreme Court has weakened the Establishment Clause, particularly the doctrine that used to prohibit government endorsements of religion in its own speech,” he said. “I would say that the chance of the Supreme Court invalidating this kind of practice is vanishingly small.”

Legal scholars say that constitutional question is separate from the practical consequences of the Pentagon’s messaging during an active conflict.

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“More problematic, if also predictable, to me is the conflation of divine and military calling and service,” said Jonathan Ebel, a professor of religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies religion and the American military.

“Besides delegitimizing the U.S. military through such overtly Christian rhetoric and alienating non-Christian service members, such blatant Bible thumping in this context implies a religious war against Iran, foolishly confirming Iranian propaganda that the ‘Great Satan’ wants to wage war on Islam,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate and military law professor.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s leaders have referred to the United States as the “Great Satan,” portraying Washington as both a geopolitical rival and a religious enemy. Iranian officials have repeatedly framed conflicts with the United States and Israel as part of a struggle against Islam, making official biblical messaging from the Pentagon particularly vulnerable to exploitation as propaganda, VanLandingham said.

VanLandingham said the Pentagon’s messaging risked replacing military professionalism with religious symbolism at a moment when the armed forces should remain grounded in constitutional principles, rather than religious conviction.

“Religious war is a slippery slope to total war,” she said. “The U.S. military fights based on honor and fidelity to the law, not to Old Testament biblical passages.”

Update: August 6, 2026, 10:18 a.m. ET
This article was updated to include comment from Jemar Tisby, a historian of religion, and Jonathan Ebel, a professor of religion.

The post The Pentagon Is Posting Cryptic Biblical Messages on Social Media appeared first on The Intercept.

The frontman of British punk rap band Bob Vylan was denied entry to Germany, detained at the Berlin airport, and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom last month due to his pro-Palestine statements.

German federal police justified deporting the band’s vocalist on June 15, referencing a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2025 where Bob Vylan led a chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” or the Israel Defense Forces.

Authorities later revoked the entry ban against the singer, whose legal name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, in a letter in late July, but refused to explain why it had been rescinded — or how the decision to impose it had been made in the first place.

A police file on Robinson-Foster obtained by The Intercept alleges that he disseminated antisemitic narratives and Hamas propaganda that could “radicalise certain segments of the [German] population” and serve as “ideological justification” for terrorist groups or individuals. It also says that Robinson-Foster poses a threat to Germany’s public security and public order. Allowing him into the country would cause “considerable reputational damage” by creating the impression that Germany was making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.”

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The German Federal Police declined to answer detailed questions about the now-revoked entry ban, citing public security interests and data protection. In response to a list of questions about the decision-making process behind the ban, its legal basis, and why it was lifted, Bundespolizei spokesperson Nikolai Jaletzke told The Intercept the agency does not comment on individual cases, internal threat assessments, or inter-agency coordination.

“It’s frankly absurd to suggest that I’m a threat to German national security,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept. “It’s equally absurd to claim that we spread propaganda on behalf of any proscribed organization.”

Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance last year drew widespread international attention at a moment when an increasing number of artists were speaking out against Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The performance — and the chant of “Death, death to the IDF” — also drew condemnation from politicians, including then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and several pro-Israel Jewish organizations. Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, described the performance as “hate speech and incitement” and called on concert organizers in Germany to cancel Bob Vylan shows.

Following that performance, Robinson-Foster and his bandmate Wade Laurence George had their U.S. visas revoked. However, Germany is the first country to deny entry and deport a member of the band.

The documents reviewed by The Intercept concern only the implementation of the ban — not the decision-making process behind it. “Our position is simple,” said Alexander Gorski, the German lawyer representing Robinson-Foster. “There is a constitutional right to know the file on which such a decision is based.”

Following Robinson-Foster’s deportation, Gorski submitted a request with the Federal Police headquarters in Potsdam seeking both the deletion of the entry ban from Germany’s national register and access to the files underlying the decision. Soon after, federal police rescinded the entry ban without explaining why it had been lifted. The two-page response, reviewed by The Intercept, states that no additional information could be disclosed.

“It is, of course, good that the ban is now lifted,” Gorski told The Intercept. “But from a rule-of-law perspective, it is deeply problematic that someone can be barred from entering the country over a political statement that is not a criminal offence — and then be denied access to the files.”

Gorski filed a formal objection seeking access to the internal files that led to the decision. He argues that Robinson-Foster has a right to know the factual and legal basis on which he was barred from entering Germany — not only to challenge the lawfulness of the measure, but also to understand what conduct German authorities consider grounds for refusing entry in the future.

“If an artist wants to comply with the law, they have to know what the rules are,” Gorski said.

It’s unclear how a British musician who hasn’t been charged with an offense in either the U.K. or Germany came to be classified by German authorities as a threat to public security. British police previously closed an investigation into Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, concluding there was “insufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction.”

“There is a lack of crime, not a lack of evidence,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept in response. “It’s on the BBC. They can just go and watch it.”

According to Gorski, the case is yet another example of a broader shift in the use of German migration law against pro-Palestine figures. Last year, Berlin authorities moved to deport four foreign residents over their participation in protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

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Gorski argues that German authorities are increasingly using immigration law “to silence unwanted voices” by preventing critics of Israel from entering Germany or removing them from the country. Similar concerns have been raised by others, including Thomas Oberhäuser, chair of the German Bar Association’s executive committee on migration law, who argues that immigration law is increasingly used for political ends.

Gorski pointed to previous cases involving the British Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, both of whom he has represented in similar proceedings. German authorities sought to prevent them from entering the country to participate in Palestine-related events.

Robinson-Foster told The Intercept that he traveled to Germany in June in a private capacity to visit friends and music collaborators ahead of the release of the band’s new album. Bob Vylan has toured Germany in recent years, and Robinson-Foster hopes to return soon. Even though authorities rescinded the entry ban, Robinson-Foster said the incident continues to shape his travel plans, saying it “opened a Pandora’s box.”

“It would seem as though the refusal of entry into Germany has now sparked this continued border confusion whenever we try to enter countries,” he said.

Since his deportation, Robinson-Foster said both he and his bandmate have been stopped for questioning at European borders. In one instance, Belgian border officials questioned the band’s drummer about the incident in Germany despite not having traveled there himself, Robinson-Foster said.

“We have shows that we are wanting to put on in Germany,” he said. “It’s a place that we’ve toured for the last five years. For us not to be able to connect with the people that support us there would be a shame.”

The post Free Speech Crackdown: Germany Deports Bob Vylan Frontman for Anti-Israel Chants appeared first on The Intercept.

The House Ways and Means Committee last week carried out an attack on journalism that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The committee subpoenaed BreakThrough News, a left-wing outlet with deep ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation that is highly critical of the United States and Israel, along with two other nonprofits with similar ideologies, The People’s Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. 

The subpoena deserves the same scrutiny as those issued to New York Times reporters over their reporting on security issues with President Donald Trump’s Qatari jet, which, after significant pushback in the courts of law and public opinion, the government withdrew Thursday — the same day BreakThrough announced its receipt of the legal orders.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for BreakThrough, called the committee “a modern day HUAC,” the McCarthy-era committee on so-called “un-American” activities. Communists aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. As Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, put it: “Attacks on independent, alternative, or radical media have troubling history. It is always the I.F. Stones or the WikiLeaks who are first on the firing line.”

The Ways and Means Committee is claiming its investigation is a tax-related probe into more than $39 million that flowed from Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen and tech financier based in Shanghai, to the groups, which it claims advance Chinese Communist Party-aligned interests. But we’ve seen that playbook before: Around the globe, financial probes have been used as pretexts to stifle journalism and dissent, and there’s every indication that this is the latest example. 

BreakThrough News has been criticized for favorable coverage of China and other U.S. adversaries, which it indeed publishes. But favorable coverage of foreign adversaries — even in the form of propaganda — is protected by the Constitution. And BreakThrough’s leadership held those positions long before they had any alleged connection to Singham.

BreakThrough’s editor-in-chief, Ben Becker, had a common-sense observation: “The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of. Journalism approved by the government wouldn’t need protection,” he said. “That’s why so many of the country’s decisive free speech cases involved the abolitionist press, the radical labor press and the antiwar press. … But history looks back on these episodes for what they were — shameful violations of free speech — and that’s the same thing that’s happening here.”

Though the committee denies it is engaging in content-based retaliation in its most recent letter, past correspondence does little to refute Becker’s framing, citing no evidence of any kind of financial illegality and instead focusing on BreakThrough News’ critical coverage of ICE and Israel and criticizing its connections to the PSL, a lawfully organized domestic political party, which it says, “orchestrated the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles resulting in violence and dozens of arrests last June.”

My Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Adam Rose, who also serves as press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, found that last part particularly infuriating (PSL and its leadership have not been charged with any offenses relating to violence in LA). The government, Rose said, has “failed to investigate the documented wholesale violence by federal agents against press and protesters” in LA. “Maybe instead of a foreign state, our elected representatives should be more concerned about our own state violence against innocent civilians in our local streets.” 

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There’s another problem with the probe of BreakThrough. Putting aside the subpoenas’ flimsy evidentiary backing, House subpoenas must carry a legislative purpose. Why would the committee need a fishing expedition into the finances of a few leftist nonprofits to decide whether legislative reforms are necessary? The committee’s letter claims to have already spotted the gap in nonprofit tax law they contend Singham is exploiting, and it cites plenty of public reporting on his network, so it’s unclear what other information its members need that could conceivably justify congressional action as extreme as subpoenaing news outlets. If the best argument they can come up with for their contemplated legislation is that three obscure organizations were funded by an American citizen living abroad, maybe they should find other fish to fry. 

As Breakthrough’s chief correspondent Rania Khalek recently said, “I think this is really just about trying to bury us in legal proceedings until we’ve basically run out of money or stop reporting out of intimidation.

BreakThrough is far from the first victim of this censorial playbook. Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines, for example, filed a series of tax evasion cases against Rappler, the investigative outlet led by journalist Maria Ressa, due to its alleged acceptance of foreign investments (Ressa is a former board member of The Intercept). Advocates described the cases as part of a broader legal campaign designed to wear the outlet down. It took years and a change of administration before courts acquitted Ressa and Rappler. Authorities in Azerbaijan have also repeatedly brought pretextual financial charges including tax evasion against investigative journalism they sought to suppress.

There are also examples closer to home — not just from Red Scares decades ago, but in present-day Florida. A 2025 state law restricts nonprofits from accepting funds from broadly defined “foreign sources of concern” tied to countries like China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, while a related “Honest Services Registry” asks charities to affirm they’re free of such foreign influence. A separate domestic terrorism law lets state officials designate organizations as terrorist groups — organizations like the Muslim civil rights group CAIR and the amorphous non-entity the government calls “antifa” have already received the designation.

Florida First Amendment Foundation executive director Bobby Block explained the agenda in an email: “Make people wonder whether joining an organization, donating to a cause, attending a protest or expressing an unpopular viewpoint could put them under a government microscope, and some will simply decide to remain silent. That’s the chilling effect the First Amendment is supposed to protect against.” 

Combined with the administration’s crackdown on purported domestic terror outlined by National Security Presidential Memorandum 7; Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s bizarre memorandum claiming a Cuban conspiracy to spread communism stateside; and the countless other suppression of dissent we’ve seen from Trump allies, all of them predictably targeting speakers whose politics differ from the president’s — it’s not hard to spot the endgame.

BreakThrough isn’t the only news outlet recently swept into this broader crackdown. Earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents detained Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal and seized two smartphones after he returned from reporting in Iran. Like BreakThrough, Grayzone is highly critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, and its detractors accuse it of being soft on U.S. adversaries. It’s the kind of outlet governments know they can harass without nearly the blowback that comes with subpoenaing the New York Times.

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After Blumenthal sued, authorities let him pick up his phones, but he remains concerned about whether their content was searched or copied. Blumenthal said officers asked him to unlock his phones and when he refused, they told him they’d “hook them up to machines,” presumably to extract their contents. Blumenthal, of course, is far from the only reporter who has reported from Iran or who visited the country to cover Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s state funeral. But, to the best of our knowledge, he’s the only one who has had his phones searched and seized.

Whatever leeway the law affords border agents to conduct searches that would otherwise be unlawful cannot be abused to punish constitutionally protected speech because they dislike its content. The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — which prohibits searches of journalists’ files absent probable cause to suspect criminality — contains no exception for border searches. It is likely not a coincidence that the attack on Blumenthal’s rights followed calls by the pro-Israel doxxing organization Canary Mission and MAGA influencer and Trump ally Laura Loomer for government retribution against Blumenthal based on his coverage.

Gibbons is right that attacks on press freedom historically start on the edges. Trump has arguably been an aberration, though. Although he certainly draws inspiration from outliers, taking legal theories that were laughed at the court on the local level and turning them into federal policy, his own strategy is generally to start big.

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Likely because he still mentally resides in a skyscraper in 1980s Manhattan, Trump is far more focused on outlets like the Times than on the independent press. He files SLAPP suits against mainstream journalists at a pace that would land anyone else on a restricted filers list; his Federal Communications Commission continues threatening the licenses of broadcasters who don’t kiss the ring emphatically enough for his liking; his Pentagon tried to extract loyalty pledges from the country’s most prominent outlets; and his Justice Department and FBI can’t seem to stop raiding and subpoenaing journalists no matter what the judiciary has to say. 

These efforts have certainly had an incalculable chilling effect on the press, but they’ve largely fizzled in court. The prospect that the administration may have caught on to that pattern and shifted its focus to outlets with less mainstream support, less money, and fewer lawyers on retainer is an alarming one.

As Gibbons put it, “Those who are serious about press freedom cannot be selective in their solidarity.” 

The post House Investigation of BreakThrough News Is an Attack on All Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.

I Would Have Thought You Mad

We’ve only recently passed the semiquincentennial of the United States of America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, at the moment of its founding, the U.S. was, of course, a slaveocracy. Of its founders, John Adams was essentially an oddball because he owned no slaves. But Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe did own people. So, give our current president Donald J. Trump some credit: At least he isn’t a slaveowner. But that’s about the best that can be said for him.

Once upon a time, if you had described our world to me, I would have thought you mad. Who could have imagined that Americans would reelect the man who shoved aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Duško Marković in 2017 in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of a photo line (because who, in any circumstance, should be photographed more than him)? This is also the same tantrum-prone president who once threw his lunch, ketchup and all, at a White House wall after his attorney general made comments he didn’t like about the 2020 election. The president who, less than two years into his second term, kidnapped Venezuela’s head of state, tried to claim Greenland as the property of the US of A, prepared for a possible future war with Cuba, blown ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, has conducted staggering numbers of airstrikes in Somalia, launched a would-be forever war with Iran (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and … well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples of unhinged behavior to cite. Honestly, a decade ago, I would have thought you were kidding.

So, what would those slave-owning Founding Fathers, memorialized on the Fourth of July just past, have thought about Trump? What would they have said about his boorish behavior, his toddler-esque tantrums, and his endless attacks and wars?

Perhaps those founders, were they alive today, would visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago and share a meal with the odd millionaire, billionaire, or trillionaire (although Elon Musk’s trillionaire status only lasted a couple of weeks!) lurking around the club. Or perhaps they would have been spotted on the White House lawn recently with Trump, first lady Melania, and the Trump kids, not to speak of a legion of blood-sport-loving billionaires watching a mixed martial arts spectacle in honor of Trump’s 250th birthday. (Oops, my mistake, Trump is just a youthful 80, which, when — or is it, if? — he finally leaves office, will make him our oldest president ever but hardly the oldest among the almost 200 world leaders of the present moment.)

Here’s a question that those Founding Fathers might ask about Donald Trump’s America: “What kind of -ocracy is the United States today?” And the answer, of course, would not be a democracy, or even a theocracy (though The Donald does love to be worshipped), but a Trumpocracy: a government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump; a government dedicated to the enrichment of the president and his cronies. And it’s a vengeful one at that. After all, on Truth Social last year, he reposted an AI-generated video of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office (as Trump looks on in glee) before he’s thrown into prison. A Black man seized (in a house built by slave labor, no less) and held in bondage is something of a nod to America’s past — and wouldn’t be unfamiliar to America’s founders.

But honestly, if you were to offer an account of Trump’s America to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, what would either of them have thought? Can you even imagine their reaction? Their dismay? You found a country and just over 250 years later, you have Donald J. Trump running it into the ground. 

Perhaps if the Founding Fathers could do it all again, they might have chosen to remain a colony of the British king, George III (whom Donald Trump makes look remarkably good). 

Coming from a largely rural land, the founders would undoubtedly find it interesting that Trump’s long solid support in the heartland finally seems to be on the verge of collapse. But then, so much of his world (and sadly, ours, too) seems to be on the edge of ruin these days.

The founders might wonder if the United States could survive another two and a half years. Or if the world can? If, that is, he doesn’t try to remain in power. After claiming to have won the last three presidential elections, Trump asked an Iowan audience ominously: “Should we do it a fourth time?” (George Washington would no doubt be disturbed, having been committed to a two-term maximum.)

In two and a half years, much less six and a half, Trump is potentially all too capable of taking not just this country but also the planet down with him. And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come (as my city recently hit the 100-degree mark on an early July day) and the president who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. Now, I’m sweating and, of course, with Donald Trump at the helm of state, it’s only going to get hotter, and hotter, and hotter.

The post A Government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

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That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources.  

Trump’s administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants to destroy journalism that holds it to account, including by unmasking sources and punishing them. This week, for instance, news broke that the Department of Justice had unsuccessfully subpoenaed reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, likely as part of a leak investigation.

But what if it could skip the journalists and simply demand that tech companies identify sources who may have spoken to reporters using their platforms?

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The risk isn’t hypothetical. The first Trump administration abused its authority to spy on journalists to figure out who they’re talking to, including online. The second Trump administration has already repeatedly attempted to unmask its critics online and raided a journalist’s home and seized the devices she used to communicate with her sources. 

In the face of these risks, using secure communication methods, like Signal or SecureDrop, can help. But some sources may still reach out to reporters through social media. As a result, age verification laws will create a new pool of data that the government can demand when it’s hunting for information about the people who may have spoken to the press.

The most common methods of age verification rely on the collection of government IDs to verify a user’s date of birth with certainty. The KIDS Act says it won’t require platforms to collect government IDs, but at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail. 

But online anonymity isn’t assured even if platforms use other ways to verify users’ ages. Even so-called “privacy-preserving” approaches risk exposing users’ identities and undermine anonymity. All of the methods ultimately require platforms to collect, process, and retain more data on all users, raising the risks for anonymous sources who use online platforms to contact reporters.

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Age verification laws will also make it difficult or impossible for journalists to use anonymous social media accounts to gather information, like sock puppet accounts used to infiltrate and report on online extremist groups, or to avoid surveillance by the very Big Tech companies they’re reporting on. Reporters outside the U.S. who publish anonymously on platforms like X or Facebook to avoid the wrath of autocratic regimes will also find those entry points vanish.

Pools of incredibly sensitive identity data also creates an enticing “honey pot” of information that malicious actors could use to target, intimidate, and chill journalists from pursuing certain stories or sources from speaking to them. Already, many age verification providers have been breached, leaking users’ sensitive data and allowing others to link online activity to users’ offline identity. Age verification companies may also grant access or sell the data they collect to others, like payment processors, creating another avenue for data breaches.

Many Democratic lawmakers recognize that journalism is under threat from the Trump administration. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the ranking member of the House committee that reached the deal on the KIDS Act, has rightfully blasted the Federal Communications Commission for abusing its power to destroy press freedom and free speech, for instance. So why would he and other Democrats now support legislation that serves the same anti-press agenda? 

Proponents of the KIDS ACT, and similar bills in the Senate, say these laws are necessary to protect children. But the truth is that age verification requirements are bad for everyone, including children. Why should we trust platforms with even more personal information, including from kids, when so many companies already use that data to target ads or share materials with law enforcement agencies that users believed was private?

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That’s not to say that platforms shouldn’t be required to do more to actually protect children online — they should. But comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone and requires platforms to collect less data, not more, is a better approach.

Mandating age verification, in contrast, effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer.  

The post Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House has been desperate to find a way out of the quagmire of its own making in Iran, leading to the remote signing on June 15 of a memorandum of understanding that promises extraordinary concessions to the Islamic Republic. Stipulations once deemed a “nightmare for Israel” by American politicians and dismissed by President Donald Trump as “not acceptable” — such as total sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars of funds held abroad — are now reality. Despite attempts by the Trump administration to spin this as an achievement of all of America’s goals and an “unconditional surrender” by Iran, the deal has been met with skepticism, derision, anger, and mockery by Democrats and even some Republicans, pushing close Trump allies such as Fox News host Mark Levin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to admonish the president for doing the “unthinkable” by capitulating to Iran.

In Israel, the deal has been seen far more uniformly across the political spectrum as an immense and almost incomprehensible betrayal by the United States, an unforeseen cruelty by Trump, and an incalculable failure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only 11 percent of Israelis say that their country won the war against Iran, and a whopping 71 percent do not expect Trump to look out for Israeli interests in future negotiations. One Likud member of the Knesset expressed his frustration by filming himself taking off his “Make America Great Again” hat and instead putting on a “Total Victory” hat, a phrase invoked by Netanyahu to justify the wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

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In Iran, the atmosphere is still not entirely jubilant. Much of Iran’s media and many officials have indeed taken a triumphant attitude: The front page of Javan, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-aligned newspaper, depicted a crowd of Iranians breaking through a wall of threats made by the Trump administration, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, claimed that “everything we wanted to achieve through military action, we achieved many times over through negotiation.” But past betrayals are, after all, far too recent to forget.

It was only in April, for instance, when Israel unilaterally insisted it wasn’t party to the ceasefire in Lebanon and continued its war there. Previous negotiations with America only served as a cover for war preparations in June 2025 and February 2026. This has resulted in a national mood that is much more cautious than the elation that many felt after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Barack Obama and agreed to by the Rouhani administration, was adopted in 2015.

While an overwhelming majority of the country has backed the diplomatic track, criticism of the efforts of the team lead by Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has burned subtly in the background since early April. Supporters of the coalition known as the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability, representing the largest faction of the conservatives in the Iranian Parliament, have begun making their objections known, countering previous attempts by those in power to present a united front and to dispense with hardliner-versus-reformist politicking amid the war.

Criticism of current diplomatic efforts on the Iranian state television program “Soraya” in late May led to the suspension of the program days later. In response, its host, Mohsen Maqsoodi, held live conversations in Tehran’s Valiasr Square, where political commentator Ali Abdi criticized the state for not striking Israel as its army continues to bulldoze Lebanon, which led to that series’ cancellation as well. Rumors swirled online that the cancellation was owed to an intervention by an adviser to Ghalibaf.

After Araghchi gave an interview on state TV on June 12 saying that Iran would have to make concessions in its dealings, angry demonstrators who were attending nightly state-sponsored rallies demanded the diplomatic corps remember the “blood of the Leader [Khamenei],” with one speaker in Tehran’s Enghelab Square leading marchers in chants of “Death to the compromiser,” against those who think “America has something to offer [Iran].”

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In Parliament, conservatives affiliated or allied with the Front have made their criticism vocal, with members calling for Araghchi to be barred from contacting Trump administration negotiator Steve Witkoff and demanding Parliament see the deal before it is signed. One representative called the agreement worse than “the JCPOA and [the Treaty of] Turkmenchay,” referring to the 1828 treaty that ceded swathes of Iranian territory to the Russian Empire. 

Tehran representative Mahmoud Nabavian has been arguably the most prominent member of Parliament criticizing the government’s diplomats, castigating Araghchi for leaving gaps in the memorandum of understanding that America could exploit, namely the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz erasing Iran’s economic leverage, and the lack of clarity in the document about timelines for the lifting of sanctions and the exit of American forces from the region.

The public criticism has less so outlined how exactly Iran could extract more concessions. But it appears such sentiment is now being expressed at the highest level of government: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. In a statement announcing his approval of the deal, Mojtaba raised the eyebrows of some analysts by saying that he “had a different view” than what was agreed to by his negotiators, but nevertheless acceded to the wishes of President Masoud Pezeshkian on the condition that Iran rejects “excessive demands” made by the United States, remarking that the nation “await[s] the realization of the aforementioned conditions.”

This kind of public and immediate skepticism of a deal agreed to by the elected government was not the type of messaging made by Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, who reserved public criticism of the red lines crossed in JCPOA negotiations until the deal had been torn up years later by the Trump administration. Coverage in Axios from an Israeli analyst speculated that Mojtaba means to place any failure of the deal firmly on the shoulders of the Iranian president.

While the deal has yielded extraordinary concessions for Iran, there are already dark clouds looming. Concerns are emerging among other members of Parliament about the agreement requiring cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was suspended last year by the elected legislature. More importantly, the first clause of the agreement — which requires an immediate and permanent end to the war in Lebanon — is already being shattered. 

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Israel, as it did when the ceasefire was initially achieved in early April, has again argued that it must remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel’s national security demands it. A ceasefire apparently brokered between Hezbollah and Israel on Friday was broken within minutes as Israel continued to bombard the Lebanese south. An order has apparently come down on Saturday from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz for the Israeli military to cease firing in Lebanon, but not withdraw from any of its positions and respond to any Hezbollah attack on its occupying forces. This leaves open the question of how Israeli military doctrine in southern Lebanon is actually supposed to change.

The United States has also taken active steps to secure more concessions from Iran outside of the explicit directives of the deal, with Vice President JD Vance saying that the $300 billion in reconstruction funds would not be released to Iran unless the nation stopped funding “terrorist organization[s]” like Hezbollah. The memorandum of understanding includes no mention of Iran’s support for allied organizations abroad, nor its ballistic missile program, both of which were primary targets of the Israeli–American war.

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Iran, for its part, closed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday in response to Israel’s refusal to stop the war. While it is still sending negotiators to Switzerland to speak with Vance, Iran is apparently not going there to negotiate a final deal just yet but instead demand U.S. compliance with the terms of the agreement. There is, as of now, still little indication at this time that the U.S. will agree to the demand for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, despite surprising recent criticism from Trump and Vance of Israel’s scorched-earth tactics in the country. 

For the moment, Israeli officials continue to dig in their heels, demanding further and further action, and stirring tension on other fronts like the West Bank, in an attempt to divert attention and lessen the blow that the majority of Israeli society agrees the country has suffered. For National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, there is no possibility of acceptance of the diplomatic track, remarking on Friday: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”

The post The Surprising Reaction Inside Iran to Its War Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

When the Department of Homeland Security announced this week the arrest of 15 alleged “anti-ICE rioters” in Minnesota, it pointed directly at their Signal chats.

The indictment is in large part built upon on conversations from more than a dozen Signal groups, citing more than 100 specific messages. The case is a stark reminder that using an encrypted messaging platform like Signal is not in and of itself a magic bullet to safeguard communications. It also raises the question: How did Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit gain access to all of these communications in the first place?

The indictment doesn’t provide a clear answer. But sprinkled throughout the document are clues that suggest that law enforcement may have gained access to the physical devices of some of those indicted.

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The indictment singles out its targets for their alleged participation in local ICE rapid response networks, where volunteers monitor and report the presence of federal agents in their communities by flagging details such as the license plate numbers of vehicles used by immigration authorities. ICE watchers in Minnesota have been met with intimidation from immigration authorities amid the national outcry following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good as they observed the actions of immigration authorities.

The 15 people named in the latest indictment are all charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer,” with some facing additional charges like “solicitation to commit a crime of violence” and “destruction of government property.” Though some of the accused had court appearances on Tuesday, their defense attorneys have not as of yet been named.

The indictment comes months after FBI Director Kash Patel said in a podcast interview that federal law enforcement had started an investigation into Minnesota ICE watchers using Signal groups to share information about immigration agents.

The bulk of the indictment consists of transcripts of group messages; at various points it also makes mention of voicemails, text messages, Signal direct messages, and Signal calls. For instance, the indictment in one spot mentions that two of the indictees “exchanged approximately 20 connected Signal calls.” This hints that authorities were able to access not just group chat messages, but likely had wholesale access to the devices of at least some of those indicted.

The Signal app provides end-to-end encryption, protecting communications in transit, so that anyone monitoring your internet or cellular data connection cannot see the contents of your messages. Signal also minimizes the amount of metadata collected, so if the organization behind the app, the Signal Foundation, was served with a compulsory legal process to reveal user information, it wouldn’t even know with whom you spoke or chatted.

But all that falls apart if your device gets into the wrong hands. In order to safeguard your Signal data from someone who obtains access to your device, it’s necessary to manually harden Signal by modifying some of its default settings.

Perhaps Signal’s most well-touted security and privacy feature is its ability to set disappearing messages. Messages can be set to expire in periods ranging from seconds to weeks. A default expiration time for all messages can be selected, and specific groups and conversations can be set to custom retention times. To minimize risk, set retention times to the shortest amount feasible — minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks.

Keep in mind that Signal’s disappearing messages delete the contents of a message, but they don’t remove evidence that communications between parties occurred in the first place. This means that even if a group has enabled disappearing messages, someone who gains access to a member’s device could later determine with whom they were chatting. Therefore it’s safest to regularly delete entire groups and chats, not just the messages themselves.

Just like its chat function, Signal also keeps similar records of voice and video calls. It’s as important to delete records of the calls as it is to delete records of text messages, both within the Signal app and in your phone’s standard call history.

On iPhones, Signal can integrate its call history into the iPhone’s regular call history. This privacy-eroding feature can be disabled on Signal on iOS by tapping your profile circle on the top-left corner of the app, clicking on Settings, then Privacy, then disabling “Show Calls in Recents.”

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Additionally for Signal on iPhones, you’ll also likely want to disable settings like “Share Contacts with iOS” and “Use Phone Contact Photos” (for Android users, the equivalent is “Use address book photos”), which can be found under Settings, then Chats.

Such precautions may sound extreme, but in a recent case, authorities were able to recover deleted incoming Signal messages based on old push notifications that were archived on iPhones (the latest iPhone update fixes this issue, highlighting the importance of keeping your devices up to date). On that note, remember to either turn off Signal notifications entirely or have them display only the names of people sending messages — which should be pseudonyms, not real names.

The post How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages? appeared first on The Intercept.

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems U.K. factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the U.K. in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: The defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International U.K.’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the U.K., including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

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For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the U.K. provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the U.K.’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the U.K. government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials; a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

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It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X on Wednesday suggesting vitamin D, zinc, and ivermectin could prevent the rodent-borne disease. Ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication, surged in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic as vaccine skepticism rose. In another post, Greene shared a 2024 article about mRNA hantavirus vaccine research while claiming pharmaceutical companies “manipulate the virus (bioweapon)” and “make the vaccine (poison).”

Other high-profile ivermectin advocates also circulated claims online, including physician and activist Mary Talley Bowden, whose post about ivermectin and hantavirus was viewed millions of times on X, and commentator Josh Walkos, known online as “Champagne Joshi,” who shared posts questioning hantavirus vaccine development.

Primarily found in South America, the Andes hantavirus can cause severe respiratory illness and, unlike most hantaviruses, has demonstrated limited ability for person-to-person transmission in previous outbreaks. Health authorities are now investigating a recent cluster linked to international travelers aboard an expedition cruise ship traveling between Argentina, Antarctica, and South Africa, with several cases identified beyond the vessel.

The strain can be deadly, with mortality rates in some outbreaks estimated at as high as 50 percent. But experts say it typically requires close contact to spread, making it significantly less transmissible than Covid-19.

The resurgence of ivermectin claims comes as some Republican-led states continue efforts to expand access to the drug years after it became a flashpoint during the Covid-19 pandemic. On Wednesday, the South Carolina House passed legislation that would allow ivermectin to be sold without a prescription.

“There is no meaningful clinical evidence for ivermectin against hantavirus, full stop,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security whose work focuses on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.

Adalja said the only antiviral formally evaluated in clinical trials for hantavirus is ribavirin, and even those results showed limited benefit.

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said the Andes virus remains the only hantavirus known to spread person to person.

“There is zero evidence indicating that ivermectin would be a treatment for any hantavirus,” Racaniello said.

While ivermectin is approved to treat certain parasitic infections in humans, including river blindness and intestinal strongyloidiasis, the FDA warns that improper use or high doses can cause serious side effects, including seizures and neurological complications.

Racaniello warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can create public confusion during disease outbreaks.

Health communication experts say distrust that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic continues to shape how some Americans respond to new disease outbreaks. Evolving public health recommendations during the pandemic, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s acknowledgment that the widely used 6-foot social distancing rule was not firmly grounded in data, contributed to enduring skepticism toward public health institutions.

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Even as his administration rushed vaccine development, President Donald Trump publicly promoted unproven Covid-19 treatments including hydroxychloroquine, further politicizing debates around experimental therapies and public health guidance.

The president has so far offered scant remarks on the outbreak. Asked about the virus on Thursday, he told reporters “it should be fine.”

“People’s experience with Covid-19 permanently changed how many view public health guidance,” said Rebecca Fish, a health communications professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media who previously worked in senior health policy and pharmaceutical industry roles. “There is now a much higher level of skepticism toward institutions like the CDC and official public health messaging.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether federal health agencies have evaluated ivermectin for Andes hantavirus or plan to address unsupported treatment claims circulating online.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly defended the off-label use of ivermectin and criticized clinically informed public health policies for Covid-19, now oversees HHS and the CDC. Last year, CBS News reported that layoffs tied to Kennedy’s restructuring of federal health agencies eliminated all full-time employees in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, which investigates outbreaks aboard cruise ships. Amid the news of the hantavirus outbreak, the administration confirmed to STAT that the cuts had been reversed. The chief of the Vessel Sanitation Program, however, announced his retirement on Wednesday.

People in a health crisis often look for reassurance and a sense of control, not just facts, Fish said, adding that unsupported treatment claims can spread quickly online when distrust in institutions is already high.

“When someone feels ridiculed for asking a reasonable question, they don’t defer to authority, they route around it,” she said. “The question is not whether that vacuum will be filled, but by whom and with what.”

Fish said public health officials and journalists should distinguish carefully between what is false, what remains unproven, and what is still unknown as evidence develops.

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But experts said distrust in public institutions does not eliminate the need for clinical evidence when evaluating medical treatments.

“Clinical claims require real evidence that goes beyond anecdotal evidence,” Adalja, the Johns Hopkins scholar, said.

Racaniello, the microbiologist, warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can still carry real public health risks.

“The problem arises when people inject their opinions on social media when they have no expertise in the matter,” Racaniello said. “Ivermectin at high doses can be damaging, so encouraging its use in this outbreak is irresponsible.”

The post Amid Hantavirus Panic, the Ivermectin Super Fans Are Back appeared first on The Intercept.

The risks are real. Customs and Border Protection agents have the authority to examine travelers’ devices. In June, for instance, federal agents denied a Norwegian tourist entry to the U.S. after looking through his phone. (Authorities claim they turned him away for admitted drug use; he says it was over a meme depicting Vice President JD Vance as a bald baby.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement have already started targeting travelers, with agents in plain clothes forcefully detaining a mother in front of her young daughter at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday after a tip from the Transportation Security Administration.

If you’re flying, take these steps to reduce the likelihood that your sensitive information is compromised at the airport.

Don’t Bring Your Usual Devices

The only surefire way to keep your devices from being searched and seized is to simply not bring them with you on your trip. If you can’t leave them at home, consider mailing them to and from your destination.

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Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap. Then buy a temporary SIM card or eSIM so that you’re not using your usual number. Remember to let contacts know that for the duration of your trip you’ll be reachable at a different number.

Create a travel account for these devices. You can do so by starting a fresh account in the App Store or Google Play. This should ensure that if you’re forced to log into your device by authorities at the airport, the only information they’ll find is data you’ve put on this specific piece of hardware. CBP agents are supposed to only be able to look at data that’s local on the phone.

If you have anything sensitive in your accounts (say, emails from confidential sources) or anything you believe federal agents could consider damning (such as party pics or memes), be sure not to sync your apps, files, and settings onto your travel devices.

Disable Biometrics and Power Off

Regardless of whether you opt to bring your usual devices or specialized travel burners, take these steps to lock down your devices.

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First and foremost, disable any biometrics, like using your face or fingerprint, to unlock your phone. Instead, set up a unique and random alphanumeric passcode; eight characters consisting of random digits and numbers is a good start. Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras. Use one hand to shield your screen and the thumb of your other hand to put in your passcode. Consider using privacy screens on your devices to further diminish the chance of wandering eyes noticing things that are none of their business.

When going through security checkpoints, turn your devices completely off. Don’t just put them to sleep — fully shut them down. Though having a locked device is better than having it be unlocked, turning it off is best, as this makes it much harder for data to be forensically recovered from your devices.

That means you’ll need to obtain paper copies of boarding passes, rather than rely on digital versions stored in a device wallet or via your airline’s app.

If you’re asked to unlock your devices, you can say “no.” But doing so may result in being delayed and hassled, and your device could be confiscated. You should receive paperwork attesting to the confiscation and establishing chain of custody (this is called CBP Form 6051D, or a custody receipt for detained property). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, it may be months before your devices are returned — or even for an indefinite period of time if agents believe there is evidence of a crime.

Delete Files and Log Out

To practice what’s known in security circles as “defense in depth,” it’s best to think of your digital security as an onion: If an outer layer is peeled off, you want there to be a good second layer to minimize the damage to the core. To that end, assume that even if you have a strong passphrase and have powered off your device, someone may still be able to find a way in. Your travel devices should, therefore, minimize the amount of sensitive information they store. In that case, even if someone manages to break through the outer layer, the information exposed would be trivial.

If you use a password manager — a specialized app that securely stores your passwords — put it into a “travel mode,” limiting the passwords it will reveal for the duration of your trip. Remove access to sensitive accounts that you very likely won’t have a reason to need to access during your travels; for example, removing your work email if you’re going on vacation, or leaving and deleting sensitive Signal chats, like local ICE watch groups.

Log out of or delete apps you won’t need while traveling. You can reinstall and log back in when you are safely away from the airport. Remember to remove them once again when you’re on your way back — and keep in mind that this may lead to some apps deleting your history.

Finally, be sure to prune your contacts to remove any that are sensitive, such as sources, if you’re a journalist. If you have sensitive materials on your devices that you’ll need to access during your travels, use a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt them and upload them to a cloud drive, then delete the files from your devices. You can download them when you reach your destination.

These extra steps are undoubtedly a bit of a pain, but any inconvenience would pale in comparison to the potential damage if sensitive information is disclosed during your time in the airport.

The post How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport appeared first on The Intercept.

She screams out the name of one of them, Mohammed, when he almost wanders into the busy street.

Fatima, 45, fled the southern suburb of Bourj al-Barajneh with her family on March 2 when Israel bombarded the community as part of the broadening regional war.

She is a mother of two young boys and an older daughter who are sitting cross-legged around her on cardboard boxes. Thick comforters, a jug of water, and a half-eaten bag of Lebanese bread lean on the statue behind them. 

It’s not the first time they have been displaced. The family is originally from Syria but escaped the civil war for the relative peace of Bourj al-Barajneh. Fatima’s mother, Warde, 70, is there in her wheelchair; she sheltered in the exact same spot under the gigantic crescent moon statue in 2024 when Israel last struck their neighborhood. 

This time, they abandoned their home when the explosions brought her sons to tears. “Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror,” she says. “So we left Bourj al-Barajneh. Yesterday we slept near this statue.” 

“Our children have been hungry since yesterday. I mean there’s no food, no drink,” she explains. “And yesterday night the children were freezing.” 

Authorities in Beirut have done nothing to help them, Fatima says. They are among a wide swath of the Lebanese populace that has been uprooted and one of tens of families who have found shelter near the gigantic crescent moon statue. A few men brought them blankets when they saw that the family was cold. The problem is that they have nowhere to go now. “Now we’re afraid to go back. They’re saying there’s bombing. So, we’re forced to be sitting here on the ground. What can we do? There’s no solution. There’s nothing,” she says. 

The next day, they are gone.

Israel’s wave of attacks on Lebanon are the deadliest conflict in the country since the 1975–1990 civil war. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people, 118 of them children, and displaced 1 million others. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah but has consistently struck residential buildings in the south and east of the country, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and, recently, parts of central Beirut as well. 

Nowhere seems safe, especially for those whose apartments are in evacuation zones that encompass nearly 600 square miles, according to the United Nations. As of mid-March, as many as 1 in 5 people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli military operations. The Intercept walked the streets of Beirut to learn their stories.

Across the street from the statue where Fatima’s family sheltered, two teenage boys lay on a thin mattress pushed up against a wall covered with purple and yellow graffiti. One is awake and scrolling his phone with one hand behind his head. Behind him, his brother sleeps. 

Karim is 16, with dark brown hair and an inviting face. A few days ago, he was in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, trying to pick up odd jobs to make money. He lived with his family in an apartment and shared a room with his brother. 

On February 28, the night the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Karim heard “problems would soon be coming to Lebanon.” He wasn’t convinced at first. When Israel started hitting the southern suburbs, Karim narrowly avoided an air attack as his parents and brother tried to escape by car on the street known as Airport Road, which connects downtown Beirut to the Rafic Hariri International Airport. “They were striking in front of us, cutting off the road.”

When they made it to downtown Beirut, his family tried to find a place to stay in schools that were being converted into makeshift shelters, but they were mostly full. “My mom has a mental health condition,” he explains. “The schools are overcrowded, and it bothers her too much.”

That’s why he’s sleeping on the street and using cafes to charge his phone. Karim runs into dukkan, or corner stores, for food, water, or whatever else he needs.

He wants to return to his house, but the strikes have only gotten worse in Dahieh since they arrived. “We have to be patient. What can we do? If we find a house we’ll go, and if we find a school we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything we’ll stay here. We have to have patience,” he says. 

“Right now, everything is exhausting. I am just so tired.”

It’s hard to grasp the scale of displacement inside Lebanon. Already, according to the U.N., 667,831 people have registered themselves as displaced with Lebanon’s government. Lebanon’s National Disaster Risk Management Unit reports that “119,700 displaced individuals [are] currently accommodated in 567 collective shelters.” However, reports suggest that more than 1 million people — of a population of just about five and a half million — are displaced, including many who have not yet registered. According to Al Jazeera, about 99,000 homes were already damaged or destroyed in the previous 14 months before this escalation started.

The Lebanese government, with the U.N. and local NGOs, says it is responding to the emergency by opening public schools, the city’s stadiums, and universities as temporary shelters. With support from the U.N. Development Programme, they also created a disaster management unit to coordinate aid, such as essential supplies and cash transfers, and direct people to safer regions like the North and Bekaa. 

Despite these efforts, the scale of displacement has far exceeded the government’s capacity to provide aid. Every one of the 36 displaced people in Beirut who spoke with The Intercept said the response has been inadequate.

“Where is the government? What are they doing?” one humanitarian aid worker asks frustratedly. 

The man who raises this question over and over again is Mohammed, who shares his frustration while sitting on his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette in front of Ras Beirut’s Public Secondary School, which has been converted into a shelter. He describes himself as part of the “resistance against Israel,” and as “a son of Ras Beirut,” known in the capital city as an upper-scale and religiously mixed neighborhood. 

“I am here to help the displaced people in that school behind me,” he points. 

He doesn’t think the Lebanese government is doing enough for its displaced citizens. “Children, boys, women, girls, are just sitting in the street with no one to feed them, no medicine at all, so we are trying, as the sons of this area, to serve them best we can.” 

Mohammed says that there are around 450 displaced people in the school with few resources. “They have no mattresses or pillows to put their heads on right now,” he begins to speak louder and get more agitated. “Inside the school, women and children are sleeping on the floor barefoot covering themselves with their clothes instead of blankets,” he says.

Throughout March, schools in Lebanon have faced a near-total disruption due to the sharp escalation in conflict. Since October 2023, Lebanon’s schools have faced repeated widespread interruption.

The atmosphere inside the school is tense as families bunch together in classrooms trying to find room. One couple has set up a nargileh, and the woman, who is in a black hijab, takes a long, deep pull from the hose and lets out a plume of smoke. “No pictures here,” one of the gentlemen running the displacement shelter tells a European journalist with a camera around her neck. “It is a very sensitive time for all of these people.” 

The facade of the school has one blue balcony on the upper left-hand side that overlooks Hamra in Ras Beirut. On it, a pair of red children’s pajama pants, along with several other pieces of clothing, are hung out to dry. “These are the children of the southern suburbs, and where are they? They are on the streets,” Mohammed says.

Hundreds of tents have sprung up along the highway that passes Horsh Beirut, a park that butts up against the southern suburbs of the city. Yara Sayegh has taken it upon herself to help their inhabitants. 

Sayegh runs an organization called Truth Be Told, which usually focuses on transitional justice and human rights in Lebanon. Now it is serving as an emergency response initiative, cooking and distributing meals and medicine to families in tents across the area. She has experience after responding the same way in during a period of intense Israeli strikes in 2024.

Recently, she decided to build a makeshift kitchen at Riwaq Cafe near Mar Mikhael in Beirut. “I decided, given how much transparency is needed and the importance and the attention to detail, and the amount of corruption I have witnessed during crises, I would just open up my own [kitchen].” 

Every day, volunteers show up to the cafe around 10 a.m. to help cook and pack meals for those fasting in Horsh Beirut. Her chef, Omar Khaled, directs volunteers on how to dice onions, squeeze lemons, and cook mujadara. He counts and recounts the boxed meals before they go out to the houseless people on the streets. Sayegh passes out as many as 1,000 meals a day in the park and surrounding areas.

“Whatever I do right now, whatever a lot of us are doing, isn’t enough,” Sayegh says “There are too many families who are displaced.”

On a rainy night in mid-March, Sayegh drives the meals to Horsh Beirut. Along the perimeter of the park, tents lining the streets are sopping wet. Tarps hang over four or five of them at a time. As she backs up her car, a line forms of people who need her help. 

“Is my medicine ready?” one woman calls out. 

“No, ma’am not yet, but inshallah I will try to bring it to you tomorrow,” Sayegh responds as she jots down another young woman’s information onto an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop. 

“I am committed to them, there aren’t enough people helping, and they have nowhere to go,” Sayegh says.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon extend far beyond Beirut and its suburbs. The most devastating strikes have been across the south of the country.

Evacuation orders took effect both south and north of the Litani River, a crucial and agriculturally rich landscape powered by the river itself, in the last week. But problems for southerners started much before that. 

At the height of its war on Gaza in 2024, Israel began a series of strikes in southern Lebanon, aimed at what it said were militant groups, including Hezbollah, that had been launching retaliatory salvos across the border. This included a campaign of deadly Israeli ground raids in the border region and the expansion of what it says is a “buffer zone.”

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According to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, between November 2024 and the end of 2025, Israeli forces have committed over 10,000 air and ground violations of a November 2024 ceasefire agreement. This included daily airstrikes and ground incursions that killed hundreds in Lebanon, including civilians. Israel never withdrew troops from southern Lebanon and has pushed further into the country as its right wing parties call to settle Lebanon and make the Litani River Israel’s northern border.

Buildings in that area have been leveled to the ground, and the Israeli military has paved roads over Lebanese homes, making sure displaced people can never return. The reality on the ground is “undeniable erasure” says Hanan, a queer Lebanese American art history student at the American University of Beirut. She is among those dealing directly with Israel’s aggression in southern Lebanon. 

Hanan grew up in Arizona about 30 minutes from the Mexican border. She came to Lebanon in August to pursue a master’s degree in art history and curation. Ever since Israel’s so-called ceasefire with Hamas, she felt a pull to Lebanon and her family there. She was drawn by bucolic memories of past visits. 

“I romanticize the shit out of that time now,” she says. “We literally ate mulberries off the trees on the mosque grounds and chopped vegetables all morning listening to Arabic music.” 

Last week, her family’s house in Chehabiye, near the southern border, was destroyed. Hanan is now housing 12 relatives in her two-bedroom apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, an upper-class Francophile, predominantly Christian community.

“Some were more prepared than others when they came. They all mostly left in a hurry,” she explains. Because of the chaos and the traffic, it took her family two days to get to her apartment in Beirut. On the journey, they slept in their cars. 

They had jobs at shoe stores and grocery stores, Hanan says. Kids were just beginning school. One relative had finally purchased a motorcycle after saving his money; it was destroyed in the strikes. “All of their lives have become completely upended,” she says.

She thinks her relatives’ building was targeted because a Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Qard Al-Hassan bank occupied the first floor. Founded in 1982, Al-Qard Al-Hassan operates more than 30 branches across Lebanon and is registered as an NGO with the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. But it is not licensed by Banque du Libam, the central bank of Lebanon, to operate as a bank. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Al-Qard Al-Hassan in 2007, stating Hezbollah uses it as a cover to manage financial activities and access the international financial system. This month, the Israeli military conducted a systematic campaign of airstrikes against numerous branches across Lebanon, identifying them as legitimate military targets because they fund Hezbollah’s military activities.

Even in Beirut, Hanan’s family is treated with suspicion. Soon after their arrival, a neighbor threatened to inform authorities that 12 relatives were crammed into Hanan’s two-bedroom apartment.

“It is just because they are southern and could be supporters of Hezbollah, and so my neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel,” Hanan explains. “What they don’t understand is that the people of the south are helping each other, even when others leave them hanging.” 

The tensions got worse on March 13, when Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets over several neighborhoods in Beirut. They called on the Lebanese citizens to “disarm Hezbollah” and said “Lebanon is your decision, not someone else’s.” Another flier, designed to look like a newspaper, warned that the current situation in Lebanon would turn into something similar to Gaza. The leaflets asked Lebanese people to inform Israel of Hezbollah’s whereabouts using a QR code. 

The point, many believe, is to stoke civil tension and sectarian fractures that will destabilize the country. Sayegh, for instance, says her family and friends don’t support her humanitarian aid work. She comes from a Christian background and is often criticized for helping supporters of Hezbollah. “We are one people and that is the only way forward, and that is why I help. I believe in one Lebanon for all,” Sayegh says. 

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Many in Lebanon understand that its diverse religious makeup leaves it vulnerable to outside forces pitting the people of the country against each other. But in the current chaos and terror of Israeli missile strikes, many who supported Hezbollah’s retaliation on behalf of Gaza just a year ago are now changing their minds. “Where were they when Israel was breaking the ceasefire in the south thousands upon thousands of times in the last year?” a young woman whose family hails from the south asks. “It seems like they came alive only for Khamenei’s death, and I don’t fully believe their leaders are doing this for Lebanon anymore,” she says.

Hanan knows the current situation is untenable in the long run. “Their loose plan is to return to the south, but I can’t realistically see that happening anytime soon,” she says.

She and her father are looking at renting an apartment in an area that will be more forgiving to her family’s circumstances and backgrounds, but with 1 million people pushed from their homes, it won’t be easy to find lodging.

An uncle works at a soup kitchen attached to a mosque that has some underutilized office space. “There’s two rooms there that they use as offices,” Hanan says. “So he’s thinking that he can turn them into rooms temporarily before they return south, which is actually crazy, because the building right next door got bombed the other day.” 

The post More Than 1 Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced. These Are Their Stories. appeared first on The Intercept.

In August 2024, the Biden administration hosted hundreds of influencers at the White House for the first-ever Creator Economy Conference. Neera Tanden, a senior Biden adviser, took to the stage and bemoaned anonymity online. The influencers alongside her agreed, pushing the idea that anonymous speech on the internet is harmful, and regulation is needed to force the use of real names on social media. The audience whispered excitedly as those on stage spoke about how proposed laws like the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, could unmask every troll. 

This narrative of online safety, particularly in relation to children, has become central to the bipartisan effort to censor and deanonymize the internet for everyone. Today, a package of a dozen “child online safety” bills is moving forward in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. The laws, framed as a way to crack down on harmful content and make the internet safer, would force social media companies to enact invasive identity verification measures in order to keep children from accessing online spaces.

The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street.

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Already, the U.S. government is flooding social media platforms with subpoenas seeking to unmask hundreds of anonymously run anti-ICE social media accounts. These laws would make it all the more easier for the government to target and prosecute those who dissent. 

Vulnerable members of society will suffer most. Trans people under attack from the government could be identified and outed without their consent. Undocumented immigrants could be cut off from the ability to communicate and connect with advocates. Young people seeking abortions in states with restrictive laws might no longer have the ability to access information safely and anonymously.

Not only will a de-anonymized internet be valuable to the government as it seeks to tighten control, it will also make it easier for any corporation or bad actor to intimidate, blackmail, or exploit people by leveraging their own data against them.

The quest to remove anonymous speech from the web is not new. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, have long pursued these laws, arguing that online anonymity fuels pornography, exploitation, and general moral decay. In recent years, Democrats have become integral to advancing these proposals, falsely claiming that surveillance laws will crack down on Big Tech or curb social media addiction.

None of these surveillance laws do any of that. In fact, the laws will lead to more data being collected on kids, which predatory companies can then use to target them in more invasive ways. Already, these bills are standing in the way of protecting kids online: Last week, the FTC said it would decline to enforce COPPA, a landmark law that mandates the protection of children’s data, in order to incentivize ID verification.

The laws would create a massive new market for third-party identification vendors, many funded by the same tech investors who backed social media giants, such as Peter Thiel, who funded ID verification platform Persona via his investment group Founders Fund. Smaller apps will be forced to shoulder the enormous cost of enacting identity verification measures, hindering their ability to operate, and making it harder to compete with Big Tech companies that are leveraging these laws to consolidate power.

It’s no surprise then that Big Tech companies are also heavily involved in lobbying for various versions of these laws. Elon Musk has endorsed KOSA. The Digital Childhood Alliance, a group that frequently posts about the dangers of “Big Tech,” is secretly funded by Meta, and has played a role in pushing the App Store Accountability Act. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told a court that Apple and Google should verify the identity of every smartphone user at the operating system level, which would permanently end anonymous internet access for everyone.

This exact invasive scheme is being boosted by Democratic lawmakers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently signed an ID verification law for all operating systems, including Linux, and has mused about banning all social media for users under the age of 16.

These efforts have “been brewing for or for a few years now, but just in the last few months, we’ve seen a lot of momentum,” said David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While it’s tempting to take a paternalistic attitude toward young people, Greene said that it’s crucial to recognize young people have rights too, and often use the internet when taking part in social justice movements.

“Young people still have human rights,” he said, “and that includes the right to access information and to associate with other people and to speak to the world. These laws are designed to diminish those rights.”

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Young people have led campuswide protests against the genocide in Gaza and against ICE across the country. Laws that restrict and surveil online access would severely limit their speech and ability to organize. And as the U.S. escalates attacks in the Middle East and immigration agents exert more power at home, activists are becoming concerned by the assault on anonymous speech.

“Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home,” Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, posted to Bluesky.

The Kids Online Safety Act, co-sponsored by members of both parties, is one of the most dangerous proposals currently making its way through Congress. The law would empower state attorneys general to mass censor any content online deemed “harmful to minors.” The Heritage Foundation has already come out publicly and said it plans to leverage KOSA and similar “online safety” laws to remove LGBTQ+ content and abortion content from the internet. 

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the lead co-sponsor of KOSA, said that it was essential to pass the law to protect “minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture.” Jonathan Haidt, the author of the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” who has played a major role in rallying political and public support for these laws globally, has promoted the fringe theory that some young people become trans because of the social media they consume.

As KOSA has encountered growing backlash, more lawmakers have started pushing proposed ID verification at the operating system or app store level. On Wednesday, the X account for the House Energy and Commerce Committee boosted a dubious poll from far right think tank the American Principles Project, a group that has opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, declaring, “The OVERWHELMING majority of voters agree—app stores should have to verify users’ age to prevent minors from downloading apps without parental consent.” 

But enacting identity verification at the app store level does nothing to address the privacy issues at play. Privacy activists and those fighting the law have sounded the alarm about how the App Store Accountability Act creates a sprawling, insecure data-sharing pipeline that mandates divulging highly sensitive user age data with millions of general-audience apps. This is why users in some states are being forced to provide their government IDs to download things like a weather app or calculator app. The way the law equates the entire internet and treats every app in the app store as inherently pornographic will also inevitably chill speech.

Rising reactionary sentiment and right-wing extremism under Trump has accelerated the push for online age verification, Greer said. “Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed [if these laws pass].” Already, similar versions of these laws are playing out abroad. Soon after the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act took effect last summer, the law was used to restrict content, including videos documenting police violence, posts challenging the government’s narratives on Palestine, and a subreddit dedicated to documenting Israel’s war crimes.

China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have used their vast online surveillance systems to crack down on speech challenging the government, imprisoning activists who leverage social media to challenge power. Dozens more countries are seeking to replicate authoritarian-style internet surveillance within their own borders. Indonesia, Malaysia, France, and Australia are among those that have embraced identity verification systems that would eliminate anonymous speech online under the guise of protecting children. 

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“The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ­— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group. “In the United States, the federal government’s recent demands that online services identify critics of DHS and ICE serves as a chilling example of the types of attacks on lawful speech that such laws will only enable further.” 

The harms of widespread government censorship, he said, are only compounded by the “massive privacy and security threats posed by collecting personally identifiable information en masse.” Systems built to remove anonymity in the name of “child safety” will be used to identify whistleblowers, protest organizers, and critics of federal agencies, Cohn said. “At this point, not seeing the planet-sized red flags is more a result of willful blindness than anything else,” he said. 

For journalists, dissidents, and vulnerable communities, the ability to gather and share information anonymously online is critical. Just this week, The Atlantic reported that the Pentagon is seeking to use powerful AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to mass surveil U.S. citizens by harvesting broad swaths of commercially available data. Age verification laws would dramatically expand the collection of identity-linked browsing and speech data, endangering users and creating new troves of data for commercial and government exploitation.

LGBTQ+ youth frequently rely on anonymous online spaces to explore identity and seek support, particularly in hostile states. Kansas recently invalidated hundreds of trans residents’ driver’s licenses. As harmful laws that target LGBTQ+ people spread, openly identifying as LGBTQ+ online could put people in danger. Tying online access to government-issued IDs will also deter vulnerable young people from seeking help or gaining information about crucial topics like abuse or sexual health. Reproductive justice activists have been sounding the alarm about state efforts to de-anonymize organizations providing abortion and reproductive health information online.

Whistleblowers especially rely on anonymous accounts to call out corporate or government wrongdoing. During Trump’s first administration, dozens of employees and scientists within the government set up “rogue” Twitter accounts, revealing firsthand information about the administration’s efforts to gut federal agencies and censor scientific information. The “rebel” accounts mirroring those of NASA, the U.S. National Park Service, and other agencies revealed crucial research on topics like climate change to the public. 

The push to eliminate online anonymity is ultimately a fight over whether the internet remains a space for dissent and free expression or further becomes a dystopian digital panopticon that operates as an arm of the surveillance state. A free society depends on the right to publish and consume information anonymously and to organize and speak privately. Age verification policies only bolster the power of Big Tech and give the government complete authority to surveil and censor online speech.

The post Congress Is Considering Abolishing Your Right to Be Anonymous Online appeared first on The Intercept.

As he followed their vehicles, they led him down a rural road that grew increasingly familiar during the 20-minute drive. Soon, Little told The Intercept, he realized where the federal agents were headed: his house.

When he approached his driveway, two SUVs were already waiting, Little said. Agents moved to block his car, claiming he had impeded their investigation and that local law enforcement would be called. No other officers came to his house, and Little was not cited or charged.

“The intent was clearly to intimidate us. It’s stressful. It’s a little bit scary. But at the same time,” Little said, “I just think it’s really important to be out there and monitoring what they’re doing.”

Interviews, sworn declarations, and video reviewed by The Intercept indicate that Little is not the only person subjected to this kind of intimidation. Across the Twin Cities, immigration agents have identified legal observers by name and address, and, in some cases, led them back to their homes after they engaged in lawful monitoring of immigration activity. Legal observers say this pattern of behavior sends a clear and chilling message: The federal government knows who they are and where they live.

These encounters are unfolding amid a rapid expansion of federal surveillance capabilities.

Immigration authorities have significantly expanded their use of mobile biometric and surveillance tools in recent years. Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection, for example, can use the smartphone app Mobile Fortify to photograph a person’s face or capture fingerprints in the field and compare them against federal biometric databases, according to a Department of Homeland Security inventory of artificial intelligence technologies.

Those tools operate within a broader surveillance infrastructure that includes automated license plate readers, commercial data brokers, and face recognition systems. A 2022 report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found ICE can access driver’s license data covering roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults, including state photo databases that can be searched using face recognition technology.

Civil liberties advocates say the growing web of identification tools has enabled federal agents to quickly identify anyone who monitors or protests their actions — chilling protected First Amendment activity and deterring the legal observation of law enforcement.

“We make sure to lock the door now,” said Little. “It’s definitely heightened our awareness. I’m scared when I’m out there. But for me, it’s a lot scarier to just sit at my house.”

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Attorneys and community observers say similar fears are emerging across the Twin Cities even as Operation Metro Surge is said to be winding down.

Beth Jackson, a longtime St. Paul resident and grandmother who participates in a local network of volunteer observers, described one frightening encounter that escalated quickly. According to Jackson and a heavily redacted police report reviewed by The Intercept, local officers surrounded her vehicle with guns drawn after a federal agent alleged that she made violent threats. Jackson denies the allegation, and her attorney said no criminal charges were filed.

Jackson said agents never explained how they identified her. In prior encounters, she said, federal officers told her they had been to her home and knew where she lived, which she interpreted as an attempt at intimidation.

Days later, Jackson said she received notice that her Transportation Security Administration PreCheck status, for moving more quickly through airport security, would be revoked based on the same incident.

Jackson was among four sources active in legal observation in Minnesota who described the panic they experienced after federal agents revealed knowledge of their identities.

“I live here. I commute on these streets every day. I am a grandmother of six, a mother of three. We should be just living our simple little life, and we can’t,” Jackson said.

Court filings reviewed by The Intercept describe encounters strikingly similar to those reported by Twin Cities legal observers.

The accounts appear in Tincher v. Noem, a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Twin Cities residents who say they were unlawfully targeted while monitoring immigration enforcement.

In a sworn declaration, Edina resident Emily Beltz said she was lawfully following an unmarked federal vehicle in January when a woman in the passenger seat leaned out of the SUV window and began shouting her name.

“Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home,” the masked agent yelled, according to Beltz’s declaration, before repeating her name and home address in what Beltz described as a mocking tone.

Beltz said the message alarmed her. “I was freaked out,” she wrote. “The agents had told me, in effect, that they knew where I lived and could come and get me and my family at any time.”

Beltz said the encounter left her fearful about continuing her work as a legal observer.

In a separate declaration, Minneapolis resident Katherine Henly described following suspected ICE vehicles when agents suddenly stopped on her block and began photographing her home.

“This seemed like a clear attempt to intimidate me and my family,” Henly wrote. She said masked agents later exited their vehicles, with one officer carrying what she described as a large firearm and accused observers of impeding enforcement. Henly said the observers had maintained a safe distance.

She said she feared the images of her home and vehicle could be stored in a government database, and that the encounter left her “extremely shaken and scared” and worried about the safety of her young children.

Civil liberties advocates say the reported conduct raises broader constitutional concerns.

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“We are seeing immigration and law enforcement officers take photos of observers, call them by name, follow observers home, and tell observers that they are being tracked in a database. This practice of intimidation is chilling communities across the country, even though documenting and protesting law enforcement operations are protected by the First Amendment,” said Byul Yoon, a Skadden Fellow with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

While many encounters described by observers involve surveillance and intimidation, some have escalated into far more dangerous confrontations.

Ed Higgins, a longtime legal observer and Marine Corps veteran in Columbia Heights, Minnesota — the city where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained earlier this year — said he has witnessed encounters that turned violent. In some cases, he feared for his life.

On February 5, Higgins said a group of federal agents pursued him through the city and repeatedly tried to force him off the road. As the pursuit unfolded, Higgins called 911, telling the dispatcher that the vehicles following him appeared to be immigration agents and that they were “trying to run into me right now,” according to video obtained by The Intercept.

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Dispatchers directed Higgins to drive toward the Columbia Heights Police Department for safety. Surveillance video later obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune showed Higgins’s van entering the parking lot at speed, followed closely by multiple SUVs that boxed him in.

Video obtained by The Intercept shows agents surrounding Higgins’s vehicle, shouting at him and striking his car windows with their firearms, before a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension official who happened to be in the parking lot intervened to de-escalate the confrontation.

“I was panicking the whole way. I thought they were going to kill me,” Higgins said. “I kept telling the 911 operator they were going to kill me.”

Higgins said the encounter unfolded in seconds.

“I had my hands up. I was yelling for help,” he said in an interview with The Intercept. “Everything was happening so fast.”

Higgins was ultimately taken to the Whipple Federal Building, where he said he watched authorities enter his Social Security number and other personal information into a Microsoft Teams chat.

“They called it ‘agitator chat,’ and they would just put information in there. I have no idea who was in there, but it looked like 500 people,” he said.

Higgins was released the same day without any charges related to the incident.

He later reiterated his account in testimony to Minnesota state lawmakers, saying the confrontation left him believing the encounter could have turned deadly if the state official had not intervened.

Responding to questions about Higgins’s account, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said: “No policies have been violated.”

“Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime,” the spokesperson said. “Secretary Noem has been clear: anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Legal observers fear they will continue to be monitored by federal authorities.

The day after her detention, Jackson, the grandmother of six, said that agents returned to her neighborhood and parked directly in front of her home.

“Family members don’t want me to come up there because they’re fucking afraid I’m going to bring ICE up there,” Jackson said. “I deliver Meals on Wheels every Tuesday to the elderly and infirm. I can’t deliver Meals on Wheels now.”

Courts evaluating potential First Amendment retaliation typically examine whether government conduct would deter an ordinary person from continuing protected activity, said the ACLU’s Yoon.

The lawsuit alleges that federal immigration agents violated the First and Fourth Amendments by retaliating against individuals engaged in lawful observation and protest. The plaintiffs are seeking court orders barring such conduct and mandating policy changes.

The case is pending in federal court in Minnesota. The plaintiffs are seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief that would bar the challenged tactics while the litigation proceeds.

Jackson said the disruption to ordinary routines has been one of the most lasting consequences.

“It’s the ripple effects of what they’re doing to us,” Jackson added. “All these intangible ways they’ve damaged us. I have a lot of time to give to my community. I don’t want to give it in this way.”

The post Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live” appeared first on The Intercept.

“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, who previously served as chief of international law at U.S. Central Command.

The United Nations Charter generally restricts the use of force to cases of self-defense or with approval from the U.N. Security Council. The Constitution separately gives Congress the power to authorize offensive war.

The War Powers Resolution also requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities and limits how long those forces can operate without congressional approval. Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed members of Congress’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in calls Friday night ahead of the strikes, according to administration officials and news reports.

Legal experts say advance briefings to the Gang of Eight do not necessarily satisfy the War Powers Resolution, which contemplates a formal written report to Congress as an institution, not just a small group of leaders.

“This is an introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities,” said VanLandingham, who now teaches national security law at Southwestern Law School. “It absolutely triggers the 48-hour notice requirement,” she said.

The fact American service members died in the operation raises further legal concerns, she said, as Congress is intended to decide when American lives are placed at risk in offensive wars.

Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., called the operation “dangerous” and “illegal,” saying Trump launched the attack “without authorization from Congress.”

“Speaker Johnson must immediately reconvene the House so we can pass a War Powers Resolution to rein in this unauthorized use of our military and taxpayer dollars,” Balint said.

Democratic leaders had already been moving toward a vote on a bipartisan war powers resolution in the days before the strikes, though the measure was widely expected to fail amid scattered Democratic opposition and near-unified Republican resistance.

From a legal perspective, VanLandingham said the attacks, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, present fewer ambiguities than prior U.S. strikes on Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025, which the U.S. said targeted Iranian nuclear facilities.

Over time, administrations of both parties have steadily expanded unilateral war powers, VanLandingham said, effectively redefining what counts as war in constitutional terms and expanding the circumstances in which presidents can use force without congressional approval. She pointed to air campaigns under Presidents Barack Obama in Libya and Donald Trump in Syria as examples of operations the executive branch treated as falling short of war requiring congressional authorization.

Questions of International Law

The death toll for Operation Epic Fury is mounting, both among civilians and combatants. A strike on a girls’ primary school resulted in nearly 100 reported civilian casualties, and U.S. Central Command said three U.S. service members were killed in action and five seriously wounded. Several others service members sustained minor injuries, the command said, as combat operations continued across the region.

Video circulating on social media appeared to show large explosions near U.S. military installations in Bahrain, including the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, though the extent of any damage was not immediately clear. The U.S. Navy did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether any service members were killed or injured in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

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U.S. casualties heighten the constitutional stakes, VanLandingham said, because the decision to place American troops in harm’s way has traditionally rested with Congress, which she described as the government’s closest representation of the American public.

“To say there’s no risk to U.S. troops … I wouldn’t call it naive. I’d call it a pure lie,” said Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

Bryant said the scope of the strikes suggested major combat operations that could quickly tip toward large-scale conflict in a densely populated country, with predictable risks to both U.S. troops and civilians.

Bryant said the early casualty figures may not reflect the full risk if hostilities continue. “I’m surprised it’s only been three deaths,” he said. “It will be more if this continues and we lose the initial shock value.”

U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks targeting American installations and reported minimal damage that did not disrupt base operations.

Early reports of successful Iranian strikes, if confirmed, could signal vulnerabilities in U.S. regional defenses, said analysts with the Eisenhower Media Network.

“If these reports are accurate, this should be very concerning to U.S. forces,” said Matt Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain and State Department official who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Iranian missiles and drones were able to breach U.S. defenses very early in the conflict.”

Hoh said early breaches of U.S. defenses, if confirmed, could reflect gaps in regional air defenses, evolving Iranian missile capabilities, or lessons Tehran has drawn from observing U.S. operations.

The Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain serves as the centerpiece of U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf, and any sustained threat to installations in the region could complicate American force posture and maritime security operations.

Also within range of Iran’s missile arsenal is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, one of the largest U.S.-operated airfields outside the United States and home to thousands of American personnel.

Iran had repeatedly warned it would target U.S. bases if attacked, said Karen U. Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon officer. The retaliation reflects “the behavior of a near-peer adversary” and marks a sharp contrast with the kinds of conflicts the United States has fought over the past three decades.

Iran is conventionally weaker than the United States but remains regionally dangerous through its large missile and drone arsenal and its ability to apply asymmetric pressure on U.S. forces. Recent reporting has also raised concerns about strain on U.S. naval interceptor stockpiles after heavy use in Middle East operations.

The risks extend beyond military escalation. Bryant said the opening strikes raise significant concerns about civilian harm and the risk of a broader regional conflict, particularly given the coordinated nature of the U.S.–Israel campaign.

“I really worry about the civilian harm that’s going to result if this becomes a prolonged conflict,” Bryant said. “Whatever happens … we own that.”

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Some national security analysts sharply questioned the administration’s humanitarian rationale for the strikes, noting that the threshold for unilateral presidential force is typically tied to imminent threats to the United States. Critics also argue that the administration’s broader domestic record — including policies affecting women’s bodily autonomy, aggressive immigration enforcement, and the detention of some government protesters — undercuts its stated moral justification for military action against Iran.

Bryant warned the risks could escalate quickly if the conflict expands beyond the opening air campaign, particularly given Iran’s military capabilities and regional proxy network.

“If we thought the insurgency was bad in Iraq or even Syria, wait until we enter Iran,” Bryant said.

U.S. officials have not announced any plans for ground operations in Iran, and analysts say the administration’s next steps remain uncertain.

Domestic Political Implications

Shortly after the strikes, Trump and his allies framed the operation through a domestic political lens, amplifying without evidence unsubstantiated claims that Iran interfered in the 2020 election.

For VanLandingham, the rhetoric stood out not just for its substance but also its timing ahead of midterm elections.

“What’s chilling is that he’s tying this attack against another country to domestic politics as a way to further consolidate power over his base and potentially link the use of force to domestic use of force this fall,” she said.

Viewed in that light, she said, the seemingly ridiculous claim appears more strategic.

“It’s mind-boggling. But when you look at it, it makes rational sense for him to say, ‘I’m doing this because I’m taking out everyone who stood in my way in 2020,’” VanLandingham said. “He is linking it to his own domestic grievances because he is laying the groundwork, I strongly believe, to use the U.S. military improperly.”

Bryant, who previously led civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said the administration’s framing echoes familiar patterns in which when governments blur external threats with internal political messaging. He pointed to recent violence against protesters and legal observers in Minnesota as a parallel, albeit on a smaller scale, to Iran’s brutal crackdowns on dissent.

“Everything that Trump is accusing the Iranian regime of doing, he has done,” Bryant said.

Other national security analysts warned the messaging could have concrete domestic consequences if wartime authorities are invoked inside the United States. Trump has previously threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests over ICE operations in Minneapolis.

“This is the kind of messaging that will allow the administration to cite national security if they attempt to nationalize elections, have federal law enforcement, like ICE, patrol polling places, and enact executive orders or push legislation to strip Americans of voting rights and other civil liberties,” Hoh said.

Federal law enforcement has already signaled an elevated posture. FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X that counterterrorism teams are operating at heightened readiness.

“Our Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country are working 24/7 to address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland,” Patel wrote.

The post Trump’s Iran Attack Was Illegal, Former U.S. Military Officials Allege appeared first on The Intercept.

The scale of the Trump administration’s plans to warehouse human beings is hard to fathom. Here’s one way to put it in perspective: On a given day, New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex holds approximately 7,000 detainees. President Donald Trump’s regime, which is currently holding a record 70,000 people in immigration detention, now plans to develop a network of Rikers-sized concentration camps for immigrants nationwide.

The Department of Homeland Security is racing to buy up and convert two-dozen-plus warehouses into mass detention centers for immigrants, some capable of holding up to 10,000 people. According to documents released last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion acquiring warehouses across the country and retrofitting them to collectively hold nearly 100,000 beds.

“If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they’ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight,” noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “The federal government hasn’t operated a prison camp inside the United States that large since Japanese Internment.”

When Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, last week announced that ICE’s “surge” in Minnesota would wind down, it marked a significant victory for the thousands of Minnesotans who have fought back against the federal forces terrorizing their state; resistance forced the Trump regime to change its plans. But nothing is ramping down when it comes to the deportation machine at large. When billions of dollars are spent to turn industrial spaces into detention camps, authoritarian desires meet market logic: The warehouses must be filled.

Local communities are nonetheless pushing back, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable federal forces with unlimited funding, abetted by powerful private interests who stand to gain from this carceral build-out.

As The Appeal reported last week, investors on a recent quarterly earnings call for private prison giant CoreCivic were worried that ICE’s unprecedented detention numbers were still not high enough. “I think people thought we’d be at that 100,000 level,” one caller reportedly said of the number of people currently held by ICE. “We’re at a little over 70,000.”

The company’s CEO stressed the major financial gains made though Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and assured callers that the drawdown in Minnesota did not, in his view, portend “meaningful changes in enforcement style or approach.” That is to say, the racial profiling, cruelty, and mass roundups will continue, and private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group, alongside giants of surveillance infrastructure like Palantir, will collectively make billions from DHS spending. What author John Ganz has called “ICE’s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob” — now with 22,000 officers — will also continue to be handsomely funded.

None of this is a surprise: When Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocating ICE nearly $80 billion in multiyear funding, the administration made clear that money would be no object in enacting its project of ethnic cleansing and the expansion of the carceral system for targeted groups of immigrants and opponents. The warehouse purchases and related government contracts have, as The Lever reported, been a boon for Trump-connected real estate brokers and a bailout for “commercial real estate owners, who have struggled to sell their properties over the past year under the weight of macroeconomic headwinds and Trump’s tariff war.”

Economic stimulus based in ethnic cleansing would, of course, be despicable. But the Trump regime can’t even pretend this dizzyingly expensive project serves its own base. Only a small number of interested businesses and parties stand to gain. Meanwhile, as public resistance in both Republican- and Democratic-majority locales has already made clear, everyone else stands to lose. And hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors stand to lose the most.

Trump’s mass deportation plan is estimated by the libertarian Cato Institute to have a fiscal cost of up to $1 trillion over a decade. And the losses? Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It’s money that could be spent improving our collective lives. The $45 billion total budgeted for ICE detention centers is nearly four times the $12.8 billion the U.S. spent on new affordable housing in 2023. The huge budget for ICE mega warehouses reflects the most Trumpian mix: cronyist dealmaking in service of white nationalism.

The historian Adam Tooze has at various points recalled the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, who said in 1942 that “anything we can actually do we can afford.” Keynes was arguing that sovereign governments have extraordinary capacity to mobilize finances; the constraints lie elsewhere. Tooze has stressed that the limits of what a government can “actually do” are political, technical, material, and logistical — and extremely complicated as such. But, he points out, they are not budgetary. The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters. That, however, does not mean the government can actually do everything it wants.

A number of warehouse owners, facing local backlash and pressure, have already backed out of lucrative sales to ICE. According to Bloomberg, Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company announced that a transaction to sell a 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, “will not be proceeding.” The company made clear that the move was political, saying, “We understand that the conversation around immigration policy and enforcement is particularly heated, and has become much more so over the past few weeks. We respect that this issue is deeply important to many people.”

For ICE, money is no object. But constant and relentless public protest, blockades, boycotts, and local government pressure significantly lessen the appeal for warehouse owners and potential contractors to do this fascist work.

Deals for warehouses near Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, and Byhalia, Missouri, have also fallen through. In each case, warehouse owners faced protests and mounting pressure. In some jurisdictions, backlash to ICE warehouses have come in the worst sort of NIMBY variety — including complaints from Republicans who do not want immigrant detainees brought to their town en masse. Concerns about water and sewage systems and economic strains in remote areas also abound. But if local self-interest becomes a barrier to the expansion of Trump’s deportation regime, that’s no bad thing, given the urgent need to hold back Trump’s deeply unpopular but otherwise unrestrained forces.

We need every possible limit on what Trump and his loyalists can actually do.

The post Can Trump’s Plan for Warehouse Immigrant Detention Camps Be Stopped? appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.

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The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

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McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

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Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

With masked paramilitary forces grabbing nonwhite people from the streets and shooting civilians with impunity, it can be difficult to keep focus on all the other ways Republicans are entrenching a fascist status quo nationwide. For trans people, however, the legislative and policy assaults, which have been escalating red states for nearly a decade, are only getting worse — and, as ever, drawing all too little concern from Democratic leaders.

Just last week, the Kansas legislature passed some of the most far-reaching measures to push trans and gender-nonconforming people out of public life to date. Bathroom bans that bar trans people from restrooms aligned with their gender identity have become grimly common; over 20 states have such a law on the books. But Kansas’s new anti-trans bathroom bill adds a dangerous twist: a bounty hunter provision.

The law would permit private citizens to sue and seek monetary reward based on claiming to encounter a trans person in the bathroom. That’s on top of some of the harshest punishments of any existing bathroom bans, such as criminal charges, steep fines and even jail time.

As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed first reported, the bill’s vague language means that its reach could extend beyond public buildings — the remit of most bathroom bans around the country.

“As written, it would not only be the first bathroom bounty law to target transgender people directly, but also the first to extend a bathroom ban into private spaces,” noted Reed, “effectively creating the nation’s first private bathroom ban if enacted by empowering bounty hunters to search for trans people in bathrooms.”

The language of the bill, while vague, says that any person who alleges to be “aggrieved” by the presence of a trans person they encounter in a restroom facility can file a civil suit against that individual for “damages” of at least $1,000.

Kansas Republicans rushed through the bathroom ban, skirting public comment by essentially sneaking the bill into another piece of legislation aimed at denying trans people correct government IDs. The ID legislation is in and of itself extreme: it would invalidate driver’s licenses, government IDs, and even birth certificates that don’t list a person’s sex as assigned at birth.

The bill would require trans people to surrender their correctly identifying driver’s license or risk a misdemeanor offense for driving with a invalid license. Trans Kansans would thus have to choose between carrying identification with their assigned sex at birth — inviting potentially further harassment and violence in public — or forgoing aspects of public life entirely. It’s a policy in line with the Trump administration’s move to stop issuing accurate passports to trans Americans.

The bathroom bounty hunter ban was then layered on top of the ID law in a so-called “gut and go” maneuver.

The twin bills passed both the state House and Senate with over two-thirds of the vote, given the significant Republican majority — enough to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

“Transgender people are already vulnerable to violence, especially in restrooms, and this bill layers prospective physical violence on top of the existing privacy violation of forced changes to identification documents,” said Logan DeMond, director of policy and research at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, in a statement.

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The fondness of Trumpian Republicans for bounty hunter laws comes as no surprise, recalling the dark legacies of Fugitive Slave Act laws and Jim Crow civilian surveillance. Now, whether criminalizing abortions, rounding up immigrants, or policing gender expression, far-right leaders and think tanks embrace vigilante violence as a key mechanism of enforcement. The aim is to produce a climate of distrust and terror.

Anti-trans zealots have been harassing people they believe to be trans — including multiple incidents involving cis women — even without the promise of financial payoff. The Kansas legislation only “turbocharges,” as Reed put it, the violent policing of access to public life.

“I have sat here for five and a half hours and listened to this entire room debate my humanity and my ability to participate in the most basic functions of society,” said Kansas Democratic state Rep. Abi Boatman, who is the only trans lawmaker in the state, when the new legislation was debated. “I hope none of you have to ever sit through something like that.”

It should not need repeating that it is trans people who overwhelmingly face harassment and violence in bathroom facilities; the framing of bathroom bills as a question of cis women’s safety has always been a bunk excuse to enforce gender conformism. It should also be obvious that any laws encouraging the surveillance and control of our bodies, particularly with women’s bodies as the site of paranoiac anti-trans obsession, make all women less safe. And as with any such laws, it is always Black trans and cis women who face the worst scrutiny.

We should not forget that just one decade ago, the Christian far-right groups that pushed the first round of model bathroom bills into statehouses largely failed. Politicians faced huge public backlash; the state of North Carolina faced massive boycotts in response to its 2016 bathroom bill. But conservative think tanks got to work, refocused manipulative messaging around children and women’s sports, and astroturfed the issue to activate the right-wing base. In the following years, anti-trans legislation swept through statehouses.

All the while, far too many Democratic leaders, like the serpentine California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been willing to throw trans people under the bus. While bathroom bills have been the preserve of Republican-led states, Democrats with national standing have roundly failed in supporting the sort of pressure campaigns that gave state lawmakers pause for thought 10 years ago. Bathroom bans now abound, and ​27 states have enacted laws or policies restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

Within such a context, there’s little wonder that legislation is only becoming harsher and crueler. And while the attack on trans existence is part of a longer history of Christian right pro-natalism and attacks on bodily autonomy, it is not so long ago that public pressure made attacks on trans rights a political liability.

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It is our responsibility to make it so again — particularly for Democrats claiming to represent a united anti-fascist front. And, above all, to ensure we support community-based networks working in solidarity with trans adults and children around the country so that they can have health care, work, learn, socialize, and share in public life without scrutiny or challenge. These are the minimal conditions for freedom — apparently too much to ask for some Democrats.

The post An Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill With a Cruel New Twist appeared first on The Intercept.

Included in the search and seizure warrant for the raid on Natanson’s home is a section titled “Biometric Unlock,” which explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson’s phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics: the convenient shortcuts that let you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint or face.

It is not clear if Natanson used biometric authentication on her devices, or if the law enforcement personnel attempted to use her face or fingers to unlock her devices. Natanson and the Washington Post did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

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Natanson has not been charged with a crime. Investigators searched her home in connection with alleged communication between her and government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, who was initially charged with unlawfully retaining national defense information. Prosecutors recently added new charges including multiple counts of transmission of defense information to an unauthorized person. Attorneys for Perez-Lugones did not comment.

The warrant included a few stipulations limiting law enforcement personnel. Investigators were not authorized to ask Natanson details about what kind of biometric authentication she may have used on her devices. For instance, the warrant explicitly stated they could not ask Natanson which specific finger she uses for biometrics, if any. Although if Natanson were to voluntarily provide any such information, that would be allowed, according to the warrant.

Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that while the EFF has “seen warrants that authorize police to compel individuals to unlock their devices using biometrics in the past,” the caveat mandating that the subject of the search cannot be asked for specifics about their biometric setup is likely influenced by recent case law. “Last year the D.C. Circuit held that biometric unlocking can be a form of ‘testimony’ that is protected by the 5th Amendment,” Crocker said. This is especially the case when a person is “forced to demonstrate which finger unlocks the device.”

Crocker said that he “would like to see courts treat biometric locks as equivalent to password protection from a constitutional standpoint. Your constitutional right against self-incrimination should not be dependent on technical convenience or lack thereof.”

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Activists and journalists have long been cautioned to disable biometrics in specific situations where they might face heightened risk of losing control of their phones, say when attending a protest or crossing a border. Martin Shelton, deputy director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation, advised “journalists to disable biometrics when they expect to be in a situation where they expect a possible search.”

Instead of using biometrics, it’s safest to unlock your devices using an alphanumeric passphrase (a device protected solely by a passcode consisting of numbers is generally easier to access). There are numerous other safeguards to take if there’s a possibility your home may be raided, such as turning off your phone before going to bed, which puts it into an encrypted state until the next time it’s unlocked.

That said, there are a few specific circumstances when biometric-based authentication methods might make sense from a privacy perspective — such as in a public place where someone might spy on your passphrase over your shoulder.

The post Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone’s Biometrics Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Less than an hour before, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted a photo of the exact same scene, but in Noem’s version Levy Armstrong appeared composed, not crying in the least.

Seeking to determine if the White House version of the photo had been altered using artificial intelligence tools, we turned to Google’s SynthID — a detection mechanism that Google claims is able to discern whether an image or video was generated using Google’s own AI. We followed Google’s instructions and used its AI chatbot, Gemini, to see if the image contained SynthID forensic markers.

The results were clear: The White House image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. We published a story about it.

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After posting the article, however, subsequent attempts to use Gemini to authenticate the image with SynthID produced different outcomes.

In our second test, Gemini concluded that the image of Levy Armstrong crying was actually authentic. (The White House doesn’t even dispute that the image was doctored. In response to questions about its X post, a spokesperson said, “The memes will continue.”)

In our third test, SynthID determined that the image was not made with Google’s AI, directly contradicting its first response.

At a time when AI-manipulated photos and videos are growing inescapable, these inconsistent responses raise serious questions about SynthID’s reliability to tell fact from fiction.

Initial SynthID Results

Google describes SynthID as a digital watermarking system. It embeds invisible markers into AI-generated images, audio, text or video created using Google’s tools, which it can then detect — proving whether a piece of online content is authentic.

“The watermarks are embedded across Google’s generative AI consumer products, and are imperceptible to humans — but can be detected by SynthID’s technology,” says a page on the site for DeepMind, Google’s AI division.

Google presents SynthID as having what in the realm of digital watermarking is known as “robustness” — it claims to be able to detect the watermarks even if an image undergoes modifications, such as cropping or compression. Therefore, an image manipulated with Google’s AI should contain detectable watermarks even if it has been saved multiple times or posted on social media.

Google steers those who want to use SynthID toward its Gemini AI chatbot, which they can prompt with questions about the authenticity of digital content.

“Want to check if an image or video was generated, or edited, by Google AI? Ask Gemini,” the SynthID landing page says.

We decided to do just that.

We saved the image file that the official White House account posted on X, bearing the filename G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif, and uploaded it to Gemini. We asked whether SynthID detected the image had been generated with Google’s AI.

To test SynthID’s claims of robustness, we also uploaded a further cropped and re-encoded image, which we named imgtest2.jpg.

Finally, we uploaded a copy of the photo where Levy Armstrong was not crying, as previously posted by Noem. (In the above screenshot, Gemini refers to Noem’s photo as signal-2026-01-22-122805_002.jpeg because we downloaded it from the Signal messaging app).

“I’ve analyzed the images you provided,” wrote Gemini. “Based on the results from SynthID, all or part of the first two images were likely generated or modified with Google AI.”

“Technical markers within the files imgtest2.jpg and G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif indicate the use of Google’s generative AI tools to alter the subject’s appearance,” the bot wrote. It also identified the version of the image posted by Noem as appearing to “be the original photograph.”

With confirmation from Google that its SynthID system had detected hidden forensic watermarks in the image, we reported in our story that the White House had posted an image that had been doctored with Google’s AI.

This wasn’t the only evidence the White House image wasn’t real; Levy Armstrong’s attorney told us that he was at the scene during the arrest and that she was not at all crying. The White House also openly described the image as a meme.

A Striking Reversal

A few hours after our story published, Google told us that they “don’t think we have an official comment to add.” A few minutes after that, a spokesperson for the company got back to us and said they could not replicate the result we got. They asked us for the exact files we uploaded. We provided them.

The Google spokesperson then asked, “Were you able to replicate it again just now?”

We ran the analysis again, asking Gemini to see if SynthID detected the image had been manipulated with AI. This time, Gemini failed to reference SynthID at all — despite the fact we followed Google’s instructions and explicitly asked the chatbot to use the detection tool by name. Gemini now claimed that the White House image was instead “an authentic photograph.”

It was a striking reversal considering Gemini previously said that the image contained technical markers indicating the use of Google’s generative AI. Gemini also said, “This version shows her looking stoic as she is being escorted by a federal agent” — despite our question addressing the version of the image depicting Levy Armstrong in tears.

Less than an hour later, we ran the analysis one more time, prompting Gemini to yet again use SynthID to check whether the image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. Unlike the second attempt, Gemini invoked SynthID as instructed. This time, however, it said, “Based on an analysis using SynthID, this image was not made with Google AI, though the tool cannot determine if other AI products were used.”

Google did not answer repeated questions about this discrepancy. In response to inquiries, the spokesperson continued to ask us to share the specific phrasing of the prompt that resulted in Gemini recognizing a SynthID marker in the White House image.

We didn’t store that language, but told Google it was a straightforward prompt asking Gemini to check whether SynthID detected the image as being generated with Google’s AI. We provided Google with information about our prompt and the files we used so the company could check its records of our queries in its Gemini and SynthID logs.

“We’re trying to understand the discrepancy,” said Katelin Jabbari, a manager of corporate communications at Google. Jabbari repeatedly asked if we could replicate the initial results, as “none of us here have been able to.”

After further back and forth following subsequent inquiries, Jabbari said, “Sorry, don’t have anything for you.”

Bullshit Detector?

Aside from Google’s proprietary tool, there is no easy way for users to test whether an image contains a SynthID watermark. That makes it difficult in this case to determine whether Google’s system initially detected the presence of a SynthID watermark in an image without one, or if subsequent tests missed a SynthID watermark in an image that actually contains one.

As AI become increasingly pervasive, the industry is trying to put behind its long history of being what researchers call a “bullshit generator.”

Supporters of the technology argue tools that can detect if something is AI will play a critical role establishing the common truth amid the pending flood of media generated or manipulated by AI. They point to their successes, as with one recent example where SynthID debunked an arrest photo of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flanked by federal agents as an AI-generated image. The Google tool said the photo was bullshit.

If AI-detection technology fails to produce consistent responses, though, there’s reason to wonder who will call bullshit on the bullshit detector.

The post Google’s AI Detection Tool Can’t Decide if Its Own AI Made Doctored Photo of Crying Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

News of the investigation broke when the Washington Post reported that investigators seized the work laptop, personal laptop, phone, and smartwatch of journalist Hannah Natanson, who has covered the Trump administration’s impact on the federal government and recently wrote about developing more than 1,000 government sources. A Justice Department official told the Post that Perez-Lugones had been messaging Natanson to discuss classified information. The affidavit does not allege that Perez-Lugones disseminated national defense information, only that he unlawfully retained it. The Justice Department and the Washington Post did not respond to request for comment.

The affidavit provides insight into how Perez-Lugones allegedly attempted to exfiltrate information from a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, and the unexpected way his employer took notice.

According to the FBI, Perez-Lugones printed a classified intelligence report, albeit in a roundabout fashion. It’s standard for workplace printers to log certain information, such as the names of files they print and the users who printed them. In an apparent attempt to avoid detection, Perez-Lugones, according to the affidavit, took screenshots of classified materials, cropped the screenshots, and pasted them into a Microsoft Word document.

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By using screenshots instead of text, there would be no record of a classified report printed from the specific workstation. (Depending on the employer’s chosen data loss prevention monitoring software, access logs might show a specific user had opened the file and perhaps even tracked whether they took screenshots).

Perez-Lugones allegedly gave the file an innocuous name, “Microsoft Word – Document1,” that might not stand out if printer logs were later audited.

In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones’s employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials — in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, “Perez-Lugones’ employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents.”

It’s unclear which printer management software was used by Perez-Lugones’s employer. But several commercial systems allow workplace administrators to view the contents of printed documents.

For instance, PaperCut software offers a print archive feature that, when enabled, allows system administrators to browse the contents of all documents printed or scanned through its software system.

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Whenever someone presses print in a network outfitted with this printer monitoring software, the program creates a clandestine copy of the file and generates an image of page every printed. This happens in the background — users might be entirely unaware that the contents of printed files are archived. Workplace administrators can choose how long to retain copies of the documents and how much space the documents can take up.

Aside from attempting to surreptitiously print a document, Perez-Lugones, investigators say, was also seen allegedly opening a classified document and taking notes, looking “back and forth between the screen corresponding the classified system and the notepad, all the while writing on the notepad.” The affidavit doesn’t state how this observation was made, but it strongly suggests a video surveillance system was also in play.

Perez-Lugones’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

The post FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You appeared first on The Intercept.